If Wishes were Horses (HURST AND BLACKETT) is one of the most engaging novels that I have met for some time.  The matter of it, perhaps, is nothing very new:  a story of expanding fortunes and contracting sympathies.  But the writer, Countess BARCYNSKA, has, before all else, the inestimable gift of making you believe in her people.  All the characters are vigorously alive.  The result is that one follows with quite unusual interest the chequered career of her central figure, Martin Leffley, from his introduction as a frankly unpleasant youth, very red about the ears, “which was where he always blushed,” to the final glimpse of him, titled, an M.P., and, incidentally, a bowed and better man, purified by the wonderful devotion of Rose, the wife whom throughout the tale he has bullied and undervalued.  Nor is Rose herself, with her unwavering belief in her clay idol, a less memorable figure.  Of the others, my chief affection went to Aunt Polly, the kindly dealer in old clothes, who imagined the Savile to be a night club.  But, as I say, the whole cast is astonishingly real.  Only once did I fear for the story, when it seemed as though the machinations of a super-villainous M.P. were about to lead it astray into the paths of melodrama.  But the danger proved to be brief, and the unexpected beauty and dignity of the closing chapter would have redeemed a more serious lapse.

* * * * *

Forced to Fight (HEINEMANN) is the record of a Schleswig Dane set forth by ERICH ERICHSEN and very capably translated from the Danish by INGEBORG LUND.  It is a book that with a singular skill and with a passion that never gets out of hand so as to convey the impression of hysterical exaggeration lays bare the heart of a youth who was at the storming of Liege, fought in Flanders, then on the Russian Front and again in the Argonne, whence a shattered elbow sent him home broken and aged—­that is what his chronicler emphasises—­not by the wound, but by the long horror and fatigue of the successive campaigns.  The poignancy of his sufferings lay in the fact that as a Dane he went without any of the great hopes and passions that inspired his German comrades, of whom however he speaks with no ill-will.  He took part by order in some of the “punishments” of Belgian villages, loathing the savage cruelties of them and deeply convinced that the rape of Belgium was an inexpiable wrong which the world will remember to the lasting dishonour of the German name.  You get an impression of the added horror of this War for the imaginative temperamental, and some pathetic pictures of all the suffering among simple innocent machine-driven people on the other side, who had no will to war and no illusions as to the splendour of world-dominion—­a vision of desolate homes and countrysides empty of all but very old men.

* * * * *