Mr Belloc's most important writings on the war are to be found in _Land and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and _Pearson's Magazine_. To these must be added his series of books of which only one has so far appeared--_A General Sketch of the European War_. His series of articles in _Pearson's Magazine_ has also been reprinted in book-form under the title _The Two Maps_. Of these his writings in _Land and Water_ are, at the present time, the most important. Since the earliest stages of the war Mr. Belloc has contributed to _Land and Water_ a weekly article. What is the nature of this article? In the first place, it is a commentary on the current events of the campaign. Mr. Belloc himself, when challenged recently to defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)--"My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do." With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy." There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard all newspaper reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly commentary in _Land and Water_ is written as he says, "at a very great expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's articles, reprinted in _The Two Maps_, on "What to Believe in War News." In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question--"How is the plain man to distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official _communiques_ read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the following explanation: