* * * * * Raison de Plus. Says the sleek humanitarian: "Any sacrifice I'd make For the voluntary system--up to going to the stake," Which inspires the obvious comment that contingencies like this Turn the coming of conscription to unmitigated bliss. * * * * * "The remaining characters were taken by Mr. HERBERT LOMAS as Ever, a splendid actor...."--_Manchester City News._ You should see Sir HERBERT TREE as Always. * * * * * Illustration: LANGUAGE-KULTUR. _Voice from the darkness._ "DOAND SHOOD! DOAND SHOOD! VE VOS DE VILTSHIRES." * * * * * OUR BOOKING-OFFICE. (_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._) If _The Prussian Officer_, a study of morbidly vicious cruelty practised by a captain of Cavalry on his helpless orderly (and the first of a sheaf of collected stories, short or shortish, by Mr. D. H. LAWRENCE, issued by Messrs. DUCKWORTH), had been written since the declaration of war it would certainly be discounted as a product of the prevailing _odium bellicosum_. But it appeared well in the piping times of peace, and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the common ruck. An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. LAWRENCE'S method. It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of those stories is a story in the accepted mode. They are studies in (dare one use the overworked word?) psychological portraiture. I don't know any other writer who realises passion and suffering with such objective _force_. The word "suffering" drops from his pen in curiously unexpected contexts. The fact of it seems to obsess him. Yet it is no morbid obsession. He seems to be dominated by sympathy in its literal meaning, and it gives his work a surprising richness of texture.... I dare press this book upon all such as need something more than mere yarns, who have an eye for admirably sincere workmanship and are interested in their fellows--fellows of all sorts, soldiers, keepers, travellers, clergymen, colliers, with womenfolk to match. * * *