_Cloth, $1.25_
Mrs. Dawson has made an admirable selection of soldiers’ letters, some
of them written to mothers, others to sweethearts, sisters and friends.
It is an interesting and appealing book, and gives a more intimate
picture of the soldier than can be gained from almost any other single
volume.
“Here are boys,” writes the editor in her Introduction to this
collection, “all sorts of boys: French, English, Italian, American;
young artists, budding novelists and poets; musicians; drab and
spectacled London office clerks just off a stool; an auctioneer
from Brixton; elderly married men as old as thirty-five and ‘little
nephews’ of sixteen; Catholics, Protestants, Christians, Jews;
grave young students in arms; Crusaders of France; Oxford and
Cambridge men and French school boys; American college men and
American rich men’s sons from New York and California....
“As one reads these letters written home, one finds that he does
not think of them as letters at all but as boys: Enzo, Antonio,
Robert, Arthur, Gaston, William, Marcel, Harry, Victor. And one is
filled with pity that they are boys--‘mere men,’ as more than one
of them says, pitted against professional soldiers, experts in the
refined arts of modern war. But if one thing more than another is
revealed in the letters, it is that the writers do not want to be
pitied, rather envied. All express in one way or another that death
has no terrors for ‘the good soldier.’”
“In such a collection ... the letters themselves are their own best
comment. A mere reviewer has no place with these offerings.... They
are such important matters as history leaves out, but hearts
remember.”--_N. Y. World._
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
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