From the Land of Silent People

IF anyone wants to know what modern war can be, at its horrible worst, told without euphemisms and without reservations, but with a powerful sweep of imagination, horror, pity, and indignation, he should read this book. Offhand it is difficult to think of anything written about the present war that can match Mr. St. John’s story of his tragic odyssey across Yugoslavia and Greece at the time of the German smash last spring.

The author professes to be merely a reporter. He certainly possesses the best qualities of a reporter or foreign correspondent: stubborn determination to get the news and to get it out (the second being infinitely the more difficult part of the task), resourcefulness, courage, and wry humor.

But there are qualities about Mr. St. John’s work that lift it far above the level of the most vivid and competent reporting and give it a place on the small permanent shelf of war literature, along with Barbusse’s Under Fire and Latzko’s Men in War and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. It is true that the authors of these works were themselves soldiers, while St. John is a war correspondent. But he shared the peril of death from the air with soldiers and civilians alike and he conveys the living sense of what he shared.

He can dramatize an observed fact in terms of a general idea, as when he shows us Yugoslav oxcarts and muskets pitted against German motortrucks and dive-bombers. There is a quick instinct of appreciation for the human beings with whom he is thrown in contact: with the grim mad aviator who is so embittered by the death of his mother and sister in the slaughter at Belgrade that he steals a bombing airplane and goes off without orders to bomb Sofia and Bucharest; with Sonia, the resourceful, highly educated, nervous Yugoslav girl who is not quite normal under air bombing and who accompanies the caravan of American and British journalists to the sea, where she is left to an uncertain future.

The author possesses the gift, almost reminiscent of Zola, of being able to ram home scenes of horror and suffering with relentless power. After reading St. John the war no longer seems far away. He makes one hear ‘the thick noise of falling walls,’ and see the hundreds of unwounded dead in Belgrade who had all been killed by repercussion, and smell the burning flesh of Corinth, where great numbers of Australians were burned alive in flames kindled by bombs.

Bombed out of Belgrade, St. John and other American and British correspondents went to Sarajevo, of evil historical memory, in an effort to keep up with the disintegrating and evaporating Yugoslav Government. They contrived to wangle gasoline (which in some cases was being sold at so much the karat in diamonds), made their way to the Adriatic coast, put to sea in a tiny sardine boat, dodged Italian warships, reached Corfu when rations of food and water were running low, lived through some of the worst days of the evacuation of Greece, and emerged to the unnatural luxury and security of Cairo.

Although it is the stories of havoc and merciless destruction that predominate in Mr. St. John’s story, there is also no lack of the heroic note. There is an Australian who refuses to be evacuated and stays with a mortally wounded friend to face certain capture. There are two British officers who quietly put off from the last vessel that is taking care of the evacuation because they have a ‘last job’to do — a suicide job, in all probability, for them.

St. John is the kind of person who instinctively makes friends with the brave Australian soldiers with whom he was evacuated from Crete after they had fought a hopeless battle against overwhelmingly superior numbers and air power. He was impressed by their awareness of world issues, their determination to find some means of seeing to it that war shall be prevented in the future.

He is also the kind of person who doesn’t hit it off any too well with Old School Tie officers and censors in sheltered Cairo. Some of the things he has to say about censorship are worth remembering when one reads the morning newspaper. He couldn’t file his stories from shattered Yugoslavia and Greece and from Egypt; he could only send a bowdlerized and in some cases unintentionally misleading version. But he has put everything into this book, and it is immensely worth reading.

WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

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