Books: Warrior’s Error

LENA—Roger Vercel—Random House

($2.50).

“Distinctly not for the squeamish.” Lena, by a Prix Goncourt winner (Captain Conan), is a War romance on the order of A Farewell to Arms, plus the sinister violence of plot inseparable from Balkan settings. Readers who stubbornly refuse to humor Balkan settings may call it merely macabre sex melodrama skilfully made up to pass as an indictment of war.

Opening of the story is a falsified military report by the narrator, a French officer, concerning the death of Lieutenant De Queslain in a duel with a Serbian captain. The rest of the story, told by De Queslain to the narrator the night before his death, unravels the real story behind the duel.

Wounded and captured by Bulgarians in the last months of the War, Lieutenant De Queslain was put under the care of a tall, beautiful brunette doctor named Lena Apostolova, who resisted all his efforts to thaw out her businesslike manner. The only time she showed any feeling was when she talked about the Macedonian question, or when she told him about her past, an incredible autobiography revolving around massacres, torture, rape, underground terrorist activity. During the last big French attack, Lena discharged De Queslain as cured, left him to make his way with the retreating Bulgarians. When they next met, Lena had joined a gang of Albanian pillagers about to attack thevillage, explaining that she had done so in order to catch Serbian spies. Her main concern at the moment, however, was to manage his escape. But De Queslain, who still thought she was trying to put something over on him, argued so long that the Albanians had already arrived and begun their slaughter and rape before he could be convinced. Lena’s next move ought to have opened his eyes to how much she cared. She cut her cheek, ripped her clothes half off, instructed him to drag her through the streets to avoid suspicion that he was not one of the pillagers. He did his best to follow instructions, got cut off every time only because he was not thoroughgoing enough. Once they passed a Serbian prisoner who spotted part of De Queslain’s French uniform. This was the Serbian captain who later challenged him to a duel because he had supposed De Queslain had joined the Albanians in their looting. After an interminable amount of this bloodcurdling kind of business, De Queslain and Lena found a protected spot. But at the moment when he might have escaped, De Queslain was seized with a frenzy like the Albanians . Overpowering Lena, he ripped her last few clothes away, assaulted her brutally. When she confessed bitterly that she hadintended to follow him after his escape, he finished her off with his revolver, used one badly-aimed bullet on himself. But the Serbians arrived the next night, nursed him back to the hell that ended mercifully a year later in the duel at Sofia.