printed pages of it. So you see
the obstacles that Miss SACKSVILLE-WEST has placed in her own and her
reader's path. That, despite them all, the interest, and passion of this
first novel do get home is an encouraging omen for her success when she
has learnt a greater simplicity of attack.

* * * * *

_Wings of the Morning_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) might have been a most
recommendable book, for it is in essentials a pleasant story of a great
artist who for the crime of his hot-headed youth suffered imprisonment
in the United States, and, having "covered his tracks," came home, fell
in love with his delightful sister's delightful step-daughter and, after
much suffering for them both, told his history and won his lady. But
unfortunately the inessentials--and among these I have the temerity to
include the great European War, or, at any rate, very much that is here
told of it--are so harrowing that they do not accord with the pleasant
story to which they are tacked on. I would not ask to be spared the
knowledge of anything faced by other people while I sat immune at home,
but there are many incidents which cannot with decency or dignity be
served up in fiction to add a thrill to the enjoyment of an hour's light
reading. Miss JOAN SUTHERLAND would have done well to have left detail
to more serious exponents, and to have discarded entirely one scene
of bestial cruelty which has no real bearing on her tale. Never in a
novel--and seldom in historical accounts of fighting--have I been asked
to wallow in so much gore. It is all the more regrettable because when
Miss SUTHERLAND uses her imagination on less horrible subjects she is
much more successful.

* * * * *

Mr. ARTHUR TURBERVILLE has taken almost over-elaborate pains with
his sketch of a type which must have been common enough in the new
armies--the young officer of pacifist leanings, who, intellectually
convinced of the futility of war and by no means out of sympathy with
the ultralogical or illogical (and anyway impossible) position of the
Conscientious Objector, yet joins up and makes the very best of a bad
job. _Kenneth, Dugdale_ (METHUEN), the prize prig (according to the
verdict of his Mess), became a brave and efficient subaltern; and the
author's idea of bringing him by means of the discipline of war-training
and war itself to a better understanding of the ordinary spontaneous
fighting types, and of brin