Nostalgic de Normandie
A. J. LIERLING must he the only American war correspondent who trained for D-Day by running every morning through the Park, from Hyde Park Corner to Kensington Palace and back : he ought to have been mentioned in a Montgomery des- patch. What it made him fit for was to come under fire off Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, in a Landing Craft (Infantry), the decks of which were soon slippery with blood and the condensed milk from a case of tins shattered by a shell. A maudlin recollection of the slimy mixture came to Mr. Liebling as he boozed a post-war evening away in a bar on West Forty-fifth Street and impelled him, years later, to undertake a senti- mental journey from Weymouth to Paris by way of the Cotentin pensinsula and the Bocage, remem- bering now the high excitements and (usually) beastly meals of war, and now the days, twenty years before, when he had been an American student of sorts in Paris, and could eat, as a light lunch--or so he now likes to recall, as he justly praises Norman cuisine—a dozen oysters; an araignee with mayonnaise; tripe a la mode de Caen; partridge in cream, cider and Calvados; gigot de pre sale; a couple of steaks, and Pont l'Eveque. (If he had made do with only one steak, say, in 1926, he might not have had to run through the Park in 1944.) It is an agreeably urbane and worldly sort of book, in the familiar way of civilised American reporting : astringent orrtop and somewhat sweetish underneath: smart about art (the baroque lingered late in Normandy, Mr, Liebling off-handedly reveals); knowing about food and drink; and sentimental about private soldiers and fellow-newspapermen (more par- ticularly the dead ones). American reporters have
been divided into the 'Oh: gee!' and the 'Aw„ nuts!' varieties, but as a military commentator Mr. Liebling is a bit of both. He is awestruck by General Omar Bradley, whereas the only two references I can find him making to Field-Marshal Montgomery are both disparaging. That able, unappealing soldier has become very nearly as unpopular a figure in American military mythology as Major-Genera] Benedict Arnold.
CYRIL RAY
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