Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3820/Our Booking-Office
(By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks.)
I suppose that never in the history of this nation did we harbour quite so many military experts. From the Service Clubs to the street corner their voice goes up daily in unceasing hortation. Therefore the moment seems specially apt for me to call your attention to a volume by a military man who really was expert, in other words to a new edition of Pasley's Military Policy of the British Empire (Clowes), brought up to date by Colonel B. R. Ward, R.E. I blush to think of the number of civilian readers to whom the name of Pasley conveys nothing. I blush still more to reflect that I have myself only just ceased to belong to them. But, quite honestly, if you are at all concerned with the science and policy of arms (as who nowadays is not?), you will find this book of extreme interest. A few chance quotations will be enough to prove that the gallant Captain was a man who knew what he was writing about. In the year 1810, for example, he could look ahead far enough to say, "Germany may become so powerful as to act the same part in Europe which France now does." It is perhaps on the ethical side of war that he is most impressive. Fair play, we all know, is a jewel; but many of us may have secreted an uneasy suspicion that the side that practises it suffers from a certain handicap. All those unpleasant persons whose names have become so uncomfortably familiar lately—Clausewitz, Bernhardi, and their professional crew—have so vociferously preached the gospel of Might as Right, that it is refreshing to read here such maxims as "It is an advantage in war to show moderation and justice," and "A scrupulous adherence to the law of nations is the only sound policy." This is the sort of sermon—from an authoritative source—that we do well to lay to heart just now; while still retaining a fixed determination to exact for future assurance the uttermost penalty from an enemy that has broken every law of God and man.
In ordinary life it would be a distinct advantage for a man to become possessed of a spell which rendered him immune from death, pain or restraint, enabled him to pass through walls and floors and generally freed him from all those little restrictions which make life the tiresome and precarious thing it is. A man so constituted would conduct himself after the manner of his fellows from day to day and would resort to the use of his peculiar powers only when the necessity arose. But the hero of fiction has his duty always to perform, and he may well find that such transcendental gifts are apt to become a burden. He must for ever be turning them to account and finding new material to work upon. That the scope is limited anyone will at once discover who reads The Great Miracle (Stanley Paul). He may never do the same thing twice: once he has disappeared through a floor at a critical moment, floors are off. Each feat must be more astounding than the last: when he has worked his way through a prison wall it would be an anticlimax to do a job with the wall of a mere dwelling-house, and, of course, he is absolutely precluded from the common use of doors. I am afraid Mr. T. P. Vaneword's primary conception has been too much for him: he lacks the nice imagination of a Wells to carry it off. Also he fails to deal with the humour of the position, whether in the madhouse, the court of justice, the manager's office or the palace, an elementary mistake which the most amateur conjurer will always avoid. It is rather the author's misfortune than his fault that his incidental picture of war, introduced only as a new field of operation for his prodigy, is rendered almost fatuous by the actual conditions at present existing.
When the father of Patience Tabernacle (Mills and Boon) suddenly left his books at the bank in a state of regrettable inaccuracy and went off to borrow the wig and other equipment of his elderly maiden sister I thought I was to have one of those jolly, naïve detective stories which the feminine hand can best weave. But I was deceived, nor do I consider quite fairly. For how was I to know that such an incident had no essential relation to any other in this quiet story of the love affairs of Patience and the wrong boy rejected, and the right man discovered, in time; that it wasn't even introduced so as to throw light on the character of any one concerned? Now I would ask Miss Sophie Coles what she would think of me if I began my (projected) Sussex village epic with the blowing up of the local public-house by anarchists and contented myself with merely casual references to the matter, never really making it part of any design or letting it modify any of my characters? And wouldn't it aggravate, not lessen, my artistic crime if I made the anarchists related to my heroine? Of course it would. Very well, then. And I am afraid our author can't claim the privileges of a lawless realism, for she distinctly doesn't belong to the photographic school.