I DREAM OF THE DAY

He wrote laughingly of himself, -- ""I must be born for belles-letters"". This slight volume, privately printed, is to be issued in a trade edition -- and the text proves that indeed here is a loss to the field of ""belles-letters"". Here is a sensitive mind with a clear perceptive of the inverted moral standards of war, and in his letters to his mother, he gives a personal account of one man's passage through the vast chaos of war. A young idealist who had met the depression head on -- he turned to writing on a freighter trip to South America -- who hated all that war stood for, was turned down for military service, and volunteered as ambulance driver with the American Field Services. These letters give little sense of continuity in the sense of history. He went to North Africa, he was with Montgomery's Eighth Army, he was killed in Tunisia. He describes the mystery of Cairo, rich, colorful Alexandria, the groans of the wounded, the wilting discomfort of African weather. His own fear during an air raid, his thoughts on the death of a comrade. It is not in their content but in their manner that these letters are a moving record. Not important, perhaps -- but evidence of a lost gift to writing.