JOURNEYS BETWEEN WARS Journeys Between Wars. By John dos Passos.

(Constable. 12s. 6d.) The Danube Flows Through Fascism. By William Van Til. (Scribners. los. 6d.) Desert and Delta. By Major C. S. Jarvis. (John Murray. ros. 6d.) The Men and Birds of Paradise. By A. J. Marshall. (Heinemann. 15s.) Journeys Between Wars ! It is a melancholy title which might equally well be applied to any modern travel book, for all Mr. dos Passos' journeyings take place between the last war and the next, or (as some would say) the present, one. The book opens with the old romantic Toledo of 1919 and ends significantly with the grimly realistic Spain of the Civil War. From Spain back ta Spain Mr. dos Passos rambles easily by way of Constantinople, Trebizond, newly Sovietised Trans- caucasia, and Persia, returning by camel caravan across the Syrian Desert ; Russia, Guatemala, Denmark, Algeria, Mexico, France, even lonely mid-Atlantic Rockall, they all flash through these crowded pages like a brilliant colour-film. It might be supposed that such a book, wandering between four con- tinents and embodying the new and reprinted travel notes of twenty years, would give an effect of scrappiness, but it is redeemed from that And lent a unity of its own by Mr. dos Passos' own vivid and all-pervading sense of the unity of the world ; a sense best exemplified by this passage describing his eastward crossing of the Atlantic on the very first page : Sky and sea are blurred in a great sweeping scud, silver as thistledown in the hidden moonlight. In that scud the shoving wetnosed wind is carrying spring eastward to fall in rain on Lisbon, San Vicente, Madrid, to beat against windows in Marseilles and Rome, to quicken the thrusting sprouts in weedy cemeteries in Stamboul.

That is a good example of the writing, easier than Manhattan Transfer or The 42nd Parallel, and always sensuous and sensitive, leaving a trail of such unforgettable images on the mental retina as this of the Grande Rue de Peru in the cesspit of concentrated misery that was the Constantinople of 1921, filled with the starving wrecks of Wrangel's broken armies. "Further along a one-legged Russian soldier stands against a lamppost, big red hands covering his face, and sobs out loud." Mr. Van Til, like his compatriot, is haunted by the imminence of the next war. He too

wanted to get inside Europe and know the people of today's fascist Danube valley and get an inkling of what some of them are thinking, hoping, fearing in these last years before the war gods bellow for flesh.

It must be said that his contacts are very casual and his conclusions not very profound ; this lighthearted description of a canoe trip he and his wife made from the source of the Danube down to Belgrade will have a greater value and interest ' for faltbooters than for serious students of politics. Since 1937, when the journey took place, much Fascism has flowed down the Danube, but even then, sad to relate, it was Mr. Van Til's experience that "from the Black Forest to the Bulgarian border . . . no man, versed or amateurish in world politics, ever mentioned England save in terms of boundless

contumely and disgust." (One wonders incidentally how many Englishmen Mr. Van Til has met, for he seems to labour under the extraordinary delusion that they pronounce glass and fabric as glawss and fawbric.) Taken by and large, The Danube Flows Through Fascism is a pleasantly light and readable book and, if one is conscious of the need of an American slang

dictionary permanently at one's elbow, at least Mr. Van Til has not fulfilled the threat which will cause many nervous readers to get no further than Chapter One, lest their three- hundred-page outing prove to be a trip to "watch the scroll of the past unroll on the river that carried Romans and Carthaginians on its back." Lowell Thomas or James Fitzpatrick themselves could do no worse thari that.

As a bogey Fascism has now almost completely taken , the

place of the Bolshevism of twenty years ago. That is not to say that the former menace may not be quite as real as the latter once was, but that the word " Fascist " is as loosely and as inaccurately applied as a term of abuse to anybody one disagrees with as " Red " and " Bolshie " were just after the last War. That being so, I have no doubt that people

may be found foolish enough to call Major Jarvis a Fascist just because his eighteen years in Egypt have not left him with many illusions as to the working of the parliamentary system and manhood suffrage among a largely illiterate people. To the Beduin a voting list is some kind of a trick to tax them and as such is to be boycotted. To the Egyptian towndweller a vote is simply a saleable commodity to be unloaded at the right

moment and to the highest bidder. Desert and Delta takes up the story of Egypt soon after the point where Sir Ronald Storrs' Orientations leaves off, and it is a worthy successor to that brilliant work—a witty, amusing and often profound

book in which are collected, pinned down and labelled poli- ticians, fishermen, Beduin, smugglers, officials, camels, pilgrims, touring royalties and all the other varied fauna of a superficially Westernised but still fundanaentally Oriental kingdom. It is

perhaps a little ungrateful to an author who has given one so - much pleasure to mention that Major Jarvis' contempt for Egyptian democracy is equalled by his contempt for English syntax, so that it is without the shock of surprise one would otherwise have felt that on page 597 we find him trapped by an errant participial clause into the statement that he was

"addicted to a little mild smuggling of hashish when oppor- tunity offered," a propensity of which, I hasten to add, nobody would ever have suspected so upright an official as the late Governor of Sinai.

In New Guinea Fascism and democracy are alike unknown. It is, after Greenland, the largest island in the world and so broken is the country and so dense are the forests that, in the words of D'Albertis, it is easier to ascend the highest peaks of the European Alps with an alpenstock than to cross • an ordinary hill in New Guinea. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mr. Marshall should find Stone Age villages where steel is not yet introduced, and that there should be tribes in the interior which have never heard of white men. A happy state of affairs ? Perhaps ; but, though Mr. Marshall has

permitted himself to call his book The Men and Birds of Paradise, he has resisted the further temptation to idealise and over- sentimentalise the lives of these Papuans who have, lagged so

far behind us in our long degeneration from the ape. Like us, they steal when they get the chance ; they kill when they are not hungry ; they are ridden by superstitions and harried by disease. One is even left unfashionably wondering whether

these our brothers who still live in the childhood of the world are really so very much-happier or better than we who live in its grim and-crackbrained dotage. ,ARcirtag.D LYALL.