Books: Armigerent

THE AMAZON—Elliot Paul—Liveright ($2.50).

Author Paul tells this fantastic story as if it had happened to himself, and so plausibly that it ceases to appear fantastic. The narrator, a U. S. newspaperman in Paris, gets into talk with another ex-U. S. soldier in a café, and hears a strange yarn about a signalling detachment of 40 women who managed to get up to the front. Their commander, Lieutenant Alberta Snyder, had drilled them into a fine body of women. During the drive against the Hindenburg Line they did yeoman service at the field telephones; an infuriated but harassed commanding officer allowed them to stay. Some of them were killed; their lieutenant was captured by the Germans.

At this point the narrator is recalled to the U. S., but there he does some detective work. From Alberta’s mother on Cape Cod, from the War Department, from a Boston War veteran who has married one of the amazons, he picks up more of Lieutenant Alberta’s story. In the files of the War Department he is agreeably astonished to find records of her. “When first I told Colonel Cole that I was trying to trace a woman who had served in the signal corps, I had been pleased that he showed no surprise. After I became better acquainted with him I realized he would have felt no amazement if I had asked him about a troop of llamas. He was willing to believe that anything might have happened in the A. E. F.”

Back in Europe again, he unearths the last missing clue to Alberta’s fate, and finally discovers her in Paris. By this time he is in love with her, although they have never exchanged a word. But when he meets a German War ace who has been looking frantically for her, and with whom she is really in love, he does an inconspicuous Sidney Carton, and leaves them together.

Author Elliot Paul is advisory editor of transition and has dedicated his book to Her Upsettledness Gertrude Stein (famed maker of verbal crazy quilts); but he has written it in the good old-fashioned way. A native of Massachusetts, he is the author of a bill against censorship introduced in the State Legislature by Senator Henry Parkman Jr. last December. His other books: Indelible, Impromptu, Imperturbe, Low Run Tide, Lava Rock.