War (usually with an Irishman involved), partly recalled from the piping and whisky-drinking times of peace, at Inishmore and elsewhere.  One can only treat them after the manner of the schoolboy who declined to distinguish between the Major and Minor Prophets.  But I rather specially enjoyed the title-piece, which tells how the super-patriotism of an aged volunteer defeated the kindly plans of those who would have saved him fatigue by assigning to him the role of casualty in a trench-relief practice.  Casualties also figure in “Getting Even,” an improbable but highly entertaining fiction of the score practised by an ingenious Medical Officer (Irish, I need hardly say) upon an over-zealous C.O., who, to keep him busy during a field day, flooded his “clearing station” with all sorts of complicated imaginary cases, only to find the fictitious victims arranged comfortably in rows under the shade of the trees to await the Padre and a burying party, the M.O. reporting that they had all died before reaching him.  It couldn’t possibly happen as here told, but that matters little, since, so far as I am concerned, a “Birmingham” tale can always well afford to dispense with credibility.

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I am distinctly grateful to ROSE MACAULAY for What Not (CONSTABLE).  It brought me the pleasantest end to anything but a perfect English Spring day.  She has wit, not so common a gift that you can afford just to take it for granted; she knows when to stop, selecting not exhausting; and she makes her epigrams by the way, as it were, without exposing the process of manufacture. (Other epigrammatists please copy.) Miss MACAULAY’S “prophetic comedy” is a joyous rag of Government office routine, flappery, Pelmania, Tribunals, State advertising, the Lower Journalism and “What Not.”  That audacious eugenist, Nicky Chester, first Minister of Brains in the post-war period of official attempts to raise the nation from C3 to something nearer A1 on the intellectual plane, happens, because of his family history, to be uncertified for marriage.  He also happens to fall very desperately in love with his secretary, Kitty Grammont, and the conflict between duty and desire becomes the theme—­perhaps just a little too heavy—­of an extravaganza that is happiest in its lighter and more irreverent moments.  Which is to say that What Not wanders out of the key.  But what on earth does that matter if one is made to laugh quite often and to smile almost continuously at a very shrewd piece of observation, whimsicality and tempered malice?  And you will like the serene Pansy Ponsonby (out of “Hullo, Peace!"), who could scarcely be called Kitty’s “sister-in-law,” but was of the most faithful.  The odd thing is that under all her gibing the author seems to have a queer furtive admiration for her precious Ministry of Brains.

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