TRAMPLED LILIES

Ten years in her home in Provence provided some background for her novels. Now it provides background for the first of the books in the vein of Hilltop on the Marne, as Lady Fort writes her experiences in August, 1940, when general mobilisation disrupted the quiet tenor of her ways. She writes with intimacy, with sentiment, with gentility of turning herself and her house over to the use of officers and poilus; of the ""foyer"" in the high Alps where soldiers on skis dropped in for rest and refreshment and comfort. Finally, towards the close of French participation, she realizes that she must get out, and makes a frenzied trip across country to St Malo, and thence to London, where news comes of disaster for her beloved France. War work -- and finally a cottage in Sussex where she retires to write. There is a good deal of the feel of the last war, oddly enough; after the brutally realistic pictures of modern warfare, this leaves a sense of unreality. Definitely for older people, who, perhaps, would rather still think of war in terms of gracious ladies ministering to homesick soldiers.