The Peripatetic Reviewer

WHEN men are hard-driven, as in war, they will sleep anywhere: in an abri or foxhole or sitting upright in a bucking plane or jeep. Napoleon’s officers, those who still had horses, must have slept in the saddle on the long bitter retreat from Moscow, and so too Jeb Stuart’s cavalry walking their horses once inside the Virginia lines after a raid. As an ambulance driver I twice fell asleep while driving, once at Verdun and again at the time of the German break-through in March, 1918. In each case the ambulance was empty, and I was returning to the front after a long, torturing drive with seriously wounded men who cried out and beat with their fists against the side of the ambulance. When at last they were unloaded at the field hospital, one dead, two living, I was given a shot of gniole, French white mule, and a mug of scalding coffee, and then with my sheepskin collar up about my cars I started back to the lines in the predawn cold. No lights, and the little Ford clicking off the kilometers. We had no windshields, and the wind was so penetrating that I stopped to bunch a blessé blanket around my shoulders. I could feel the doze coming, and to fight it off I kept banging my head with my tin hat. For a split instant I was back with the family in the library at 1279 with Mother singing, and then I was flung awake as the Ford rocked over tree roots, plowed through the roadside ditch, and hung itself halfway up on the muddy bank. From which as the sun rose we were extricated by the crew of a French 75; the radiator had boiled over and the rubber connection jerked loose, otherwise no damage to the Model T.

But what remained in the back room of the mind, stored away like an unhung painting, was not the comedy of that smoky dawn, with the artillery putting me back on the road, nor the fact that in swerving off the road I had missed colliding with a tree by the narrowest margin. What remained and is still there is the inescapable anguish of the drive in: leaving the paste de secours at midnight with the living load, edging into low gear through the slithering mud of the sunken road, lurching in and out of the water-filled shell holes while the voices behind me cried, “Doucement! doucement!,” past the batteries which made the whole car shudder when they fired, past the crossroads, past the ghostly Indochinese who were silently filling in the worst of the craters, and then the long grind up the hill which was in clear sight of the Germans by day. Not until we had topped that rise with its walls of tattered camouflage could we ease the pressure on the left pedal and let the Ford into high. It was probably not more than forty minutes from the forward paste to that point, but in terms of vicarious suffering it felt like infinity.

On one run, in the autumn of 1917, I carried a French colonel who had been mortally wounded. He was clearheaded, very pale, and calm, and he smiled at me as they were loading his stretcher into the holders. All through the early anguish I could hear the priest who was riding with him talking in a low voice. We came to the long hill, and as we neared the top I suppose I let up on the low pedal too soon. The Ford bucked and stopped, and at that instant, so the priest told me afterwards, the colonel died. Had I driven better, could I have got him back alive? The question kept recurring in my mind long after the Armistice, when I was in college and sleeping lightly. Again in my dream I would be lurching through the mud, grinding up the hill incapable of averting what was to happen. Insomnia is a form of self-examination, and perhaps it is just as well that those who have been to war should be left with such reminders of guilt and compassion.

MARTHA GELLHORN was a pacifist when shortly before she was twenty-one she went to France to work. There in the early 1930s she became one of a group of young pacifists who had their conviction and their poverty in common. They believed that there could be no peace in Europe without Franco-German rapprochement. In 1934 she had her first encounter with the Nazis in Berlin, and in 1936 she stopped being a pacifist and became an anti-Fascist. A year later she was in Spain writing about the defense of Madrid, and thereafter her dispatches to Collier’s, whether from Finland or China, the Italian front or Germany, marked her as one of the most perceptive of our correspondents. Because she was a woman, she wrote with a difference: her pity, while not less than that of Pyle, had a special apperception for the women and children; her observation could be as graphic in detail as Tregaskis’, but back of it was an anger rising at times to a sense of outrage which makes her paragraphs hot to read.

War to her as she followed it over ten years became more and more abhorrent. She felt that democracies were criminally at fault in not stopping Hitler before he got started, and her contempt for democratic indecision is only a little less than her hatred for the totalitarian decree. In THE FACE OF WAR (Simon and Schuster, $3.75) she has placed the best of her war writing, lashed together with short sinewy prefaces in which she protests again and again the monstrosity of projecting nuclear warfare — a vivid, militant book by an intense and merciful writer.

