A Bit Queer

HOME FIRES BURNING -- Robert Henriques--Viking ($2.50).

"You wish me to give you my professional opinion of Brigadier . . . David Sloane?" asked the London brain specialist.

"We're getting married," replied Jane, who had served as a nurse in Italy and had not seen her fiance since he was decorated with the Victoria Cross and demobilized with a serious head wound.

Mumbling about what happens to the "hypothalamic proclivities" when they are released through concussion from "the higher control of the cortex," the special ist began to draw the marks of the wound on a scratch pad. "A person in this state," he concluded, "may find ... his disability offers a convenient escape from responsibilities, you understand?"

"I think, my dear," said Jane's Aunt Mary, "that your wedding must be postponed."

Questions & Answers. Anxious, hopelessly confused, Jane decided to take the night train to David's country home. The London station was packed with weary soldiers, sailors, workmen, mothers and children. A friendly corporal appeared out of the yellow fog, and helped Jane through the milling crowd.

"Don't you pushme, son," he warned a civilian, "I've been pushed enough." "We've all got our rights," retorted the civilian. "Take your rights," barked the corporal, "but take them out of my way, see?"

Aboard the train, the corporal and his three buddies "commandeered" a first-class compartment, and added a pregnant mother and her children ("someone suitableand deserving") to the group. One of the soldiers questioned the pregnant woman, whose husband worked in an anti-tank gun factory. "[Your husband] didn't come out on strike, did he?" asked the soldier. "Yes, he did--twice." "Why?" asked the soldier. "They wasn't paying enough, and it was terrible long hours." "We could have done with those guns," snapped the soldier. . . . Suddenly he blushed and became apologetic: "Sorry, miss . . . I'm a bit queer. We all are."

Enter the Cavalry. Jane left the soldiers at her fiance's home station, after urging them to drop in on her soon. David was not at the station to meet her. At the house, she first heard his voice querulously complaining about cold bath water. Soon he was enthusiastically outlining to her his plans for British Fascism -- "a great company [of veterans] bound by common experience, [with a] soldiers' guild . . . soldiers' candidate . . . soldiers' party."

Jane might well have lost her democracy then & there, if her four soldier pals had not suddenly swept to the rescue like the U.S. cavalry in a Western. In no uncertain terms they informed the mad brigadier that their common gripes and hatred of red tape had nothing whatsoever to do with dictatorship.

Hopes & Fears. Commando-Colonel Robert Henriques wrote Home Fires Burn ing in the hours before dawn that he managed to snatch during the North African campaign. It probably exaggerates the gap between civilians and veterans, and discusses their differences with too little tact. Lacking the sharp, balanced obsevation that marked his previous novel, No Arms, No Armour (TIME, Jan. 15, 1940), it comes off best when Author Henriques is writing not about the things he fears as an intellectual democrat, but the homey things that he longs for as a soldier overseas.

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