On the North Atlantic

H. M. CORVETTE--Nicholas Monsarrat --Lippincott ($ 1.75).

THE SAGA OF SAN DEMETRIO -- F. Tennyson Jesse --Knopf ($1.25).

These English books, models of the quiet modesty lacking in many U.S. I-saw-it-happeners, deal with the grave and sinister, but little publicized, warfare in the North Atlantic.

Novelist Nicholas Monsarrat (TIME, Jan. 13, 1941) has turned his amateur yachtsmanship to use as a lieutenant on the Corvette Flower. This is his third winter of service in the North Atlantic convoys. Corvettes are the smallest British vessels in active service. They "would roll on wet grass," and some of Lieut. Monsarrat's most vivid writing describes merely the mixture of discomfort and deep pride which the corvettes engender in the heroic, fatalistic corvetteers who man them.

As Acting Medical Officer (unpaid), Monsarrat has seen more than his share of pain and of that conduct of men in pain which is one of war's few compensations. He is perhaps at his best in communicating the simple grandeur, purposefulness and comradeship of a great number of vessels spaced and moving upon constant danger. H. M. Corvette is a quick cleaning-up, obviously, of spasmodic, hurried jottings in a notebook. It promises England a fine writer, when more time is had for writing.

The Saga of San Demetrio is a labor of patriotism by the grandniece of Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and the author of the remarkable psychological study A Pin to See the Peepshow. Rather touchingly old-fashioned in its style, it is marred by such phrases as "the simple faith of sailormen" and "these unalterable British!" It suffers, inevitably, from being told at secondhand. But it is an honorable and exciting account of an exceedingly honorable, exciting--and true--event.

In November 1940 the motorship San Demetrio, well out of Halifax with 11,000 tons of gasoline, was struck amidships and on the port bow by shells from the pocket battleship Admiral von Scheer. She caught fire and her crew abandoned her. After two days 16 of her seamen, some wounded and one dying, boarded her, blazing as she was, and put out her fires. They got her in commission and sailed her by dead reckoning to Ireland. Her normal complement was 42 men. One single spark, at any moment, could have been the end of the 16 who manned her. Fifteen of the men, and their ship, are in service today.

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