The latest of our writers to contribute to the growing literature of the War is Mr. Hugh Walpole. He has written a book about it called _The Dark Forest_ (Secker), but whether it is a good or a bad book I who have read it carefully from cover to cover confess my inability to decide. It is certainly a clever book, and violently unusual. I doubt whether the War is likely to produce anything else in the least resembling it. For one thing, it deals with a phase of the struggle, the Russian retreat through Galicia, about which we in England are still tragically ignorant. Mr. Walpole writes of this as he himself has seen it in his own experience as a worker with the Russian Red Cross. The horrors, the compensations, the tragedy and happiness of such work have come straight into the book from life. But not content with this, he has peopled his mission with fictitious characters and made a story about them. And good as the story is, full of fine imagination and character, the background is so tremendously more real that I was constantly having to resist a feeling of impatience with the false creations (in _Macbeth's_ sense) who play out their unsubstantial drama before it. Yet I am far from denying the beauty of Mr. Walpole's idea. The characters of _Trenchard_, the self-doubting young Englishman, who finds reality in his love for the nurse _Marie Ivanovna_, and of the Russian doctor, _Semyonov_, who takes her from him, are exquisitely realized. And the atmosphere of increasing mental strain, in which, after _Marie's_ death, the tragedy of these three moves to its climax in the forest is the work of an artist in emotion, such as by this time we know Mr. Walpole to be. The trouble was that I had at the moment no wish for artistry. To sum up, I am left with the impression that an uncommonly good short story rather tiresomely distracted my attention from some magnificent war-pictures. * * * * *