not a single member of the Cabinet wrote or telegraphed to me about my being nearly drowned' (II, 303). His successor was appointed, without his advice. He attended a Cabinet meeting, the first in nineteen months: 'Lloyd George did not nod at me nor take notice of me, nor I of him,' he adds with spirit. That spirit was not broken by neglect. After an expression of his views to Mr Chamberlain (II, 299), 'Austen really had no reply at all, and I think I turned him inside out.' After tearing to bits' a proposal made by Mr Churchill, Winston curled up' (II, 326). Finally, and just in the nick of time,' he was offered the chance of a seat in the House of Commons to represent North Down. He agreed to accept, provided there would be no opposition. There was none; he was elected. He was now a politician without the uniform of the soldier. He himself had become a Frock. The war being over, he was free to develop his strategy for Ireland. In 1916, he had suggested that General Maxwell should arrest the Secretary for Ireland, Birrell, and have him shot if convicted' (1, 279). At the Colonial Office in 1922, his strategy was to 'reconquer Ireland or lose the Empire,' when 'Winston jumped in with "the way I gloated about reconquest"' (II, 326). He demanded general conscription so that southern Ireland might be brought under military control. This reconquest would require 150,000 troops for two years. He was indignant at the proposal for a truce when we are having more success than usual in killing rebels' (II, 290). The conference with the Irish leaders was 6 a murderers' meeting.' His motto was : 'Stick to your friends, kill your enemies.' He was in favour of 'reprisals under proper authority, shooting by roster' (II, 252). He develops the idea, 'Once the Government shoulders responsibility, the reprisals can go on crescendo if necessary' (II, 265). Truly, as he admits, a foul job for any soldier' (II, 281). These details are put forward not as an excuse for his assassination, but as the reason for it. In the diary up to this point, there is nothing better and nothing worse than that set forth in this review; and the inevitable judgment is that Sir Henry Wilson exists not as a man but as a lay figure drawn by his own hand, inhuman, calculating, callous, without a single generous sentiment or kind word; impersonal, with no suggestion of whom he loved, what scene of beauty he admired. There is no such man. The book is not true. Sir Henry Wilson does himself an injustice. He makes of himself a vision he only thought he saw: a lay figure standing with long legs apart in nonchalant ease, a great image whose brightness was excellent and the form terrible; sleeves, lapels, and breast radiant with signs and symbols-stars, swords, and batons increasing and crossing like heavenly constellations; but the stone that smote this image was a book that issued forth from the mouth of it. But happily at this point, something of the charm which Wilson's friends ascribe to him breaks through. When he found his natural environment amongst frank politicians in the House of Commons, in a curious group at tea in the smoking-room, all telling stories,' he is at home, and himself. But the civil world is a hard place for the soldier turned politician. He had a nice speech ready, but Austen and then Hugh Cecil jumped up before him; a speech he made was garbled in three newspapers and not mentioned in others; it was difficult to get a hearing against Lloyd George. A young man who came to interview him, he suspected in his innocence had been 'sent by Northcliffe,' as it was well known the noble lord was identified with that journal; but he observed with chagrin that the play-boy had interpolated some of his own stuff.' An unnamed friend attributes to him the saying, 'Asquith hates me after the Ulster pogroms, and says that Wilson is the sort of man to head a revolution. I am not sure he is not right.' He was not right. He always flatters himself. When he spoke of his capacity for mischief, he was only boasting. He always drew back from the consequences of his own action. He was for the Western Front, for the Eastern Front, for both. He never took a decision, and never was obliged to carry out a decision taken elsewhere. He was content to set forth hypotheses and alternatives. He had a strategy for Ireland: he was equally sure it could not be executed. When he was breathing out threatenings against the Government and against Ireland, the utmost of his rebellion is defined in his own words, 'I will not vote at the election.' He was nothing more than the intellectual T revolutionary. He boasted of himself to himself in his secret diary, and by a strange perversity the things of which a boaster boasts are always to his own discredit. The diary was published and he was betrayed. It makes of him the Play-Boy of the Western Front. The final test of a man's nature is his conduct in a supreme emergency, and that conduct often is to himself a revelation of hidden weakness or sudden strength. But in either case, his essential nature is revealed. To most men the emergency never comes, and they go to the end in ignorance of themselves. The great emergency came to Sir Henry Wilson on June 22, 1922, as he stood on the steps of his house, 36 Eaton Place. He hesitated for a moment, did the wrong thing, and was