A Leaf in the Storm
A LEAF IN THE STORM $2.50 By JOHN DAY
THE author of this long novel, at what is ostensibly a point of the greatest suspense in the plot, turns his back squarely on his own fable to interject five pages of cold fury about the gratuitous and senseless horrors committed by the Imperial Japanese Army against the most helpless, harmless elements of the Chinese civilian population. His American reader, catching at this clue and other clues in plenty, does not have to feel apologetic if he finds the indubitable history in the book altogether more commanding than the possibly invented story. The significance of A Leaf in the Storm to Americans comes, in fact, not from its tumultuous romance of individual passion and mystical sublimation, but from what we may broadly call its news. Lin Yutang shows us the invaded China of 1937-1938. We see it gradually evolving a tenable military strategy by the method of sore trial, of tearful and costly error. We see it gradually welded into unity, at first by spontaneous mass hate, then by the spreading response to inspired leadership. After the slow education of a pacific people for war by the disasters and the incredible sufferings of the Shanghai area, of Nanking, of Hankow, we feel that people electrified by the sudden realization that it has miraculously attained the power to take the offensive — a realization that dawns with the stupendous moral and tactical triumph of Taierchuang. Out of diverse and clashing elements, the old and the new, the native and the foreign, the realistic and the mystical, there has come to birth something truthfully describable as the soul of a great nation, and with it an awareness of indomitable strength, an everlasting endurance, a certainty of final victory. Moment in Peking was the China of yesterday; A Leaf in the Storm is that of today. Together they are the expression not so much of a novelist as of a publicist whose task is to be the interpreter of his country to ours.
W. F.