As was to be expected, one of the signs of the times in literature, not of one country but of all, is a grim change in its attitude towards war. The era of pomp and circumstance, as of genial make-believe, is gone by; more and more are our writers beginning to give us militarism stripped of romance, a grisly but (I suppose) useful picture. I have nowhere found it more horrible than in a story called _The Secret Battle_ (METHUEN), written by Mr. A.P. HERBERT, whose initials are familiar to _Punch_ readers under work of a lighter texture. This is an intimate study, inspired throughout by a cold fury of purpose that can be felt on every page, of the destruction of a young man's spirit in the insensate machinery of modern war. There is no other plot, no side issues, no relief. From the introduction of _Harry Penrose_, fresh from Oxford, embarking like a gallant gentleman upon the adventure of arms, to the tragedy that blotted him out of a scheme that had misused and ruined him, the record moves with a dreadful singleness of intent. Sometimes, one at least hopes, the shadows may have been artificially darkened. It seems even to-day hardly credible that events should conspire to such futility of error. But as a story with a purpose, not, in spite of the publisher's description, a novel, _The Secret Battle_ certainly deserves the epithet "striking." It is a blow from the shoulder. * * * * * The worst of quotations is that either their staleness is tedious or their unfamiliarity irritates. Mr. S.G. TALLENTYRE has at least one, generally of the latter sort, and oftener half-a-dozen, on every page of _Love Laughs Last_ (BLACKWOOD), or, at any rate, that is one's first impression of the book; while the second is that the number of characters is not much less. It follows that in trying to identify all the persons to whom he may or may not have been introduced in the previous pages, and all the phrases in inverted commas he has certainly seen somewhere else sometime, the truly diligent reader will be kept faithfully at his task--a pleasant one possibly, but just a thought too much like hard work to be quite entertaining in a novel. Apart from all this and an occasional obscure sentence there is nothing much to grumble at in a story that tells how _David_, the sailor, unlearned in the ways of ladies, became engaged for insufficient reasons to one _Theo_, only to fall promptly in love with another, certainly much nicer, called _Nancy_; and how still a third, _Sally_, with various other people, intent on rescuing him from his dilemma, made a most unscrupulous and indeed most improbable conspiracy against number one, who was unpopular. One can't help feeling that they were all, including the author, a bit hard on _Theo_, whose philanthropic notions were really too good for the amount of sense allotted her to work them out with. Most of the rest of them would have nothing to do with raising the masses, but, after