SEE IF HE WINS

by Richard Spong '36.William Sloan Associates, Inc.; 1949; 275pages; $3.

To realize the vast differences between World War I and World War 11, you need only read A. P. Herbert's The Secret Battle (Methuen, 1919), and Richard Spong's SeeIf He Wins. Both are stories of deserters, and both are excellent as psychological studies, and as pictures of the chaos in men's lives and characters resulting from war.

Mr. Spong writes with great competence, and with genuine compassion and understanding. His locale is Paris in the winter of 1944, a city of black marketeers and of confused, hungry, war-weary, inflation-plagued people. Tom Sword, a Dartmouth man of recent vintage, awaking after a classical hangover in the Rue Pigalle, becomes, through causes almost beyond himself, a deserter from the 973rd tank destroyer battalion. Teaming up with Spud, a big negro G.I., and Edouard Buchain, an admirer of Al Capone's empire of years gone by, Tom becomes engaged in at first small-time and then in big-time black market operations. His exciting story filled with "suspense and violence," including a somewhat sentimental love affair with Solange, unfolds to a catastrophic end with the inevitability of a Greek drama, and with a pace that carries the reader along almost breathless.

Mr. Spong has been around and knows of what he writes. He spent two and a half years in a tank destroyer battalion, and six months in counter intelligence. It is, on the whole, a tough book, unsuited to members of the Etna sewing circle, but war is tough, and is never suited for any sewing circle. The book reeks with authenticity; he has just the right nuance time and again. The characters are fully realized, and Dick has gone a long way since he got his B in English 41. This is a first novel that he and Dartmouth, too, can take pride in; a creative work of real excellence, able to stand up with the best recent books in the literature of war.

His flashback to the Hanover Plain was, I think, an error, and it is the only part of the book which for me pegged it as a first novel. I can understand that he felt he needed to bring this chapter in to make Tom's actions credible, but I do not think it was necessary. It is the one amateur part of the book; the rest is strictly professional.

Another Dartmouth man speaks for Tom: "He was as honest as they come If it could happen to him, it could happen, I guess, to anybody. I don't know, I guess it could happen to me."

And to all of us.