Crumps

By CAPTAIN LOUIS KEENE, Instructor in Military Science at Dartmouth College. With Prefatory Note by General Leonard Wood. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Crumps, The Plain Tale of a Canadian Who Went, by a member of the first Canadian expeditionary force, furnishes an interesting addition to the literature dealing with personal experiences in the early days of the war. The author makes no attempt at a connected narrative, but, by reproducing a series of letters and extracts from his diary, takes the reader across the seas from Canada in the first transport fleet, through the preliminaries of an English training camp, and then into the thick of the fighting in the Ypres salient, where the young officer commands a machine gun section until he is wounded and forced to retire, late in 1915. The life of the British soldier, both on and off duty, in those pioneer days of the war is treated with an abundance of vivid pictorial detail; and many interesting lights are thrown on the science of machine gun fighting as it existed at the beginning of the war and as it later came to develop. Effective use is made of the diary of a dead German soldier covering a period corresponding to that treated by Captain Keene in a large portion of his narrative.

The work maintains a high level of interest from beginning to end; its easy, conversational tone is well adapted to the type of material that the author has to present; and there is a note of simple sincerity running throughout that should make friends for the book wherever it is read.

Captain Keene, who before the war was a well-known newspaper cartoonist, aids the reader greatly in visualizing his war scenes concretely by the vigorous and striking drawings with which he has illustrated his book. These, ranging in subject matter from the transport fleet on the high seas to studies of the various nationalities represented in the allied armies, show an unquestioned power of stroke and a strong sense of pictorial values.

The Scientific American for August 25 contains "The War of Specialists— the Machine Gunner" by Captain Louis Keene.

"Education and Tradition" by Professor C. R. Lingley appears in the October number of the Texas Review.

"The Influence of Hans Folz on Hans Sachs" by Professor E. F. Clark '01 is printed in Modern Philology for October, 1917.

"Commercial Tendencies and an Esthetic Standard in Education" by Professor Homer Eaton Keyes '00 has been reprinted from Volume 11 (1917) of the Proceedings of the American Association of Museums.