From the war in Spain, I am most smitten by her account of the children’s ward in Barcelona. The valiancy of the Finns, as in their incredible winter warfare they stood off the Russian horde, called out her unreserved admiration; she saw the fighting in China with her then husband, Ernest Hemingway, and there she was most impressed by the unbreakable endurance of the people and by the audacity of the Americans who were flying the Chinese transports.

When we invaded Europe she managed to stow away on one of the first hospital ships to Normandy, and her paper on the wounded, which is the high point in the book, got her into such hot water that she was scolded and sent adrift. Her next stop was on the Italian front, where she admired her beloved Poles, and in the final chapters what touched me were her flight in a Black Widow, her conversations with the airborne in Bastogne, and the sights she will never forget at Dachau. Courage and sacrifice—and bestiality — beyond measure, and not again.

Dr. Conant’s recommendations are aimed at improving the “comprehensive high school,” which has no counterpart in any other country and which he believes is indispensable for the maintenance of our classless society. He would improve the programs for those developing skills (stenography, home economics, trades, and so forth), and the majority of his recommendations would stimulate the work of the academically talented, the 15 per cent who will go on to the professions. He proposes ability groupings, feeling that students do much better work when they are competing with their peers and that it is not undemocratic for them to be encouraged in their specialty. He would abolish the rank in class (and the valedictorian), for he asserts that such rank has increased the tendency of bright students to avoid stiff programs. He believes that the programs should be harder for the abler: seven years of English and social studies; seven years of math and science; three, preferably four, of a foreign language. He recommends writing a theme a week in English composition, and fifteen to twenty hours of homework for the highly gifted, the 3 per cent who he suggests are home too little. Terse, powerfully argued, and very economical.

In my youth a librarian was thought to be a guardian of books, a master of cataloguing, a collector of petty fines, a troglodyte dwelling within gray Carnegie walls. The new generation of librarians believe that their primary function is to stimulate reading. The library today has been transformed into a cultural center, operating under a creed set forth by LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL as simply as this: “that books are basic and that people are good, and that to work with them both is the best of all lives.” Dr. Powell, the university librarian at UCLA, has well conveyed the zest and devotion of his profession in his new collection of essays, A PASSION FOR BOOKS (World, $4.50). For seven years after leaving library school he was “a simple bookman, uncorrupted by administrative responsibility,” cutting his teeth on first editions and working up a fine head of steam. Then President Sproul put him in harness, and the librarian discovered somewhat to his surprise the excitement of administrative initiative. It was a time of yeasty change, for libraries were expanding to include recorded readings of the famous poets, microfilms, folk songs, famous photographs (and new readers); and Powell, who was a tireless traveler, brought home new ideas as well as new collections. He has an eye for the adoption of libraries to their local conditions. “I believe,” he writes, “in good housekeeping, in work simplification, and in the use of modern devices to relieve drudgery. But I am not in favor of wrapping each book in cellophane or of issuing gloves to the staff. Not a day should pass but that every librarian, in every library on earth . . . should handle books.” As a collector he takes pride in his acquisitions, but even more in the circulation of the books under his care. His essays have in them the contagious delight of reading.

Salmon anglers have many reasons to be grateful to LEE WULFF, first for the dry fly which bears his name and which has added such an attraction to low-water fishing, then for demonstrating the fun of using lighter and lighter tackle, and finally for the philosophy of conservation, which informs without preaching everything he writes.

Fly fishermen are a tribe of individualists, each of whom is developing his own style and technique; they admire skill in others but have little wish to emulate and even less patience to hear about it. Yet I must confess that my normal resistance is disarmed by Mr. Wulff’s new book, THE ATLANTIC SALMON (Barnes, $10.00). As an expositor he speaks from fascinating experience but without ever seeming to force his knowledge upon you. His episodes — and the book is full of them — are as honest as they are graphic; they admit to failure as well as success, and the freshness of discovery is reinforced by the patience of the veteran observer. The superb illustrations in offset are what keep fishermen living through the snows of March.

I read with particular delight the account of the dry fly in action and of the assortment which Mr. Wulff used in working over one particular fish. I noted that even with the dry fly he always sinks his line, and that on occasion he uses a seventeen-foot leader. I was edified by his study of the salmon rising, and I agree a hundred per cent when he says that “The most difficult salmon to play is one that simply holds his place in the current and shakes his head.” I have memorized his laughable demonstration of the use of the slack line, and I willingly subscribe to his powerful plea in the closing pages against murder in the headwaters. The longer we fish, the more we want to keep the great breed alive.