More Mementoes

A ROUMANIAN DIARY--Hans Carossa-- Knopf ($2.50).

THE PATRIOT'S PROGRESS--Henry Wil-liamson--Button ($2.50).

The end of War books is not yet, though by now many an old soldier has blown the gaff on Mars, who lies peacefully dead, or perhaps only sleeping, under the Palace of Versailles.

A Roumanian Diary is the journal of a German doctor who served on the Roumanian front in the winter of 1916. Primarily a physician, a man of peace, he never strikes the professionally martial note. Once an artillery officer pointed out to him where the Roumanians were supposed to be, lent Dr. Carossa his field-glasses. "Turning a little screw, I suddenly discovered behind a juniper thicket a whole band of Roumanians digging themselves in; my first impulse was to tell the officer, but then I felt discouraged and said nothing." One of his duties was to help censor the men's letters to their families. One private's words, mystic, poetical, moved him very much. When the man was killed, Carossa took his papers, read one of the poems to the company when they were under shellfire in the open. The men did not understand it but they said they liked it, it made them feel better.

Author Hans Carossa, 52, Bavarian, is a specialist in lung diseases. He practices his profession in Seestetten, a village on the Danube. During the War he served as medical officer with the Bavarian infantry on several fronts, was finally wounded in April, 1918 at Nieppe Wood. A Roumanian Diary is his first book to be translated into English.

The Patriot's Progress is the story of John Bullock, young London clerk who joined up soon after war was declared, to fight for King & Country. In graphic, impressionistic, sometimes onomatopoetic prose, Author Williamson tells what happened to Private Bullock, from his raptured enlistment and training on Salisbury Plain to the attack beyond Ypres in 1917 when a shell left him with only one more leg to give his King & Country. "Then his heart instead of finishing its beat and pausing to beat again swelled out its beat into an ear-bursting agony and great lurid light that leapt out of his broken-apart body with a spinning shriek and the earth was in his eyes and up his nostrils and going away smaller and smaller into blackness and tiny far away."

After the Armistice, John Bullock gets his job back. Artist William Kennode, whose numerous woodcuts are grafted into the text, shows a picture very much like the frontispiece: Clerk Bullock back at his old desk, but now his boss is a younger instead of an older man, himself prematurely middleaged, one-legged.

Author Williamson and Artist Kennode fought side by side in Flanders. For four years Williamson never went home, were never out of the trenches more than 4 hours. After the War he worked on the London Daily News, then retired to a workman's cottage in Devonshire to learn to write. Other books: The Dream of Fail-Women, The Lone Swallows, Sun Brothers, The Old Stag, Tarka the Otter, The Pathway, The Wet Flanders Plain, Dandelion Days.

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