FIRE AND SUFFERING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 809, 28 January 1955, Page 10

FIRE AND SUFFERING

JOAN OF ARC, by Lucien Fabre; Odhams Press, through Whitcombe and Tombs, New Zealand price 22/6. EW medieval personalities stand before us so vividly as Joan of Arc, and fewer still with greater poignancy. Some of those who did her to death were well meaning, but uneasy about their work, and were anxious that full records should stand as their apologia. Others were vindictive or driven by political pressures; and they, too, felt that ample documents would serve the ends of their political masters or of their personal spite. The records are theretore quite unusually detailed: and with devastating thoroughness they achieve the reverse of what their compilers intended. In particular they give us the lively picture of this astonishing personality, who cut through the sordidness of the Hundred Years War, and in defiance ‘of all rational expectation, gave a new twist to the history of Europe. This is the field which M.- Lucien Fabre sets out to explore. He was a

soldier, engineer and administrator, who was also a notable man of letters. During the Second World War he had, as a patriotic Frenchman, tasted the bitterness of foreign occupation, and of collaboration between the Occuping Power and Frenchmen whom he despised. It was with this in mind that he wrote about that earlier period when France was -torn and miserable and longing for leadership. For him the riddles of Joan’s personality and influence, and the universal moral problems raised by her martyrdom, are entangled in the seamless web of French history. Here was an object of study worthy of his varied talents: and the issues raised are bril-» liantly set out in a brief introduction. The body of the book does not quite fulfil this high promise. The author is too enthusiastic, too laboriously detailed, and his villains are too imaginatively lurid: His valiant efforts to avoid anachronism occasionally break down. He does less than justice to Joan’s contemporaries, friend and foe alike. Yet there is valid history here, and the story of a spiritual as well as a military and political struggle. It is chastening, too, to remember that a heroic French re- sistance movement hated the goddems of the 1420’s as bitterly as the doryphores (the Occupation Troops) of the 1940’s. The common heritage of Western Europe was tempered in fire and

suffering.

F.L.W.

Wood