The Peripatetic Reviewer

THIS is the time of year when, during my boyhood in New Jersey, you could come down with anything — chicken pox, measles, whooping cough, croup, or an earache; these stalked us as the winter ran its course. “As the days get longer the cold grows stronger,” and though we were fortified with daily doses of cod-liver oil, we were probably more vulnerable then than at any time since summer. Doctor Jim Green, our family doctor, who had brought me and my five brothers and sisters into the world, was in heavy demand; so, except for emergency, we were cared for with household remedies applied by Mother with the advice of Mr. Parsons, the druggist.

For earache, that sudden frightening pain, the worse because it came at night, she used hot goose grease, drop by drop, or a peeled and heated onion, hot as you could stand it and just small enough to fit the cavity. (I have heard of those who used pickerel oil, but who had it and how it was procured, I never knew.) For croup or a cold that settled in the chest, heat was again essential, and it was rubbed into you with camphorated oil— boy, how that burned ! — or mustard plaster, or lard and turpentine, all of these unguents being kept in place by a strip of flannel. The lard and turpentine mixture was warmed in a hot plate and afterward kept out in the laundry; it was bad luck to throw it away — if you did, someone else in the household would get sick.

In the early stages of a sore throat, when our sniffling and barking were getting on Mother’s nerves, she would spoon into us Brown’s cough mixture or Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral. Both were tasty in a day when most medicines were hard to stomach.

Whooping cough was a mixed blessing, depending, of course, on how bad a case you had. It meant that you would be quarantined (no school!) for seven weeks and you would be expected to swallow quarts of Hive Syrup to keep you from whooping. I spent my quarantine with my grandfather and favorite aunt, and enjoyed it.

Tonsillitis, on the other hand, was a nag, and the cure for it humiliating. They tied a wet washrag around your throat, and to keep it from slipping, wrapped it around with one of Mother’s old black stockings.

Burns, incurred when you were making fudge or otherwise fooling around the kitchen range, were salved by an application of linseed oil and limewater. For an upset stomach, there were several remedies, and since no allowance was made for allergies and you were supposed to eat whatever was set before you, I suffered frequently from what was called heartburn. Fried tomatoes, fried onions, cucumbers would set me burping in no time, and at the sound I would be sent upstairs to eat some charcoal tablets. If that didn’t work, then a tablespoonful of rhubarb and soda, and if I was still irrepressible, this would be followed by a tall glass of baking soda and steaming water. For hiccups you simply stole up behind the victim and dropped a fifty-cent piece inside his or her shirt. The shock was supposed to cure.

Chicken pox, like mumps and chapped hands, you just suffered until nature did the mending. For fever, sweet spirits of niter diluted in water, or, if it was bad, an alcohol rub and, oh, the relief of witch hazel on a cool cloth on cheeks or temple. As long as there was snow on the ground, chapped hands would be scarred and the skin broken by nightfall. The trouble, of course, was with our mittens, which got soaked in our snowball fights, soaked when we coasted, and caked with snow when we hitched up our Flexible Flyers to the rear end of delivery wagons. Good-natured drivers would tow us all through our part of town; those who weren’t would crack their whips at us until we let go. Allen Church, my most daring cousin, hitched his sled to a Hahn’s delivery wagon and got towed all the way to Newark, where, when night fell, one of his father’s friends found him and brought him — and sled — home.

With the March thaw came lassitude, and as the stronger sunlight filtered through the window I remember how we used to stretch and yawn. Spring was coming, and we were almost home free. We had heard of country cousins whose mother tied around their necks little bags of asafetida, which stank like onions and old clothes; if you could stand that smell, I guess you could stand anything. But we had our own form of grueling, and we knew we were in for it when on a bright Saturday afternoon Mother would suddenly exclaim, “Come, children. Time for spring housecleaning. A clean house is better than a bad tenant.” We always hoped she might forget, but she never did. That night, before we undressed, each of us would be made to swallow a tablespoonful of castor oil. We could take it in a tumbler mixed with orange juice, the orange juice in the top layer and the oil underneath, or choke it down in a desperate gulp with eyes shut tight. Either way, it marked the end of winter.

1918 — THE LAST ACT, by BARRIE PITT (Norton, $5.95), invites comparison with Barbara W. Tuchman’s splendid chronicle The Guns of August. Mrs. Tuchman has the more spectacular material, Mr. Pitt the more desperate. In the summer of 1914 the nations rode off to war with a pride, confidence, and color they were never to have again: the uhlans carried their steel-tipped lances; the Cossacks were a nightmare threatening Prussia; and the Czar’s armies, the least equipped and most naïve, maintained their staff work with wireless messages anyone could intercept. Mrs. Tuchman is the better portraitist; she has more bizarre and choleric types to work with, and her skill in characterization contributes much to the readability of her book. Finally, her account of von Moltke’s remorseless advance through Belgium and toward Paris, so unstoppable until Gallieni and “Papa” Joffre turned the right flank on the Marne, is an example of the classic military reverse, a miracle of recovery in which the dazed leadership of Sir John French and the always late B.E.F. played a disappointing part.

