Every now and then, out of a mass of War-books grown so vast that no single reader can hope even to keep count of them, there emerges one of particular appeal.  This is a claim that may certainly be made for An Airman’s Outings (BLACKWOOD), especially just now when everything associated with aviation is—­I was about to say sur le tapis, but the phrase is hardly well chosen—­so conspicuously in the limelight.  The writer of these modest but thrilling records veils his identity under the technical nom de guerre of “CONTACT.”  With regard to his method I can hardly do better than repeat what is said in a brief preface by Major-General W.S.  BRANCKER, Deputy Director-General of Military Aeronautics:  “The author depicts the daily life of the flying officer in France, simply and with perfect truth; indeed he describes heroic deeds with such moderation and absence of exaggeration that the reader will scarcely realise,” etc.  But he will be a reader poor indeed in imagination who is not helped by these pages to realise some part of the debt that we owe to these marvellous winged boys of ours; As for the heroic deeds, they are of a kind to take your breath—­tales of battles above the clouds, of trenches captured by aeroplane, of men fatally wounded, thousands of feet above the enemy country, recovering consciousness and working their guns till they sank dead, while their battered machines planed for the security of friendly lines.  Surely the whole history of War has no picture to beat this in devotion.

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EVELYN BRANSCOMBE PETTER has much that is interesting to say about men and women, and packs her thought (I risk the “her”) into a quasi-Meredithian form of phrasing which does not always escape obscurity.  But how much better this than a limpid flow of words without notable content! Souls in the Making (CHAPMAN AND HALL) is mainly an analysis of two love episodes in the life of a young man, the liberally educated son of an ambitious self-made soapmaker.  The first—­with Sue, the pretty waitress—­is thwarted by a very persistent and unpleasant clerk; the second—­with Virginia, a girl of birth and breeding—­is threatened by the intrusion of the girl’s cousin, a queerly morbid ne’er-do-well.  There is no action to speak of, so one can’t speak of it.  I can only say that the interest of the shrewd analysis held me, and that if my guess as to the sex of the writer be sound it is noteworthy that more pains and skill are bestowed upon the characters of the men than of the two girls, who are some thing shadowy—­charming unfinished sketches.  There is a vigour and an effect of personality in the writing that put this novel above the large class of the merely competent.

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