FASCIST HIKER

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21536, 27 July 1935, Page 19

FASCIST HIKER

Through Fascist Italy. By Roland G. Andrew. Oortfe O. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 303 pp. (10/6 net) Mr Andrew is perhaps not quite a Fascist; he even exp l ains his decision to tramp through Italy in terms that define him as an heir to the European tradition of culture and civilisation, making pilgrimage to one of its major sources. And there is a faint clash between this acknowledgment and the Fascist assertion. But the way the wind blows is clear enough. "I saw a new Italy—still the land of Virgil, but revitalised and moved by a great uplifting force that may alter the future of the whole world." says M>Andrew; and he could see more than that, too. He could see "mighty Union Jacks fluttering out over a vast throng of Englishmen, and a forest of blackshirted arms rising like one in the Fascist salute. And then, in future years, all nations strong and free, looking beyond the empty talk of Geneva to the councils of a Fascist world." This second vision, however, shaped itself before Mr Andrew's eyes in La Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, remarkable for (among other things) the waistcoat, bloody and bullet punctured, which Mussolini had on when the Irishwoman tried to bump him off. Yet even in this sacred place Mr Andrew was not so far carried away as to be blind to "vulvar dr corations, and hideous caricatures," to an example of bad soldiering that would have "disgraced a junior

0.T.C.," and to the ruin of a "grand and inspiring" show (as it ought to have been) "by sheer lack of taste." In fact, Mr Andrew is constantly proving that he is a young man of sense. with normal prejudices and sympathies, with more than ordinary tolerance and humour, and with a pretty gift for recording a journey and its local and personal interests. It is only sometimes that he flaps a notion and launches himself into the wind of folly. From One of these flights he precipitates himself with a ruth and a whir upon the poor old University of Oxford—"one of the most drunken places in the country," and worse than that. This amusing and interesting book, more frequently Valuable than silly, is well illustrated and has a useful itinerary map, , ~_