BOYD CABLE is already one of the prose Laureates of the War, having earned his wreath by Between the Lines and Action Front.  He now proves that he is still entitled to it by Grapes of Wrath (SMITH, ELDER).  The two former books gave us detached articles all relating to the one great subject.  The present book is a continuous story, the episodes of which are held together by the deeds and characters of a quartette of friends, Larry Arundel, Billy Simson, Pug Sneath, and the noble and adventurous American, Kentucky Lee, who had enlisted in our Army to prove that “too proud to fight” was a phrase which did not agree with the traditions of an old Kentucky family.  These four and the rest of the regiment, the Stonewalls, are plunged into one of the big “pushes” of the British Army, and their achievements in one form or another are thick on every page of the book.  The author has reduced the description of a modern battle to a fine art.  No one can describe more vividly the noise, the squalor, the terror, the high courage, the self-sacrifice and again the nerve-shattering noise, that go to make up the fierce confusion of trench-fighting.  How anyone succeeds in surviving when so many instruments are used for his destruction is a mystery.  The book is very certainly one to be read and re-read.

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Separation (CASSELL) is another of those intimate studies of Anglo-Indian life that ALICE PERRIN has made specially her own.  The tragedy of it is sufficiently conveyed by the title.  Separation, of husband from wife or parent from child, is of course the spectre that haunts the Anglo-Indian home.  It was, chiefly at least, for the health of their child Winnie that Guy Bassett was forced to let her and his wife abide permanently in Kensington while he himself continued his Eastern career as a grass-widower.  Very naturally, the result was all sorts of trouble.  This first took the form of a flirtation, only half serious, with an artful young woman of the type with which Mr. KIPLING has made us familiar.  Unfortunately poor Bassett escapes from this emotional frying-pan only to plunge into the fire of a much more scorching attachment.  But I will not spoil for you an ingenious plot.  For one thing at least the book is worth reading, and that is the picture, admirably drawn, of the half-caste Orchard family, whose ways and speech and general outlook you will find an abiding joy.  Mrs. PERRIN has nothing better in her whole gallery, which is saying much.

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