C’est La Guerre!

WAR books. We cannot get our fill of them: there is one on every pretentious list this fall. Curiosity to see what was going on behind the German lines has encouraged a wholesale importation; publishers had better watch out that curiosity does not kill the cat. Curiosity was the compulsion that kept me reading Class of 1902, by Ernst Glaeser (Viking Press, $2.50) — a picture of German youth growing up in the war years. It is a story of village life; the war is visible only in its repercussions upon adolescent minds. Inhibited by so much discipline, exhortation, and hardness, it is perhaps natural that human nature should break out in what seem to this American abnormalities. I value the book more for its impression of a warring Germany than for the verity of its youthfulness.

The German invasion has been counterbalanced by that masculine American product, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and, from England, the bitter beauty of Aldington’s Death of a Hero; I hope it won’t stifle the enthusiasm for H. M. Tomlinson’s war book, scheduled for 1930.

Marshall Best, an acute reader and editor, has this to say about some newcomers to the Shelf.

C’KST LA GUERRE!

As long as war books remain true to the lights of the author, they will be read with eagerness and each will take its place ill the picture which is slowly being assembled to stand for the future.

God Have Mercy on Us! by William T. Scanlon (Houghton Mifflin, $2.50) is the most Concentrated picture of men in action that has come from either side. It follows the fate of a United States Marine in France in 1918 — a noncom encouraging his men through the first fierce engagement at Belleau Wood, at Blanc Mont in the St.-Mihiel advance, and through the Argonne to the Armistice. As a narrative of actual combat and the movement of troops, it is astonishingly lucid. This untrained writer gives as expert and graphic a picture of an advance as Ernest Hemingway, in A Farewell to Arms, gives of a retreat. Under barrage, in progress over rough and shell-raked terrain, capture of machine guns, hand-to-hand combat, the digging in and the endless waiting, he somehow manages to keep in sight the larger plan into which his own group fits. One grasps the meaning of army drills, discovers that strategy actually had a use, and breathlessly watches the functioning of each individual and each unit as a part of the greater whole. These men were ‘hard-boiled,’ they took terrific beatings, and their story is as cold-blooded as they themselves must have been in order to endure as they did. The solid virtues of the common man’s character under stress — and its weaknesses, too — are brought out with never a grain of sentiment, in fact with understatement. There is a kind of obvious irony, too, that is sometimes very effective. But one must turn elsewhere for the overtones and undertones that give greatness to such war books as All Quiet and Sergeant Grischa.

The overtones and undertones are not lacking in ’It’s a Great War !’ by Mary Lee (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00), who shares with Mr. Scanlon a recent prize for the best American war novel. Miss Lee has attempted and largely succeeded in the most ambitious undertaking of any American novelist of the war. Through a panorama of the entire cosmos of war, she contemplates those tremendous changes which it wrought in the character of individuals, of a nation, and of a generation,

Anne Wentworth goes from a comfortable New England home to be initiated as a clerk attached to a base hospital near Bordeaux; she transfers to an aviation office in Paris, moves on from there to a ‘ Y’ hut close to the lines, follows the Army of Occupation to Germany, and finally returns for the most difficult stage of the war, the readjustment at home. Along the way she watches men and women under all the stresses of war time: fighting and love-making, eating and playing, suffering, cursing, dying, and most of all waiting. She involves us in the tangled skeins of living that bind her to a dozen friends and each of them to others. She fights in person the Battle of Red Tape, the demoralizing Battle of Paris, the human battles of character beset by challenging influences. As a woman among hundreds of men she is acutely conscious of the pull of sex that dominated these abnormal lives. 1 Somehow you remind me of my wife’ becomes a refrain chanted to her by officers and enlisted men alike.

While Miss Lee ignores no human aspect of the whole turmoil, the things that absorb her are the bitter waste of character, the disillusionment and deception, the breakdown of all that has seemed worth living for. Her book is frankly a crusade, the burning cry of the civilized against the failure of civilization. It is written in countless brief, fragmentary episodes, in sketchy but telling sentences, unadorned with the graces of language. It suffers a little from its great length, — a greater artist might possibly have gained his effect with less elaboration and insistence, — but it does convey an overwhelming sense of the twenty years of living that were packed into those twenty months of time. Its honesty is as relentless as that of any of the men writers, and its observation is ever so much more sensitive. Not all who went through these experiences would react to them as she did: not all will admit that her picture is entirely fair. But it is the natural response of the sensitive and civilized individual, and as such it is the only view of war that really matters. In the face of it, war becomes unthinkable.

Another aspect of war demoralization comes out in Schlump (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50), the story of an unknown soldier in the German ranks. It is a picaresque narrative of an ordinary fighting man, a youth who remains excessively childlike throughout his years of service and goes home as unscathed spiritually as he is physically. This quality of naïveté endears him to the reader, and one follows his adventures with a certain sympathy under the alternate escort of Mars and Venus. The goddess is excessively kind to him, and his story is thickly coated with the frosting of sentiment dear to the bourgeois Teuton palate. Nevertheless it gives a credible idea of what the common man felt and did on the other side, and what he probably thought about when he thought at all. Its best merits are its anecdotes, which have almost the flavor of legend. Its picture of the final retreat forms a complement to Mr. Scanlon’s account of it as seen from the opposite side.

After the fervor of the other war books, Frederick A. Pottle’s Stretchers(Yale University Press, $3.00} is a polite and rather pallid document. The author has made the mistake of trying to popularize his really important subject by working it into a personal narrative which happens to be a little colorless. Yet the essential material, the record of a hospital unit in action, has not been presented before, and the author is an expert recorder and an admirable historian. His duties at an evacuation hospital brought him in touch with all the complicated machinery of this important arm of the service. An evacuation hospital was the crucial post to which the wounded man was brought from the front — after receiving the first-aid treatment available just behind the lines - for examination and usually for surgical operation before being sent on to the base hospital in the rear. The chapters on these hospital functions offer one of those vital studies of detail which are necessary to complete our picture. MARSHALL, BEST