Orphan Convoy

PIED PIPER--Nevil Shute--Morrow ($2.50).

Pied Piper reads like a semi-final draft for one of the best sentimental novels to come out of World War II. The telling is not all it might be, but the materials of the tale are surefire.

The story starts in a London Club, and is told all night between bombs and sips of Marsala by a gentleman of seventy, quite unsteady on his feet. By chance he was fishing in the Jura Mountains when the Lowlands fell. He struck out for England in charge of the children of two English acquaintances, and on the way west he found it necessary to his conscience to pick up several more. They were a little French girl, an orphaned French boy, a derelict Dutch orphan, a ten-year-old Polish Jew who desired only to kill Germans, and ultimately, a Nazi child. All of them he made it his increasingly dangerous business to protect, to convey to England, to reserve from war's destruction both in body and spirit. En route they endured every mechanism of debacle from delayed trains to a strafing, and old Mr. Howard managed his charges with exquisite kindness and tact.

This image, of a frail, gravely serene, utterly courageous creature of the past, transporting across the immediate ruin of the human present the innocent and polyglot future, has exciting possibilities both for tear-jerking and for simple grandeur. Nevil Shute's modest abilities are at least honest and competent enough to make it a good story.

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