The _Letters of a Soldier: 1914-1915_ (CONSTABLE) are letters to a mother; letters also of an artist, and full of an exquisite sensibility, a fine candour. I can best give you an impression of the charming personality of this young French soldier (who survived his first great battle, to be reported missing after the counter-attack, since when no news of him has reached his friends), by quoting little sentences of his, and if you don't want to know more of him after reading them then nothing I can say will be of any use: "The true death would be to live in a conquered country, above all for me, whose art would perish.... If you could only see the confidence of the little forest animals, such as the field-mice! They were as pretty as a Japanese print, with the inside of their ears like a rosy shell.... How is it possible to think of Schumann as a barbarian?... I am happy to have felt myself responsive to all these blows, and my hope lies in the thought that they will have forged my soul.... Spinoza is a most valuable aid in the trenches.... We are in billets after the great battle, and this time I saw it all. I did my duty; I knew that by the feeling of my men for me. But the best are dead. We gained our object ... I send you my whole love. Whatever comes to pass, life has had its beauty." And then no more. * * * * * If Mr. HAROLD LAKE'S account of the British forces in Macedonia is supposed to supply an answer to a not unnatural query as to what they are doing there, I am afraid one must take it that in fact they are doing nothing in particular. An intelligent British public believes that at least they are immobilising important enemy forces and perhaps accomplishing several other useful things as well, but the writer, who has actually been _In Salonica with Our Army_ (MELROSE), frankly lays aside high considerations of policy and, seeing it all in desperately foreshortened perspective, knows only that he and his fellows, having volunteered to fight, are being called on instead to endure a purgatorial routine of dust and dulness, mosquitoes, malaria and night marches, and the grilling away of useless days in the society of flies and lizards, with only, as a very occasional treat, the smallest glimpse of anything resembling a Front. 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.