Looking for Trouble

IT was not difficult to find ‘trouble’ in Europe during these last tumultuous years. Indeed, trouble often came uninvited, as correspondents who dodged bombs in Spain or participated in the handicap race from Paris to Bordeaux at the time of the French collapse could testify. Still it required an unusual combination of pluck, initiative, and perseverance to be present at as many significant scenes in Europe’s tragedy as Virginia Cowles records. There was Spain, where she was the compulsory guest of a Soviet General who tried to convert her to belief in world revolution. There was the Parteitag at Nürnberg in 1938, where Hitler’s British aristocratic admirer, the beautiful and eccentric Unity Valkyrie Mitford, told how the Führer lived on excitement, as other men live on food and drink. And there are sketches of Berlin on the day when the Second World War began, of unhappy Czechoslovakia in its time of general desertion, of Moscow and a Ukrainian collective farm in 1939, of the SovietFinnish war, where the showing of the Soviet troops was in such curious contrast to the power of resistance which they displayed against the German onslaught last summer. The author’s impressions of Moscow are lively and humorous; she senses the contrasts and paradoxes of a capital where ‘glamorous subway stations, modern cinemas, and American jazz’ were combined with postage stamps that wouldn’t stick, water taps that broke down, and doorbells that were invariably out of order. The primary appeal of the book lies in its wealth of dramatic episodes; but the author possesses enough grasp of politics and history to convey a sense of underlying unity to the incidents she reports so vividly.

W. H. C.