Prelude to Battle

EUROPA -- Robert Briffault -- Scribner ($2.75).

European novelists who matured before the War have found one theme more inspiring than any other. This is the vision of European society driving innocently toward a catastrophe so vast and overwhelming that even the most daring pre-War imaginations could not visualize it. The theme of Jules Remains' Men of Good Will, it is also the dominant note in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in Marcel Proust's The Remembrance of Things Past. Even the cloistered Henry James, at the outbreak of the War, wrote that to consider that the peaceful, pleasant pre-War years had been secretly building up to this horrible climax, was "too tragic for any words," stopped writing, died. For European intellectuals the War meant more than the end of amiable illusions under which they had lived. The very problems that had occupied them-- feminism, modern art, social progress-- were made irrelevant and petty by the thunder of the conflict that raged off the intellectual stage.

Robert Briffault's oldfashioned, awkwardly-written first novel cannot be compared with the great post-War novels on the same subject. Subtitled "The Days of Ignorance," it is an exhaustive 500-page picture of upper-class Europe in the decades before the War, with particular emphasis on those forces within society that were even then laying the ground for conflict. The emotional life of Julian Bern, precociously intelligent son of an English consul in Italy, began with a love affair with Zena, a Russian princess, whose noble family, perverse, gifted, incredibly wealthy, gave evidence of the fatal decadence of Russian rulers. One of Zena's aunts, under the influence of religious charlatans who were then dominant at the Russian court, wanted to subsidize Pan-Slavic conspirators in the Balkans, had her husband assassinated in order to secure his fortune. An uncle, a sadist, lived in barbaric splendor in Italy, once compelled his guests, including Julian, to witness the flogging of a financier's wife who had been caught cheating at cards.

Moving in these circles, dividing his time between Italy and England, Julian learned to look upon the monarchs of Europe as insane, upon European society as doomed, struggled to maintain his belief in human reason in a world irrational and lost. Zena suddenly left him. In England he met suffragettes and careerists trying to be "modern," had a troubled love affair with a girl whose independence grew more & more neurotic. He met Mussolini when the future dictator was a Socialist editor, heard Jaures speak, listened to Balfour discuss European affairs. Although such contacts seem plausible enough for one of Julian's station in life, the famed historic figures seem even less real than Author Briffault's imaginary characters, who are often little more than mouthpieces for ideas and opinions. Julian took up science, plunged into work, loafed at Capri with elegant specimens of Europe's moral decay. When he met Zena again he found her married to a noble Russian pervert, became her lover, recovered his emotional health but not his ambitions, spent an idyllic summer in Germany. Skeptical and enlightened as he was, he could not believe that the War could be serious or prolonged, or that it would disrupt his life with Zena. He learned it when the authorities unceremoniously loaded the pair on a train, shipped them across the frontier.

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