Tenacity in a Drowned World

ROLL BACK THE SEA (435 pp.)--A. Den Doolaard, translated by Burrows Mussey--Simon & Schuster ($2.95).

Early in October 1944, the British bombed the Dutch island of Walcheren (pop. 60,000), which is largely below sea level. When the bombs fell, "the dikes bowed their straight backs like animals rearing in fright . . . Suddenly the water began to move across Walcheren. It billowed in through the front door of Flushing and the side door of Westkapelle; through the back door of Veere it ran out . . . Now the air photos grew daily more satisfactory. Dozens of red circles were marked in the gray. Each circle stood for a group of enemy pillboxes. On each new photograph a dozen circles were gone . . ."

At spring tide, 1,364,000,000 gallons of sea water poured in, flooding the island's 45,000 acres. By November the island was cleared of the enemy, but the sea water had washed between trees and over hedges, slapped against the wallpaper in the lower rooms of houses, carried away chairs and cradles.

In this drowned world the Dutch water engineers prepared to rebuild the dikes and dry the land behind them. It was calculated that the work had to be completed before November 1945 or the damage to the island would be permanent. To accomplish it, the engineers started with four rowboats, three cars, eight horse-carts, twelve hand shovels, two wrenches, and a few hundred laborers. They succeeded.

Roll Back the Sea is a hard-working attempt to make fiction of their achievement. Its author, A. Den Doolaard (real name, Cornelus Spoelstra) is a 47-year-old Dutch journalist, author of Express to the East (TIME, Nov. 18, 1935), who "meddled in underground work," escaped to England and became chief of the Dutch government's broadcasts. After the liberation of Holland he was posted on Walcheren as liaison officer between the Dutch department of dike repairs and the Royal Engineers.

Roll Back the Sea never quite becomes either a dramatic novel or an authoritative document, though it has some of the quality of both. The characterizations of the engineers and contractors and dike workers are not in themselves of sufficient interest to carry the story, and the depersonalized project, impressive as an example of courage and tenacity, turned out in detail to be just hard work. But some of the processes of the water workers--especially the fascine workers, who lace brushwood mattresses to be spread like skin on the ocean floor, to prevent the channels from deepening--make absorbing reading. And some of the glimpses of daily life in the occupation and after the liberation have a matter-of-fact, unexciting acceptance of hazard and horror that evokes war more vividly than more pretentious efforts.

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