GRIEVANCES GALORE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 784, 30 July 1954, Page 14

GRIEVANCES GALORE

COURT MARTIAL, by Alistair Mars; Shakespeare Head, N.Z. price 15/6. MAN obsessed with his own grievances is not often good company, _and Lieutenant-Commander Mars in this book is no exception. One cannot help but feel sorry for him, but many of his difficulties were his own making. He is a forceful writer and a forthright critic; but he complains too loudly and too long. He constantly emphasises his arguments with exclamation marks and italics, sometimes with both together: the result in print is almost as tiresome as if he were at one’s elbow grumbling into one’s good ear. Though he writes only of events of which he has first-hand knowledge, his criticisms leave behind some disturbing thoughts. His chief targets are the Admiralty and the civil servants who tun it; a parsimonious Treasury; an inept British Navy "toadying" to inefficient Americans; the shortage of accom modation at overseas stations which results in the wives and families of naval officers living in squalor and penury; the Navy’s low rates of pay and its sys tem of promotion; the default of an earlier New Zealand Government in the matter of allowances while he was First Lieutenant ("a sort of cockaded charwoman") in the Bellona on loan to the Royal New Zealand Navy. The last em perience was not happy. "The appoint ment was the last thing I wanted... but ... some confounded snob wanted

a Dartmouth man.’

W.A.

G.