highway. French regiments cross the Marne, and unmoved by deadly fire rush on the Germans at Villeblanche, and he witnesses hand to hand conflicts with many of the frightful details, as the Teuton horde is vanquished and driven off by his loved Frenchmen.

Nothing but ruins of the once beautiful estate now remain. So he bids farewell to Villeblanche and returns to Paris, crossing battle fields covered with ghastly and gory mementoes. On reaching Paris he receives a visit from his son Julio in rough uniform; never had the boy seemed so distinguished to his father, and a complete reconciliation takes place.

Then months of anxious suspense follow while his son is on the battlefield. Through an influential friend Desnoyers obtains permission to go to the front and the curious experiences of trench warfare are unfolded to him. He visits his son who is a hero to him now, reaching him through tortuous, zig-zag, curving trenches, bullets whizzing overhead like flies, on through dark galleries, and subterranean fortifications, until at last the outer line is attained.

Desnoyers finds his son Julio much changed, in fact hardly recognizable, but although Julio has undergone terrible hardships, yet he has found joy in comradeship, and he has experienced a delight hitherto unknown to him, that of being useful in the world, and the joy of service.

When Desnoyers goes back hope whispers to him: "No one will kill him; my heart which never deceives me tells me so."

Julio is an efficient soldier and is promoted; he becomes a sergeant, then sublieutenant, and for exceptional bravery he receives the croix de guerre, the military medal, and finally he is recommended for the Légion d'honneur. One afternoon, during the Champagne offensive, Desnoyers, still cherishing his fond hopes that his son will be spared, returns to find awaiting him the dreadful news. Julio, his son, is dead upon the field of honor. His father goes with other members of the family to find his son's resting place in an immense soldiers'

cemetery on the battle ground. They discover the grave at last among the thousands and thousands of others all marked similarly, in wide expanse, on the field of death. He recalls the words of the dreamer Tchernoff, the four terrible horsemen whom he saw in his vision riding ruthlessly over his fellow creatures and the prophecy which he made: "No, the beast does not die. It is the eternal companion of man. It hides, spouting blood, forty. . . . sixty. . a hundred years, but eventually it reappears. All that we can hope is that its wound may be long and deep, that it may remain hidden so long that the generation that now remembers it may never see it again.""

As one may imagine, the descriptions of warfare that Blasco Ibáñez saw in person have been attached by him to the thread of the story outlined above. All the strength of his hatred of the Germans and of their methods has inspired the profoundly absorbing pictures that his great powers of observation and his fertile fancy have enabled him to draw.

France at the outbreak of the war, the mobilization and departure of troops for the front, the French retreat on the Marne, the onslaught of the Germans, the battle and the victory for the French, the battlefield, and subsequently trench warfare, the cemeteries and the battle grounds, these in their many aspects afforded the writer such material as he had never had before, and he makes the reader see and experience the whole of it. To read this book is an event in one's life, it leaves a deep, indelible impression. Story and description are well entwined, both entertaining, absorbing and informing, in a word a brilliant book of high import that all should read. Surely, as novelistic propaganda this book is almost without an equal, and genuinely prophetic vision seemed to animate the writer in 1916.

Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) as the Romans called the Mediterranean, is the title of the second of the great trilogy of

'Cf. condensation by Miss Alice C. Higgins, Boston Athenaeum, Parts of which have been quoted.

the war (1917); it is a companion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which it supplements, for it gives us scenes never to be forgotten of submarine warfare and its unspeakable horrors, "of gray submersibles slinking past Gibraltar, and of the pressure of intrigue upon neutral Spain;" but it contains in addition a thrilling "romance of the Mediterranean, the land-locked sea so passionately loved by all the Latin races. It is as if one turned from the smoke and grime of the trenches to the tonic freshness and sparkling beauty of the Sea."

More than this, it tells us in outline the history of the Mediterranean and its shores throughout the ages, from the day of prehistoric man who ventured with varying fortune, often tragic, over this sea on rafts of logs, down to our present day. Not merely essays on history, and navigation, but essays on the marine life of the Mediterranean are interwoven, to the detriment of technique, despite their profound interest to a thoughtful reader. In addition to this, it may be said that no more powerful propaganda against ruthless submarine warfare has ever issued from the hand of

man.

