Over The Arno In Cinemascope

Most people know Peter Ustinov as a screen actor and not as a writer, although he has several volumes of short stories to his credit, and half a dozen plays. The Loser is his first novel.

ALTHOUGH usually referred to as British, the bearded Ustinov face, as well as the name, conjure up Slavonic images. His novel does likewise as it pursues, with sardonic humour, flashes of sentiment and starkness, the career of Hans Win terschild from the cradle to the firing squad.

Hans was born of a mother who had pretentions to aristocracy, and of a father who was a soldier of the old school, whose brief period as a fighting man was compensated for by rhetoric. Hans was born in 1920. As he grew into adolescence so did the Nazi Party grow into power, and the

boy was prodded along in the right direction by his Storm Trooper brother-in-law.

Because of the time of his birth, Hans was ready to go to war at the same time that Hitler did. He saw service in Poland, Russia, Greece and finally, Italy.

By the time he reached Italy the Germans were in retreat on the Arno, and Florence was besieged.

This seemed to be of less personal interest to Hans than the fact that in Florence he met Teresa who showed him that sex and love were not two entirely unrelated things as he had hitherto suspected—although Teresa was, in the very best tradi tion, a prostitute.

It was during this time that Hans, now a Major, sacked the Italian village of San Rocco and in so doing extinguished over 100 lives. It was this act that made him a target for local Italian enterprise after the fight ing had rolled away, and which brought Hans ultimately before a firing squad.

But this is not before he becomes involved with a fantastic enterprise run by a mysterious individual called Erhardt, who makes a good living smuggling German soldiers out of Italy on forged passports, and into neutral countries where their techni cal qualifications, or the local dislike of Anglo-Americans, make them wel come.

Erhardt also bought war scrap and arranged other deals. In the pro cess of both, he gathers Hans in with numerous other Germans and pre sents them to an American film com pany that has arrived to re-enact, four times larger than life, the rape of San Rocco, This put the final nail in Hans’ coffin but provides also the most entertaining part of the novel.

Ustinov has produced a Cinema scope-sized, complicated novel that in the matter of terrain leaps around all over Europe like a grasshopper, and through which fighting types of every nationality stride or creep according to individual temperament. Its mes sage is that all life is futile; most men are puerile; and that men at war are both. (THE LOSER. Published by Heinemann. 20/-.)