Marsena (and other stories of wartime)

Book excerpt: Those who have read Mr. Harold Frederic's novels and short stories will need no commendation of this book. The tale of the progress of Marsena Pulford, a young man with an artistic temperament in embryo (and absolutely, as his office boy would have said, " without no show"), is told with acuteness through the times when Marsena was a village photographer, having failed as a painter, and through the period of his service in the war, straight on to the hopeless tragedy at the last. It scarcely seems possible that any young woman could be both a hospital nurse and such a wicked fool as Miss Julia Parmalee is represented to be; but as the red-nosed man once said to Mr. Peter Magnus : " Rum creeters is women." There are three other stories in the book - all "of the wartime," and all well told.