Books: Up a Familiar Trail

THE SCARLET SWORD (282 pp.]—H. E. Bates—Little, Brown ($3).

" 'I haven't kissed you. I haven't seen you,' she said. 'Not for so long. There's nowhere I can be with you.'

" 'God,' he said."

For laconic British Foreign Correspondent Crane, there were more important things to talk about than love on that autumn day in 1947. Civil war raged through India's Kashmir, and swept over the cream-colored British Catholic mission where he had arrived a few days before, looking for a story. Bloodthirsty Pathan tribesmen had swarmed down from the north, seized the mission and taken their revenge by slaughtering some of the...