War Diary

MY WAR WITH THE UNITED STATES-- Ludwig Bemelmans--Viking ($2.50).

Recalling the World War years, most German-Americans agree that their neighbors' spy hysteria shattered not only their nerves but, for a time, their faith in the U. S. as well. Yet during that frantic period, Austrian Immigrant Ludwig Bemelmans, a 19-year-old U. S. Army recruit whose English could barely be understood, almost completely escaped the spy mania and acquired an affection for the U. S. that embraced factory landscapes, a "wondrously beautiful" prostitute and the insane. My War with the United States, a translation of his German diary, is the record of that sunny Americanization. Smiling readers will agree with Private Bemelmans' officers that the ingenuous, eager rookie deserved both his kidding and his promotion.

Sent to train with a field hospital unit at Fort Ontario, Oswego, N. Y., he marveled at the amiability of officers who let him bring his dog along, called each other by first names, lay on the grass with the rank & file. In the German Army the whole lot of them would have been either court-martialed or stood before a firing squad. But, notes Private Bemelmans gratefully, "they let me speak German, tell me that Germany is beautiful, and don't say a word that I have a stack of German books and many German ideas." One of his German expressions, in fact, became a fixture of camp life. Private Bemelmans called his Oswego girl friend "Summer Sprouts," because that is the German phrase for freckles, of which she had a great many. She never outlived the nickname because the other soldiers had so much fun calling her by it.

Put in charge of a ward for "amorous diseases" occupied by "Oldtimers." Germanic Private Bemelmans decided it was time to introduce some discipline in the U. S. Army. But when he tried to turn out the lights per regulations, his patients threw things at him. Threatened with his revolver, "they howled with joy. threw all the rest of the things." Two shots over their heads brought an amused reprimand from the Colonel, who suggested: "The basic function of a Hospital, Private Bemelmans, is to cure men, not to shoot them."

His next setback as a disciplinarian was in the Government mental hospital at Buffalo. w?here he was transferred as an attendant. Promoted to mess manager, he once kept the kitchen gang overtime to rewash greasy dishes. In playful revenge they dropped a blanket over his head, pounded him with a plank. The officer whom he asked to arrest them replied: "It will do you good, this is America." After delivering a strait-jacketed Negro to Mississippi authorities, he was picked to attend Officers' Training School in Georgia, where for the first time he found things a little more suggestive of German goose-stepping and got his first and last brief taste of spy phobia. But he was still firm in the belief that "the Army is like a mother."

The Author, Small, mild-mannered, versatile Ludwig Bemelmans worked first in the U. S. as busboy in a Chinese restaurant. His last restaurant job was managing Manhattan's famed Hapsburg restaurant, whose walls he covered with his own paintings. The author of two charming children's books (Hansi, The Golden Basket], illustrated, as is this one, by himself, he has written and drawn for Vogue, Story, Harper's Bazaar, FORTUNE, designed the stage decor for Noah, decorated the studio of Jascha Heifetz. He is now reported "somewhere in Ecuador on horseback."

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