ONE WOMAN'S WAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 483, 24 September 1948, Page 16

ONE WOMAN'S WAR

THE SEVEN THUNDERS. By Sarah Gertrude Millin. Faber and Faber.

HIS is a valuable book, but not neatly so valuable as the blurb would indicate. It is certainly "a great achievement for a single writer" to have produced already "a complete history of the war,’ but it may not be an important achievement. If it really were a history of the war the author who even thought of achieving it in so short a time and by such simple means would have written ‘herself out of the consideration of serious readers, But it is of course absurd to call these six volumes history. They are the personal record of an intelligent, but not highly intelligent, woman who had many. opportunities for getting inside information. The fact that Mrs. Millin enjoyed, and no doubt still enjoys, "a close friendship. with General: Smuts" would bring her much inform@tion of events as they happened that would not reach people in general, but even then it would be events as they happéned in South Africa or seemed in South Africa to be happening elsewhere. In any case men in the position occupied then by General Smuts tell their friends chiefly what they know already or are likely soon to find out. The war in Europe was over before Mrs. Millin was able to leave South Africa, and the account she ha’ put on record of the horror camps and the Nuremberg Trials will not persuade anybody that she has a highly trained critical faculty. It is not writing history to extract from the leading newspapers or from the reports of radio correspondents what the correspondents themselves saw, heard, or thought in moments of excitement and tension. That is material that posterity will find it useful to have and amazing to read, but it is false pretences to offer it as history to-day.