A Page of Early Spring Novels

BACK in this reviewer's toy-soldier age, which coincided with the early years of the war, there appeared a succession of war stories like Empey's "Over the Top" and Collins' "Outwitting the Hun," that gave him vicariously--and diluted--the thrills of combat. Such books stood on the seven-day shelves of American libraries, and though they protested stoutly and even violently their fairness, they had their little part in arousing the sentiment of 1917. As books, they were fitting for the toy-soldier age. Private Suhren is a definitely more matrue volume than these, and while it does not provide the grisly enjoyment that fills the soul on reading of a well-executed atrocity, it excels in honest naturalness, and reels its story out in the staccato What Price Glory manner that fits modern war.

Nor does this book try to ring the church-bells for home or country or anything else. It does not even limit itself to the more sensational patches of the war zone--dressing-stations, trenches, No Man's Land; only near the close does the action shift from various sections behind the lines to the real front, and supply the story with a satisfactory climax. Thus, the work is complete, not composed at an oblique angle; its scenes dramatic, not melodramatic. Private Suhren, withal, decidedly concerned with the fortunes of himself, of his girl, and of his three or four closest comrades; it's only when he has particular cause, and can think somewhat coolly, that he grows patriotic. The greatest moments are his alone. So the broad, dispassioned, epic away is missing. The tragedy of a nation is not here, nor does it need to be. The personal narrative succeeds without it.