PIED PIPER

A compact, realistic story, achieving somewhat the effect Nathan strived for in his last novel, They Went on Together. Shute has the faculty for seizing upon contemporary drama and weaving it into a story with very human elements. This is the story of a conservative, tradition-bound old Englishman, faced with the need to be needed, meeting it with quiet courage and no bombast. He is caught by rumors of German invasion, while on holiday in the Jura mountains, and is asked to take two English children to safety in England. In their checkered progress across invaded France, he takes under his wing other children, — the niece of a matron at the Inn, a French child whose parents were killed by a dive bomber before his eyes, a Dutch urchin, and finally — as the price of his own freedom, a German child, whose Jewish blood condemns her to perpetual escape. What a picture of refugee glutted roads, of German dive bombers, of terror — and yet of the sentimental weak spot that exposes even the most hardened to the appeal of sheer goodness.