precision in arms. What would such a war mean in reality to the soldiers engaged? What the play of human elements? What form the new symbols? Therefore have I laid my scene in a small section of a European frontier, and the time the present.

Identify your combatants, some friends insist. Make the Italians fight the Austrians or the French fight the Germans. As a spectator of wars, under the spell of the growing cosmopolitanism that makes mankind more and more akin, I could not see it in that way and be true to my experience. My soldiers exist for my purpose only as human beings. Race prejudices they have. Race prejudice is one of the factors of war. But make the prejudice English, Italian, German, Russian, or French and there is the temptation for reader and author to forget the story of men as men and war as war. Even as in the long campaign in Manchuria I would see a battle simply as an argument to the death between little fellows in short khaki blouses and big fellows in long gray coats, so I see the Browns and the Grays in "The Last Shot" take the field.

But, though the scene is imaginary, the characters are from life. Their actions and their sayings are those of men whom I have studied under the stress of danger and sudden emergency. The delightful, boyish confidence of Eugene Aronson has been at my elbow in a charge; Feller I knew in the tropics as an outcast who shared my rations; Dellarme's last words I heard from a dying captain; the philosophy of Hugo Mallin is no less familiar than the bragging of Pilzer or the transformation of Stransky, who whistled a wedding-march as he pumped bullets at the enemy. In Lanstron we have a type of the modern officer; in the elder Fragini a type of the soldier of another day. Each marches in his place and plays his part in the sort of spectacle that I have often watched. If there be no particular hero, then I can only say, in confidence behind the scenes, that I have found no one man, however heroic in the martial imagination of his country, to be a particular hero in fact. Take, for example, our trembling little Peterkin, who won the bronze cross for courage.

As for Marta and Minna, they speak for another element—for a good half of the world's population that does not bear arms. In a siege once I had glimpses of women under fire and I learned that bravery is not an exclusively masculine trait. The game of solitaire? Well, it occurred in a house in the midst of bursting shells. But the part that Marta plays? Is it extravaganza? Not in war. The author sees it as something very real.

FREDERICK PALMER.

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