Men and Mountain

THE VOICE OF THE TRUMPET--Robert Henriques--Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

It started . . . that day in the Whitehall, office. It was in that high and solemn room with a view of the Thames that we were first shown the small-scale chart of Norway with a blue circle round the fiord the island and the fortified pimple islet set off at one corner.

In these words British Commando Officer Lieut. Colonel Robert Henriques describes the opening of the Commando raid which is the core of his unusual novel. As in his earlier No Arms, No Armour (TIME Jan. 15, 1940), Colonel Henriques' interest goes far beyond the surface mechanics of British army life.

Readers who attempt The Voice of the Trumpet's involved, often overwritten pages will find a heroic tour de force with spiritual and religious overtones, splashes of blank verse and some of the best descriptive writing of World War II.

To Captain Smith and his Commandos came telegrams giving each of them two days to return from furlough. When they met at the railhead "they were still congruous with civilian notions of tenderness . . . One could easily envisage the disentanglement of a sergeant's gear from feminine articles, helmet recovered from a web of stockings, rifle extracted from a flimsy slip." A few days of special training in friendly, sheltered coves, and then "the filing into craft by twilight, each man in his proper place and fighting order."

The Commando men were landlubbers, and "the clatter of a cruiser in a gale roused desire for the lowing of cattle; and the sort of chanting that the winds make to a cabin . . . evoked an appetite for the comfortable village noises that steal by night over a long quiet distance." Before dawn they found themselves off the coast of Norway, and "high above us, on the shelf of an incidental mountain, the lovely, unbelievable, almost-forgotten picture of a lit window . . . hung in the morning darkness. For two years we had not seen such a window." But while the men stared, enemy star shells burst in the sky and small boats carried the Commandos to the beaches. Destroyers of the Royal Navy escorted them, and "sometimes we caught snatches of the suave voice of the naval commander: 'Make to Rastus--Sink her,' or 'Make to Seraph--Board her.' "

Ashore, the Commandos began the long, exhausting climb to the mountain top, beyond which lay the bridge they must destroy. Soon their cheeks were "streaked to the neck with charcoaled sweat, and the neck raw from chafing collar . . . the nostrils sore from running mucus. . . . There was pain in . . . the stooped shoulders straining downwards away from the pack . . . in the bent spine, in the small of the back. . . . Pain in the strung thighs, red pain in the chafed buttocks . . . in the gooseflesh skin of the thigh where a holster, or a knife in ihe trouser pocket, rubbed with the polish of dripping water." It was still dark when they stopped to rest at "a heap of stones . . . shown on the map as a farmhouse . . . many miles from any road or track."

The men relaxed. Hunt, "the timorous rodent with a brave but shivering soul," wrote by candlelight to the nonexistent "son" of his imaginary "wife." Efficient, reliable Corporal Barnes, a wealthy Communist under whose discipline the weak became bright and strong and the strong became weak and shriveled, watched over his section with "broody care . . . a curious phenomenon in a renegade gentleman who has discarded the supposition that he was born to lead." Lieut. Jones discussed the soldier's lack of ownership. "Nothing that he takes with him to war is his own by choice: nothing is his own in any sense except that he must pay for it in cash or punishment if it is lost or damaged. [The soldier has] only his recollections . . . dust and cobwebs and a musty odour of sentimental affection."

Then on to the hilltop, and a long wait in the dark silence while the working party disappears to lay its explosives against the arch of the valley bridge. From the beach comes the sound of enemy mortars. Searchlights light up the hilltop. But the working party is back now, trailing a twist of electric cable. The men move off towards the beach as bullets begin to fly around them. "'Fire the damn thing,' Smith said and Jones, kneeling beside him, locked the key into the exploder."

Not all of Author Henriques' soldiers reach their ships again. But before they are shot down they have made it plain to the reader that their terrible climb up the mountainside should mean more to the coming generation than a minor military operation. "We are not to build on the past that is dead. . . . The world must go forward from the dream of avarice to the dream of God which is scarcely remembered. . . . There has been more love on this mountain born of our suffering than was ever found in the plain of our leisure. Our sons . . . must lift their eyes to the hills we have traveled for their understanding." It must be the end of "the pompous man, the man of success and greed for money and power."

Tall, immaculate, 37-year-old Robert David Quixano Henriques stems from historically bizarre stock. His first forebear to reach England was a Spanish Jew who came by way of Holland in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His great-grandfather was the first English Jew to hold a commission in His Majesty's army.

Born in 1905, Henriques was educated at Rugby School and Oxford. He entered the Royal Artillery in 1926 and served in England, Egypt, the Sudan. In 1928 he married a niece of Viscount Bearsted, chairman of the Shell Transport and Trading Co. Ltd. Retiring from the army in 1933, Henriques hunted lions and leopards in Darfur (Death by Moonlight), became publisher of three local newspapers.

At the outbreak of the war Henriques was brigade major in the Royal Artillery, later resigned to become a Commando captain. He took part in raids on Vaagsoy (TIME, Jan. 5, 1942) and helped to plan the successful raid on the Nazi submarine base at St. Nazaire. Much of The Voice of the Trumpet was written aboard ship between raids. Last summer Henriques was "lent" to General Eisenhower and worked on the plans for the invasion of North Africa, went ashore with U.S. assault troops on the beaches north of Casablanca.

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