Special Forces
The Password fs Courage. By John Castle. (Souvenir Press. 15s.)
'So you bumped into the S in Vienna?' (Or the Gestapo in Oslo or Paris or Brussels or Berlin.) 'You say you didn't care for them— you ran for it, bluffed it out, gave them a dressing down? I'm sorry, put it beats me. But what were you doing exactly? It's nine years mow, but I still haven't gathered.'
`Bumming around, old boy, bumming around. Drink up, it's my Shout.' The bars and clubs of England still ring with hints, know- ing chuckles and bantering evasions which minister simultaneously to the needs of security, facetiousness and exhibitionism. If the heroes are less cagey, their stories tend to be of a breathtaking incon- sequence with some of the properties of a joke. Many books have described them—some by the heroes themselves, others, replete with imaginative dialogue and fed-in emotion, by enthusiastic professional writers. As literary products they are seldom of any great distinc- tion; as records of emotional experience they vary from the momen- tarily luminous to the dcad-pan; as narratives of fact, in defiance of Mutual resemblance and repetition, they are often astounding.
In Sweet is War, Mr. Munthe writes his own story. Clearly he is OCTU material, though of an unorthodox kind, for in addition to the Bratt's Club social background (including a foreign princess) Which he sketches in, he is the son of Dr. Axel Munthe and a speaker Fol. several languages. The Finnish adventure looms up, he is briefed °Y the War Office (this is a delicious sequence of portentoul, confi- dential mystery-mongering) and arrives at the joint headquarters of Finnish and a Swedish general—both self-confessedly gaga—to ensure liaison, blow up trains and purvey supplies. He observes the ensuing maelstrom with the sharp, erratic eye of the totally bewildered. A third general—this time British—arrives, vomits on his host's Carpet and retires ill; his volunteers wrangle, dispute one another's rank and even identity, demand promotion, refuse to change into Uniform; the Finns are heroic and enterprising, something blows up, Convergent muddles resolve themselves into a local victory, but the victors gasp with incredulous dismay at the peace terms. Next comes the Norwegian interlude, which for some time maintains the note of laconic farce. In April, 1940, having no head f ir heights, Munthe is parachuted into Norway to serve as liaison officer with the southern Norwegians. After many adventures he escapes to Sweden. As assistant military attaché in Stockholm, busily organising Nor- Yfeilian sabotage, he is no longer an engagingly bewildered amateur. 5,,ventually the place gets too hot to hold him and he winds up with oPecial Operations in Italy.
_ Mr. Andersen deals with the adventures of Aage Schmidt, a Danish tenl working for the American OSS, who speaks throughout in the
trs,t Person. He was passed through Denmark into Berlin a month _uerore its capture by the Russians, and though the vicissitudes of the 400thward journey and of the long, paralysed pause before the Red
Army smashed into the city are sufficiently hair-raising, he is mainly concerned with the Russians and his treatment at their hands. Need- less to say it was uncompromisingly hostile at the higher levels (though now and then relieved, lower down, with a naive innocent friendliness) and but for a series of lucky chances it would probably have ensued in his death or permanent captivity. 'You were not the last secret agent against the Germans,' says a Russian captain; 'you were the first—against us.' Never, perhaps not even in Mongol or Turkish days, has Central Europe felt the impact of anything so shatteringly alien as the Red Army. Mr. Andersen catches well, though with. less distinction than Lali Horstmann, the anarchic vagaries of the Russian soldiers' behaviour and the smug, pedantic ruthlessness of the MVD; at one point he is guarded by two young privates who, with six years' service apiece, may be said to illustrate a new type of military nomad. Their minds are a social and cultural blank, they are animally inquisitive and technically apt; they like Schmidt, laugh with him, feed him on officers' rations whilst remain- ing foodless themselves, procure him a gratuitous woman and repulse with tommy-guns an official attempt to remove him. In the end the Red Army authorities bundle him off, but he escapes by knocking out an officer-escort and bluffing again.
The Password is Courage, in which Mr. Castle descril'es the career of Battery-Sergeant-Major Coward, gets off to an unpromising start, in the shape of a corny title, a distressing jacket and a profusion of cockney anecdote. Misleadingly, these prepare one for yet another dish-up of the stock ingredients of the British POW book, but readers would do well to be patient. Not only must Cowardhave been among the bravest, shrewdest and most enterprising British prisoners the Germans ever had to handle; he also voluntarily identified himself with the fortunes of those other prisoners—Jews, Poles and Russians —to whom their captors denied that bare minimum of humanity on which others could rely. (Presumably this type of heroism belongs essentially to the Western tradition. The conditions of war, and indeed of life in Eastern Europe, tend to nourish a starker and more tragic variant.) There are Schweilc-like passages—notably the one where a German general inadvertently decorates him with the Iron Cross—and the dialogue is sometimes funny, but for the most part Coward relentlessly applies himself to welfare, sabotage and escape. Again and again he is caught and gets off lightly, until at length he is sent to boss a turbulent crew in a sugar-factory who seem likely to murder him. But he can be ruthless, he has a hand in two murders here. It was in the small British camp at Auschwitz that he surpassed himself. Here he contacted the Polish Home Army, penetrated the worst of the concentration camp itself in a vain attempt to rescue a dying British officer, peddled arms to the inmates and started a trade in corpses which saved four hundred men from the gas. chamber. (He saw some naked Jews enter this and remarked that they entered singing.) The Poles, in astonished gratitude, presented him with a lump of gold from dead men's dentures. He was often terrified—though here Mr. Castle is not at his happiest—but nothing and nobody could finally defeat him. Despite the faults of taste and style in the narrative, he emerges as a perky, unpretentious, genuinely heroic figure.
H. M. CHAMPNESS
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