December 12, 1918 
LAND &• WATER 
17 
Recent Novels 
* 
WHEN I open a new novel and find a country 
squire who, on being disturbed in his library, 
says " D — mn ! " in a loud voice, I hardly know 
where^ I am or wh'kt is happening. I turn 
back to the beginning of the book and confirm 
my first impression that it was published this year. I read 
on and come to the delicious sentence : " ' Athene Ageleie ! ' 
murmured the Major, who had been proxime for the Ireland 
and a Balliol man" (like the immortal Mr. King) ; and not 
many pages further the Squire observes: "By Zeus — ct ttot' 
iariv — if it weren't for that, I should never keep the whip- 
hand of her at all!" Wliere are we then? I will not, 
gentle reader, keep you in suspense any longer. It is culture, 
a good large dollop of it, by the last surviving exponent there- 
of. It is The War and Elizabeth, by Mrs. Humphry Ward 
(Collins, 6s. net). But I must admit that here culture is, 
if only temporarily, the villain rather than the hero of the 
story. It describes how the country squire aforesaid, an 
enthusiastic classical scholar, saw in the war only something 
to resent because it interfered with his pursuits and with his 
plans for archaeological research. He refused to make any 
difference in his habits, objected to his sons becoming soldiers, 
forbade his daughters to do war-work, and landed himself into 
a first-rate quarrel with the local War Agricultural Committee. 
But Nemesis overtook him in the shape of a secretary 
whom he engaged on the strength of her classical qualifica- 
tions. She defeated him in several pitched battles, re- 
organised his affairs and turned him almost into a model of 
a patriotic country gentleman. When the book closes he 
is begging her to marry him, and her ambiguous reply does 
not deceive me. His fascinating younger son, who went 
straight from Eton into the Artillery and carried the Greek 
Anthology to the front with him, is killed, of course; but I 
could see that that was inevitable from the first. On the 
whole, I do not think that this is Mrs. Ward at her best. 
I miss the strong but delicate clash of high politics which 
makes some of her books so exciting. I feel that the Greek 
should have been on the lips of a Prime Minister ; and where 
are ^11 those Dukes ? Candidly, Mrs. Ward has strayed a 
little out of her proper sphere, has chosen much too 
topical a subject (she brings her story down to the present 
year) and has treated it very slightly and superficially. 
Perhaps culture, feeling the injustice of the whole thing, 
has revenged itself on the ungrateful author. 
There is no culture at all about Mr. Keble Howard's The 
Adorable Lad (Melrose, 5s. net) ; but I have extracted a good 
deal of harmless amusement from it. One would not think 
that a book of fifteen stories, illustrating how a young man 
and a young woman can fall in love with one another in 
different ways and in different situations, could possibly save 
itself from monotony. But Mr. Keble Howard is a very 
ingenious and agile performer. He puts himself to the trouble 
of thinking out good surprises ; and when he has thought them 
out he unfolds them to his readers with a considerable amount 
of cunning. He is not by any means a great artist ; but he 
does what he sets out to do nearly every 'time. I think I 
like best the story of Jim Hotchkiss, the movie star, who got 
married in a lift. 
Mr. Andreas Latsko, on the other hand, in Men in Battle 
(Cassell, 6s. net), like so many others who have attempted 
to describe the horrors of war, does not quite do what he sets 
out to do. The bool^ has been highly praised by certain 
critics, and it has, I freely own, some powerful passages. 
There is one notable description of an Austrian officer taking 
a number of elderly Reservists for the first time into battle 
during the progress of a furious Italian attack. But it is 
hardly as good as Le Feu or Stephen Crane, hardly as good 
even as Ambrose Bierce. The author is an honest artist 
desperately anxious to make these horrors real, and several 
times he very nearly succeeds. But he is like a man trying 
to draw a heavy weight up to a window. He gets it to the 
edge, you think he has managed it, and then it slips again. 
He gets nearer to success than most ; but thai is not enough. 
