to serve as Constable, when word comes of an unexpected break, by a band of yeggs, at the post-office. Tom is commissioned to handle it. The brother turns up in the party, and Tom, for their mother's sake, permits the criminals to escape. Then a number of highly improbable things happen in rapid succession. Sherry and his particular pal are suddenly converted to the error of their ways, and make up their minds to enlist. First, though, they must square themselves with their gang. There is a row, and a coup by which Sherry and his reformed pal capture the leaders of the gang, turn them over to the authorities at Tredick, are forgiven their past and permitted to enlist and all is well. It is a pity that the writer, who has evidently had the impulse to do an honest and inspiring piece of work, was not able to avoid the worn counters of the story-telling trade. As a sort of literary recruiting poster, at least, it has merits. "These stars of France, shining on our boys, shine upon us.

The same

winds blow over us all; it is our mutual sun, and the ocean touches us both. We did not know this before, or if we had known we were forgetting. We were thinking that we lived in our little world apart. We know better now. Wherever one of our Tredick boys lies asleep in France, that little spot is part of Tredick, and shall ever be."

Nor is it only the Tredick boys who have experienced the great awakening of war. You remember Marcel Berger's "Ordeal by Fire"-one of the earliest and best stories of its sort, with its picture of the young boulevardier fighting his way not more towards the defeat of Germany than towards the love of France and his kind. "You No Longer Count" is

a parallel study of a young Frenchwoman, a wife whose idol has been snatched from her in the first days of the war. She has led the sheltered and petted life of her class. After four years of marriage, her husband is still her lover and her world. He happens to be an officer of reserves, as is good form in their circle. Suddenly the sky falls. He is called to the frontier, and is one of the victims of the first German wave of invasion. There is nothing to soften the blow for the little widow. Her heart has had no warning, and will not be consoled. She deliberately vows herself to the memory of her happiness. The war is nothing to her except as the destroyer of that happiness. Even when her misery finds company in the households of her friends, she is not to be diverted from her exclusive sorrow. In short, she is an egotist of grief, a selfish and sterile cumberer of the stricken earth. The war closes about her. She finds no real escape from it, and is presently drawn into hospital work. But her heart is unsoftened; her desire for escape remains; her cold indifference to France and the world's destiny. Her time is to come, however. Incapable as she is of clearing a new path for herself, the pressure of circumstance is to do it for her. Slowly she perceives that she is exceptional, not in her loss but in her selfishness. Everywhere about her, even among the most worldly of her old set, she sees steadfast sorrow and steadfast sacrifice. What affects her as much as anything is the secret change in her odd confidant, the old worldling La Villaumer. In theory a hater of war and a lukewarm patriot, an individualist and hedonist, his speech remains sceptical long after his heart has given in. Odette finds that as quietly

as possible he is giving his time and his fortune to the victims of the war who have fought for France; and it is he who words for her the motto that renounces individualism in the name of France: “Tu n'es plus rien!” he says. "The individual is dead. You no longer have any rights, not even the right to mourn your unending grief. The moment has come to mourn more largely, more grandly, with the only grief that can save a soul like yours. The only hope of a resurrection lies in giving oneself to the common need, and losing oneself in it with love."

It is with many difficulties that race has drawn near to race, through all the years of opportunity. Even now, with all the experience of the Tommy and the poilu painfully approaching each other over the barrier of language, we send our thousands over there with little or no attempt to give them at least an elementary bit of French in advance. The doughboy's ignorance of French is considered an excellent joke, as Tommy's was before him. And indeed it is an obstacle soon got round, if not surmounted. Thrown in among the good, honest, devoted French people, our boys at once find under the quaint differences of the surface a great store of common feelings and ideals. Each of the newcomers has this to discover for himself, and hastens to inform the folks at home of the astonishing fact that the Frenchies are a very decent lot. Here is a typical incident from "Ambulance 464", an animated account of the experiences of an American boy who decided to put in a season in the ambulance service in France while he was waiting to be old enough to go to college! One would say from the evidence of his narrative as a whole

that he had quite a bit of French, but here is the incident: "I picked up a chap near Brocourt today who was on his way home to Mort Homme after his permission. He had walked all the way from Bar-le-Duc that day, and was tired out. He was mighty glad to get the ride, for he had orders to be back in his company before mid; night. We talked for a while in jerky little sentences; I, using the usual 'N'est-ce pas?' and 'Comprenezvous?' and he always relying on 'C'est la guerre' for an answer to my questions. At one place we passed a flock of strange birds. I pointed to them and mumbled something to signify that I wanted to know what they were. He simply said 'oiseau', and I replied as well as I could that we didn't have any "oiseaus" in America. He looked rather surprised and muttered something about always having heard that Les Etats Unis was a queer sort of place. I discovered when I got back to the cantonment that the word oiseau means bird." This chronicle, which is a sort of revised and enlarged diary, is very straightforward, amusing, and youthful.

