"Miles Sapiens ,' Sword of Bone. By Anthony Rhodes. (Faber and
Faber. 8s. 6d.) THE average war book written by a serving combatant tends all too often towards the inarticulate or the two-dimensional. How well we know them now—the modest warrior who claps all his adven- tures into two classes, " good shows " and " bloody good shows "; or the type voluble in a strange language that has its roots in the Road House Era : " I pressed the tit and gave him a thirty seconds' burst. Then the glasshouse bought one, and so I had to do a brolly- hop into the drink." We are moved, but remotely, as it might be by the valour of the Zulu impis at Isandhlwana.
But Sword of Bone is another pair of shoes entirely. Mr. Rhodes is somebody whose reactions we can understand and share, a civilised man who in arms has lost neither entity nor sense of values. Quite evidently, he isn't the type that finds oblivion and release in war. On the contrary, he is pre-eminently interested in the texture of peaceful life, in good writing, music, human eccentricities, painting, pretty women. He landed in France before the war was many weeks old. After an agreeable interlude in Brittany, his unit was sent north into the inhuman plains round Lille. Their task was to fortify the Franco-Belgian frontier with innumerable pill-boxes. After the Belgian declaration of neutrality in April, 1937, it was generally assumed that the Maginot Line would be extended down to the sea. During the ensuing three years, all who like myself were constantly crossing the frontier nourished le delusion that the Line was being extended apace. Mechanical, trench-cutters spluttered and lurched this way and that ; from the dunes to the Ardennes digging and the slapping down of concrete was incessant. Yet when Mr. Rhodes arrived on the frontier, in October, 1939, he found "a handful of pill-boxes fifty miles apart, a few French soldiers equipped with 1914 rifles, and a strand or two of wire to keep French cattle from straying over into Belgium." It was the British Army that in those idle months of the " phoney war " constructed this part of the Maginot Line. And they appear to have done it most efficiently. " It was, to me, significant," says Mr. Rhodes, " that at the end of 1940 the Germans did not attempt a frontal attack on these fortifications ; I am sure that if the war had depended only on them and things like them there would have been no Dunkirk" Mr. Rhodes has engaging powers of characterisation: Stimpson, who said that he was fighting for " Pergolesi's Stabat Mater and a few lines of Sappho," who during the retreat stopped in ruined Tournai to buy a clarinet cheap, and accompanied the tumult of an air-raid with snatches of Mozart's clarinet quintet ; the epicurean doctor, always conjuring champagne and foie-gras out of nowhere ; Georges, the Americanised . French liaison officer ; Mademoiselle Wecquier, the full perfection of whose pretty figure was only revealed when she burst into Mr. Rhodes's bedroom one morning in a silk nightdress to sa' that Belgium had been invaded. Incidentally, Mr. Rhodes treats us to the best description of the Dunkirk evacua- tion that I have yet read. The publish/its claim for Mr. Rhodes powers " which show promise of rivalEng Evelyn Waugh." But there is nothing in him of Mr. Waugh's splenetic frenzy. Rather would I say that he is naturally equipped with that elegantly humorous outlook- which your fashionable amateur explorer so doggedly strove to affect in the recent days of peace.
SIMON HARCOURT-SMITH.
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