[A Separate Peace], modest as it is in tone, is likely to leave you thinking. The misuse of science now makes it necessary to articulate a new and purely practical form of Pacifism, a Pacifism which, free of crankiness and owing nothing to religious sensitivity, depends entirely on simple common sense. From now on, people must say, war will mean not only a shortage of cakes and ale but the end of everything. It is this form of protest, of personal withdrawal from political folly which, among other things, makes such pleasant reading of John Knowles's A Separate Peace. It is the story of two friends at a smart American preparatory school (for 'preparatory' read 'public' in this country) at the time when America first joined the Second World War. In the beginning the younger boys are more or less ignored while their elders are hurriedly prepared for the blood bath; but as time goes on the whole school is efficiently geared to the conditioning of cannon-fodder, and every aspect of work and play comes to be valued, by masters who are themselves too old to fight, only in so far as it is a preparation for the trial to come…. Gene, the intellectually inclined narrator, has a fit of insane resentment and causes his athletic friend, Phineas, to break his leg. Phineas, so badly crippled that he will be out of the war in any case, broods over the separate peace thus forced upon him and eventually decides that the war is entirely spurious, that the whole thing has been thought up by Roosevelt, Churchill and the authorities in gen-eral simply because they are old men jealous of youth and pleasure….

Phineas, of course, is in part rationalising his annoyance at being out of something; but the more sensitive Gene accepts what he says as an important truth. So privately and together they resist the war and all it implies until reality makes itself felt—sickeningly so—in its own good time…. In emphasising the wider theme of this book, I have done less than justice to other matters—the quietly told story of the boys' relationship and its crises, the sweat and hopeless melancholy which pervades the whole. But then the real importance of Mr. Knowles's novel does indeed lie in its account of the attempt, made by two powerless individuals, to dissociate themselves from them and the follies for which they are responsible. It is an attempt strictly in accord with the principles of the 'commonsense' pacifism I described above—but an attempt doomed to painful failure unless everyone makes it. How silly the Generals on both sides, how silly they would look then. But Mr. Knowles makes it plain enough (if we hadn't guessed already) that quiet common sense is a feeble match for reality and the Generals: they are sure of the last word.