Books: Little Reminder

THE CROSS BEARERS—A. M. Frey— Viking ($2.50). Publishers, reviewers, readers, dreading the saturation point, grow leery of War books. But still War books are coming out; now and then comes one that should be read. The Cross Bearers is one to read. Though far from being a record of unrelieved horrors, it shows war’s seamiest side, and with open seams. It is a story of a German medical corps. Author Frey. onetime stretcher -bearer, Red -Cross-wearer, knows whereof he writes.

Private Funk, pacifist at heart in the heart of a nation under arms, elects to be a stretcher-bearer and as such is sent to the Western Front. But he is physically unable to do the work, is transferred to the dressing station behind the lines. Here he makes himself indispensable, soon is more useful than the surgeon. A writer in peacetime, he knows nothing of medicine, learns gradually how little can be done to help the wounded, even before the medical supplies begin to give out. before they have to use paper bandages, the same dressings over and over.

Some of the wounds they deal with: “One buttock is lacerated; bleeding has stopped, but he is in a horrible mess . . . There is a hole above the temple as big as an apple. His closed eyes bulge under blue lids; his puffy face is green. He has torn away the bandage, his fingers pluck at his curly black hair that is clotted with blood and dirt, they pluck at the rim of the wound. His torn brain pulses, partly exposed—like a red brown overcrusted cushion filling and deflating in frantic recurrence. . . . His head is a black lump with bloodstreams trickling down. His skin hangs in ribbons; it is scorched and smells of burning. . . . Thus they lie, rows of them, on hay, on mattresses—ravaged entrails, burst bladders, shattered lungs, lacerated throats, iron-studded skulls—the irretrievable ones. . . . Let it not be thought that these are just isolated horrors, sensational but only occasional instances of pain and suffering, and not essentially significant. These examples represent but a shabby trickle. Taken in its entirety all was far worse. . . . What is here told is but a single page of the whole story.”

Many a Warbook author has told of self-inflicted wounds, apparently a common method in all armies of getting a respite from the front, but Author Frey tells of soldiers deliberately infecting themselves with gonorrhea, of painfully faking symptoms of syphilis. “Information as to the best practise spreads from hospitals to the troops in the line.”

Even less politely written than All Quiet on the Western Front, The Cross Bearers mentions words, things not usually mentioned, in its own way does its bit to illuminate war.

The Author. A. M. Frey had published his first book when the War came,swept him into four years’ service with a Bavarian medical unit up and down the Western Front. Afterwards he broke down. When he started to write again he gave the War a wide margin. The Cross Bearers, his first book to be translated into English, is also the first book in which he remembers the War.