A WORLD WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 19, 23 January 1937, Page 24

A WORLD WAR

WAGED AGAINST ANTS

Over thirty years ago H. G. Wells I published a story called "The Empire on Df the Ants." It described how a an( Brazilian gunboat with a Yorkshire engineer went up the Amazon to ini/estigate strange stories of a new race c 3f ants that was attacking human pr( oeings. It found abandoned settle- a , rnents, lost a man who was attacked s i l( by the ants, fired its big gun, and sh( went down river again, with its Yorkshire engineer excited to the point of preaching by his glimpse of a new mi world-peril. A date between 1950 and lis! 1060 was fixed for the ants' discovery ag; and discomfiture of Europe. That was a typical H. G. Wells fantasy and hardly intended to be taken seriously. But Professor L. Detre in "His War of Two a Worlds" threatens the world with re] something more plausible—-a concerted an attack by ants in alliance with termites on the crops on which the CO human race depends. lia This story, too, begins somewhere in tix the forests of the Amazon which a future world-state despoils to the discomfort of the ants living there. These ants are thus led to unite their fellows wJ for the purpose of reprisals. They be- f_i c gin by destroying crops in patterns so an symmetrical that they can be recognised from the air as obviously the sii work of intelligent beings. They proceed with symbols by means of which re they indicate how much of the earth s in surface must be given up to them as the price of peace. At length a com- a promise is reached, a fantastic confer- m ence takes place between the leaders ti] of humanity and the leaders of the of ants, and peace is restored. 0 f The author obviously knows a good h( deal about ants and their ways, and cc he does not try the reader's imagination too highly with purely fantastic S( suggestions. Wells gave his ants of "accoutrements" and "things strapped p . about their bodies by wmte p( bands like white metal threads, while c( yet another story on the same lines q had ants which had grown to a m gigantic size and which used flying \ s machines to carry off human beings. Professor Detre is less imaginative, w His idea that the ants would damage gJ the crops by destroying the germinating power of the seed reads plausibly d< enough, but in telling his story he h rather fails to make sufficiently ai graphic the effect of this insect in- s< vasion on the human race. H. G ai Wells can do that kind of writing p very much better. ' SEEING FOR HIMSELF £ - t< An example which other would-be members of the House of Commons t] would do well to follow was * hat set sby Mr. William Teeling. In 1929, when a not long down from Oxford, he con- a tested a London Docks seat in the Con 0 servative interest, and gained much experience of English working-class t conditions. For two years previous to s that he had. also been chairman of all a Roman Catholic emigration organisa- t tions, and people returning from the h Dominions made him realise that the conditions were not such as he had t depicted. So he determined befoie E standing for Parliament again to see as t much as he could of the Empire and \ those nations most likely to influence \ the Dominions' future, and to write I down his experiences and observations, f These have now been published by t Lovat Dickson under the title of ''Gods s of Tomorrow." . J Mr. Teeling spent first a year in r Canada, and was later in the United ; States, jumping freight trains, hoboing, i living on ranches, with foreign re- i ligious communities, and people of that sort. Then in 1934 he was invited to s attend the Melbourne Centenary Cele- i brations, which is the starting point of this book. He chose to arrive in Mel- < bourne signed on as fourth navigation ' officer on a Swedish oil tanker. After < six months in Australia he did a very « thorough tour of New Zealand, Fiji, Papua and New Guinea, Malaya, Indo- ' China, the Philippines, South China, and Japan. Finally he came home through Manchukuo and Siberia. His ; visit to New, Zealand coincided with the beginning of the Labour regime, ■ and Mr. Savage told him how excellently things were working out. He was favourably impressed, too, by the youth of New Zealand. He believes that if peace can be kept in the Fai East for the next five years, then Japan will not dare risk war. HE POISONED HIS WIFE When you decide to poison your wife, it is not really enough to work out ways and means down to the smallest detail, to be ready to change your plan at the last moment if necessary, and to act the part of a mourning husband plausibly after the event. You must also have some way of combating those faint whispers of suspicion that may be so damaging, especially to a professional man, and you must not get rattled when you find that someone else knows your secret. The dentist who figures in "Middle Class Murder, by Bruce Hamilton (Methuen), made both these two fatal mistakes, and though at the inquest he conducted himself with due propriety, and everything seemed foolproof, three months later the cat was right out of the bag. The method of his crime and the story of the hectic days while the net is closing in on him are described by an author who shows great insight into the twisted workings of a murderer s mind. LAUGH AND GROW FAT An old theme has been exploited by P. G. Wodehouse in "Laughing Gas' (Herbert Jenkins) —that of the interchange of personalities. He sends a famous Hollywood child star and a noble earl to their respective dentists. Each is subjected to gas, but the soul of the Hollywood child star returns to the body of the earl and that of the earl to the body of the star. Then, of course, trouble began and endless humorous complications which are detailed in the customary Wodehouse style.