STRANGE MEETING

This is a curious book for this day and age -- almost a period piece, and a curious book fora woman to have written in any day and age -- a very self-contained and self-restrained account of World War I over there profiled with something of the lean nobility of say Brooke or Sassoon. After a slight wound John Hilliard, an infantry lieutenant, has a home leave only to find that he is now totally uncommunicative in the world he left behind (an elegant mother, a sister on whom he was too dependent who is now about to marry). He goes back to the front and what is left -- very little -- of his old company and a young man Barton, as yet untouched by any actual war experience, whose open confidence he returns with a first and absolute love. But as the weeks pass Barton too is tarnished by the guilt, fear and failure which rub off on him under these circumstances as each man's death diminishes him and he goes inevitably to his own rendezvous while Hilliard in the bleak prescience of what will happen, just survives -- losing a leg. . . . Miss Hill writes with a meticulous, quiet, almost letter-perfect exactitude which corroborates rather than encroaches, most understandable under the circumstances -- there is that interval in time as well as Hilliard's gloved reserve.