In No Man’s Land (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is revealed a breadth of vision which may astonish some of us who have been inclined to regard SAPPER as merely a talented story-teller.  Among the writers on the War I place him first, for the simple reason that I like him best; and I am not at all sure that I should like him any better if he cured himself of his cardinal fault.  With his tongue in his cheek he dashes away from his story to give us either a long or short digression; no more confirmed digressionist ever put pen to paper, and the wonderful thing is that these wanton excursions are worth following.  True he often apologises for them, but I do not think that we need take these apologies seriously.  This book is divided into four parts, “The Way to the Land,” “The Land,” “Seed Time,” and “Harvest,” and in “Seed Time,” at any rate, we have a series of chapters which require not only to be read but to be thought over.  But whether he is out for fun, as in “Bendigo Jones—­His Tree,” or for pathos, as in “Morphia,” he obtains his effects without the smallest appearance of effort.  And I reserve a special word of praise for “My Lady of the Jasmine,” and commend it to the notice of those pessimists who hold that only the French and the Americans can write a good short story.  Thank the powers that be for SAPPER.

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The Loom of Youth (GRANT RICHARDS) is yet another school story, but with a difference, the difference being, partly at least, that it is written by one who has so lately ceased to belong himself to the life described that his account must carry an authority altogether unusual.  Here, one feels, is that strange and so-soon-forgotten country revealed for us from within, and by a native denizen.  For this alone Mr. ALEC WAUGH’S book merits the epithet remarkable; indeed, considered as the work of “a lad of seventeen,” its vitality, discretion and general maturity of tone seem little short of amazing.  Realism is the note of it.  The modern schoolboy, as Mr. WAUGH paints him, employs, for example, a vocabulary whose frequency, and freedom may possibly startle the parental reader.  Apart from this one might call the book an indictment of hero-worship, as heroism is understood in a society where (still!) athletic eminence places its possessor above all laws.  This in itself is so old an educational problem that it is interesting to find it handled afresh in a study of ultra-modern boyhood.  The actual matter of the tale, individual character in its reaction to system, is naturally common to most school stories; but even here Mr. WAUGH has contrived to give an ending both original and sincere.  Prophecy is dangerous; but from a writer who has proved so brilliantly that, for once, jeunesse peut, one seems justified in hoping that enlarged experience will result in work of the highest quality.

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