"Far-flung Headline 9,
Retreat to Victory. By Allan Michie. (Allen and Unwin. 12S. 6d.) HERE is a book, written by an eminent and intelligent American journalist, to dispel any belief among his countrymen that the British are fighting this war with monocles, from behind club-bars. As correspondent for the Time-Life-Fortune group, Mr. Michie followed most of our campaigns in the Middle East during 1941—the Libyan counter-dance, Syria, Persia, Iraq. After passing through India, and Malaya, he was cressing the Pacific on his way home to America when the • Japanese attacked. He was one of the first journalists to see the havoc at Pearl Harbour. It did him little good. The local U.S. censorship was as starched as anything against which he had vainly railed in Cairo.
Freedom from the restraints of cable-rates and page-space is an intoxication that few foreign correspondents can resist. In their books, verbosity too often blurs all crispness of impression, or shrewdness of comment. Confronted by such monuments of wordi- ness as " Retreat to Victory," and yet anxious to do justice to its many virtues, how can the unhappy reviewer stifle his 'nostalgia for an old-fashioned brevity in the reporting of war—Captaill Walton's immortal despatch, for instance, after Passaro: "Sir,—We have taken and destroyed all the Spanish ships and vessels that were on the coast, the number as per margin. . . ."?
Mr. Michie's competent narrative is too often disfigured by clichés: Mr. Jinnah is " well dressed " ; regiments are " swanky " ; the late King Ghazi- of Iraq is, inevitably, "sports- loving, speed-crazy." Yet these tiresome coruscations cannot hide Mr. Michie's native sense.' He has strong views, which he is not afraid to express. He considers, for instance, that we are laying up for ourselves a store of trouble in Syria by perpetuating French dominion there. He will not dismiss the possibility of the Persian tribesmen—who are apparently far from disarmed—stabbing us in the back at some embarrassing moment.
The main value of Retreat to Victory must lie in the picture it gives America of the appalling difficulties which until recently con- fronted the British forces in the Middle East. For the, Rnglish public it constitutes as useful a handbook as I know on the land campaigns outside Europe, until Rommel's final attempt to break through at El Alamein last September. Inevitably it suffers from the glorious transformation of the last few weeks, which has rele- gated the principal props on Mr. Michie's stage to the box-room
of history. But as a survey of the first three years of war in the Mediterranean, it can be warmly recommended to the patient reader
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