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"A SKETCH IN ALBERT." BY MUIRHEAD BONE. FROM THE WESTERN FRONT," A
BOOK OF DRAWINGS DONE FOR THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT. IN THE DISTANCE
CAN BE SEEN THE FAMOUS "FALLING VIRGIN" WITH THE CHILD OUT-
STRETCHED IN HER ARMS. SINCE THIS DRAWING WAS MADE THE STATUE
HAS BEEN COMPLETELY SHOT AWAY

finally she fell the war would end; and which was felled by a German shell a few days ago. In the drawing the Virgin appears as she was, strangely memorable spectacle against the sky, pitched forward

a

with the Child in her outstretched
hands. In the illustration, "A
Sketch in Albert," reproduced on
this page
the Albert Church
tower with the Falling Virgin
may be seen in the distance!

There remains to be written some day the plain, ungarnished tale of

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Charles Brooks,

T.B.M.

the Tired Business Man. A legend hov

ers about his indifference to Art, Lit

erature, Music and the Drama, especially when the last gives scant latitude to the Frills and Frolics, the Airs and Graces of Broadway. The college bred T.B.M., however, is yet another thing again. He occasionally takes us shyly into his confidence over his hobbies indoors and out, his starved tastes and enthusiasms. For is not this a commercial as well as a Freudian age? Projected into business on leaving Yale over a ripe decade ago, Charles Brooks combined success in business with a turn for phrase, an interest in Elizabethan drama that he had rashly caught at Yale. His prosaic Cleveland evenings were devoted to the business of Literature. When his first volume of essays, Journeys to

JOHN DRINKWATER. FROM A DRAWING BY WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN. HIS "POEMS 19081914" IS DISCUSSED IN MISS RITTEN HOUSE'S

ARTICLE IN THIS ISSUE

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Bagdad, appeared, his business associates were sure it revealed a nefarious pursuit on a par with watered stocks or paper assets. Another volume from the Yale Press, There's Pippins and Cheese to Come, placed him outside the ancient and honourable order of the T.B.M. and suspicion burgeoned into distrust. The critics began to call him a disciple of Elia, and the Cleveland T.B.M. little wot that even Lamb was a slave of desk and ledger. When they find this out they will get together and found a Lamb Club to rival the Rowfant for literary suppers. Meanwhile, having proved a successful and precocious T.B.M., the renegade Mr. Brooks retired to New York's Green

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which was built by someone in their family before the Revolution—a log house, into whose walls a cannon ball was shot during the Revolution, picked out, laid on the parlour floor, and has rolled about there ever since. The room across the hall, with old guns and a sword still resting on the beams, has always been called the "keeping room." The house is heated only by great fireplaces and lighted by candles. And its attic is a place of spinning wheels and chests and drying herbs-which New London uses for post-cards. Miss Branch's contribution to The Masque of Poets, which appeared in the December BOOKMAN with the title The Name, was called by the Boston Transcript "the best poem of the year."

"German
Offensive not
Alarming":
Major Ian Hay
Beith

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as a means of economising troops,
and if we need those troops elsewhere
the flattening of the whole line would
be a distinct advantage.
The really important thing, though,
is that American soldiers should get
into the fighting now. One Amer-
ican soldier now is worth three
eighteen months hence." Major
Beith's new book, The New America
at War, will shortly be published by
Houghton Mifflin Company.

Front

Donald Thompson, the author of Donald Thompson in Russia, has been on every fightMovies from the ing front in Europe since the war started; he has been in the midst of thirty or forty battles, great or small, has been wounded three times, and has been arrested so often that he has lost count. He has worked his camera with bodies falling around him and upsetting his machine. He has made during the war and sent back to the United States one hundred and fifteen thousand feet of moving-picture film and has snapped more than seven thousand kodak pictures. Thompson, who is a Kansan by birth, is still under thirty. He is at present in America, where, in addition to preparing his book of Russian experiences, he has sold his moving-picture films to one of the great companies for an almost fabulous sum. He plans to get back to the Western Front as soon as possible.

The author of The First Hundred Thousand and All In It says of the present German drive: "I think the situation is pretty good on the whole. The main point is that, although it is naturally a time of great anxiety for us, it is ten times worse for the enemy. If this drive fails, it means disaster for him. It is not a question of disaster for us. The enemy does not actually outnumber us. The fact that he seems to, that he does in the actual fighting, means that we are holding out reserves for future action. The French are doing the same. As for Ypres, I think the British will voluntarily flatten out the Ypres line. It will not be a loss. It will be good strategy. For three years we have held the Ypres salient as a sentimental corner of Belgium and for no other reason. Its straightening has been suggested busse, is particularly interesting.

With all the interest in that greatest of war books, Under Fire, the following translation of an early poem by the author, Henri Bar

A Barbusse
Poem

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published by Houghton Mifflin Company. Many war books have mentioned the performances of the tanks, but this is the first book which tells in detail about life with one of "His Majesty's Landships," as they are officially called, and the first book to be written by a tank commander. The author entered Sandhurst in 1914, having already chosen the army as his profession, but the war cut short his training and early in 1915 he went to the front with an infantry regiment, the Royal Berkshires. He fought with them until he was wounded at Loos. After his recovery he joined his regiment and was again wounded at the Somme, where he was recommended for, and later received, the Military Cross. Shortly after his second convalescence he joined the Heavy Branch Machine Gun Corps, which later came to be known as the "Tank Corps." He was a tank commander and went into action with his tank at Arras and at Ypres. Last winter he was recalled, and sent to this country with the tank, and he is now touring the country in the interests of the British Recruiting Mission.

"There is a growing sentiment in this country," writes Prof. Albert G. Keller in the inThrough War to troduction to his Peace new book, Through War to Peace,

"that what Germany has come to stand for is utterly irreconcilable with all those acquisitions of human society-freedom, democracy, Christianity-which we most prize; that it represents a grave menace to them all. This sentiment, with its attendant foreboding, I believe to be substantially correct, so that it will bear examination in the light of reason

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