Books: Behind the Front

INVASION—Maxence van der Meersch—Viking ($3).

Most of the novels about the World War, from Andreas Latzko's Men in Battle (1930) to Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (1935), have been in terms of frontline fighting. To such outstanding exceptions as John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers and Arnold Zweig's Case of Sergeant Grischa was added this week Author van der Meersch's Invasion—the first novel to show what the War was like for civilians caught behind the German lines. Invasion's scene is the district around Lille, in northern France, a narrow strip between the Belgian border and...