"I TOO HAVE BEEN IN ———"
Gun Fodder. By A. Hamilton Gibbs. 8vo. 313 pages. Little, Brown, and Company. Boston.
A Private in the Guards. By Stephen Graham. 8vo. 340 pages. The Macmillan Company. New York.
I CONFESS that these two books have puzzled and impressed me; the one by Hamilton Gibbs is as superficial, the one by Stephen Graham as wrong-headed, as any book may be, but I think that even the reader who remains unaware of these faults will confess that he is both bewildered and affected. It would be an impertinence to discuss the books impersonally, because each is a highly personal record of one man's activities and emotions during the war and the reader's response to them will depend only on what he himself has experienced. As one who was expert in the nineteen separate positions of the manual of arms and as one who at least knew a duckboard from a Verey light, I pay a reluctant tribute to the graphic accuracy of these war books; as one who knew distantly but poignantly some of the brutalities and the cruelties of the war, I render the authors, both, the homage due to their honesty. For the moment, that is enough.
There is something more important. I think that no one can read these books, or any other war books which may be honestly written, without a feeling of strangeness, as if they came from another world. No doubt an effort will be made to throw glamour over the beastly dirtiness of the war—not the political filth out of which it rose, but the actual physical ordure in which it was prosecuted. It may be necessary, at some time, to revive Mr. Kipling's unhappy phrase about "the lordliest life," and I should hate to be one of those who sought to mitigate the smallest item of horror in the whole business. But the pathos of distance is intensified by the tragic disillusion which has come to the world since the end of the war and the feeling that those who write in the spirit of the war are alien to us is justified. Because they are messengers from a time and place not ours, living by ideals which we have lost, and the
