BOOKS FOR SOLDIERS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9991, 11 March 1910, Page 4

BOOKS FOR SOLDIERS.

It should be set down to the credit of the woman novelist that she it is who chiefly delights the British soldier. A report upon his favourite reading statas that Mrs Henry Wood and Miss Braddon entertain the leisure hours of the martial life.

"Let others praise analysis, And repel in a 'culutied' style, And follow the subjective Miss From Boston to the banks of Nile."

What the soldier wants is wholesome sentiment and a good story. Give him "East Lynne" and "Lady Audley's Secret," and others of their tribe, and he prefers such work to anything yet wrought by man. He has a fondness, too, for Mrs Wilhams on and Florence Warden, for Baroness Orczy, and, more in comprehensively, for the lady who writes as "JRita." The masculine element in literature, however, is not altogether ignored. Conan Doyle has a successful place in soldiers' libraries; Rudyard Kipling, of course, fis esteemed there; and the 'isfc of lesser stars include Hornung, Stanley Weyman, Mounteny Jephson, and Hawley Smart, Dickens and Thackaray are in fairly steady demand; and military novels win much favour, provided that they are written by milairy men. Tommy Atkins knows his own world too well to stand inaccuracy of detail, but Colonel Newnham Davis, Major Haggard, Robert Blatchford, and Edgar Wallace, can satisfy an exacting criticism upon this point: while such graver books as Lord Roberts, "Forty-one Years in India." Sir Evelyn Wood's "From Midshipman to Fbld Marshal," and Lord Wolseley's "St)ry of a Soldier's Life," are naturally held in high regard. What the soldier does object to is the

fantastic title. Like a wise man, when ordered off to some far quarter of, the k lobe, . he usually desires to, read u f i the 1 ical conditions. SiJ a reeitn*iit bound for riong Kong took to reading, "Chats on China" with a zealsellom bestowed bef re 01

cups and plates; while "The Flowery j Land" had been unhesitatingly re-! jected as "something to do with gardening." A young corporal who took out a treatise on "Kock Dril- ,' ling" was equally disappointed to find no word that applied to military life at Gibraltar. But this research makes it evident that the regimental library is at least as popular as the canteen. "The modern soldier is a good deal more thinking than drinking, and he knows very well that S books will do much to help him on in his profession." j ! . , ,