Right Off the Map
by . New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1927. 12mo.viii+324 pp. $2.50.
IF a reviewer feels it his business to give prospective readers some account of the essential nature of a book and some notion of the effect it is apt to produce, be is likely to find that Right Off the Map presents difficulties. It is easy enough to employ Mr. Montague’s novel as a springboard whence to plunge into a sea of discussion about the folly of war, splashing the pacifists with occasional ridicule in order to preserve an appearance of impartiality. But to do justice to the book itself is another matter. It is a satire on war, a history of an imaginary state, a story of fighting and adventure and heroic endeavor. Yet to apply to it any or all of these labels is likely to be misleading, and furnishes no conception of its readableness and charm.
In order to escape somewhat the clamor and prejudice of partisanship, Mr. Montague has taken the ghosts of other days and endowed them with a bright, vivid existence in the little British republic of Ria. At some indeterminate time after the Great War, the government of Ria declared war upon Porto. There had been gold discovered in some debatable land between the two countries. And there were more reputable frictions that furnished convenient excuse for hostilities. Most of the Rians did not know why they went to war, but, after reading their newspapers, they were quite sure that the Porta as were a mongrel race, who would poison Wells and fire upon flags of truce, who possessed a certain low cunning in battle, but were afraid of cold steel. So the troops marched gayly away ‘to wipe Porto off the map.’ But through the censorship leaked rumors of defeat, then disaster, till in the ironic end it was Ria that disappeared from the map.
In the satirical unfolding of events the soldiers come off much better than the civilians. There is, to be sure, the general who relies so thoroughly upon the old bulldog virtues that he is contemptuous of war as a science until long-range artillery and high explosives waft him to a less changeable world. There are officers in the romantic tradition who oppose flesh to machine guns in futile bravery. But there are more admirable heroisms, too: forced marches through heat and frost, desperate fighting, adventure against enormous odds transfiguring defeat into a thing of glory — heroisms sustained by the simple conviction that here at last is a war that is a good war, fought in a cause that is a good cause. Meantime at home orators rant. Excitable women wave flags. Mothers mourn for their sons. The followers of the Nazarene boom out prayers for blood-drenched victories. And the exponents of vicarious virility urge others to the front with furious zeal. Through the turmoil move various individuals in whom ambitions, fears, and ideals take on human complexity and significance: Burnage, the editor and orator, a ’pincushion with plush brains’; Rose, his neurotic wife; the militant, soft-living Bishop Case; Dr. Crowell, the head of the university, a ‘rag bag of old clichés’; and Willan, the soldier of fortune, whose career ennobles the story.
Satire predominates; romance and imaginary history are secondary. But the satire is astringent, not corrosive. Like one of his characters, Mr. Montague accepts us all as we are, ‘in our incorrigible “halfness,” our crooked attempts to go straight, our incomplete failures.’ He reveals shortcomings, but he does not scold. Even knaves and fools take on the dignity of pathos as symbols of human futility, and the irony that plays around the exhibition of folly and greed is mingled with tenderness at the spectacle of man’s fumbling valor.
GEORGE B. DUTTON