'The World Crisis"

Sections of the British press have praised highly the second (and concluding) volume of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill's The World Crisis.* More than once the work has been referred to as " the best book yet written upon the War."

Despite adverse criticism to the effect that Mr. Churchill has waited until after the deaths of Lords Kitchener and Fisher in order to attack them, it is abundantly clear that he has written a fair, searching and important factual narrative on the causes which made the Dardanelles campaign necessary, and on the ofcial conduct of that ill-fated venture. Mr. Churchill might well answer his critics that if historians had refrained throughout the ages to write of Philip of Macedon, the first great military strategist, because he was dead, nothing would now be known of him.

On the failure of the Dardanelles campaign Mr. Churchill's veiled invective is brilliantly trenchant. He says: " We may pause to survey the scene on both sides of the front this sunny August afternoon [Aug. 9,

1915]. On the one hand the placid, prudent, elderly English gentleman [Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford] with his 20,000 men spread around the beaches, the front lines sitting on the tops of shallow trenches, smoking and cooking, with here and there an occasional rifle shot, others bathing by hundreds in the bright blue bay where, disturbed hardly by a single shell, floated the great ships of the war; on the other the skillful German [General Liman von Sanders] stamping with impatience for the arrival of his divisions, expecting with every hour to see his scanty covering forces brushed aside, while the furious Kemal [Mustafa Kemal Pasha, now President of the Republic of Turkey] animated his fanatic soldiers and hurled them forward towards the battle." From this statement it can be easily inferred why, in Mr. Churchill's opinion, the British were defeated on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

The criticism that naturally suggests itself is that Mr. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was apt to think himself First Lord of Omniscience; for he consistently proves that he was right and the other fellow wrong. This is more apparent than real, however; and, in any case the ex-First Lord never fails to make out for himself what seems an incontrovertible case. What Mr. Churchill really did fail in was underestimating the strength of the " red tape " which bound him so securely in his dealings with the Admiralty Board and the War Office. It is apparent that he had no idea of the limits of the possible within a bureaucratic government; in other words he was the optimistic fly in the red tape web of the Government spider.

The book is technical to a large extent, but so admirably is it written, so meticulous has been the choice of words that it is easily assimilable to the layman.

-- THE WORLD CE:SIS, Second Volume.-- Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill.--Scritner ($6.50).