"Home Fires in France" is a sympathetic and frankly emotional study of the French people in wartime. As the work of a skilled novelist, many of its sketches take more or less loosely the form of fiction. But primarily it is the work of an American woman who knew life in France during the early years of the war, not only as an observer but as a practical worker in the interests of the wounded poilu and the refugee. A special service was the founding in Paris of establishment for printing in Braille. But she has seen much also of the people of the French villages, and perhaps the most valuable part of the book is her interpretation of

an

those "provincials" whom we now apprehend to be the really national type. Those traits and customs of country living which must remain a puzzle, though a kindly one, to the transient Tommy or doughboy, she dwells upon with illuminating sympathy. Their religion of old ways, their religion of thrift-above all, their religion of home-are strange matters to the casual Yankee. He does not understand the huddling of French farmers into villages, their cherishing of cramped houses and tiny high-walled gardens while the whole countryside lies open and empty. Miss Canfield helps one understand the stubborn persistence of these villagers, who have refused to leave the spot where their cottages and gardens and streets once were. She has a pathetic tale of a poilu on leave after two years, making his way towards his devastated home, not knowing whether wife and children are alive, but lugging with him over the weary miles the tools with which he means, if the worst has come, to do what he can for the old spot during the few days granted him. He finds wife and children haunting the desolate ruins, unable to think of leaving their place on earth. So they all fall to among the rubbish. There is a very good story, too, called "A Fair Exchange". A staving American dealer in toilet preparations is in France bent on the main chance, but not without his vision of service. He sees what is wrong with the French from a business point of view-their conservatism, their caution, their total lack of enterprise in the American or even the German sense. He sees a chance to do his bit by preaching the gospel of Success among these sluggards and by setting one here and there on the right path. In a provincial village he

happens on a pharmacien who makes a wonderful cold cream. His family, it appears, has been making it for generations, making it with the utmost care in limited quantities for the few who know. The American is outraged by this failure to push a remarkable article. He offers to back it, to find the capital, and market a huge output as soon as the necessary factories can be built and set to turning it out. The Frenchman quietly refuses. He is satisfied with his comfortable little French prosperity. He knows that his precious cream cannot be made wholesale by machinery and untrained workmen. He prefers the pleasant leisure of his routine, his family, his garden, to the glitter of wealth. The American is incredulous and contemptuous, and they part at odds. But each has his afterthought, yielding to his adversary the possession of something that he lacks. Each of them has dropped a seed of doubt into the complacency of the other; and neither will ever be quite the same thereafter. The give and take of race and race in sympathetic contact-this is, of course, the moral of the little story.

The war has produced several notable books introducing us as it were in the flesh to those strange Russians whom we had known hitherto only through the vaunted Russian novelists. They leave us, on the whole, not very much farther than the novelists have left us. There is a racial cleavage here to be found between no Western peoples. In Hugh Walpole's remarkable story "The Dark Forest", in "Miss Amerikanka", by Olive Gilbreath, the obscure and tragic romance of the Russian character is strongly lighted, yet remains fitful of color and wavering of outline. So it does in "Trapped in Black Russia",

by Ruth Pierce, and even in "Runaway Russia", by another American, Florence MacLeod Harper. Mrs. Pierce's might be called a personal record with a literary flavor and Miss Harper's a personal record in a frankly journalistic style. Miss Harper, to accept her own tone, is a fellow with no nonsense about her. When the revolution broke out she was in Russia as a correspondent of "Leslie's Weekly", because she has had a "hunch". "Runaway Russia" is the informal record of her nine months in Russia, ending with the fall of Korniloff. She writes with the vivid random touch of the experienced journalist, apparently running together without care her narrative of public events and the minutiae of personal experience. It is good "copy", if no more. Out of it the Russian looms, as always, a mass of contradictions and potentialities. Devoted at the front, treacherous at home, hero and mountebank, patriot and charlatan-what is a Russian, when all is said? One belief emerges clearly in the hopeless opportunism of the Kerensky type, and the forlorn hopefulness of the Korniloff type.

There have been several attempts (all of them that I recall by women) to give a generous slant to the interpretation of the character of the individual German as distinguished from the national "Hun" type. There was the honest and bewildered German surgeon in "The Red Cross Barge", by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. In "The Light Above the Cross Roads", by Mrs. Victor Rickard, as in "Comrades", by Mary Dillon, there is a great-hearted German noble who with strong ties to England and a fine nature, finds himself caught up in the machine of war and destined to take part in a struggle whose meth

Now

ods and morals revolt him. comes the translation of a personal record by one of the most famous German aviators during the first years of the war, Captain von Richthofen. He also is of the higher caste, a Freiherr and a professional soldier before the outbreak of the war. His record shows the ruthlessness of the fighter. He bags his enemy as he bags the wild boar whom he hunts during his leaves of absence. He has the reckless, sporting attitude of the airman, but if this record is to be trusted (and there are signs of its having been "edited" by authority) he is not a beast or an opponent without scruple. He downed some fifty allied machines before his own inevitable end came; but to all appearances he downed them honorably and according to the rules of the game. In flying as we know there is the closest modern approximation to the war-duel of chivalry. Even the German service has retained certain usages not observed elsewhere by the practical Hun; so that the enemy aviator-young Roosevelt, for example, is buried with full honors of war as an adversary conquered and not merely a foe to be wiped out. C. G. Grey, editor of "The Aeroplane", seems justified in saying in the preface he here supplies that von Richtho

The Rough Road. By William J. Locke. New York: John Lane Company.

Khaki. By Freeman Tilden. New York: The Macmillan Company.

You No Longer Count. By Rene Boylesve. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Ambulance 464, Encore des Blessés. By Julien H. Bryan. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Home Fires in France. By Dorothy Canfield. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Runaway Russia. By Florence MacLeod Harper. New York: The Century Company.

The Light Above the Cross Roads. By Mrs. Victor Rickard. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

The Red Battle Flyer. By Captain Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen. New York: Robert M. McBride and Company.