Books: 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...