P.W. Story

HORNED PIGEON (434 pp.)--George Millar--Doubleday ($2.75).

Readers of George Millar's first book were left with two impressions: that he was one of the most promising young British writers, and that he was mighty unhappy about something. Waiting in the Night (TIME, Jan. 14) told of Millar's parachuting into France a few months before Dday, to work with the Maquis. Author Millar hinted that he had volunteered for the job because something mysterious was gnawing his heart & soul. "I wanted a useful death and then peace," he said darkly; "I was thirty-three and so unhappy. ..."

Horned Pigeon, his second book, explains why he was unhappy and what he did during the first years of the war. The sorrow, as revealed in a tasteless postscript: his wife no longer loved him. The rest of the book is as remarkable in its way as Waiting in the Night. It gives a vivid, highly individual, often humorous picture of life as a prisoner of war.

Almost. Millar, an armored division platoon leader, was captured in Libya in the winter of 1941-42. For the next 20 months he was a P.W. in Italy and in Germany. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, officer P.W.s may not be forced to work. Both in World War I and in World War II, hundreds of them worked like mad--digging hidden tunnels, forging counterfeit papers, tailoring civilian-like disguises, anything that might eventually help them escape.

At Campo 35, near Salerno, Millar and three others nearly succeeded. So clever was their game that they walked calmly out past the Italian comandante's office and were within reach of the open gates when they were discovered by a little Italian corporal who saw the British boots under the faked uniforms. The gates swung shut. Soldiers swarmed out of the guardhouse. The comandante himself popped to his office window, screamed as though cut to the heart, bustled into the courtyard. "Swine, filth," he yelled at the P.W.s. "seducers, whoremongers, robbers! ... I who have been so noble,, so kind, so Christian, so hundred per cent generous with you filthy bastards. . . . And this is my reward. . . . How many got away?"

That time none got away from Campo 35. But there was another time at another place. After Italy surrendered, the Nazis moved Allied P.W.s by the carload into Germany. There at last Millar had his chance. With a friend, he made a break from a railroad train near Munich. They had laid careful plans: a roll of marks, suitable clothing, a nearby underground contact. At night the train guards were sleepy. The prisoners went into the lava--tory of the third-class coach, closed the door, forced the window and climbed out. "At intervals telegraph poles whisked past our noses with a blowing noise, like seals coming up to breathe on a pitch-dark night ... I jumped ... I found myself doing neck rolls down a granite-chip embankment. I came to rest in a little gully. . . . It was stifling, suffocating, wonderful to be free."

Getaway. From Munich it was a clean getaway across Germany to Strasbourg, across France slowly to Perpignan. He climbed wearily over the Pyrenees into Spain, eventually reached the British Consulate at Barcelona. Horned Pigeon is an almost day-by-day account of these adventures, in the tradition of Cage-Birds, The Tunnelers of Holzminden and other "escape books" of World War I. Like them it makes exciting reading, until Escaper Millar's lapse into bitter irrelevance at the end. His publishers think that the postscript, and the pained significance of the title (the pigeon, released from a foreign cage, is wounded when he gets home), add to the "suspense" involved. They don't, they merely detract from an otherwise first-rate account.

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