Told to Forget

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT (380 pp.]--Drew Middleton--Viking ($3.75).

Since Vincent Sheean's immensely successful Personal History in 1935, neither he nor many of his successors has succeeded notably with that difficult formula: the journalistic catchall which mixes autobiographical adventure, eyewitnessing of disaster, punditry, prophecy and philosophy. Some have seemed too wise after the event; many have not seemed wise enough before it. Drew Middleton's Our Share of Night is a welcome exception. It is written with rare honesty and simplicity. Best of all is his reason for writing, stated not in a self-conscious foreword but in the last sentence of the book: "Now perhaps I can forget it."

Middleton has plenty to forget. At 25, in the spring of 1939, he joined the London Bureau of the A.P. That fall he was one of the twelve U.S. correspondents assigned to the British Expeditionary Force. From then on, in England, Africa and Europe--ending with Dunkirk; and later, after the Blitz, returning to the Continent for the New York Times, he saw more of the war than most of his colleagues, rapidly built a reputation for courageous and able reporting. He is now the Times's correspondent in Moscow, but Our Share of Night covers only up to the end of the war.

From his book there is little for serious historians to salvage, but the general reader will find some of the best combat reporting done by an American. Much of what Middleton has to say merely underscores what most readers already know; but at least it is convincingly underscored: the unpreparedness of England and France, the defeatism of the French, the unyielding firmness of the British people during the time they stood alone.

Few correspondents have ever learned how distasteful I-Was-There writing is to combat veterans. Middleton's book is one of the few that has a fair chance of cracking that resentment, especially in his intensely personal summing up:

"War is often represented by enthusiasts as doing great things for men. It does in certain ways raise men above themselves, bring out great qualities, foster great utterances. But for each man who is elevated by a war a thousand are debased. For despite what its apologists can say, it remains the most ignoble of occupations.

"War has imposed a callousness which I abhor. I find I am intolerant and overly suspicious. I dislike all Germans and hate many of them more than any man should hate another. I have seen things which made me rejoice to be a member of the same species as those who did them. But I have seen much more that makes me regret that I was born into this century."

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