# Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3819/Our Booking-Office

Punch's regular book review column.
OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I confess that I did net foretell the present state of affairs, and I refuse to believe anyone else who professes to have done so unless he can produce his prophecy in writing. Germany and England (Murray), however, puts the late Professor J. A. Cramb definitely among the few and persistent prophets who should long ago have been very much more honoured in their own country. The book is a resumé of lectures delivered in London in the early part of 1913, and it was first published a few months ago. The present reprint proves the lecturer to have been wiser before the event than many of us are even while the event is happening. Had he lived to see "the day," he would certainly have revised his incidental opinions of French competence and Russian honesty, British resource, and the utility of the Territorial; he would have willingly praised what he has somewhat hastily derided. His theme, however, is not criticism of the Allies, but appraisement of Germany; and his arguments, simply but eloquently expressed, should be very closely regarded by those haphazard optimists who suppose this War to be the personal prank of a braggart Kaiser, doomed to an immediate failure for want of his subjects' support. I have devoured more pages of printed matter since this trouble began than I care to think about, but from the whole lot I have had less enlightenment than from this half-crown volume; I have learnt exactly what is taking place—and why—from one who, unhappily, died before any of the existing wars was declared. Clearly the days of miracles are not yet dead.
No doubt you already knew the work of Mr. H. F. Prevost Battersby (Francis Prevost) in "another place," i.e., on the battlefield, where as a war correspondent he has proved himself a keen observer and an accomplished master of style. But he can also write romances uncommonly well. His latest, The Lure of Romance (Lane), displays once more exactly the qualities that have brought its author previous renown—an appreciative eye and a ready pen for the dramatic and picturesque aspects of a big fight. He knows exactly what a bullet sounds like as it whistles over the head of the person to whom it was addressed; and as no doubt many of us are taking an unusual interest in bullets just now there should be a large public for a story that is so largely concerned with them. On its own merits as a tale it is bustling and picturesque enough. The scene of it is laid in a South American Republic (that useful variant on Ruritania), and the plot deals with the rescue of the charming daughters of a rapscallion President, threatened by local revolutionaries. Naturally, therefore, there is some shooting—in the American sense—all of which bears the sign of expert handling. The affair ends with a really thrilling climax, in which Doyne, the engineer and chief hero, confounds the politics of his enemies by letting loose a reservoir upon them. This is great fun. Especially as the contents of the reservoir, on its way down through a mountain-jungle, brought along with it what Mr. Battersby pleasantly calls "clattering carapes of gigantic crabs." A truly gripping finish!
It would seem a far cry from the clash of armies to the romance of a honeymoon spent on a raft de luxe drifting lazily down a river of Burma. That is the theme of Love's Legend (Constable), by Mr. Fielding Hall, author of The Soul of a People. But there may be a war of sex with sex scarcely less tragic than the wars of men with men (or brutes). The author shows us an oldish husband—a civil servant—who surmounts, with not too much indelicacy, the primary difficulty of his young wife's ingenuousness in relation to the sacrament of marriage. But a further and worse difficulty is waiting for him when he comes to deal with the incompatibility of the sexes in the matter of moral standards. The thing, of course, has been done once for all by Louis Stevenson in Virginibus Puerisque. But he did it in essay form; here we have the piquancy of personal narrative and dialogue. Husband and wife in turn are responsible for the story, each assuming a partial attitude towards facts and opinions; or else it is one of his old friends (a source of foolish jealousy to the wife), who takes up the tale without warning when they meet at some riverside station. This means a pleasant variety of styles, and there is a certain childlike freshness about the method by which the husband adapts himself to his wife's intelligence, presenting his more difficult arguments in the form of fairytales—a habit which the author may, for all I know, have assimilated through intercourse with the local native. All goes badly, and things began to threaten an impasse, when one foggy night the raft is cut in two by a paddle-boat and the pair get separated and nearly killed. They are so pleased to be restored to one another alive that they tacitly agree to waive their differences. It is perhaps rather a puerile denouement, and not likely to be very helpful to the newly-wedded public. There must be very few couples who can count on having their elemental differences healed by means of a collision between a honeymoon raft and a paddle-steamer on a Burmese river. All the same I commend the book, for it has a charm of manner that will appeal to all. As for its matter, half of it will seem sound to you if you are a male, and most irritating if you are a female; and the other way about with the other half. Personally, being a man, I thought the woman wanted smacking.