Retelling Marines

Retelling the Marines

RED PANTS--John W. Thomason Jr.--Scribner's ($2.50). A hurried Kipling, a carelessly capable War correspondent, Artist-Author-Captain Thomason writes about marines and soldiers, sailors and adventurers on the hot coasts of Cuba and in the lively fields of France. Exhibiting the scattered but emphatic vigor of exploding shrapnel, his stories lack the controlled and deliberate, effectiveness of heavier artillery.

The title piece is less a story than an impressionistic anecdote. It ironically details the slender history of a nameless Negro in an overseas battalion who was caught filching food from another outfit's mess. He finds that the hardboiled lieutenant to whom he is brought for discipline hails from Galveston, Tex. So does the Negro. They chat together for a few minutes. Months later the officer learns that the black regiment has been destroyed.

"The Marines Have Landed" entertainingly relates the customary escapades of Jack, or in this case Captain Jinks, ashore. A grimly sentimental story, "Kupid's Konfidential Klub," tells about the death of awkward little Soldier Kemper whose speedy achievement of a great desire to be successful in the Army was interrupted when he stood in front of a machine gun. "A Razor Strop" is an embittered sketch of a soldier whose trivial theft leads him to a profitless disaster. Other stories about captains and colonels and knights-at-arms gain their effect from staccato characterization, a style made pungent by army jargon. Author Thomason has much ability to make the minutiae of life significant.

The Pictures share equally with the writing in story-telling importance. Artist Thomason draws as he writes except that he does it a little better. In sketches full of rapid motion his pen achieves subtleties which his typewriter is too unwieldy to reproduce. The current Cosmopolitan Magazine introduces him as a full-fledged professional illustrator of other people's stories.

The Author became famous when he published in Scribner's (monthly) his War impressions illustrated with burnt-match strokes. While these were selling widely in book form as Fix Bayonets, he was gathering fresh material at his post of duty with the U. S. Marines in Nicaragua.