The Puritan soldier keeps all his military experiences to work them all up into his _Holy War_, the one and only war that ever kindled all his passions and filled his every waking thought.

But since John Bunyan was a man of genius, equal in his own way to Cromwell and Milton themselves, if I were a soldier I would keep ever before me the great book in which Bunyan's experiences and observations and reflections as a soldier are all worked up.

I would set that classical book on the same shelf with Caesar's _Commentaries_ and Napier's _Peninsula_, and Carlyle's glorious battle- pieces.

Even Caesar has been accused of too great dryness and coldness in his Commentaries, but there is neither dryness nor coldness in John Bunyan's _Holy War_.

To read Bunyan kindles our cold civilian blood like the waving of a banner and like the sound of a trumpet.
The situation of the city of Mansoul occupies one of the most beautiful pages of this whole book.