Whitehall to Riga
Man and Boy. By Sir Stephen Tallents. (Faber. 2 Is.) SIR STEPHEN, I feel, has been just a little copious. He speaks in his preface of. "the rather formidable task of writing iso,000 words in the interstices of my ordinary work." One of the ways of rendering the task less formidable would have been to keep the 150,000 to ioo,000. The book, I think, would have gained thereby. Autobiographers usually tend to overrate slightly public interest in their heredity, infancy and childhood, and Sir Stephen cannot be entirely acquitted of that. It did not really need 97 pages to get him as far as Harrow at the age of 12 plus, and, in the same way, full of interest as his experiences in the Baltic provinces in 1919 and 1920 were, a less detailed description of day-to-day events would have left a clearer picture of an almost inextricably confused situation. To be mildly critical to that extent does not mean that I feel anything but admiration for Sir Stephen's book- as a whole_ He
has had a singularly interesting career, meeting—at Harrow, at Balliol, in the Civil Service, in the Army, in the Baltic States— numbers of people already distinguished or who have since gained distinction, and the series of perplexities, adventures and crises he had to face in the ex-Russian territories subsequently known as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania make a story crowded with interest and excitement—even though, as I have said, with rather less dis- traction of detail a broader path might have been cut through the welter of warring Ests and Letts and Balts and Russians and German Landwehr and various irresponsible freebooters.
When Sir Stephen Tallents came down from Oxford he went, after a brief interval, into the Civil Service, living at Toynbee Hall (where he inherited an interesting burglar from a much less dis- tinguished resident), and working in the Marine Department of the Board of Trade. Thence he migrated to help Mr. Winston Churchill and Sir William Beveridge start Labour Exchanges. In the last war he served in the Irish Guards and was badly wounded, recovering to join Beveridge again in the Ministry of Munitions. After that the Ministry of Food, inefficient under Lord Devonport, efficient under Lord Rhondda, and then, when a starving Europe had to be fed after the Armistice, to Poland as food overseer. Here an interesting figure is introduced. The first thing Sir Stephen found the need of when he got to Warsaw was something of a staff, and in response to his urgent cables there duly arrived two girl typists and two Irish Guards officers, one of the latter named Alexander. Sir Stephen mentions that " Alex," who reappears, invaluable in every crisis, in the Baltic States imbroglio a few months later, had been an Irish amateur mile champion and became subsequently Commander of the First Corps in France in 1940, Commander in Burma, and in 1942 Commander-in-Chief, Middle East. His further step in 1943 came too late for inclusion. About a third of Sir Stephen's book is devoted to the Baltic mission, from March, 1919, to October, 192o. It was full, often uncomfortably full, of incident, and Sir Stephen (who, as readers of Th.: Spectator well know, is a writer of distinction) knows how to describe incident. His narrative sustains interest at a high level throughout, and should create in advance a strong demand for another instalment beginning,
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