served, and although the tale of closest interest and most thrilling tragedy is reserved―as Fate willed it―for the leader himself, there is not one of his party who does not deserve his share of the honours gained. As everyone knows―or ought to know―Mawson, with one of his sledge-companions, Lieutenant Ninnis, killed in a crevasse, and the other, Dr. Mertz, dead from sheer exhaustion, was left to battle alone for over three weeks against every conceivable shape of ill-fortune. No one can read of this struggle without being amazed at the courage of man's heart and saluting it with reverent homage. One is impressed almost overwhelmingly, but one is also inspired and invigorated, and this is the reason―quite apart from the valuable scientific discoveries made on these expeditions―why we owe a greater debt to such pioneers than we can ever repay. Men of the type of Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Mawson have kept the pure flame of heroism still burning, and not even beside the great deeds of our soldiers and sailors can the splendour of their record be paled.
If you hanker for an agreeable fairy tale, about frankly improbable persons in a setting of tropic splendour, where spicy breezes blow soft o'er mango groves, and trenches cease from troubling, then Flower of the Moon (Mills and Boon) is the goods for your money. What happens in it was mainly the fault of a wandering tale-teller named Uhtoo, who had a pet story about a mythical maiden of rare beauty, the offspring of the mango and the moon. This Uhtoo must, as they say, have been some teller, because, having given his recitation to an Arab youth and an English officer, he left them both with no other passion in life than to prove the affair. I am only sorry that Louise Gerard failed to engender in me a like passion. Perhaps it was because of the name of the English officer: call a hero Carlyon, and my interest in him is dead at birth. Anyhow, Whazi, the Arab boy, had the first of the luck, since it was he who found the shipwrecked English maid sleeping beneath the mango and took her to his home. From the first I was exceedingly sorry for Whazi. True, he had not my own blighting experience of similar situations in fiction, which warned me that, with golden-haired Carlyon in reserve, poor Whazi hadn't an earthly―as indeed it turned out. But, though I laugh, there is enough real beauty in this episode of the boy lover to compel the sympathetic sigh. And, as in the writer's other work, a feeling for the heat and scent of the tropics stirs in these pages and saves them from becoming too obvious and commonplace.
To the majority of people Sussex is the county through which the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway runs on its way to Brighton, Eastbourne, Littlehampton and Portsmouth. For every traveller who alights at wayside stations, thousands are carried to the watering-places, and, once there, never leave the sea; but no county is so well worth exploring. In The Book of Sussex Verse, which the Hove firm of Cambridge has put forth with a taste and comeliness that Metropolitan publishers might envy Mr. C. F. Cook has brought together as large and excellent a collection of patriotic enthusiasm as any county could produce. Among the poets who have rejoiced to praise Sussex are pre-eminently Tennyson, Swinburne, Francis Thompson, Mr. Belloc, whose "Envoi" to the volume is one of the most beautiful of recent lyrics, and Mr. Kipling, who chose the land of the South Saxons for his English home, first by the sea and then inland. Among Mr. Cook's discoveries is a charming, topographical, familiar epistle written by William Stewart Rose to John Hookham Frere, then in Malta. It is a pity that the notes take no account of Rose, of whom one would like to know more. The only song that I miss is that complacent ditty which every soldier in Brighton, Shoreham, Seaford and else where in the county is now singing, "Sussex by the Sea"; but that is not Mr. Cook's fault, for it was prepared, for military purposes, only the other day.
I heartily approve of Makers of New France (Mills and Boon). New France is a thing I should very much like to have made myself. But I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that those who had the job were better men; for instance Poincaré, Joffre, Delcassé, the late Jaurés Metchnikoff, Anatole France, Brieux and Madame Paquin appear from Mr. Charles Dawbarn's personal descriptions to have a very definite something in common, which I suppose is French and certainly is not English. The circumstances of the moment make it possible for an Anglo-Saxon to confess that here, at any rate, we are their inferiors. I leave the reader to discover for himself, since I cannot describe it, what this characteristic is; the author succeeds admirably in conveying the impression of it. Incidentally he leaves us wondering how England can ever have fought with Germany against France, even the old France.
Experience does not teach me to look forward very hopefully to a novel "by a well-known author who wishes to remain anonymous. They Who Question (Smith, Elder) is an incoherent and in many ways a tiresome book; and, seeing that it faces the eternal problem of the reconciliation of unmerited suffering with Divine compassion and justice, it is of necessity irremediably inconclusive. But it contains one well-conceived and capably drawn character, Inez Bretherton, the hard, cynical, ultra-maternal mother of the boy who is doomed to the heritage of his father's insanity. The vaguely unorthodox Dean of Malinchester, who alone seems left to uphold the hopeful view in face of the successive shattering strokes of fate, talks and preaches with sympathy and discretion. There is sincerity behind this book, hardly reinforced by any very clear or stiff thinking, the truth being that the thesis is beyond the scope of circulating library treatment.
Captain (addressing team). "Now, mind you spread yourselves, 'cos fightin' in close formation against a 'eavier force is bound ter lead ter utter defeat."
