BEASTS AND MEN (249 pp.)—Pierre Gascar—Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.50).
The proper study of mankind may be man, but writers from Aesop to Kafka to Orwell have found animals just as instructive. The latest to scan human nature in the visage of the beast is French Author Pierre Gascar whose Beasts and Men was published as two separate books in France, one of which (Les Betes) unprecedentedly won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix des Critiques awards in 1953. Very much in the Kafka tradition, Author Gascar has put together in these short stories as mordant and bone-chilling a set of circumstances as modern literature has had to offer since Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, a tale of a timid salesman who woke one morning to find himself in the monstrous shape of a gigantic cockroach.
A Tale of Two Corpses. Gascar feels no need to transmogrify his humans into animals: World War II and its aftermath, the setting for most of the stories, has already reduced both species to a state of competitive coexistence. One story, The Animals, openly pits a band of starving Russian prisoners against a German circus menagerie, uprooted from its East Prussian winter quarters by a Russian offensive. Each morning the Russians line up at the barn door of their makeshift prison to watch the animal keeper toss scraps of meat to the ravenous lions, then slink back to their own mess tins of watery soup. Some new prisoners bring with them a cache of cigars—and the idea of bribing the keeper for the animals' rations. Soon the prisoners are eating not only the lions' meat but, somewhat guiltily, the peaceable bears' bread. Local German police officers get wind of the deal, shoot two of the
Russians as an example and announce that the animals will get double rations, the men none, for three days. At story's end, the prisoners are nudging one of their number forward past the two snow-shrouded bodies of their comrades to ask the animals' guard if he will trade the day's meat ration for the corpses.
Rat's Alley. In The Horses, a corporal named Peer helps care for 800 hunger-crazed horses. As he daily enters the stockade with his bag of oats, the milling, rearing horses snap at the feed and at him.