Miller's Memoirs

To the list of roving reporters who have recently reported biographically,* last fortnight was added the European news manager of United Press. In the 332 painstaking pages of / Found No Peace,/- United Pressman Webb Miller describes the troubles he has seen in his 24 years of journalism, affirms that like his boss, Roy Wilson Howard, he fears the world is in for plenty more unpleasantness.

Mr. Miller says he was a timid, colorless bumpkin when he showed up in Chicago for his first newspaper job. Sent to cover police courts, murder trials and hangings, Cub Webster Miller soon learned to talk tough, shortened his first name to Webb "because it made a better by-line." A War correspondent after graduating from the Mexican border troubles, Webb Miller lived through London air raids, saw men die on the Western Front. After the Armistice, as chief of U. P.'s Paris Bureau, Webb Miller watched Poincare, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and President Wilson knock together the doomed Peace of Versailles, met Mussolini when he was still a fellow journalist.

In 1922, Mr. Miller saw Hnri Desire ("Bluebeard") Landru guillotined in a Versailles street for butchering ten women and a boy. When the warders flung the murderer on the machine, part of the platform collapsed, but they managed to clamp his neck under the knife anyway. The heavy blade fell and Mr. Miller observed that "a hideous spurt of blood gushed out." Time elapsed: 26 sec. Three years later, star Reporter Miller turned war-weary eyes on other Frenchmen potting Riffs. In 1930 he hurried from London to cover Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign in India. While Mr. Miller looked on at Dharasana, native police under the direction of British officials methodically clubbed and booted rank after rank of the Mahatma's supine, unresisting followers. Says Reporter Miller: "I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs. . . ."

Biggest journalistic show put on by Webb Miller was his coverage of the Italian operations in Ethiopia. He walked his socks into bloody rags following the Italian troops, observed their surprising efficiency in mowing down the natives with bombers, tanks, field guns, gas and liquid fire. At the war's end Correspondent Miller concluded: "After studying the history of the partition of Africa by European powers I felt that the Italian invasion was in fact no less and no more reprehensible than the series of unprovoked aggressions and land grabs by which England, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Germany had gobbled up the entire continent of Africa, excepting Ethiopia and Liberia, previous to the World War. There did not seem to be much difference between these aggressions and Italy's, except that hers had been committed after the World War, which was presumed to have ended aggression, but hadn't. ... As had happened in India and elsewhere, my preconceived ideals were reluctantly shouldered aside by less high-minded, practical considerations." After flying home on the Hindenburg, Webb Miller retreated last May to Connecticut to write his book.

An egoist like his fellow reporter-biographers, Mr. Miller likes to go on solitary two-day hikes "as a useful mental astringent," still has to give himself a fight-talk to ward off journalistic stage fright before interviewing famed figures. Less blatant in his self-revelations than Negley Farson, he shows less literary skill than Walter Duranty, less philosophical originality than Vincent Sheean. He gropes for "some system ... of bringing the capacities of production and the requirements of consumption together so that the whole world can enjoy the advantages made available by the machine." That this solution will be realized in a libertarian Utopia is far from Mr. Miller's mind. After 24 years in "a grandstand seat at the most momentous show in history," his tortured conclusion is that "the price the world must pay--and is already paying-- for the material advantages of the modern machine is increasingly greater curtailment and restriction of the personal liberty of people. . . . Under authoritarian governments in which one man virtually sways the destinies of his country, nations are more than ever moved by the same emotions, instincts and interests as the single individual. It is conceivable that a dictator awakening one morning with a bellyache might throw his country into a war which might never have happened if he had taken a cathartic the night before." As a lad, Webb Miller was inordinately impressed with the works of Henry David Thoreau, found in that gentle naturalist's Walden a blueprint for human peace & happiness. As a man, though he still carries a tattered copy of Walden wherever he goes, Webb Miller rounds off his memoirs by sombrely remarking that "the philosophy of Thoreau ... is impractical as a rule of life. . . . Often I wish I could find the peace which Walden represents to me . . . but now I am starting back to Europe to cover the next war."

*Vincent Sheean (Personal History), Walter Duranty (I Write As I Please), John Gunther (Inside Europe), George Slocombe (Tumult and the Shouting), Negley Parson (Way of a Transgressor), Miles Vaughn (Covering the Far East).

/-Simon &Schuster ($3).

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