And all this is in a country
so desolated by centuries of war that in spite of obvious natural
fertility it is a sullen treeless desert--a desert of blight and
thistles, as profitless to our men as their periodically deferred
anticipations of a grand advance. A book that sets out to record
vacuity can hardly be crammed with thrilling literature, and I am
not going to pretend that Mr. LAKE has achieved the impossible. All
the same one found points--for instance, his desire that someone
(apparently England for choice!) should colonise Macedonia; and his
most right and appropriate plea for fairer recognition of those who
have sacrificed their health in the national service. A man, he holds,
who is to suffer all his life from malarial fever has done his bit no
less than plenty who bear the honourable insignia of the wounded in
battle and the snout of a mosquito may be as valorously encountered as
the bayonet of a Hun. And so say all of us.
* * * * *
I can read Miss MARY WEBB'S studies of the peasant mind with great
pleasure, but at the same time I am doubtful whether she is as
successful in _Gone to Earth_ (CONSTABLE) as she was in her first
novel, _The Golden Arrow_. My difficulty--and I hope it will not be
yours--was to believe in the power of _Hazel Woodus_ to make very
dissimilar men lose their hearts and heads.
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