WAITING IN THE NIGHT—George Millar—Doubleday & Co. ($2.75).
When the last boatload of valiant fugitives pushed off from the beach at Dunkirk, they left, among the prone bodies, the carcasses of horses, the discarded rifles and smashed cannons, a historical deposit undistinguishable from the sands that the tide washed in & out. It was the remains of the faded Victorian Age, whose shibboleths of family security, personal freedom, humanity, honor, greatness of purpose, faith, liberalism and the intangible called decency had so long stood between civilized society and those forces within itself which are always at war with it. At one stride, a new age, The Age of Violence, had invested Europe from Asia to the Atlantic Ocean.
By the time the war had been pushed back violently toward the dark heart of Europe, there was scarcely a peaceful family, particularly in France, which had not shared the new experience of violence and conspiracy. Sharing it with them was a new type of European leader, the violent, simple, purposeful man of action typified by the Resistance leaders and the British and American officers who lived with them and helped them. In one of the most exciting and intelligent books produced by World War II, one of these British officers, Captain George Reid Millar, has described his experiences as an area leader of the French Resistance. Captain Millar has the face of a fanatic without a dogma (this made it possible for him to lead a forlorn hope). He also has a sense of the absurd, which makes it difficult for him to take seriously the politics of the Right or the Left. This helps to keep his report of the Resistance in focus as a patriotic (rather than a social) uprising.
In the Aquarium. The year was 1944. The place was a vast, dirty, cobwebbed "aquarium" of a room in a London house, which served as the British headquarters of the French Resistance. Here George Millar was interviewed as a candidate to be parachuted into France. Millar believed that he was being offered death. "And I wanted a useful death and then peace. . .. I was thirty-three and so unhappy that life was almost sense-free, almost sensation-free."*
Millar was accepted for Resistance work. At first he was just barked at by his superiors or kept cooling his heels in the dirty waiting room filled with dated copies of the Daily Express and France Libre. But if he was not on time, he was barked at louder: "Handsome Mrs. Pollock would glower at me from behind her flower-and-chocolate-laden desk, and her pneumatic Jane, the American secretary in uniform, would pretend to be engrossed in her typing, so that she could spare no sympathy." A major warned him: "Please be careful, my friend. You must not give a false impression of slackness you know. You are being trained for a position of great responsibility. Punctuality is considered most vital in this organization. We demand the most absolute discipline and obedience."