A Portrait of Total War
very, distant to most people ; but it is none the less a good thing that we in England, who have as yet experienced no
horrors from the war in which we have engaged, should be made to realise what Total War means. I can think of no better way to that realisation than the above book, partly because of the contrast it presents ; for Mr. Worsley's experi- ence falls into two parts. A young man instinct with that positive absence of misanthropy which, in youth at least, carries with it the necessity of Left sympathies, he went out to Spain, on the spur of Mr. Stephen Spender's moment, to investigate the rather dull mystery of the ' Komsomol,' that Russian ship which, laden with a cargo for France, disappeared in the Mediterranean. The first part of the book describes the desultory detective work, in Gibraltar, Tangier, and else- where, which the two men carried out, with remarkably little result. The background is very amusingly sketched in, but it is difficult to care about the ' Komsomol,' and one gets the impression of a great deal of intelligence wasted on an objective of irretrievably secondary importance, when suddenly some- thing happens to pull Mr. Worsley much nearer to the hub of events. He falls in with two Americans, Rathbone and Hesketh, who are running a mobile blood-transfusion unit. Tentatively, he proposes joining them ; they are enthusiastic, suspect competition, make difficulties, eventually accept. The lorry door slams, and off they go.
The portraits of Rathbone and Hesketh are brilliant and ruthless. The former is a doctor with an instinct for self- dramatisation, the latter a self-important boy with a boy's passionate belief in the sufficiency of technical theory. Both are superficially confident, amateurish, fundamentally humane, very pathetic—and supremely comic. They have the Ameri- can passion for finding a banal phrase with which to dispose of anything that disquiets them. They are hopelessly muddle- headed, but—unlike the Fascists—they think human life im- portant and rate kindness high.
For two-thirds of the book comedy prevails, and the blood
remains largely inside Rathbone's bottles. Pursue the war as they will, it eludes fie trio. Until they near Malaga, the
impression of amateur ineptitude (of which Mr. Worsley was fully aware) is almost unbroken. Then, suddenly, tragedy rushes forward to meet the advancing lorry, and laps it round in waves of desperate fugitives.
" Still round every corner they came, seeming to get a little thicker, the distance between each group diminishing, the top- heavy donkeys and mules emitting an occasional pathetic bellow, the children plodding behind mostly bare-footed, the women and men with typical peasant faces, creased and prematurely old ; unsmiling and uncomplaining they seemed to be going through an unending routine with fixed automatic movements.
" The intervals between them continued to decrease : until down one side of the road there was a continual long, thin line, dun-coloured and dusted, a long colourless procession like a grey rope threading the twisting road : until they became a part simply of the road itself, merging into the dust and the dark grey rock."
The work of rescuing these wretched people, reduced to a condition of animal instinct by terror and exhaustion, was exceedingly difficult. Mr. Worsley describes his efforts, and those of his companions, with a cool objectiveness and an eye for significant detail which commands respect for himself and admiration for his writing. But the scene he evokes is utterly appalling ; it is the background against which Roy Campbell, armed with his " flowering " rifle, strikes his puerile romantic attitude ; and Mr. Worsley's direct statement makes that gentleman's frothy rhetoric look pretty vile.
Mr. Worsley is a novelist, and the best pages of this book remind one of the fact—not because they are in any way " heightened," but because in them character and event are viewed as a whole. And the book succeeds so well as a portrait of Total War because this means, as well as death in battle, the futile café life of Barcelona, the hair-splitting party quarrels, and civilian life carried on in conditions of varying squalor and indifference. At a time when Europe threatens to return to the conditions prevailing in Germany and Bohemia during the Thirty Years' War, this book comes as a discreet warning.
On only one point would I quarrel with the author's point of view. He reproduces the old, old jibe at the uselessness of a " classical " education. Now I submit that the object of the latter is to enable you to deal intelligently with a contingency that does not involve your speciality—whatever that may be. Hence Mr. Worsley's ability to keep his head and cope efficiently with the chaos of fugitives from Malaga. Hence- conversely—Hesketh's relative ineptitude, though his preten- tions were in the highest degree technical and scientific.
EDWARD SACKVILLE WEST.
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