Current Literature
BENES, STATESMAN OF CENTRAL EUROPE By Pierre Crabits This is a strange piece of work. -Dr. Benes is the most accessible of men, and possessed of a vivid personality which no one could appreciate who had not had frequent contact with him. Yet M. Pierre Crabites, setting out to write a biography on such a scale as has justified his publishers (Messrs. Routledge) in pricing, it at 12s. 6d., remarks in- genuously in his preface (as proof that he is grinding no axes) : " I have never seen Benes: I have not corresponded with him. I know but few of his intimates." In the same spirit of airy detachment from things that matter he writes of the Genoa Conference—when Dr. Benes ran foul of Mr. Lloyd George and for the first time took rank as a European figure : " We shall not speak of what took place at Genoa," adding as reason for this singular 'reticence a few superficial commonplaces about Conference junketings. The fact is that once M. Crabites gets outside the field covered by Dr. Benes' own War Memoirs and speeches, Mr. Wickhaid Steed's Through Thirty Years and Professor Toynbee's Survey of International Affairs, from all of which he quotes on an almost staggering scale, he gives little indication of knowing anything about Dr. Benes at all. And his final sentence, in which he affirms that " the future of Europe depends today more upon the brain, the tact and activity of Benes than upon any other factor "—than upon any other factor—is a piece of hyperbole to which Dr. Benes' warmest admirers (of whom the writer of this review is one) could apply no milder adjective than fantastic. Ten minutes' talk with Dr. Benes would have taught M. Crabites more about what the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister really is than all his months of rummaging through biographies and memoirs and speeches.
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