THE THOUSAND HOUR DAY

Report repeated from p. 786, when scheduled for publication last year, as follows: ""Dimensionally--only one--this is a Polish War and Peace of World War II extending a week before and a few weeks after the actual less than three weeks which it took to gut and defeat Poland. In spite of its respectable intentions and considerable research, it hardly rises above its orthodox layout and characters which alternate to carry the burden of the military action: aging, one-armed Janusz Prus, General of Brigade who carries on the tradition of Pilsudski, an old soldier fighting an old, obsolete kind of war; Lala his young mistress; Loomis, an American correspondent with whom she has a short-lived affair during the siege of Warsaw; Pawel, a hunter; Adam, the General's son, a mountain climber who is interned during the war and chooses death willingly; peasants and soldiers, Stas Guz, Antos, and others; Michal, the General's brother who knows at the start that this will be a hopeless resistance. 'One endless period, a nightmarish day of a thousand hours' is witnessed through their eyes, from the mobilization to the capitulation, the actions in the woods, in the fields, on village streets; the front which breaks first in the north--the attempt to stop the Germans which only rain and a miracle can accomplish; the bombing of Warsaw in which Lala is killed; etc. Throughout, there is a certain amount of sententious philosophizing about war, and life, and love, and death, and it is hard to think that interest in the characters or this particular phase of the war, will shoulder quite as heavy a fieldpack as this--some 700 pages. However, there will be strong publisher enthusiasm and backing (and the Book-of-the-Month Club) to reverse this judgment. Perhaps.