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 Hindu refugees hiding there.
Through the wide, wild sweep of Kashmir's back country, British Author H. E. Bates has followed Correspondent Crane up a familiar narrative trail. Its destination: that old tried-and-tired Grand Hotel situation, into which the invading Pathans burst as uninvited guests. Some cleanly chronicled violence whets The Scarlet Sword's edge. But no amount of honing can file away such a collection of rusty cliches as the turnabout of the shunned prostitute who finally reveals her heart of gold; Correspondent Crane's scorn at first sight and love at second for the English girl he meets at the mission; and the transformation of the dreamy bumpkin (this time clothed in clerical robes) into a two-fisted fighting man when the battle starts.
The question of the mission's fate is settled when the Indian army drives off the Pathans. The question of what turned one of Britain's freshest, most talented short-story writers of the '30s into a postwar author of slick adventure fiction remains unanswered.