Peculiar Horror

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE STARS-- Valentin Tikhonov--Little, Brown ($2.50).

This accurate historical novel of Baron Ungern-Sternberg's last days is for readers whose literary will power is as strong as their stomachs. Written in the tradition of the conventional Russian novel, with almost eye-witness vividness, it ranks in intensity if not in scope with Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

One of the last and most legendary of the White Russian counter-revolutionists rounded up by the Soviet Government was Baron Roman Fedorovich Ungern-Sternberg, diminutive, monstrously capricious, brilliant commander of the East Asiatic Cossack Division, who in his last stand in Outer Mongolia beat the best the Red Army sent against him, went down to defeat only when his own officers rebelled against his sadistic despotism.

The book's focal characters are two boys who join Ungern-Sternberg simply because they want to fight, graduate from their schooling with a horrifying mixture of sophistication and childish innocence. But it is not the brilliantly realistic description of fighting that gives The Mountains and the Stars its peculiar horror. This is supplied by Ungern-Sternberg's cruelty toward his own officers (he humors the rank-&-file, who dote on him). The high point of his officer-discipline is when he flogs an officer who has shot two Cossacks, then burns him at the stake--a scene which puts all stories of lynching in the primer class.

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