The sun., 1918-12-08
Mr.. Kipling's War Book
"The Eyes of Asia"
By GRANT M. OVERTON.

which has very little to commend it. No
one thinks Of running down Thomas Har-
dy because his later SUBMITS were peaks
considerably lower than Tess No one
abuses Owen Wister because he never
wrote another Virginian. If Mr.. KipIing
had settled down supinely to write about
India and Irish soldiers for the rest of his
life we should probably never have heard
word in dispraise of him
Well, for those who demand the Indian
Kiphng, here he is back again, in a slen-
der book called The Eyes Of Asia, and
containing three letters from Indian SOL
diers to their people somewhere in
France talking to somewhere east of Suez.
That's not accurate. Two of the letters
are written from convalescing places in
England. The fourth piece in the book
(the third in position) is in dialogue.
The family of an Indian soldier, Afghans,
read his letter from the Western Front
and talk it over.
Nothing more interesting has come out
of the war than this book. How far it
may be based on actual letters or CONVEX
sations, how far Kipling may actually see
the war with "the eyes Of ASIA" how far
the pages are faithful to the Indian heart
and the Indian mind have no means of
knowing; but / think the reader will find,
as I do, that it is impossible to care
whether the book is all-India or all-Kip-
ling or fifty-fifty or an Understandable
mixture. AS literary performance it is
worthy Of nothing but praise; and as a
novelty among war books it is without a
parallel. India-the India of Kim, at
least-permeates it. And the readers i'm
agination is excited by every page to con-
jure up the weird reality that this war
must have assumed for the Rajputs and
the Sikhs and the Afghans and the men
Of Punjab who came from so many
thousand miles away to the cold and too I
wet land of France to fight.
What do they observer That cavalry
are useless and that artillery and mines
are everything "The blowing up of the
Chitorce Bastion when Arjoon went to
Heaven waving his sword, as the song
says, would not be noticed in the noise of
this war" That "the nature of the enc
my is to commit shame upon women and
children" That the English ''boast is not
to boast" That India has taken at face
value English self-deprecietion and knows
not the strength and nobility of the Eng
lish nation.
Much about agriculture! For this is
matter Of acutest interest to those who till
the soil back home. "In Franceville the
dogs are both courteous and industrious.
They play with the cat, they tend the
sheep, they churn the butter, they draw
a cart and guard it too" Oh, why do we
not make useful animals Of our dogs, We
Sikhs7 And why do we not educate our
children, and educate well our womenf
For it Is possible here to see what edu-
Gated women can do. And as for US At
ghans, we have our feuds, our private ac-
counts; but those who come out here to
France thinking to settle such a private
account find such killing as they never
dreamed of. "Men are swallowed up or
blown apart here as one divides meat.
1t needs a very fierce stomach to
add anything to our Government rations"
IN this little matter of sudden death.
A compact little book and to describe
it much is to subtract perceptibly from
the book itself and the feast it spreads
for the reader. And it is feast, not be-
cause of its length but because it feass
= the readers mind and not his eyes merely.
No living writer has compressed so much
into so few words as Kipling, not once
but repeatedly; it is so here.
THE EYES OF ASIA. By RUDYARD KIP
LING. Doubleday, Page & Co. 81.