These horrors are too horrible, unless we are to receive from 
the author's success in describing them the final thrill and 
purification of the spirit that comes from great art. 
Submarines 
Very much has been written since 1915 about submarines, 
about our own submarines and their exploits, about U-boats 
anB how to deal with them ; but during this time I do not 
remember to have met with any book which gives so good 
and full an account of the whole subject as Sir Henry Newbolt's 
Submarine and Anti-Submarine (Longmans, 7s. 6d. net), or 
one which is so well and excitingly written. Sir Henry begins 
with the series of inventions and experiments which made 
the submarine possible ; and he proves triumphantly that 
this long period of development owed 'nothing at all to German 
enterprise. Then, one by one, he takes all the different 
methods which have been used in this war for employing 
submarines and for countering them. He cannot, of course.- 
tell us how the enemy organised his campaigns ; but he does 
leave a fairly clear impression that in the whole story only 
the exploits of our own under-water craft are worthy to be 
compared with the exploits of the miscellaneous surface 
craft which kept the seas open even at the height of German 
submarine power. It is certain that the U-boats never at 
any time or place had the success which we gained in the 
Baltic and more than once in the Sea of Marmora. The 
boats that operated in conjunction with the Gallipoli cam- 
paign did not by any means confine themselves to warships 
and transports. They shelled troop trains and columns on* 
the march ; and they sent men ashore to blow up bridges 
and destroy railways. Of the anti-submarine devices, none 
has so much appealed to the public imagination as that of 
the decoys or Q-boats ; and Sir Henry's account of the 
adventures of Captain Gordon Campbell, V.C, prove that 
public imagination is right. It was Captain Campbell's part 
to plod along pretending to be a tramp steamer, dismayed 
and helpless at the sight of an enemy ; and when the German 
captains tumbled to this trick he went to the length of allow- 
ing himself to be torpedoed in order the better to lull the 
suspicious U-boat into a feeling of security. It is noticeable 
that on the first two occasions when this device was tried 
the same officer was slightly wounded by the explosion ; 
and one cannot help wondering what Engineer Sub-Lieutenant 
■John Smith, R.N.R., thought of the resource and ingenuity 
of his commander. I have unfortunately no space (I really 
say this with much more regret than usual) to mention a 
half or a quarter or even a tenth of the things Sir Henry has 
to describe. I can only repeat that this is not merely an 
exhaustive book on its subject, but also one of the most 
exciting war-books of any kind that I have read'for a long time. 
Various Volumes 
General Gourko's Russia, 1914-1917 (Murray, i8s. net) 
is, I think, unique, as being the impressions' during the war 
of a soldier who was for some time Chief of the General Staff 
of one of the great armies. General Gourko is naturally 
well-informed, and is a sincere and honest writer. L'nfortu- 
nately, he is a little stiff and reticent ; and, by not being able 
to let himself go, has just missed writing a great book. The 
most significant thing in his story is its pathos, the pathos 
of the keen soldier, who found himself faced at every turn by 
impossibilities and eventually saw all his hopes ruined. 
Captain R. B. Ross writes on a much smaller scale of The 
Fifty-first in France (Hodder & Stoughton, los. 6d. net) and 
does let himself go with a vengence in the way of language. 
He writes habitually in the style of " No time for lugubrious 
observations fell to our lot " ; and it is a pity, for he has much 
that is interesting to tell of the famous Highland Territorial 
Division. Mr. Eric Keith's My Escape from Germany (Nisbet, 
6s. net) is an exceedingly good specimen of its kind, which 
is becoming numerous. Part of the story covers the same 
ground as part of Mr. Ellison's book which has already been 
noticed here. Mr. Keith writes rather more vivacity and 
fluency than Mr. Ellison ; the slight suggestion in his style that 
he is not used to writing gives a certain piquancy. His first 
escape, in which after being taken near the frontier he got 
out of the village lock-out and made a second attempt, only 
to be taken again probably after crossing the frontier, stands, 
I think, very high in the records of these adventures. 
Peter Bell. 
