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.
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