Last year, after nearly two decades in Europe, Kay Boyle returned to America. Primer for Combat, her first book since her return, has its setting in France in 1940 during the months that followed Compiègne. It is a novel which in the form of a diary presents an incisive portrait of France after her defeat.

Miss Boyle is no journalist. She does not content herself with a mere enumeration of facts but searches for the human purport behind them, exploring a people's psychological reactions under the immense pressure of a political force majeure.

The form of the book is well chosen. No doubt Miss Boyle must have felt that the Battle of France is too recent an event, too much just one chapter of our current struggle, to be made the theme of a broad objective novel. By letting Phyl, American wife of a historian and mother of three children, write down a day-to-day account of what she observes around her in the small Alpine village of the Haute-Savoie, Miss Boyle gives her story the fragmentary touch which helps avoid that false ring of melodramatic prophecy so frequent in contemporary war novels.

Phyl relates the conversations she has had with French soldiers, bistro-keepers, merchants and aristocrats as well as refugees from Austria, Holland and Czechoslovakia. Small incidents, side glances and casual remarks reflect the common soldier's sarcastic bitterness over his leaders' inadequacies. There is the story about the poilus cheering as they were promised shot for their guns. Cautioned that they may not even get near enough to a German, they started laughing. "The Germans?' they said, 'who's talking about the Germans? It's the captain and the lieutenant we want to put away.'" There is the burning fury of the little people as they recognize that France fought nazism with fascism, the coal merchant Lafond's fearless rebellion against the poison of defeatism, and St. Cyr's dandylike submission to the new order as he voices hazy ideas about France's national resurrection, smart in the "uniform of appeasement," the khaki shorts and shirt of the Compagnons de France.

Along with true reports about bombings, fleeing refugees and Nazi bestiality, the village is flooded with rumors about German politeness; legends, originating from Goebbels's propaganda mills, about the courtesy and tact of German officers who, "invariably tall, broad-shouldered, clean-limbed and remarkably blond," offer their seats in streetcars and restaurants to French women while "the hollow-chested, seated Frenchmen" do not make a move. One of the reasons, according to Nazi agents, why France lost the war.

Besides specific political observations. Phyl's diary gives a faithful account of the practical difficulties that confront the French daily under the regime of their "liberators." Dunking a dry zwieback into the tasteless liquid of a café national, one hardly thinks "about the inconceivable tragedy of France's defeat," but "merely of the speechless misery of these café breakfasts, of the acceptance that was given the dry rusks and the sugarless drinks on the blank marble tables." Primer for Combat illuminates the France of 1940 from a hundred different angles. And against the background of snowcapped mountains, the cool, majestic beauty of the Haute-Savoie, which Miss Boyle describes superbly, the people's shamefaced depression over their country's fall lays bare the very core of France's misery.

Throughout the broader pattern of the tale runs the intimate story of Phyl's love for Wolfgang. Wolfgang, strikingly handsome Austrian and the husband of Corinne, Pétain's god-daughter, is with the Foreign Legion in Africa. He is no political refugee. He has come to the village as a ski-instructor, and when war broke out was, as an Austrian subject, given the choice of either going to a concentration camp for the duration or signing up as a Legionnaire.

At first, he implores Phyl in his letters to help him escape to Portugal, lest he should be returned to Austria by German authorities. Phyl takes his anti-fascist feelings for granted, as much for an established fact as her unreasoning passion for him. Later, however, the tone of his letters changes. He is still eager to get out of Africa, but does not care to escape nazism. He now turns to his French wife for help, knowing that Corinne, who understands the Nazis as "a new race of man," will, through her close family connections with Vichy, make it possible for him to live on in France.

For the first time Phyl recognizes Wolfgang's true face. Not the face of a villain, but that of the opportunist who lines up with the side which will most likely succeed: the "perfect athlete who understands one thing only; the exact moment to spring from the board." And through this sudden perception, the source of her love reveals itself to her. Her love, she now knows, did not belong to the Wolfgang who exists, but to the one she created. For Wolfgang "is one thing in one woman's language, and another thing in another woman's language, and perhaps he is nothing in anybody's language ∗ ∗ ∗ not even a star, not even a refulgence, but merely nothing."

Phyl's love, incidental and yet conclusive within the tale of a nation's tragedy, is developed with Proustian discernment. Phyl's dream, a woman's dream, brought to an end through the power of her own ethical choice, gives this book its profound human value.