In 1918, the Germans are again advancing, this time under the more capable direction of General Ludendorff; after an incredible barrage, a gap miles wide has been opened between the British and French armies, and up the roads toward Amiens come the German infantry, packs on their backs, virtually unopposed. But this time the defenders’ roles are reversed: it is the British who bear the brunt; the French, bled white and mutinous in some divisions, were capable of holding but had lost their élan. Thus, Mr. Pitt is as much a proponent for the British Army as Mrs. Tuchman is for the French. He was born in 1918, that great turning point which he writes about, and as the son of an officer in the Royal Navy he naturally sympathizes with the British. Mr. Pitt’s prose is concise and lucid; his narrative is focused on the troop movements, the fighting conditions — excellent in the description of the muddy, drowning stalemate — and the intricate chain of decisions. Personalities come through by inference: he prefers Douglas Haig to Petain, and both to Foch, whose ability he consistently underestimates. Yet it was Foch’s duty as Supreme Commander to close that door before Amiens, and this he did at the critical moment by throwing in his shock troops — the Australians, the Foreign Legion, and the Moroccans. In this assault the German spearpoint was tempted beyond endurance; having fought its way through the wasted country, it entered villages with wine cellars, food, and booty — and the drinking began. Here, as later, Pitt quotes the German staff officer Rudolf Binding to good effect.

In AREA CODE 215 (Atheneum, $5.75) WALTER TELLER records his appreciative, highly personalized journal of the bucolic life in one of the most jealously guarded and beautiful counties in the East. Mr. Teller is part naturalist, part historian. His entries follow the course of the year and are written with an unhurried curiosity which adds to the fun. I like him best when he is talking about the old-timers: Albert Large, the hermit who for three decades holed up in Wolf Rocks; Edward Hicks, the painter of primitives who become a Quaker convert; Joseph Pickett, another selftaught artist; and Dr. “Ralcy” Bell, “knight of the loyal heart,” as it says on his epitaph, who had a way with the ladies and who accidentally knocked himself off with a shotgun trap he had set up beside his front door. “In gentle-appearing valleys strange happenings occur,” says Mr. Teller, and indeed they do. I enjoy the perception with which he watches the birds and the changing moods of the weather, and his savagery at a cocktail party, but I am a little less taken with his somewhat mushy love affair of Ernest and Lucia.

EDWARD WEISMILLER published his first volume of poems, The Deer Come Down, shortly before the Second World War. During the war he was one of the few marine officers to serve in Europe, and in Cherbourg after the invasion he was involved in counterespionage which opened up the seamy side of the Occupation and laid the foundation for his novel, THE SERPENT SLEEPING (Putnam, $4.95).

The story is set in Cherbourg in the summer of 1944, when the women who collaborated were still being shaved and spat on, and when there was suspicion among the natives, which rubbed off on the Americans, as to which of the returnees were innocent and which guilty. Weismiller tells his story through the understanding of young Lieutenant Phillips, sensitive and with little training for a nasty job, who tries to thread an honest course through the web of vindictive rumor and deceit. He believes in the innocence of Thérèse Bouliard, a girl whom his superior officer has every reason for wanting to convict - and thereby hangs the tale. The handicap of this story is inherent in the material, for counterespionage is a small hard cord of truth leading through an indefinite maze, and it takes persistence on the part of the reader to follow this plot to the end.

The famous foreign correspondents Bill Shirer, Ed Murrow, and Raymond Gram Swing, who warned us of the approach of the Second World War, were followed by a second wave of action writers, Dick Tregaskis, Ernie Pyle, and John Hersey, and by young novelists who had been in action, like John Horne Burns, Tom Heggen, and James Jones. The young writer who was the longest exposed was JOHN HERSEY. He experienced the night fighting on Guadalcanal, lived with the American GIs in Italy and with the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force, saw the gas chambers, studied the crushed ghetto of Warsaw, reported with enormous patience and compassion the dazed aftermath of Hiroshima. It would be quite wonderful if a writer of Hersey’s quality, after witnessing these many faces of death, could find any theme worth writing about save man’s desperate struggle for survival.

In his new book, HERE TO STAY (Knopf, $5.00), Mr. Hersey has brought together eight of his prose pieces, each of them a heroic adventure in survival. The lead piece, “Over the Mad River,” tells how a little old lady outlived the hurricane and flood in Winsted, Connecticut; and the second is of a family’s flight from Hungary after the revolt of 1956. The war pieces include “A Short Talk with Erlanger,” an almost unbearable diagnosis of an American soldier who has lost the use of one leg; John F. Kennedy’s inexhaustible tenacity shepherding the crew of PT boat 109, and the long, brilliant description of Hiroshima, commissioned by the New Yorker and in itself a classic. Charged with sympathy, vivid and terrible in detail, this is eyewitness writing of a high order.