Coffin to Coffin

THE CASE OF SERGEANT GRISCHA--Arnold Zweig--Viking ($2.50).

The Story. Much as he liked his German guards and his fellow Russian prisoners, Grischa had had enough of prison camp. True, he had heard that Russia was done for and the War near an end--it was blustery March of 1917--but enough was enough, and he yearned Eastward toward his wife and little girl. His monotonous duty was to pile timber in freight cars bound for the front. At the end of one carload he neatly constructed a cavity for himself, and that night slipped out of the bunk house. Under cover of his comrades' merrymaking he crunched across the snow to the wire enclosure; under cover of the wind screaming through ice-ribbed pines he snapped the twanging wires. Three days later he climbed stiff and jolt-bruised from his living coffin, and stumbled into the forests of--Prussia? Russia? Poland?

A lynx will not attack a man. But, emboldened by the tastiness of chance corpses that War-winter, a female lynx stalked Grischa for days, till suddenly he noticed her crouching to spring. So drolly did her crooked eyes and fringe of whiskers remind Grischa of himself, that he burst into a roar of terrifying human laughter, and unwittingly saved himself from fangs and evil claws.

The limpid spring months he spent at an outlaw camp, favorite of the only woman --a girl whose hair had turned white with the War. Babka weaned him body and soul from the starvation of trenches and prison; then reluctantly sent him on, his identity of escaped prisoner well camouflaged by the clothes and identification-tag of dead Bjuscheff, Russian deserter.

In seven languages--German, Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Yiddish, Lettish, Esthonian--the Germans posted their proclamations, but Grischa could read not one of any seven, and in a few hours he was imprisoned again. For, the newest ordinance read that in the name of discipline all Russian deserters would be executed--dour example to weary-hearted German soldiers. Grischa, alias Deserter Bjuscheff, was promptly sentenced, whereupon he took refuge in confessing his camouflage. His peasant simplicity won belief in the hearts of guards, officers, and even old Commander von Lychow.

But the "case," stripped of its humanity, happened to come before Schieffenzahn (said to be Ludendorff), engrossed as he was with annexation, colonization, Germanization, of the whole new border territory. In wholesale efficiency as to forestry, mineral resources, new currency, savings-banks, travelling incinerators, German bookshops, and paper factories for newspapers, insignificant Grischa fell under the category of discipline necessary to state maintenance. In vain did old von Lychow, beloved of his men, argue that it is justice preserves the state: "I know that justice and faith in God have been the pillars of Prussia, and I will not look on while her rulers try to bring them down."

Grischa was shot, having meticulously joined his own coffin, lustily dug his own grave, manfully marched to his death.

The Significance. War novels by the gross have detailed the lice, the mud, the oaths, on "Flanders Field." The present volume is distinctive in vivifying that other, more mysterious, no-man's-land east of Germany, west of Russia. But far more than this, The Case of Sergeant Grischa is a powerful indictment of autocratic statecraft, a pageant of heterogeneous border peoples, and a human document of uncanny understanding. The jocund vitality which lured Grischa to mad escape is no less vivid than his fatalistic reluctance to escape again. Insignificant "case," Grischa is the symbol that rouses the interest pf villagers, the prophecies of Hebrew elders, the affection of restive German soldiers, the championship of officers, the pique of a Prussian super-official.

The Author. War-author Zweig was intimately acquainted with Flanders lice and oaths and mud, having wallowed thirteen months at Verdun. On the Eastern front he knew similar nastiness, saw deeper implications. A German Jew, 41, he has studied French and English literature, translated much of Kipling's verse. He is no relation to Stefan Zweig, the popular modern who adapted Ben Jonson's Volpone for the Theatre Guild.