ABOUT THE WAR.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11504, 28 September 1915, Page 7

ABOUT THE WAR.

AN INTERESTING VOLUME. "Morn Thoughts on tlie War'' is a non-committal title Hike "Once Aboard the Lugger." Jn it Air A. ChlttonBroek puts the acid test on some cherished German credos, and the reader will spend an enjoyable session in studying his results. Ho has analysed' the Germnn Tia t ion shrewdly, and when' he writes of England as her people know her. ho is able to write of England as the German people vcb her and, seeing. misjudge her. "In their sense of the word there is no British Empire even in India," ho says. "For an en> pirn to them means a State in which the rubers enjoy ruling because the subjects dislike, being r ill pel." The varying chapters of the little book make light rending of what otherwise might bo too profound for the average war reader. They put into simple words) the half-rcsotved problems that aris® in the now fatalism of Germany, tho conflicting aspects of war and religion, freedom and false doctrine. And leavening it all is a. lighter chapter on the Kaiser, of whom one reads: " Suddenly the Kaiser is to tho English people what ' Boney ' was to their forefathers, and old gentlemen talk after dinner of how he ought to be punished, just as they used to talk of Napoleon. They suppose that lie himself feels villainous inside and enjoys it, and yet. he is ft ill, what he was before the war, the same incongruous mixture of Siegfried and journalist, with' the same serious unconsciousness of hid own incongruity." And the incongruity of the Kaiser is the incongruity of modern Germany, says the author, and he discourses of tho comic Kaiser with his divine right of chieftainship, comically conceded! by his countrymen. Indeed, the Kaiser is a comic figure because, to himself, he is officially everything, personally nothing; officially religious, romantic, modern, terrible—-fn fact, all the different things which Germany believes itself to be. (Methuen and Co., Is.), —"Beta.''