Ulysses Ferragut, a son of Valencia, is the leading character in this story of the sea. Though he came of a well-todo family yet he could not resist the call of the sea. So, after serving in various capacities on vessels plying the ocean to South America and to all parts of the world, he goes the round of the sailor's experiences and ultimately assumes command of his own steamer. When the great war involves the world in a life and death struggle, Ferragut finds his swift steamer a valuable investment.

During a stop in Naples he accidentally meets a beautiful adventuress who turns out to be a German spy. Her name is Freya Talberg. Ferragut becomes wholly infatuated with this dazzling creature and proves unfaithful to his true wife at home in Valencia. He is persuaded by this beautiful and fascinating woman to carry fuel oil to a German submarine

in the center of the Mediterranean. On his return to Naples he learns that his only son, nearly grown, has been in Naples looking for his long absent father, and that he has set out for home again in Spain, possibly by water. The awful seriousness of what he has done now bursts upon Ferragut in all its terrible possibilities. Repentant and tormented by anxiety he sails for Marseilles. En route a submarine is encountered but his vessel escapes. Soon they come, however, upon remnants of a wreck; ghastly bodies floating on the surface tell the terrible story of the fate of the ship that had previously sailed. One of the shipwrecked passengers that had gone on the preceding steamer and escaped destruction by going into a lifeboat is picked up after drifting for many hours. The man talks freely, and Ferragut learns the details of the tragic sinking of the steamer by a German submarine, of the frightful loss of life, and of the suffering of the victims. At last the man speaks of a youth who rushed to the railing just above the point where the torpedo struck, and who was literally blown to atoms; he had previously given his name as Ferragut, and he was returning from Naples, where he had been looking for his father, Captain Ferragut. Whereupon Captain Ferragut falls in a swoon and on recovering, after a serious illness, he experiences a complete revulsion of feeling. He now determines to cast in his lot with France, to place himself and his ship at the service of the French government, and to do everything in his power to fight the nation that is using submarines, and while trying to gain world supremacy is committing so unspeakable horrors. After visiting many Mediterranean ports carrying supplies to the army in the east, and after many exciting adventures, his own vessel, the Mare Nostrum, unexpectedly receives a torpedo one fair morning and immediately afterwards another, so that the ship sinks at once with all on board. Ferragut after struggling with the waves for hours is at last engulfed in the arms of all embracing Amphitrite, and sinks, sinks, sinks, endlessly into infinite oblivion!

Of Freya Talberg we learn that she was captured in France as a German spy and after a stirring trial in Paris sentenced and executed by a firing squad in the early morning hours. Thus sin is adequately punished in the end.

The most memorable scenes in this book are the execution of Freya, and the closing one, the death of Ferragut. I can think of only one parallel to the latter in literature, the death of Claude Frollo in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, in which five pages describe the fall of Claude Frollo from the summit of the tower of Notre Dame Cathedral to the pavement of the street below. For the exhibition of descriptive powers these scenes are among the best in Blasco Ibáñez's writings. The love story, though thrilling, is somewhat shocking to our taste. Essays so long and technical are often displeasing in a novel, and the unmitigated propaganda will some day seem excessive. Nevertheless, this is one of the author's most interesting and informing works.

Los enemigos de la mujer (The enemies of woman, 1919) the last novel that has appeared under the name of Blasco Ibáñez, marks the farthest venture of our author in the fantastic realm of fiction. In this book the writer has removed us far away from the personages and events that one meets in ordinary life. At least this is true of the two leading characters in the story, the hero, a fabulously rich Russian, Prince Lubimoff, and his almost equally rich and capricious. cousin Alicia, the Duchess de Delille.

Both of them after the loss of their fabulous wealth through the vicissitudes of the great war, after spending the most of their youthful days in capricious and luxurious extravagance such as few mortals in the world have had, are now living in comparative retirement and simplicity in the celebrated gambling city of Monte Carlo on the Blue Coast of the Mediterranean. Gambling is going on recklessly. We live in an atmosphere of gambling, and a large portion of the book is devoted to a thorough exposition of the vice of gambling and its gripping and terrible effects on its