No Time for War
THE first of these books, modest as it is in tone, is likely to leave you thinking. The misuse of science now makes it necessary to articulate a new and purely practical form of Pacifism, a Pacifism which, free of crankiness and owing nothing to religious sensitivity, depends entirely on simple common sense. From now on, people must say, war will mean not only a shortage of cakes and ale but the end of everything. It is this form of protest, of personal withdrawal from political folly which, among other things, makes such pleasant reading of John Knowles's A Separate Peace. It is the story of two friends at a smart American preparatory school (for 'preparatory' read 'pub- lic' in this country) at the time when America first joined the Second World War. In the beginning the younger boys are more or less ignored while their elders are hurriedly prepared for the blood bath; but as time goes on the whole school is effi- ciently geared to the conditioning of cannon- fodder, and every aspect of work and play comes to be valued, by masters who are themselves too old to fight, only in so far as it is a preparation for the trial to come. The boys of today are only toler- able at all because they are the soldiers of tomor- row. But at this stage Gene, the intellectually in- clined narrator, has a fit of insane resentment and causes his athletic friend, Phineas, to break his leg. Phineas, so badly crippled that he will be out of the war in any case, broods over the separate peace thus forced upon him and event- ually decides that the war is entirely spurious, that the whole thing has been thought up by Roose- velt, Churchill and the authorities in general simply because they are old men jealous of youth and pleasure. Once upon a time, Phineas says, all these kill-joys . . got really desperate and arranged the
Depression. That kept the people who were young in the Thirties in their places. But they couldn't use that trick forever, so for us in the Forties they've cooked up this war fake.'
'Who are they, anyway?'
'The fat old men who don't want us crowding them out of their jobs. . .
Phineas, of course, is in part rationalising his annoyance at being out of something; but the more sensitive Gene accepts what he says as an important truth. So privately and together they resist the war and all it implies until reality makes itself felt--sickeningly so—in its own good time. . . . In emphasising the wider theme of this book, I have done less than justice to other matters—the quietly told story of the boys' re- lationship and its crises, the sweat and hopeless melancholy which pervades the whole. But then the real importance of Mr. Knowles's novel does indeed lie in its account of the attempt, made by two powerless individuals, to dissociate them- selves from them and the follies for which they are responsible. It is an attempt strictly in accord with the principles of the 'common-sense' paci- fism I described above—but an attempt doomed to painful failure unless everyone makes it. How silly the Generals on both sides, how silly they would look then. But Mr. Knowles makes it plain enough (if we hadn't guessed already) that quiet common sense is a feeble match for reality and the Generals : they are sure of the last word.
In Fear of Silence is a terse and very compe- tent tale of patrolling in the Malayan jungle. John Slimming not only describes actions of this kind with precision and speed, he is concerned to let us know what lies behind it all—the maps with their little coloured flags, the spies, the middle- aged officers who have lost their confidence. And in the end, of course, there are just a few more young men dead while the old men go on with their planning. Written at the end of the nine- teenth century, Mordecai Zeev Feierberg's Whither? is the mental history of a Polish Jew who, defying rabbinical stricture, actually dares to pursue his studies beyond the Talmud and read a few Western authors for a change. It gives a fascinating impression of the extreme cultural and intellectual narrowness of the more downtrodden communities of orthodox Jewry as they existed in Europe at the turn of the century.
SIMON RAVEN
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