Stark war novel reappears

Press, 8 January 1983, Page 14

Stark war novel reappears

The Secret Battle. By A. P. Herbert. Oxford U.P., 1982. 130 pp. $8,40 (paperback). Best-known as a humorous writer, specialising in light verse, libretti for musicals, and satiric pieces for “Punch” and as the M:P. who was instrumental in liberalising English divorce laws with the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1938, A. P. Herbert was also the author, in 1919, of an uncharacteristically serious novel. “The Secret Battle” has now been republished as a paperback by the Oxford University Press. Based on the author's own experiences at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, the novel tells the story of a young subaltern, Harry Penrose, and of his lonely inner struggle with his fears and self-doubts. Beginning with the stark simplicity of "I am going to write down some of the history of Harry Penrose, because I do hot think full justice has been done to . him,”

Herbert goes on to relate the mixture of accident and inevitability which led to the death of the young man before a firing squad. “That is the gist of it,” says Herbert’s unnamed narrator, a fellowofficer, “that my friend Harry was shot for cowardice — and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew.” Not surprisingly, a novel with so harsh a subject and so bitter a tone was not, in general, well-received in 1919, though Winston Churchill, who contributed a preface to the first edition, praised it warmly. Now. however, the merits of “The Secret Battle” can be seen more clearly and dispassionately. Not a great novel, like Frederic Manning's "The Middle Parts of Fortune," it is nonetheless a very good one, moving in its simplicity and powerful in its understatement. It is good, that it is widely available once more.—David Gunby.