Volume 7, Number 5 · October 6, 1966
Intoxicated With War
By Neal Ascherson
Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War
by Bernard Bergonzi
Coward-McCann, 235 pp., $5.00
Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War
edited by I.M. Parsons
Viking, 192 pp., $4.50
The Long Trail: What the British Soldier Sang and Said in 1914-18
by John Brophy, by Eric Partridge
London House & Maxwell, 239 pp., $5.95
A Passionate Prodigality
by Guy Chapman
Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 281 pp., $5.00
In Flanders these days, in the land from Passchendaele down to Mount Kemmel, there is nothing to be found but a sense of loss. The Queen of England visits the white drilled ranks of the cemetery at Tyne Cot: The oldest gardener is very old, and even he does not know where the front line ran. The long slopes of wheat are green and gradual. The woods are blandly foliate and have Flemish names. Zillebeke is a red-brick mining village. Ypres has been fitted together again out of gray ashlar which suggests a new public school. Hill 60 is a dimpled park beside a restaurant. At Poperinghe, in the padre's house which was once a club and chapel for men coming down from the line or waiting to go up, they have let relics and faded photographs run away into a terrifying soldier-death cult which is more Mithraic than Christian.
Review, 2128 words
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