lost, as a platoon leader might,-and was lost with his whole platoon, Sir Henry was entering his house. He was fired upon. He did the spectacular thing. He turned and drew his sword. It was a useless and fatal gesture. He had not engrained in his nature that swords are obsolete, that flesh and blood will not endure fire. He had not by bodily presence learned the lesson of Loos and the trenches. He was the traditional staff-officer of his imagination until the very end. Had he acquired by daily familiarity in the trenches a contempt for small arms, that in time became an instinct, he would have gone on his way unmoved by the sound, opened his door, closed it, and summoned the authorised persons. Had he been a man of intellectual quickness, he would have observed that his assailants were thirty feet away, and remembered that they were under a nervous strain that would render their aim uncertain. Had he been a man of humour and sympathy, he might have left his sword alone, and if he turned at all, addressed to the two men a few firm, kind words. They might have changed their minds and gone away. He should have known that they were Irishmen. But this is all surmise. And yet his death was the last link in his life. A good man as he grows old develops the diffused virtue inherent in him. In a bad man, as he grows old, qualities that in youth are commendable pass over into vice. Thrift becomes avarice; desire greed; emulation jealousy; detraction meanness; criticism malice; dislike hatred; alertness intrigue; caution cowardice; a laudable discontent in the extreme case may slowly and insensibly pass into disloyalty, treachery, and treason, unless in the meantime kindly death intervenes. That is the Nemesis of the Greek tragedians. But it is of ambition and opportunity all the moralists bid the young to beware; ambition, the last infirmity even of minds that are noble; and opportunity 'O Opportunity, thy guilt is great. . . And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him, All eulogists agree that the young Wilson was ambitious and eager to make the most of opportunity. The Diary throughout its long length discloses to what extent he avoided the perils inherent in those qualities. During the forty years that Sir Henry Wilson was expending his labour upon these diaries, with the intention of creating a monument for himself, he little it : knew the inscription that should be inscribed upon 'Seekest thou great things for thyself: seek them not'which might well be inscribed too upon his less permanent monument in St Paul's where he lies so proudly with Roberts, Wolseley, Nelson, Wellington, and Napier-but not with Haig. A man writes a diary with the intention of creating a monument: he may erect a scaffold instead, and secure contrary fame from that eminence. Le bon Dieu est Boche,' he wrote after an anxious day.' That is not true either, for there is a depth in the wisdom and knowledge of God that is not peculiarly boche, and a judgment that was unsearchable by Sir Henry Wilson when he was writing these diaries: 'For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore, whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light. And I say unto you, my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear': Let a man fear himself. ANDREW MACPHAIL. 'Religio Militis.' By Austin Hopkinson, formerly a private of Dragoons. Martin Hopkinson, 1927. A BOOK by Mr Austin Hopkinson is an event, and both the matter and the manner of it bring joy to the reviewer's heart. It is a difficult book to review, though so short, for every page is written with a purpose, while the argument may slip along the length of many pages; but all that is written is worth grasping and retaining. We delight in Mr Hopkinson's English, which is grave, austere, and dignified, suggesting the thought that he has sat at the feet of the Elizabethan and Carolean stylists who wrought our language to its fullest glory. A wise and charming reticence pervades the book, despite its frankness. We conceive the frankness to be deliberate and possibly not easy to the author; for the true soldier is a man of action and effort rather than of words, and the Religion of the soldier is self-effacement and self-sacrifice, which do not lend themselves to analysis and description. We are told that the book 'was planned in the trenches before Ypres and has been written at odd moments since. It is a serious attempt to give an outline of the beliefs of the War-generation and to refute the allegations of those who complain that the present age is one in which faith is dying. The author holds that the boys and girls of to-day are not scoffers at religion, but the churches are not in touch with their ideals.' We know that the soldier fulfils himself in deed rather than in word. Why, then, does one whose evident pride is to be a soldier deliberately lay bare convictions which, forged in the secret places of high endeavour and tempered by adversity, might be deemed almost too sacred for expression? Moreover, are there not too many War-books? We struggle in a spate of them, wordy, contradictory, self-assertive books. The author himself says: 'It has become but too common for great captains of the War to write books by which they show how wise were their plans, and how wonderful would have been their victories, |