Bride of an Army

VIVANDIERE!--Phoebe Fenwick Gaye-- Horace Liveright ($2.50).

Vivandiere, meaning a female brandy-selling camp-follower, is a word that has fallen into disuse since Blanche Bates played the part of one in the dramatized version of Ouida's novel Under Two Flags. Author Gaye's vivandiere "was born to the sound of a salvo of guns. She was weaned at three weeks and put on the bottle. Only it wasn't milk in the bottle, it was brandy! . . . The only powder she's ever had on her hair is gunpowder. She could walk at nine months, talk at a year, and had a remarkable vocabulary of bad language before she was three. . . . The only doll she had was a cannon-sponge on a used fuse-stick, dressed in a soldier's waistcoat." When she grew up she was popular for more reasons than the obvious one. The soldiers said: "She'll die in her shoes, like the rest of us. . . . Let's drink to . . . the black eyes of Julie!"

Julie's story begins when she falls in love with an officer, socially her superior. After considerable blood and thunder set against the background of Napoleon's famed Russian campaign of 1812, the two do not marry. Instead the officer turns civilian, the girl remain's an army's bride; remains, says Author Gaye, "the spirit of Joan of Arc"--vivandiere. Author Gaye, like so many other young English novelists, especially female ones, has been inordinately praised by Arnold Bennett and Frank Swinnerton.