How to Go to War in a Hammock

THE UNVANQUISHED-Howard Fasf-Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

HIGH STAKES-Curt Riess-Putnam ($2.50).

ASSIGNMENT IN BRITTANY-Helen Mac-Innes-Little, Brown ($2.50).

UNTIL THE DAY BREAK-Louis Bromfield-Harper ($2.50).

THE COMMANDOS-Elliott Arnold-Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

There is no known way to make war cozy, but publishers and popular novelists have done their best to enable summering readers to go to war in a hammock. These five novels are some of their doings. One is a worthy, serious book. Some are a mere buzz. All are easy hot-weather reading.

Birth of a Hero. By long odds the season's best novel about war, Howard Fast's The Unvanquished never mentions World War II at all. It is about those early desperate months when the American Revolution faced defeat and disintegration. The book begins with America's Dunkirk, the retreat across Manhattan's East River that saved the Continental Army after the Battle of Long Island. It ends with Washington's recrossing of the Delaware-a prototype of the Commando raids.

The Unvanquished is the first attempt in fiction to present General Washington from the inside out, as a suffering and growing human being. Wholly successful or not, Author Fast's portrait is persuasive, moving, alive and bold. Fast's Washington has touches of Lincoln about him, possibly even a trace of General Kutuzov in Tolstoy's War and Peace. But in his own right he is a great human character.

To Novelist Fast, George Washington has the fascination of paradox, some of the strength of paradox resolved. The man who was to lead one of the most important

88 revolutions in history was a very rich man, perhaps the richest in the Colonies. He was also a very simple man, a foxhunting Virginia plantation squire, "slow and awkward at introspection, which he regarded as something slightly sordid." He was a man of colossal dignity. He had thin red hair, outsize hands, feet, nose, jaw, and his outsize body was "skin wound on bones, with broad shoulders and broader hips." His face was deeply pockmarked. When he could not sleep, he used to reassure himself by stroking the scars. He was "a sickly man, and he had the sickly man's intimate knowledge of death." He had "a physical abhorrence of physical fear."

He was no strategist, and he knew it. He was "not a revolutionist, so he would say to himself, over and over again, 'My country, my country, my country.' " He profoundly respected arrogant, disloyal Charles Lee. He liked to think of the Continental Congress "as an august Senate, such as had sat in ancient Rome." He knew "there was no real bond between himself and the rabble of Yankees, backwoods Southerners, and foreign revolutionaries he led; yet there was a drive and a force, and an ache in his heart for something unseen yet tremendously powerful and forthright."

The story of The Unvanquished is the story of Washington's growth in clarity and unity during the critical fortnight when his shattered forces ("an alien army in an alien land") retreated across New Jersey. "On the bleak road he now traveled a fortitude was required that could draw no sustenance from the past. . . . All that mattered now was to exist. . . ."

Fast leaves Washington in the act of recrossing the Delaware to attack Trenton. And Author Fast is artistically right. For "the man," says Fast, "who had set out across the Delaware as a Virginia farmer, as a fox hunter, became on the other shore something else, a man of incredible stature, a human being in some ways more godly and more wonderful than any other who has walked on this earth."

The other novelists on this list content themselves with the melodramatic fringes and stage properties of World War II.

> ASSIGNMENT IN BRITTANY. -Helen Maclnnes' second spy story proves that Above Suspicion (TIME, July 28, 1941) was no flash in the brainpan. Author Maclnnes is, in fact, one of the smoothest melodramatists operating outside the Gestapo (and Hollywood).

Not long after Dunkirk, Hero Martin Hearne, a British agent, parachutes into Brittany to impersonate a wounded French soldier (safely in Britain), whom he faultlessly resembles. Hero Hearne's business: to tell London what the Germans are doing along 200 sq. mi. of French coast. Miss Maclnnes' story includes Mont St. Michel, secret passages under it, quicksands beyond it, Gestapo torture, a Commando raid, breath-taking moments further complicated by love. It also manages to convey with some vividness what subjugation means to Breton peasants.

> UNTIL THE DAY BREAK is Louis Bromfield's labor-saving device for writing a sure-fire best-seller by working the E. Phillips Oppenheim lode. Locale: Paris under the Nazis. The characters: a set of spectacularly pathic Nazi officers, and some no less spectacular democratic aliens. One is thick-lipped ex-procurer Leon d'Abrizzi, late of the Levant. One is Russian Nicky Stejadse, who looks like Victor Mature, but acts more maturely. One is the Madonna-faced, Lilith-bodied feather-dancer Roxie Dawn from Indiana.

Under cover of a new revue (a staircase dance by Roxie sheathed in three feathers) they set up a secret printing press, a hideout for refugees, one link in a chain of saboteurs. Roxie uses her "white ivory body" to extract information from Major Freiherr Kurt Fabrizius von Wessellhoft, a quintessence, complete with childhood trauma, of that "complicated Gothic perversion" which is Mr. Bromfield's synonym for National Socialism. A good-humored Hoosier, Roxie does not understand her war aims until the Major kills her lover, Nicky. She accomplishes an ingenious revenge, fades into the night in a surge of that dead-earnest hatred which, despite his entertaining claptrap, Author Bromfield manages to recommend to his readers as a useful weapon of war.

> THE COMMANDOS. First novelist to skim off the rich literary cream offered by the Commandos is Elliott Arnold, a former feature writer for New York's World-Telegram. The nervy rhythms of Arnold's clipped, reportorial prose pace the rush of Commando troops on a Nazi outpost. The story is laid in the Norwegian underground. Chief characters: a U.S. newspaperman, his chain-smoking girl friend, a Nazi officer from whom she worms secrets. The hero's teen-age musings and the pseudo-Hemingway love scenes are embarrassing, the credibly grisly flashes of Norwegian suffering and sabotage excellent. Better still are descriptions of Commando training and action, which derive from jujitsu, U.S. Indian fighting, the mugging tricks of London's East End thugs.

Supplementary reading:

THE OTHER HORSEMAN-Philip Wylie -Farrar & Rinehart ($2). The old story from which Philip Wylie gets his title is better than the story he tells. The old story: There was a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, who galloped ahead of the others to warn people that they were coming. Realizing as he returned through a devastated world that nobody had heeded his warning, he became so disgusted that he joined the other Four Horsemen in destroying what was left of human life. The Fifth Horseman's name: Reality.

In Author Wylie's story, a Midwestern ex-Rhodes Scholar comes home, after a year in blitzed London, to manufacture an incendiary bomb that will instantly burn up anything it hits. At home he finds a group of pre-Pearl Harbor isolationists. Despite a great deal of angry talk, the young bomb enthusiast manufactures no bombs, burns up nothing except his boss and the daughter of the chairwoman of the local America Forever Committee. His name is not Reality but Jimmie Bailey, and, unlike the Fifth Horseman, he never enlists with the other four.

THE CASTLE ON THE HILL-Elizabeth Goudge-Coward-McCann ($2.50). This rather touching, mildly mystical story of England-after-Dunkirk transforms England's caste system into one big family of stout-fellas. High point of this social salad-mixing comes when a shy little housekeeper, Miss Brown, proposes to her elderly patrician employer, Charles Birley. No snob, Birley prefers bachelorhood. But Miss Brown's leveling instincts achieve satisfaction in others who need her: two cockney children and a soul-sick refugee violinist whom she selflessly agrees to marry.

Meanwhile, Tolstoy's War and Peace, possibly the greatest of all war books, has sold 263,000 copies for Simon & Schuster, who reissued it in May on one of the year's smartest publishing hunches.

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