WAR BOOKS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 15 February 1930, Page 4

WAR BOOKS.

Recent additions to the growing number of ‘ * realistic ’’ books and plays dealing with the war have drawn protests from two eminent sources. A little time ago a British officer known to a wide reading public as “lan Hay, ” the author, uttered a strong protest against the production of fiction which displayed the soldier in an un--1 favourable light, and he has been joined more recently in his stand against the prevailing tendency of “war literature” by Colonel Freyberg. Protests such as these raise interesting considerations, but it is possible for them, if accepted too literally and if made too sweeping, to have an influence almost as misdirecting as the influence of the type of writing which has called them into being. People who do not claim to keep up to date with the outpouring from the publishing houses of j war-time fiction have possibly missed some of the books which have been read by those who are now protesting, but even so, the casual reader has come in contact with some stuff which has impressed him as being but the expression of the minds of neurotic authors. This applies, of course, even in greater degree, to the works of others of the moderns who do not use the war as the main theme of their work, but merely as a shadowy background excusing abnomalities of thought and action —a treatment which, carried to excess, merely disgusts any clear-thinking person. But it is unfair to include all writers of “strong” war plays and novels in the category of the money-grubbing sensa-tion-monger. High purpose allied to art has shone through some war-time plays and novels which may have shocked the public. The most serious charge brought against the play “Journey's End” was that its proportion of “unusal” characters was too high and its treatment of the “ordinary” fighting man too scanty. That charge is warranted if one views the play as a literal translation of a war-episode, but it was not meant as such. It was intended, through the actions and re actions of its few characters, to show something of the mental trials endured in some measure by men who shared the trying conditions of trench life. ' That it succeeded in drawing the attendance and praise of returned soldiers, and that it was deemed worthy of more than one visit by the King, are facts which prove that the author handled real knowledge with high art —for the stage, and in some degree literature, must exaggerate in order to gain a natural effect. We must be careful that, in our revulsion of feeling against the sensationalist who is more concerned with monetary returns than art, or clear-thinking, or peace, that we do not throw ourselves back into that state of mind which will be satisfied with nothing more analytic than Captain Bairnsfather’s cheery and immensely helpful pictures as a true revelation of the “meaning of war.”