Europe in the Spring

THIS is a brilliant piece of reporting. Free from the harassments ot censorship and of writing against time which cramp the style of the best foreign correspondents, Miss Boothe conveys a vivid and realistic sense of the curiously mixed atmosphere of apathy, false confidence, and despairing criticism which characterized political and social circles in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels on the eve of catastrophe. She is at her best in showing ’the untidy, very distinguished, Gladstonian-looking’ J. L. Garvin denouncing the ineffectiveness of the Chamberlain Government in a Conservative household or a Dutch lady-in-waiting reflecting that the penalty for failing to create a free Pan-Europe would perhaps be an enslaved Pan-Europe. And the book bristles with such wisecracks as ’I’ve noticed that bombs never make hits — on people who live in the Claridge or Ritz.’ Brilliant as a reporter, Miss Boothe would scarcely make an A grade as a contemporary historian. The pose of naïveté which she frequently adopts is perhaps not so much of a pose as she believes. Typical of her sketchiness as regards factual accuracy is her remark that Blum and other New Dealers ‘gummed up industrial production after Munich with a forty-hour week.’ Blum was never in office after Munich, and it was after Munich that the forty-hour week was abrogated. Her program for America does not err on the side of modesty. It is ‘to march forward and conquer the world again piece by piece tor all free and Christian people; to battle the flag of Nazism on every border, wherever it flies, in whatever hemisphere.’ One question which she doesn’t ask (she asks a great many) is how much liberalism and democracy would be left in America after the conclusion of such an unlimited crusade.