Ex-Soldiers
Soldiers What Next ! By Katherine Mayo. (Cassell. 8s. &I.) Timis is a book to be read by those who desire to know what has been happening to the men who fought in the Great War since they returned home respectively to Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States of America.
The author of Mother India is a fearless Writer. In Soldiers What Next ! she has again shown her determination-to expose abulies with an unflinching: regard for facti; no -Matter how much they may tell against her own country. She shows how, owing to the extraordinarily efficient Lobby machinery of the American Legion, -pensioni; to Say nothing of bonuses, have been steadily increasing instead of diminishing year by year, as in other countries, through the automatic effects of death, re-marriage of widows, and the growing up of children.
The following tables illustrate hex' point :
Killed in Battle or Disabled by Wounds Died of Wounds or or Service-incurred
Sickness. Sickness. United States . • .. 1$0,128 .. 192,369 France .. .. 1,393;388 .. 2,052,984 Germany.. .. - 2,050,466 .. 4,202,028 Italy 700,000 1,000,000 United Kingdom . • 812,317 .. 1,869,567 .. ..
Numerical Comparison of World-War Disabled Men, as of 1919, with World-War Pensioners as of 1929.
United States .. . .. 36.00 per cent. increase France .. 49.80 per cent. decrease
Italy . 78.50 per cent. decrease
England .. 73.08 per cent. decrease
" Our American official estimate " (Miss Mayo writes) " based on continuance of the laws in effect in 1932 . . . indicated a continuous increase of the budget up to and including the year 1958. Two years later, in 1960, the English World-War Pension Budget, by orderly decline, will be extinguished."
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Miss Mayo is full of admiration for the manner in which Great Britain has looked after her war-disabled, her widows and orphans. Her detailed enumeration of what has been done should be read by all who are jealous that our debt of honour should be paid. She praises the Ministry of Pensions through several chapters, and realizes the fine work which is being, and has been accomplished, by the British Legion. The Legion Tubercular Settlement at Preston Hall, near Maidstone, and the Legion Poppy Factory at Richmond, have evidently impressed her deeply. What she has not appreci- ated is the influence for good which the British Legion has exerted in keeping successive Governments alive to the im- portance of making the pension system as fair as possible. I wish, too, she had found space to refer to the beneficent work accomplished by the Women's Section of the British Legion.
Her review of the Italian situation immediately after the War is full of interest ; her description of the methods em- ployed by Mussolini in draining malarial swamps ani settling thereon, under healthy conditions, thousands of ex-service men, makes inspiring reading.
Soldiers What Next ! will undoubtedly evoke fierce opposition in certain quarters. Miss Mayo knew, however, what she would have to face when she undertook a work, the left motif of which may be best expressed by the French saying, " /a democratic sans les lumVres, e est an fleau."
G. R. C.
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