merely a literary trick which they have all learnt, but a common way of thinking which they have arrived at. And it is a way of thinking which in the future may make the melodramatization of war more and more difficult. What books on war are likely to be read by the educated young people of the next generation? Not the movie-poster propaganda of the press bureaus, but the books I have mentioned above. There are scarcely any other literary works which can be conceived as having a chance of survival; the well-written books of the war, if they are not detached and prosaic like Mr Boyd's, are in general either the saddened reflections of non-combatant older writers—like Masefield's history of Gallipoli or Kipling's epitaphs for dead soldiers; or, like the poems of Siegfried Sassoon, they are the expression of madness and despair.
