LIFE OF A WAFDIST

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23131, 21 September 1940, Page 5

LIFE OF A WAFDIST

Independent Egypt. By Amine Youssef Bey. John Murray. 372 pp. (13/net.)

There is something both appropriate and characteristic in the author’s choice of title. His book, is an autobiography. Ibis that of an ardent and active Egyptian patriot, whose life has been devoted to the cause of national reconstruction and . national independence. There lies the theme of a personal record: but it is a modest and essentially just man who waives the opportunity to proclaim himself in it in such a title, for example, as “My Life for Egypt or “I Serve the Wafd.” Best-seller writers and opportunist politicians could have taught him the trick. Amine Youssef Bey is connected by marriage with the eminent nationalist, Zaghloul Pasha; but it is not in that fact that the spring of his zeal for Egypt is to be sought or found. It was an unborrowed energy and wisdom that promoted the cooperative movement to which Sir Valentine Chirol paid the tribute quoted by Mr Wickham Steed in his preface. Youssef Bey initiated if in his own town, one of Egypt’s poorest; it spread, and it proved itself so far superior to the 1 British! Government scheme of poor relief that “Lord Allenby very wisely did not allow himself to be deterred from giving official support to this promising movement by the prejudice which its Nationalist origin seemed at first to raise against it.” In two years, it appeared, Youssef Bey’s genius had been instrumental in developing an organisation that assisted a third of a million poor families, saved the people of Egypt £7,000,000, and (from nothing but the “very meagre funds borrowed from a few friends”) established a reserve capital of £500,000. Mr Steed’s short preface is a foundation on which the reader may safely build his estimate of the author’s credit.

Nothing is more significant in this book than the author’s readiness to credit the British Government, with honest motives and intentions in the conduct of Anglo-Egyptian relations. If it also appears that Egypt was at fault, in the candid witness of Youssef Bey, the fact that emerges into the first prominence is that, after the Great War, British policy was framed and directed by men who, far away in London, had learned and unlearned too little The process of learning and unlearning has gone on more rapidly in recent years. Amine Youssef Bey is an exponent of the faith that promises it success: faith in the nationalist virtue and fidelity of the Egyptian peasant; faith, also, in British co-operation and encouragement.

Twelve vigorous portrait sketches by Saroukhan and twice as many photographs add to the value of this excellent book.

Queen Anne’s Lace, of which Messrs Eyre and Spottiswoode now issue a cheaper edition (6/- net.), will please those of Mrs Frances Parkinson Keyes’s readers to whom it is new. The heroine, Anne Chamberlain, marries a man who is to make his way to White House; and the story is that of his journey, or theirs, through those social and political scenes and stresses which Mrs Keyes always successfully represents.

THE WORTH OF LIFE The Fire and the Wood. By K. C. Hutchinson. Cassell. 418 pp.

Mr Hutchinson’s book confirms his status as a novelist of the first classy and though many readers will find the reading of it a painful experience, they should not find it a depressing one. For Mr Hutchinson’s theme, developed through pages harsh with cruelty and suffering, is the worth of life, the sense of which is earned through love and through suffering. The central figure is a young medical man, Josef Zeppichmann, whose researches had led him to the edge of certainty in developing an injection treatment for tuberculosis. But his hospital chief would not allow him to make the critical .experiments on human patients that certainty demanded. For Josef, theirs were lives without value: they were units who might be reconditioned, or who might be , , discarded. But he learned to take a different view when, having make his experiment on the desperately sick serving girl Minna and saved her, her gratitude and love turned his professional pleasure into a warm personal interest. Mr Hutchinson, however, enforces this lesson on the worth of individual life by submitting Josef to the ruthless cruelty of the Nazi system, which pitilessly denies it; and this part of the story is the bitterest to read. Both Josef and Minna eventually escaped to England"; but there is no full escape from pain in the close of this honestly thought-out story.

BETWEEN WRECK AND RESCUE Nuns in Jeopardy. By Marlin Boyd. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 311 pp. (7/6 net.)

When a liner was wrecked in the South Seas on a lonely island, a party of nuns and some of the crew were saved and settled down to life on the island as well as they could. But unsettlement would be a better word for the result. A nun, at the novice stage, became engaged to a sailor. Some of her sisters and the sailors took to carousals. Others of the nuns kept their vows. When a

MARTIN BOYD

rescue ship arrived, the survivors dispersed, and we are told only of the" fates of Sisters Agatha ■ and Winifred. The first went back to her convent: the second married the