Sources of Fortitude

ALL OUT ON THE ROAD TO SMOLENSK--Erskine Caldwell--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

THE VOICE OF FIGHTING RUSSIA--Edited by Luclen Zacharoff--Alliance ($3).

These two books, the first to come out of Russia since the war engulfed the Soviets, shed a strange leftish light on the mysterious spiritual sources that steel Stalin's subjects to fortitude. There emerges a weird composite of child mentality, propaganda hallucination, semireligious selflessness and apparently bottomless intrepidity--a mixture as interesting but alien to U.S. understanding as Tibet.

Equally alien is Caldwell's account of an efficiency of desperation which might drive Americans mad but seems to work in Russia. Prize samples: 1) On the trunk highway from Moscow to Smolensk, an unbroken line of supply trucks moved day & night at a constant 20 miles per hour, without collision even when traffic was doubled. Reason: collision would have meant liquidation for the colliders. 2) Russians took orders so literally that one railroad-crossing guard refused to raise the bars and let Caldwell's stalled car get off the tracks to safety; a train was approaching, and the guard's business was to keep the bars down.

Caldwell gives many further impressive examples of morale and vigilance, and credits the hermetically sealed press and radio for Russia's swift mobilization (it took only three days) and for the average Russian's lack of fear of the Nazis. Reason: the Nazis had had no chance to war on Russian nerves.

The Voice of Fighting Russia is almost a kid's book of brave deeds along the front and behind both lines--farmers weeping with outraged peasant piety as they destroy their crops; the obscure, invaluable labors of guerrilla warriors and of the ten million who form the labor battalions of the People's Army; the structure and fac,ade of an entire people at war. Tank, infantry, sea and air engagements, if as consistently heroic as here reported, would have backed the Nazis off the Atlantic coast long ago. Gummy on every page with the fancy frosting of party journalists, The Voice of Fighting Russia is a sort of mirror maze in which truth and half-truth interreflect.

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