To the Woods No More

THE LAURELS ARE CUT DOWN--Archie Binns--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

Contemporary novels laid in the Pacific Northwest have substituted an ironic for a sentimental meaning in calling that part of the country "The Charmed Land." In The Laurels Are Cut Down, Author Binns attempts for the first time, in telling the story of two brothers who grew up on Puget Sound at the Century's turn, to trace the rise of that disillusionment. Readers who found his Lightship a talented and dramatic performance will not be disappointed in Archie Binns's second novel, may think it a good candidate for the Pulitzer Prize.

Still living in the small settlement of Forest City during George and Alfred Tucker's boyhood were some of its first settlers--dramatic living links to the earliest beginnings of a "beautiful, somber" country. With few playmates, George and Alfred depended mostly on each other and their imaginations, but in their eyes they lived in a world twice as exciting as any city kid's. In the best descriptions that have been written of the Northwest's giant forests and mountain scenery Author Binns makes convincing their swelling pride in the beauty of a land where high-speed logging operations had not yet penetrated. Here they counted for something. They were building a new country and a flag was raised every time "an American was about to be born." It was not until George and Alfred were out of high school and helping their father try to clear a farm of 5-ft. tree stumps that they got a taste of the backbreaking side of pioneer life, the poor future in it. After a year, having cleared one acre, they decided to try their luck prospecting in Alaska, sailed in their homemade sloop, enjoyed themselves but found no gold. When the U. S. entered the War, they went home to join up.

But instead of going to France they landed in Vladivostok with some 7,000 other U. S. troops, most of them from the Pacific Coast, who formed the U. S. contingent of Allied Intervention in Russia from 1918 to 1920. From this halfway point the story is told against a background of the "strange, mystifying events" related in General Graves's America's Siberian Adventure. President Wilson's instructions were specific and General Graves stuck to them: to protect Allied munitions stores against German seizure, not to interfere in Russian internal affairs. The British and Japanese took a different view, supported the White Russian armies openly, laid down a barrage of vilification against the U. S. for not joining in.

Desperately homesick, sick of the senseless killing and intrigues, George and Alfred concluded bitterly that "things Americans believed in didn't seem to mean anything in this foreign country." Anti-U. S. feeling, open attacks on U. S. troops reached a peak with the refusal of General Graves to deliver a shipment of guns when he discovered a plot to use them against his own men. But what hurt most was to read in the screaming newspapers from home that all of them, including General Graves, were Bolsheviks to a man. On a railway platform Alfred saw his big, good-natured brother killed in cold blood by a White Russian colonel.

Back home after two years, Alfred found himself regarded more as an undesirable alien than a returning hero, tried futilely to explain why he was no Communist, but finally kept his mouth shut after a call from an agent of the Department of Justice. His girl had married a wealthy logging operator's son from Seattle, but now she suggested that if he would get a job in Russia she would go with him. Alfred declined. One Russian exile was enough. Meanwhile, even though the bottom had dropped out of his world, where there was any democracy left, there was hope.

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