* * * * * Mr. ARTHUR TURBERVILLE has taken almost over-elaborate pains with his sketch of a type which must have been common enough in the new armies--the young officer of pacifist leanings, who, intellectually convinced of the futility of war and by no means out of sympathy with the ultralogical or illogical (and anyway impossible) position of the Conscientious Objector, yet joins up and makes the very best of a bad job. _Kenneth, Dugdale_ (METHUEN), the prize prig (according to the verdict of his Mess), became a brave and efficient subaltern; and the author's idea of bringing him by means of the discipline of war-training and war itself to a better understanding of the ordinary spontaneous fighting types, and of bringing these by the same discipline to a readier appreciation of the intellectual and idealist position, is well enough worked out. The character-drawing impressed me less favourably. The author, I should say, finds it rather difficult to understand the ordinary good or indifferent fellow with his qualities and their defects. I doubt the possibility of such a snake in the grass as _Lieutenant Seymour_ carrying on without getting kicked. Nor do I think that that simple soldier man, _Fortescue, V.C._, would have so tamely accepted _Dugdale's_ betrayal to the woman they both loved of the fact that he had just seen his rival putting a dubious young lady into a cab in Regent Street at midnight. There is a good deal of thoughtful work in this novel which should be interesting to amateur students of the psychology of war and men of war. * * * * *