Marching Song
DE VALERA AND THE MARCH OF A NATION. By Mary C. Bromage. (Hutchinson, 25s.)
`SITTING around a turf blaze at the hearth of one of Ireland's old country houses is conducive to talk, and it was in such a place I thought of writing this book.' As the writer is American, the ,opening is ominous. Surprisingly, the book turns out to be meticulously careful, marred only by a felk errors of detail. Nevertheless it has one serious defect. The people who come and go through its pages, Pearse, Griffith, Collins, Childers, Cosgrave, are occasionally brought to the mind's eye with a touch of description, but they are never brought to life. The moves in the game are admirably described: the personalities of the players are hardly described at all. This matters little to an Irish reader, who can attach his own labels; but it will make the story chore difficult, and much less interesting, for outside readers to follow. Indeed, it may even be positively misleading. The clash of personalities affected, and sometimes decisively altered, the course of events; and without some inkling of the type of person that, say, Collins was, the events of 1921 become impenetrable.
The author, too, does little to relate what happened in the war of independence to the Irish background. The impression given is that nothing went on in Ireland during those years except the national struggle—a natural enough, but wholly mis- leading impression. And on de Valera himself the author is more industrious than perceptive. Still, the book has great merits as a chronicle. It sets out clearly, and for the most part dispassion- ately, the meetings and counter-meetings, the escapes and hurried journeys—all the intricate irregular tessellation of a national
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