Fiction

By WILLIAM PLOMER The General. By C. S. Forester. (Michael Joseph. 7s. 6d.) Education Before Verdun. By Arnold Zweig. Tr. by Eric Sutton. (Seeker and Warburg. 8s. 6d.) • The Hill. By Eleanor Green. (Cape. 6s.) Entr'acte. By Vladimir Koshevnikoff. Tr. by Denys Ogiander. (Cobden-Sanderson. 6s. )

IF anybody has taken the trouble to form a collection of novels dealing with the Great War he must by now have a

fairly large library, and he will no doubt be able to go on adding to it until it is destroyed by a bomb dropped in the next Great War, for in the meantime the last War continues to . be a subject attractive' to novelists. It might be supposed that when the supply of war books was most plentiful and the • demand for them keenest every shade of disgust and disillusion- , ment was recorded and every possible tribute paid to heroism.

It might be supposed that there is nothing left to say, but Mr. Forester and Herr Zweig would not agree. Mr. Forester, I believe, was not of military age at the time of the War,

but Herr Zweig, the author of The Case of Sergeant Grischa, took part in it, so their approaches to the subject form a strong contrast. Herr Zweig has written a long, rather discursive, and on the whole profoundly pessimistic novel, centred upon the thirst for justice which men may continue

to feel even under the most hellish conditions : his book is full of the atmosphere of the place and time, it abounds in .observed detail, and is especially concerned with the fate of . individual Jews on the German side and with simmerings of anti-semitism. Mr. Forester on the other hand develops a single idea in half the space, and the result is a neater and perhaps no less disillusioned examination of man as a " fighting

animal."

This idea is quite a simple one. Think of a professional soldier of solid character, whose individuality is entirely lost in his adaptation to a type, whose lack of imagination is complete, and who enjoys no special advantages of birth, wealth, or influence. Imagine him by a series of lucky flukes early distinguishing himself in action, rising rapidly in his profession, marrying the daughter of a duke, obtaining the rewards of a successful servant of his country, and finally acknowledging the greetings of his friends from a bathchair at Bournemouth. There you have General Sir Herbert . Curzon, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O. He is a man almost without a temperament, free from curiosity, untroubled by doubt, doing what seems to him the obvious thing for its own sake, having a heart of oak and a head of oak as well, trained to be reliable and conventional within certain narrow limits, and altogether the kind of man who is supposed to keep the British Empire together. But will this kind of man, one is left asking—a man trained from schooldays onwards to develop Character but not his character, a man who never asks a question but has an answer to everything—will this kind of man be able to keep anything at all together in the future ?

For although he may be " the soul of honour," although he would " give his life for his ideals," although his courage is unflinching." although he shirks no duty, responsibility or difficulty, although he may be an " instrument of destiny," .there are qualities which may be more powerful than blind obedience to a convention. What of the men who came under the control of a Herbert Curzon twenty years ago ?

" It occurred to no one that they had to die in that fashion because the men responsible for their training had never learned any lessons from history, had never realised what resources modern invention bad opened to them, with the consequence that men had to do at the cost of their lives the work which could have been done with one quarter the losses and at one-tenth the risk of defeat if they had been adequately armed and equipped."

At a moment when militant pacifism in this country seems to be giving way to concern about a strengthening of our defences, Sir Herbert Curzon makes a timely appearance. As Mr. ,Forester's eleventh novel, The General is the work of a prac- tised author, and it is more than efficiently written. He has Made Curzon both admirable and sinister, he has made Curzon's story both amusing and terrifying, and all is set forth soberly And credibly. In fact Mr. Forester has written, in a quiet and peculiarly English way and with almost no recourse to obvious horror, an original book about the War.

Education Before l'erdun, which aims at and indeed achieves

an effect of greater richness, and makes more appeal to the emotions and the imagination, would have gained by bing reduced in bulk. There is no longer any novelty in descrip- tions of mud and blood and rats and lice and bombardments, and although the strength of Herr Zweig's feelings and of his talent are both unmistakable one cannot help feeling that he has over-elaborated the sad story he has to tell. He has not undertaken it lightly, and in view of his difficulties it is a remarkable achievement. It forms part of a trilogy ; it was begun as long ago as 1927 ; " the confiscation of my manu- scripts and my expulsion from Germany put off its publication ; and the steady deterioration of my eyesight made difficult the final revision of the re-dictated manuscript." The point of the book may be extracted from a letter written at the front by a certain Sergeant Christoph Kroysing to his mother : • • . Last April I wrote a letter to Uncle Franz describing how our N.C.O.'s let the men go short while they lived on the best of everything. Uncle Franz knows how important it is for the men's morale that they should not feel any sense of injustice. It is what he would call a damned disgrace. This letter was opened by the censor. Papa will tell you how a court martial enquiry was started, not against the N.C.O.'s but against me, and our battalion managed to get the enquiry held up. I was promptly shifted here and kept here—and it's a pretty hot spot, I can tell you."

In the hot spot Christoph was killed, but the facts of his case were already known to an acquaintance named Berth', a "little bespectacled radical Jew," a poet and barrister, now a private in the German Army Service Corps. They also came to the notice of Christoph's brother Eberhard, a lieutenant of sappers, who thereupon devoted himself to vengeance against those " paltry little A.S.C. captains " who had wronged Christoph and sent him to his death. Behind these captains

" loomed the gigantic shape of what held and wielded power—of all those whose task it was to plan and accomplish the suicide of Europe ; poor cretinous fools who looked on their neighbours as mere objects of attack, and conceived, as the final trump in the struggle for world markets : the Gun."

And yet to Bertin the War was

" a primeval force that roared above his head, like an avalanche, for which natural laws were responsible, not men. The war . . . appeared to him-more and more as in the guise of a storm decreed by fate, a release of malignant elements, not amenable to judgment nor accountable to anyone."

One answer is that made by the Judge-Advocate who took up the Kroysing case : having taken poison, he played himself to death with a Brahms quartet and left mankind " marching to the rhythm of every public lie."

The Hill and Entr'acte are short novels written-with great care and by no means without taste. The first deals with a young American girl's perceptions of the beauty and sadness

of human life. She is in love, and sees the world with new eyes, and we are made to share with her the experience of suddenly becoming a grown-up person. Together with her family she goes to a picnic : the weather and surroundings are perfect, but in the family all is not well, and the musing Vinnie pieces together momentary impressions, memories, and speculations, so that the time element disappears, and she sees as in a vision or carefully composed picture the hidden truth

about all those she loves. The sufferings of those we love may

be especially painful to us at a time when we have causes in some other direction -for happiness. We wish to share their

sorrows, we wish them to share our happiness, but we are separate and both are impossible. The word has been cheapened, or one would say that this book is poignant. It will be safer to call it touching. It is not perfect, and Miss Green rides the word " beauty " too hard, especially between

pages 40 and 50.

Entr'acte is an illustration of the truth that " art may require passion, but life requires self-control." Elisabeth Arsenieff, a young girl belonging to an impoverished family in Berlin, misses by chance the opportunity of marrying the man she really loves, and marries instead one who helps her to a triumphant career as a pianist. Long afterwards, too late, she meets the first man again, and sees her whole life as " nothing but an entr'acte between two concerts." Musical novels are often gushing, soulful, and esoteric. This one is so cool and clear that it has appealed to at least one quite unmusical reader.