1933-12-01 — Page 7

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1933.

LITERARY NOTES

LIVELY BOOK OF POST-WAR YEARS

World Competition Won. By Hungarian.

an

ABUNDANT HUMOUR

THE CHINA MALL.

Defy Mayor's Ban on Nazis

"First" World War As Shown By Camera

Poignant Pictures Of Four

Years Of Horror

IN

A

REMARKABLE

"Escape to Life," by Ferenc Kermendi (Chapman and Hall. 7s. 6d.), is the winning novel an internationel competition. Hungary is the country of birth, and here again the post-) war years, grey with poverty, anaemic with disillusion, sardidi with furtive and shady make the setting.

tricks.

The plot is a good and original

one.

RECORD

(By Howard Spring.)

I have just seen a newly-publish- the world; and for three years the "Daily Express" has been hunting

You have othe of thusend book called "The First World pathetic and useless "clubs" of men who have little interest in one another, but meet

neas.

RT

War."

Locatise The title seems to be a terribly they were all at school together significant one. Hitherto we have and still consider themselves "the

known the conflict which raged all tragic They boys.

48 the failures. trying to warn them between 1914 and 1918 selves with a communal hearti- World War. Now we are to know

an the First World War.

other This book is unlike any

book that

hAR over beer war published. We have ranged from the ponderous unreadability of the sent oficial histories to the shrill

of In an English paper ane them finds u portrait of a man.) now, the caption makes clear, do- Africa. ing very well in South who had been a boy at school with the rest.

A note of greeting is from the "club"; and the novel dividual hysteria of the then revolves round the tragi- comedy of how all these-down-soldier. and-outs, who had completely plays, forgotten the successful Kader

till they saw the picture, swarny ed round him, protested friendship, and tried

HO

it down, sifting, winnowing select- ing the relevant, and arranging all into a chronological sequence, that from the firing of the fatal shot in Sarajevo the story rolls mobilisation forwards, through and conflict to peace here, revolu on there, the downfail of dynas- ties, the overthrow of thrones, and the insurgence of the Dictators.

Mr. Laurence Stallings has put! captions to this remarkable serler those of pictures. Nearly all of captions are ironic; some are de vastating.

in-

What could say more of folly and private futility than the two almost iden novels, tical pictures that face one an

Speakers at the riotous meeting of United German Societies of America which was hold at New York to lay plans for the celebration of the 260th anniversary of German Immigration to America, despite edict of Mayor O'Brien, forbidding Naxi demonstration. At right is Beins Spanknorbel, Nasi director of propaganda; left, with cigar, Hans

.Holterbusch.

His wit is heavily tax-

We have hnd

other, one laconically labelled "Red theme he has to deal with again, NEAR MASTERPIECES reminiscences. Not till

Victims of the White Army," the and again.

OF FICTION now have we had the war portray other White Victims of the Reded to keep count of these ghastly

Army"? ed in pictures.

New Collection Of Short Stories.

their 14 Auck That is what we have

of

in Tlir

something out of him when at First World War." Throughout last he came on a visit to Buda-

the four most fatal years the world pest.

the has known the camera, at innumer The characterisation book is keen and lively; and as able poiste and on innumerable Herr Noth gives us in "Berlin occasions, blinked and captured

moral Tenement" the post-war

for all time another moment from German disintegration of the

are given the annihilation's night. poor, so here we кате phenomenon manifested among the young Vientoke rich.

The Second English Review Book of Short Stories. Edited by ..Horace Shipp.....

heape that manured a continent, "No more

parades." "By-stan- The Way of an Eagle

ders in East Prussia." "Journey's What do you think of when you End." "Short days ago we lived "

the proud word "Ace"? "And no birds sing." hear Flashing wings, the way of an What do catchwords mean? What eagle, the hum of power high above does "Backs to the wall" mean, for the earth-al! north of glorious example? "Why, this." explains) things speed and youth and vie Mr. Stallings, And he gives us a

(Sampson Low. 85 6.) tory. In this book you will find wall, or what he might have call-

with Here is an admirable collection & picture of a bloody, flattened ed "This was a wall," and mass, hardly distinguishable from their backs to it some men ("These of short stories which originally the ground it defiles. Mr. Stallings were men"); and, letting it speak appeared in the "English Review," for itself, he prints Haig's famous with biographical notes on the au- thors. There are near master- calls the picture briefly: "Ace."

"Divine Service," says Mr. Stal- despatch across the page. Hugs in his quiet, mocking voice; So the tale goes on, and the pieces amung them, and the general widespread. ranging ice and snow and the war horses and there you see a cathedral on cumulative effect is devastating. You level is very high. Stacey Aumo- from Middle Europe to England. | magnißrently aparisoned in which For centuries men have notice the big, whiskered men of aler's brilliant "The Friends," Hem- thence to South Africa, and backstreets of Berlin; in august cham-wrought to bring beauty and sanc- the early pictures, smiling, confid-ingway's "The Master." and David

tuary from the world's clone siege; ent, martial.

