Better Tears

THE UNFORGOTTEN PRISONER--R. C. Hutchinson--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

Thirteen years ago If Winter Comes (by Arthur Stuart Menteth Hutchinson-- not to be confused with Ray Coryton Hutchinson--made many a reader weep. The Unforgotten Prisoner should do likewise, but the tears will be of a better quality. Author Hutchinson has turned the difficult trick of writing a realistic modern romance, a contemporary story of strong but unmawkish sentiment, a poignantly sympathetic study of English and German victims of a war that did not make democracy safe.

Charles, younger son of a conservative English parson, fell in love with the German governess, Hedwig. When his father tried to break up the affair they eloped, were caught and brought back before the marriage was legalized. Hedwig, sent home to her mother in Germany, was married off to an army officer in time to give her baby a name. Innocent Charles never even suspected he was a father. Then the War came. John, the elder brother, was an officer in France. One of his jobs was catching and condemning a German spy, who turned out to be Hedwig's husband. John took charge of his farewell letter to Hedwig, promised to deliver it when he could.

After the War John went to Germany to deliver the letter, found Hedwig and her son Klaus, half-crazed, half-starved, living like wild animals. They would have nothing to do with him, but he saw to it that they were helped. When the report came that Hedwig was dead and Klaus had disappeared, John thought that was the end. But when Klaus turned up in England as a stowaway John found him again, managed to adopt him, gradually weaned him from the horrors that had cost him his memory. Klaus fell in love with an English girl, was beginning to settle down when a letter came from Germany, from a girl who had saved his life and mothered him for months when he was out of his head. Klaus said good-by to his uncle, his sweetheart and England, and went back to Germany, where he thought he belonged.

The Author. Ray Coryton Hutchinson's first novel (The Answering Glory) made little impression on England. The Unforgotten Prisoner, his second, was chosen by the English Book Society. Twenty-seven-year-old Author Hutchinson has a job with the English advertising firm of J. & B. Colman, leans away from London literati. Before that he was an Oxonian but no esthete, no scholar. Though Author Hutchinson is no old soldier (he was too young to fight in the World War), his deeply-felt picture of post-War chaos will be classed with Erich Maria Remarque's The Road Back.

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