Wartime Chaplinesque

WOODEN SWORDS--Jacques Deval, translated by Lawrence S. Morris--Viking ($2.50).

Many a shrewd, bitter, searching re-mark has been made about war behind war's back. Author Deval's remarks, no less bitter than most young soldiers' reminiscences, are cloaked in comic, Chaplinesque, sometimes clownish guise. Author Deval, short-sighted and unfit for fighting, spent most of the War in the Service of Supplies, saw little action at the front. Even at that, three of his comrades were killed by a shell within 50 yards of him; he himself was gassed.

At the outbreak of the War, the narrator-hero of Wooden Swords was just finishing his military service, comfortably suffering from an imaginary ailment in the comparatively restful infirmary. Mobilization cured him. Sent to Rheims as part of a convoy to a supply train, he and a comrade managed to slip by the sentries into the Cathedral. Soon German shells began to burst in the ruined nave. Said his comrade: "It's not that I'm afraid, you understand, but I hate loud noises." On his return to Paris, Hero 'T' became successively clerk, bicyclist, male nurse; was often in trouble, sometimes in the guardhouse, oftener in the infirmary or some soft job. Says Author Deval: "A soldier may be as ignorant as he likes as to whether his heart is located on the left or the right . . . but what he must do. what is indispensable for him, is to know one disease--just one. But that one he must know as thoroughly as Widal or the Mayo brothers."

Author Jacques Deval, 37, Parisian, is in Hollywood superintending French talkies for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This is his third trip to the U. S. Of himself, he-says: "I am not a humorist. I am a merry pessimist." He has written several plays, of which one, Her Cardboard Lover, has been produced in the U.S.

Wooden Swords, Author Deval's first novel, is the July choice of the Literary Guild.

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