In the air, on the land and on The book has abundant humour, the sea: among the Russian ponies but of a bitter savour, and its picking their shaggy way through action is

to Middle Europe again.

the

bers where kings deliberated and in dug-outs where peasants fesler ed in fifth and hunger; amid the LOVE ON THE GOLD cheering, jeering women who hounded their men to war and the COAST.

weeping women whose men did not

Novel Of Humanity And Observation.

come back; where men fought in the trampled flats of the Flander mud or amid the Alpine snows of

than dust and ashes past the troops swing by un service."

"Keep the Home Fires Burning!"

veteran

Garnett's "Old Dovecote" may be as samples at random, and the cathedral is little more You see the youth of the world chosen

which sucked gradually intu the mael-while the list includes Galsworthy, "Divine strom, till you come to that picture Lawrence, Forster, May Sinclair,

that gripe the heart: "Men of and Gabert Sliwell. war." A squad of raw recruits, he cries cheerily in front of a ham just arrived at the front, pathetis let going up in smoke; and, bend-children blinking at the ing down to decide what label he who regards them with a puzzled shall attach to this boy lying and doubtful air. stricken under the noon, with pain

olher You note

changes, too; and surprise still on his baby face, for example, how the radiant fares he decides on "Babe in the Wood." cheering for war, delirious with Like the Hound of Heaven, Mr heaven knows what dreams of con- Stalling's ironic voice purauce you quest and dominion, sober down, Record for the Future

down the foul corridors of these become grave, anxious. haggard, a masterpiece The First World War was the pictured years. "What on earth is and culminate in

the post-war epitomises first war to be thus put on record this ?" you cry, aghast before a that

the mands of the desert or the wastes of the sea: in all these Fetish. By Kathleen Hewitt.

Elkin Mathews and Marroplares the cameras were blinking: 7 d.1official cameras, newspaper men's ted to Westermerna, the cameras of the fight An artist, who Africa to escape the mentul ment of a unhealed love affair, is the central fure of Mrs. Hewitt's) novel.

turing men.

with

There

The escape was not a real one.

for all time, я that succeeding tangled heap of rotting corpses. situation for millions of the poor., Vanessa, his lost mistress, sails on

what Mr. Stallings is at once alongside "Little man, what new?" asks the the same bout to rejoin her hus-generations might know

hia label "Tactical caption, and in the eyes of the man band, and once more Martin finds facts lay behind the shouting and you

and woman who trudge the pave himself in the toils of her selfieis the tumult, what residue of horror blunder."

state- You can imagine for yourself ment there is no answer. personality. West Africa, with was concealed behind the narrow, conventional routine, and its ment that in four years ten million the four pictures he has call "This is nothing but the pathos of the

was a home," "This was a church," last despair. failure to provide the distractions nien were dead.

much There was grave danger that "This was a forest," "This was a for Vanessa, and tragedy ends her much of this great record would man." story, while Martin finds himself be last.

of civilisation, proves too

at hat & free man.

Mrs. Hewitt, who wrote "Mardi," knows the man's helplessness through and through, and this characterisation is brilliantly done. So are her pictures of ship life and and of the taugh, sordid dreary existence. which the white men lead on the Yellow Fever coast. Here is a novel of human- ity and observation as well as pie- turesqueness.

NOVELIST HERO IN "A MAN'S WAY."

Muriel Hine's Latest Publication.

A Man's Way. By Muriel Hine.

(The Bodley Head. 7 d.) The hero of "A Man's. Way" is a successful novelist named 'Clive Martyn, whose wife, Paulino, pre- fers horses to her husband's books. The clash is not unusual in fiellon, but here it is considerably over weighted by the endless references to reviews, royalties, editions, and so on, while it will be difficult for the most naive reader to accept: Pauline's husband as a creative writer whose avolution can be taken seriously.

But whereas Clive is paraisent- 17' over-drawn, Pauline herzali. is Inconsistent in her bright, happy ignorance, and the side characters the young Oxonian, Toffes, in par ticular, are excellently sketched.

It is scattered all over i "This was a man." That is the

Did Their Part for Homeland

· Donating their time had talent

thens Marlian movie starwars platured na they atti beseft for victims of the hurricane taas swept Tamp They are, left to right, Dolores Del Rio Eamon®

War's Significance

This, then, is a book whose pages you must turn before November 11 calls us again to remembrance. who day the ser- There are some

discontinued be- vice should be cause a generation has arisen that knows nothing of the war's signi- Acance Here in the war's elgn!- ficance for all the world to see.. I do not know who could.

upon thle record unmoved.

look

I do not know how any, even the among those who recall moments af pride and exaltation | that the war brought with it, can fail to contemplate this book with shame and remorse. ''

cartloads of These pictured crosses, these cemeteries reaching beyond the bounds of vlilon, these wagons piled with fragments of men, these Russian peasants sit Ling round a table on which the glittering crowns and sceptre of the Romanoffs are outspread, these marching Senegalese and Indians, Chinese and Moroccans, and `little Eton boys with rifles and, tali] hata, these ruined trenches, and Boaring steel shares, these, priests| with hands that bless, these gune with months that blasphemously roar back their answers to the priate; amid all this rely you can pick your way to the war's significance, to the significance of the time when, by the, superbest trong, of history, the individual man could rise to unparallele belghts becauBOTTES a spec had sunk to unfathomable dent

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