Men From Nowhere

THE international population of a spit of land jutting into the Mediterranean from the southern coast, of France is the subject of this book. The men, mostly wanderers and refugees, are employed in an English-owned lead and silver mine, which is operated by an ex-Bengal Lancer with a taste for strong drink. Former German scientists and generals to the late Czar subsist on the mining company’s wages. Their lives are aimless, their pasts obscure, their futures hopeless, and their diversions nothing that, the rigidly righteous would approve. The miners are too lightly drawn to inspire intense feeling of any kind, yet the book manages to be kindly and often raucously funny, radiating sunny sympathy with these defeated drifters.