BOOK MOTES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 210, 4 August 1934, Page 9

BOOK MOTES

“SOUTH OF THE LINE.” While the lure of gold persists, stories of adventure in search of treasure will never lack readers. “South of the Line,” by Gordon Volk, is a book of this class. It is brightly written, the characters are sharply drawn, and its atmosphere is refreshingly impregnated with the salt of the sea. The story opens in Port Natal, where Captain Nelson, of the tramp steamer Dunbar, is eating his heart out, begging fruitlessly for freights, while foreign subsidised vessels leave the port loaded to the Plimsoll mark with British produce. Luck comes his way when Charlie Lloyd, known among the islands round about Madagascar, as “The Rag-and-Bone-Man,” charters the Dunbar on profit-sharing terms, equips her with salvage gear, and sets out for Guichard’s Island to recover a quarter of a million of Million, seized by a German cruiser in the early days of the war, and now lying in the hold of a wreck in six fathoms of water. Guichard and his family are the only white people on the island, and Lloyd has made a compact with the owner to salvage the gold and divide it equally between them. Lloyd, however, is a slippery customer, and Guichard is suspicious. The salvaging of the gold is a ticklish business, and matters are complicated by the loves, jealousies, and hates of three women—one of them Guichard’s daughter, wild and passionate ; the other, a coloured girl in love with Guichard’s son; and the third a refined English girl brought from Durban in the Dunbar to act as governess and companion to Guichard’s family. When she realises the state of things on the island, the governess refuses to stay. Since her engagement the younger son had died, and Guichard’s suggestion that she should marry the other is repellant to her. Guichard’s ultimatum to Lloyd is “No Miss Whyburn, no gold.” With these as the main ingredients, the author has compounded a story, which from first to last never relaxes its grip on the reader. A STORY OF MALTA. “Grand Harbour,” by Bradda Field, is a story with a setting that brings in novelty m the class of book in which English or English-speaking characters are thrown up against a foreign landscape. The title indicates the locale, winch is the Grand Harbour of Malta. We are introduced to an Englishman hearing an ancient name, Sir Anthony Shrive,_ and his two daughters, Agatha and Elizabeth, living a struggling, unsatisfactory life in the lower quarters of the island. Ho is the impecunious, kindly, good-humoured type to be found in many communities—one of those caprices of Nature in which the jest is not appreciated by good-looking young women obliged to live in squalid circumstances. Into the drab and chequered existence of the two girls conies romance. Agatha is a sagacious, sophisticated young woman, capable of surviving a psychological shock. Elizabeth is the other kind, unable to face results, sentimentality overweighing common sense. The character sketching is excellent. The girls are drawn effortlessly and naturally. Their love adventures are portrayed with the intensity a woman writer can throw into such incidents of life, and the skill in the handling is undoubted. Miss Field won the Femina Vie-Heu-reuse prize last year with “Small Town,” She writes with a sure hand, and her crajtsmanship is a model for story writers.

“IMPERIAL POLICING.” Major-General Sir Charles W. Gwynn’s treatise on “Imperial Policing” was prepared so as to give members of the defence services examples of the police work they may he required to perform ; that is, “some historical background to their study of a subject which is of increasing importance, and about which there is very little literature of a permanent or easily accessible character.” But Government officials are also concerned, because of their frequent co-opera-tion with the forces, and their occasional subordination to the military authority. A knowledge of the military point of view would be invaluable in such cases. Furthermore, it is necessary to clear away prejudice against caliing in the army i.n time of need, and to point out that ugly developments in a situation can be prevented by immediate resort to such aid. Police duties imposed on officers of the army bring a different set of problems and responsibilities from their ordinary activities, and so the writer gives some of the principles and doctrines which have been laid down in official manuals or are generally accepted by tradition, following this with examples of their application, neglect or misapplication. These instances are all recent —and, in fact, are given great importance by proposals before tlie League of Nations for international policing—beginning with Amritsar in 1919 and continuing to the Burmese Rebellion in 1930-2. All are of great interest to the general student of world affairs, and the book as a whole will no doubt be of the utmost value to those primarily addressed.

“COSSACK GIRL.” It is not uncommon for women to enlist and serve with men in times of war and confusion, but the experiences of a young Russian, Marina i’urlova, are surely unique. She tells the story herself, under the title ot •‘Cossack Girl.” At the outbreak of the Great War Mademoiselle Yurlova, the daughter of an officer at Ekaterinodar, in Caucasia, was fourteen years old. Obeying a craving for adventure and excitement she followed with the women when their husbands and sweethearts mobilised and departed for the Turkish frontier, was protected by a kindly Cossack, and allowed to remain in the camp, wearing the uniform of his regiment. Thus she became a soldier, willing to endure hardships and danger, only anxious to iorget her sex and be ” regarded as a useful acquisition. Her first military engagement resulted in a serious wound and a military decoration. On two other occasions, for what she regarded as mere fortune of war, she was similarly honoured. Action after action culminated in the grand attack on Erzerum, under tlie direction of the Grand Duke Nicholas, after a terrifying march across the snow-covered range near Mount Ararat. Wounded again, she recuperated at Tiflis, in Georgia, and received training as military chauffeur, which made her a skilful ambulance driver under enemy fire and gas in Persia, but there she suffered shellshock, and then the Russian revolution came. If before her adventures were out of the ordinary, what she had to encounter now under these conditions was positively fantastic. It was no longer possible to claim credit for heroism in the service of the motherland since the cause was repudiated, and, forced from hospital at Moscow, the writer fell into the hands of Bolsheviks at Kazan, and was iniprisoned, to be released b- the White Army, under Captain Kappel, in whose service she again acquired a wound. Thereafter follow numerous adventures.