SUSPECT
By Allan Strawbridge
Suspect (Heinemann, 8s. 6d.) is the story of an Australian artist who spent the War years as a prisoner in Germany, wrongly suspected of being a member of the French Intelli- gence Service. During that time he was the victim of every form of pressure, physical and mental, and of cruelly ingenious tricks, to force a confession from him. Those four years of torture came as the culmination of a series of misfortunes and left him as broken in soul and body as any casualty of actual warfare. Mr. Strawbridge's assurances that, apart from certain rearrangements of material, the story is true, are unnecessary; if the book had been published as a novel—the form in which it is cast—its truth would have been apparent. It is not a pleasant story—to read it is like witnessing the writhings of an ultra-sensitive body under vivisection. Mr. Strawbridge went to Paris, against the wishes of his family, to study art. His guardian refused to send his allowance, and before long he was reduced to the utmost poverty. He worked in a back-street cafe, until typhoid landed him in the pauper ward of a Paris hospital. With the money given him for his fare home he went sketching in Luxembourg, and there became engaged to an American girl. When in 1914 the Germans occupied Luxembourg, he was arrested on a charge of espionage. His fiancee, a German agent, had reported him because of his sketches of the frontier. From then until he was freed by revolutionaries in 1918 he wore the black prison garb of a suspect," and lived in dread of speaking a word that would send him before the firing squad. One feels that in this autobiography he has attempted to objectify and overcome the preying horror or his toe vivid. memories. He has written a nightmare of a book, and has: surely laid the ghost.
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