Mr. PHILIP GIBBS has gathered together, under the title. _Open Warfare, the Way to Victory_ (HEINEMANN), his despatches written from the Western front during the last year of the War. What strikes one most on seeing them again in book form is the obscurity in which they veil the events they record. They so shine, as it were, with a luminous mist that they seem to reveal everything, yet in sober truth very often it is only in the light of later knowledge that they reveal anything at all. Congratulations, therefore, to Mr. GIBBS, the perfect war correspondent! I defy anyone from these papers alone (apart from the plentiful and excellent maps) to form anything like an adequate conception of the disaster that swept down upon the British Armies in the Spring of 1918. And yet in a sense it is all there, gorgeously camouflaged under the control--I daresay the wise and necessary control--of the censorship. The author, watching the very moulding of history with every advantage of proximity, has written down, if not much bare statement, yet an amazing sequence of heroic detail, associated with such stirring names as Arras or Givenchy or Cambrai. Curiously enough, though each chapter is intensely vivid, they become, through much instancing of the same unconquerable spirit, something monotonous, though never wearisome, in bulk. One trusts that a future generation will realise that the value of a book of this order consists in its first-hand record of such incidents of valour; it would be pitiful to have it hastily assumed, because so much is slurred or omitted to deceive the enemy, that England was so feeble-hearted as to require her evil news predigested before consumption in this manner. It should be added that the writer gives us a good sound introduction that goes a long way to fill the yawning gaps. * * * * * [Illustration: _Gatekeeper (at castle of unpopular baron--to new grocer's boy)._ "YOU SILLY IDIOT! WHY DON'T YOU GO ROUND TO THE TRADESMEN'S GATE? GOOD THING YOU DIDN'T PULL THE BELL, OR YOU'D 'AVE GOT A 'ALF TON OF BOILING LEAD ON TOP OF YOU. THIS IS THE _VISITORS_' DOOR!"] * * * * * "GIRL WANTED.--A reliable girl for the summer months to go across the Arm."--_Halifax Evening Mail_. To prevent misapprehension we ought to say that the western part of the bay at Halifax, Nova Scotia, is locally known as the "Arm." * * * * * END. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919, by Various