People on Our Side

EDGAR SNOW knows India and China and Russia well. His newest book, like his others, is fair, well documented, and persuasive. It labels clearly those peoples who can be relied on to coöperate with us in case we are able to fetch out an American policy at the end of the war and stick to it.

This book takes the form of narrative into which are woven vivid descriptions and accounts of his talks with the leaders and with the rank and file. At convenient points he pauses to give us the conclusions that an honest man cannot dodge. While he spares us the details of the firing on the unarmed mob at Delhi in 1942, which he witnessed, he makes clear enough the logic of that action and of all the other pathetic happenings in India and Russia and China which mark the increasing rebarbarization of the world. If it is true that we in America are incapable of comprehending cause and effect in history Emerson’s two austere “chancellors of God — then the book will be a mere crying in the wilderness. Its sober purpose is to untangle the causes of this mess.

Mr. Snow’s accounts of the phenomenal success of the food and arms production in Russia, and of the progress among the Chinese Communists, suggest that our own muddling through under vastly easier conditions is no great matter for pride. But the book is not a piece of Leftist special pleading. No one can deny the plain fact that some millions of Chinese on our side have been ignored and neglected by America where, unreached by Lend-Lease, they have stood alone for seven years against the Japanese. Nor is it possible to forget that we persist in sending to Washington Senators and Representatives who play Hitler’s game by thundering against the peoples of Russia — who are on our side.

According to Mr. Snow, the best hope for American coöperation with the large body of staunch and proved Chinese Communists lies in two facts: (1) that the Communists hold the territory closest to Japan, just where we want bases for our bombers; and (2) that they want so little from us in the way of supplies. Surely an embarrassed State Department, hitherto blinded by Chungking to the fact that the Communists are on our side, can save face — ours and China’s — by entering into effective contact with these most desirable allies. Americans who know and love China tell us that the Generalissimo could be persuaded to shake off the bonds imposed on him by our unfriends in the party he heads and gradually recognize the Communist millions.

As for our friends in Russia, we need to show some belated enlightened self-interest and to learn from them how they have secured the race tolerance that Americans yearn for at home. It would be healthy also for us to admit that they are making far better weather of it with their recently bombed fields and factories, their new-dug mines, and their man and woman power, so lately discovered, than we are, though our earth is unscorched.

As for India, Mr. Snow reviews the various factions, gives us the gist, of his talks with the leaders, and, without raking up the old tales of England’s failures, makes it seem possible that something can yet be done. He does not say so, but one gathers that he believes America might be of some help, even in so touchy a situation. This war is not for race or color or creed. In this sense India is very much the business of all the .United Nations. Possibly the rest of us should leave it to England to manage, but perhaps it is impossible for her to do the job alone in the face of Indian prejudice.

This book should be a textbook for Army and Navy training schools. Random House, $3.50.