Moppets' Crusade

OUR LIVES HAVE JUST BEGUN--Henry Myers--Stokes ($2.50).

Among the world's lost causes, none was more fantastic than the Children's Crusade. The least glorious pilgrimage in religious history, it has been mostly lost to literature as well. The exception is that macabre legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, invented by satirical 13th Century peasants.

The Children's Crusade might be the subject for a fine work of imaginative realism. Our Lives Have Just Begun attempts instead a piece of reverent irony--the story of a French shepherd boy who, mistaking a joking troubadour for God, is inspired to start the first Children's Crusade to Jerusalem. He recruits tens of thousands of moppets, sweeps across France like a locust plague, accepts slave-traders' transportation to the Holy Land as a miracle, dies of fever as the flabbergasted Caliph of Bagdad good-humoredly pretends to surrender in the name of the Virgin Mary.

The publishers' readers "made bold to class this unusual first novel with The Bridge of San Luis Rey." A bold blurb, it is something less than accurate. The main aptness of the comparison is that Author Myers' story also collapses, too lightly constructed to support its load of symbolism.

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