BRITAIN, FRANCE AND CULTURE
SIR,—The correspondence in your columns on Britain, France and Culture reminds me of the replies given by French soldiers at the front to a questionnaire addressed to them last February by Le Figaro: "What were they reading? " inquired that newspaper. " Very little," wrote one. " Bridge, crossword puzzles, talk about the weather, the daily incidents of our service occupy our leisure." For those who did read Balzac, Hugo, Alphonse Daudet, and among contemporaries Duhamel, Mamiac and Jules Romains seem to have been favourite authors. But above all Romains. " Il est le seul auteur que je con- sidere comme valable," writes one.
The discovery in 'a peasant's bureau of a volume by Dumas Fils is described as a great find. And Treasure Island, which lay beside it, was not unappreciated. Other English writers mentioned were Conrad and Charles Morgan.
Mamiac's son could read nothing but poetry at first, especially the poems of Paul Valery. Later he began Flaubert's Letters. One could never be parted from a volume of selections from the works of St. Catherine of Sienna and St. Theresa. Another took no books whatever with him, but instead a blank note-book, in which he intended to set down his own observations, les confidences d'une solitude pres- unite. Urgent appeals-to the home front for books and papers were frequent. And the replies varied from learned scientific treatises to detective stories and one hundred pornographic novels, including l'Amour du Pays des Soviets, sent by a Parisian lady of high society.—
Blockley, Gloucestershire.
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