War in Iberia

RIFLEMAN DODD AND THE GUN--C. S. Forester--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Before he became the most readable of living sea-storytellers, C. S. Forester (Captain Horatio Hornblower) wrote two novels still scarcely known to U.S. readers.* Both are about the war against Napoleon's legions in Spain and Portugal. They are not quite up to the best of his seagoing stories, but thanks to Forester's interest in the men and minutiae of military tactics, they are well out of the class of most "historical novels."

Honor and Horror. Rifleman Dodd, cut off from his regiment in Portugal, spent the winter in the scorched-earth portion of that country which Wellington had left to the French and the Portuguese guerrillas. He could be shocked (as the reader will be) by the cruelty of his guerrilla comrades toward prisoners and the wounded, but the sight and the infliction of death never so much as put a pleat in his brain. The hungry French gratefully killed stray dogs, and roasted rats; Dodd as gratefully subsisted on raw horse liver and roast mule.

While the French, with heartbreaking effort, improvised a pontoon bridge over the River Tagus, Dodd crawled the better part of 50 miles, among enemies, to destroy it. When, at last, Dodd tried to tell his story, "it was hard for a later generation to realize that [honor and duty] had meant anything. . . ."

Dignity and Destruction. The Gun, a 13-foot 18-pounder abandoned by retreating Spanish regulars, fell into a few weeks' frenzied and ingenious service at the hands of Spanish mountaineers. More properly, the mountainers served the gun: its dignity and its power coalesced half-hearted and wrangling bandits into an army which swelled from two to ten thousand. This armv's third leader, a mountain boy, destroyed a crack French regiment with the gun. He was nudging to pieces a fortress wall ten feet thick when another 18-pounder put an end to the gun and thawed to nothing the ill-disciplined army it had held together. But by that time the brutal nobility of a machine had made its dent in history: "The fall of Almeida was the beginning of that ebb tide which was to continue until the Allies should reach Paris. And Almeida fell because of the success of the revolt of the North. And it was the gun which was the cause of that success."

Author Forester, still doing practice work in these novels, sometimes sounds like it. Some of his asides about the Portuguese and Spaniards, who are set up, patronizingly, as half savages, are a good deal worse than mere literary botching. But Forester has a real gift for making warfare articulate to laymen, and a gift no less admirable for revealing, in just proportion, war's blend of honor, selflessness, intelligence, insanity, bestiality; for suggesting, too, the awful disparity between war's expenditure, war's result.

*Rifleman Dodd, under the title Death to the French, was published in England in 1932; The Gun, in the U.S. and England, in 1933. Both were distributed in one volume last year to Readers' Club subscribers.

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