Justice & the Governess

A TRAIN OF POWDER (310 pp.)--Rebecca West--Viking ($3.75).

Rebecca West, firm, formidable, and possessed of a frown like a side of the Grand Canyon, likes to see her nouns buttressed by stout adjectives like "fatuous," "obscene" and "idiotic"; even "bitchery" is in her vocabulary. At worst, her hardbitten prose is that of an obsessive governess threatening children with hellfire; at best, it expresses an energetic mind absorbed in the pursuit of common sense and justice. In A Train of Powder Author West examines with Old Testament sternness some recent efforts to bring malefactors before the bar.

Nuremberg Revisited. "Greenhouse With Cyclamens," principal of these essays, begins with the Nuremberg trials, ends with Western Germany's trade revival under Allied occupation. Those who believe "it was right that the Nazis should have been punished for what they did to the Jews" but not right that they should have been punished for "aggressive war" get a sharp rap over the knuckles. Legalist West argues that precisely the reverse is true; no law ever existed under which the leaders of one nation could punish the leaders of another for having murdered their own nationals, whereas "aggressive war as a crime was inherent in the Kellogg-Briand Pact." The Nuremberg trials were not only necessary and justified; they were an ambitious effort by "brave" men to restore an international sense of moral proportion. Author West believes stoutly that "it is only by making such efforts that we survive," but she also believes that this particular effort was bungled.

There were various reasons for this. The trials were conducted "by officials sick with the weariness left by a great war." The code that governed them was a mongrel code, "a compromise between the English and American procedures." It proved to be diametrically opposed to democratic German law because it bound the accused men, on pain of perjury, to speak the truth on oath, whereas German law would have given them .the right to lie to the full in their own defense. To the prisoners and their many supporters in Germany, Nuremberg was a put-up piece of legal chicanery, fit only to arouse derisive laughter. And such laughter, says Reporter West (who covered part of the trials), was heard frequently and horribly in the Nuremberg courtroom. A ruling against women visitors showing their legs (unfair to "the sex-starved defendants") and another against "disrespectful" catnapping in court somehow combined in such a way that "one of the most venerable of English judges found himself, one hot summer afternoon, being tapped on the shoulder with a white club by a young military policeman and told to wake up, stay awake, and uncross his legs."

But the best, or worst, joke of all came when the Russian judge read out his part of the judgment. All were awed as "the Russian language rolled forth from the firm fleshy lips of this strong man like a river of life, a river of genius," but no one knew whether to laugh or cry when "it turned out that the Russian was reading the part . . . that condemned the Germans ... for taking men and women away from, their homes and sending them to distant camps where they worked as slave labour . . ."

Everything, concludes Author West, conspired to render Nuremberg absurd or immoral as an object lesson. In the end the convicted men were hanged with the utmost clumsiness ("Ribbentrop struggled in the air for twenty minutes"), and this was the finishing touch in a trial that had gone on for so long (ten months) that the vile natures of the accused had long since become overshadowed by their human plight. Goring (who beat the gallows by poisoning himself) was one of "the most evil of human beings that have ever been born," but by the trial's end he "simply appeared as a man bravely sustaining the burden of fear." Old Bailey Polished. None of the other essays in A Train of Powder has the weight and portentousness of "Greenhouse With Cyclamens." But in "Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume," the reader gets a chance to see Author West at her best, stripped of her Jehovah drapes and writing like a veteran novelist and trial reporter.

Mr. Setty, a used-car trader, made a great splash in Britain when (in 1949) his headless, legless, knife-stabbed torso landed in a marsh near the Thames estuary after being pushed out of an airplane.

Mr. Hume, an amateur pilot, made the ripples spread when he admitted ejecting several packages which turned out to contain not only the said torso but also, in separate parcels, Mr. Setty's amputated members (never found). But Mr. Hume insisted staunchly (and on oath, of course) that he knew nothing about the actual killing and sawing-up of Mr. Setty; he had merely disposed of him, in return for a small fee, to oblige three men named "Mac" (or "Maxie"), "The Boy" and "Greenie." Everyone was sure that the three were figments of Mr. Hume's highflying imagination--until a surprise witness stepped into the box and declared with a "diffident smile" that he had met "Maxie" and "The Boy," and that they were members of a gunrunning, automobile-smuggling gang. Mr. Hume got twelve years for being an accessory after the fact.

The Hume case is a classic in the long tradition of English murder. Even its flattest statements of fact are gems that shine with the brilliance of Old Bailey craftsmanship. Undoubtedly, the Kohinoor of these is a remark made by one of the pathologists in commenting on part of Hume's testimony: "It is quite impossible to go on dictating to one's secretary if human bones are being sawed through in the vicinity."

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