With its naturally ardent temperament irritated by months of bitter cold, its constitutional hunger aggravated by a prolonged fast, its appetite tempted by a novel diet in the form of British soldiery well-washed and firm-fleshed after years of Army rations, the North Russian mosquito is likely, in the opinion of experts, to take a high place among the more deadly horrors of war.

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[Illustration:  Sergeant.  “NOW THEN, ARE YOU THE FOUR MEN WITH A KNOWLEDGE OF MUSIC I WAS ASKING FOR?”

Chorus.  “YES, SERGEANT.”

Sergeant.  “RIGHT.  PARADE OFFICERS’ MESS 11.30 TO MOVE GRAND PIANO TO MARQUEE—­DISTANCE 500 YARDS—­FOR CONCERT THIS EVENING.” ]

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OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(By Mr. Punch’s Staff of Learned Clerks.)

That audacious paraphrase of the Book of Job, The Undying Fire (CASSELL), seems to me to be marred by a fundamentally false note.  I am sure that Mr. WELLS is as serious about his new God in the Heart of Man as he was about the Invisible King—­I’ve no sort of intention of sneering—­but I cannot credit him with belief in the Adversary, who by arrangement with the Almighty (as set forth in a discreetly flippant prologue with something of the flavour of those irreverent yarns invented and retailed by Italian ecclesiastics about Dominiddio) visits Job Huss, the headmaster of Woldingstanton, with the plagues of his desperate trial.  However I take it that the author was anxious that his parody should be as complete in form as possible, and, being rather impressed by the insouciance, not to say insolence, of the Satan of the original, seized his chance of bizarre characterisation and “celestial badinage” and let consistency go hang for the time.  Certainly the theological disquisitions of Mr. WELLS are remarkable not for their formal logic, but for their provocative quality and the very real eloquence of detached passages of the rambling argument.  In particular, taking up again the thread of Joan and Peter, he gives such a survey of the scope and glories of a new education that is to salve the world’s wounds as would move the heart of a jelly-fish.  Mr. WELLS has his own methods of justifying the ways of God to man.  He may be discursive, impatient, rash, perhaps a little shallow; but he has an undying fire of his own.  He is certainly not dull.  And therefore orthodox divines and pedagogues may perhaps have a real grievance against him.  But I can’t imagine any serious-minded man in a serious time reading this book and not getting hope and courage from it.

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