Fun in War

ONLY THE STARS ARE NEUTRAL--Quentin Reynolds--Random House ($2.50).

Correspondent Quentin Reynolds (Q.R.) probably got more fun out of World War II than anybody else who has ever been near it. In this book he tells how he did it. In London he ran into Harry Hopkins, cracked wise with Winston Churchill, battled bugs and censors in Russia, discovered that Russians are human, went through a cowboy-and-Indian melodrama of tank warfare in the Libyan desert, ended up in London having a post-Pearl Harbor Christmas dinner with Ambassador Anthony Drexel Biddle.

"This book," says Reynolds, "is as personal as a toothache, a liking for spinach or a taste in fancy ties. It is the story of the things I saw and the people I met in a year's roving from one theatre of war to another. . . ." There is little fighting war in Reynolds' book. But there is an inordinate amount of Legman Reynolds reacting to the excitement, triumphs, tragedies and discomforts of war--especially the discomforts.

Author Reynolds turns the war into a personal battle between himself and censors, hard airplane seats, scabies, censors, poker adversaries, carbuncles, stratosphere cold, censors, dietary deficiencies, Nazi bombers, scarcity of cigarets, and censors again. Always the censors--British, American, Iranian, but especially the Russian.

Coziness and Cables. Nevertheless, he had fun. There was the "cozy family dinner" with the Churchill family, including Churchill's cat Nelson. After dinner, Reynolds, Churchill, Harry Hopkins got together and talked Dunkirk, Spitfires, Hitler and romantic poetry. "It was exciting to hear Winston Churchill recite Shakespeare. On and on his sonorous voice rolled. He was acting the part now. He was Hamlet, and not a word in a long passage did he miss." Reynolds got a great kick out of London's worst aerial blitz, writes his report of it in semi-cablese: . . . THE BLITZ WAS AT ITS VERY HEIGHT AND MORE THAN ONCE THE BIG SAVOY SHOOK UNDER THE PARAGRAPH QUOTE EYE WONDER HOW MANY OF US WILL BE ALIVE IN THE MORNING UNQUOTE A WOMAN SAID CALMLY STOP WE LOOKED AT HER INCREDULOUSLY STOP NONE OF US KNEW HER STOP SHE WAS A STATELY MIDDLE AGED WOMAN IN EVENING CLOTHES AND SHE WAS SIPPING A TALL DRINK PARAGRAPH. . . .

Once he sat in a "fine, decent pub, the type found only in rural England, run by a nice middle-aged woman and her two daughters." It was three miles from an airport where some of the R.A.F. night fighters were stationed. One "lad named Terry, who was like a character out of a book" described just what he would of do to Nazi troop planes if they ever tried to invade England.

" 'I would pick out the biggest and the fattest troop-carrying aircraft. . . . Then I would call to my gunner, 'Tallyhoo, Andy,' and ... I would see our bullets cross-stitch the fat troop-carrying aircraft up and down, back and forth. . . . Then I would wait for the blood to come out of the holes made by our bullets. That's what I'd do, by God, that's what I'd do. Then . . . you know what I'd do? I'd give the motor everything it had, and I'd ram the Goddamn troop-carrying aircraft, that's what I'd do."

Caviar and Thrillers. Reynolds was on the plane that brought Ambassadors Litvinoff and Steinhardt out of Russia. He picnicked with his companions on chicken legs, hard-boiled eggs, Madeira. He "borrowed a detective story from Mme. Litvinoff and read it while eating her lovely caviar sandwiches all the way from Kuibyshev to Teheran. Every fifteen minutes she'd say, 'Do you know who did it yet?' I would yell over the sound of the motors, 'No, and don't tell me.' "

Later, at the dead center of the stifling Libyan desert, he learned that a single can of beer can be worth its weight in gold. Reynolds' hard, racy report of what it is like to be stuck in the middle of one of General Rommel's blitzes is the best piece of reporting in the book. Almost as good is his dithyramb on Russia at war.

In Russia Reynolds attended the famous banquet of 23 courses ("the three high spots were perhaps the mushrooms fried in sour cream, the sturgeon in champagne and the pilaf of quail") at which Stalin asked God to bless Franklin Roosevelt. Between courses Author Reynolds found time to tick off some neat thumb nail impressions of Soviet leaders.

> Stalin -- a "little man, rather bow-legged," whose "left arm is slightly withered" and carried "close to his body, which almost hides the defect." When he laughs, he "laughs with his eyes, too."

> Molotov -- "a small man with a Groucho Marx mustache." He always looked "as though he [was] watching someone else sucking a lemon."

> Litvinoff-- "definitely European." "An amazing man--big, jovial, affable, shrewd."

> Lavrenti Beria -- "scholarly-looking, soft-spoken . . . who looks like a physician but whose innocent-sounding title. Commissar for Internal Affairs, means that he is the head of the NKVD [ex-Ogpu]."

> Lozovsky--the "dapper bearded man who, as a ragged eight-year-old urchin, sold matches and lemons on the streets of a small village far from Moscow."

In Moscow Author Reynolds went to the circus, watched a Russian soccer game, talked with his Russian barber ("the only barber in Moscow who spoke any English"), flirted with Ballet Dancer Lepeshinskaya, fell in love with the Russians.

He also visited a Soviet hospital, the Central Institute of Experimental Medicine, watched Brain Surgeon Grastchenkov take shrapnel out of a soldier's brain.

He inspected some of the factories transplanted beyond the Urals. In a Soviet copy of a 1936 Buick. Author Reynolds was driven over desolate steppes to a new "war city." "The population was 125,000, every one of whom was connected in some way with the production of guns, ammunition or other war equipment." There Reynolds paid a visit to a TNT factory, learned the elements of explosives manufacture and the elements of Communism from one Chekotikhin, "obviously a very fervent member of the Party," who was shocked because Reynolds admitted that he had never visited a Du Pont factory.

Chekotikhin thought that big American corporations hired "armed thugs to intimidate the workers and occasionally murder them." But though Author Reynolds liked Russians, the Bolshies did not convert him. Says he: "I left almost as ignorant of Communism as when I arrived."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.