"JOURNEY to the End of the Night," which has been a literary sensation throughout France, is an adventure story of one Bardamn, an impressionable young French doctor. Bardamn is caught in the flood tide of the war and when the evil game of killing is ended, finds himself part of the "lost generation," stranded in the mire of post-war degeneration.

At this point probably four-fifths of the book remains and Bardamn's adventuring continues. There is no let-down at this point either in reading quality or in the amount of degradation and muck which M. Destouches' lascivious here continues to encounter. The story shifts to Africa, then to the United States; back to France; then finale in the shadow of a private insane asylum where Bardamn is director. American readers, perhaps, will be disappointed when "The Journey," which begins as if to be a French "All Quiet on the Western Front" develops into a sort of "Candido." Throughout the whole book there persists the same strange humor to lighten the continued examinations of subjects gross and primitive that are usually neglected in print. In many places M. Destouches has seized upon psychological phases of post-war French attitudes with great skill, capitalizing the fact that he is working with new material, but to the English reading public the conviction and justification of the book falter seriously after the treatment of the war.

We suspect that one explanation of the French success of the "Journey" is that it lays open the terrible defeatist psychology that has attached itself to the French people, the psychology that acknowledges at one time the hideousness and inevitability of War and which realizes the futility of a French victory as much as it dreads the possibility of a German one.

"I wasn't very wise myself, but I'd grown sensible enough to be definitely an coward forever," Bardamn declares. It is here that he plucks at the most vulnerable nervous fibre of the French--the secret doubt of their own courage that arises not from national cowardice but from the memory of the last war with its indescribable weariness, interminable sleeplessness, horror, death, filth and inevitable thousands of mutineers.

From the book salesman's viewpoint, the lascivious subject matter of the book will count more against it than for it. What one is willing to accept as a realistic picture of conditions of war becomes repulsive when offered as a view of ordinary life. It is an honest obscenity, one that exists in matter rather than in mind, but it may prove too all-pervasive for the American stomach.

It the reader expects relief from a surrounding of brothels, insane asylums, and disease when Bardamn arrives on Broadway, New York, disappointment is sure to be profound. Broadway is promptly described as "a running sore." The tip-off is complete when, after one or two deprecative observations on what Americans are proud to call "The Main Stem," Bardamn pops into a public toilet. Now there is a subject for you! The author gives it as many pages as Broadway itself.

For straightforward character delineation, Destouches succeeds in leaving an unforgettable impression of his hero. There is no hesitancy. Pride and fear of violating moral standards belonging to others have no place in the "Journey." The other characters do not take shape with anything near the same success. Robinson, a fellow inmate of the war hospital who appears intermittently throughout the book seems simply a variation of Bardamn himself, one whose moral sense and self-respect have mired deeper and deeper in futility, filth, and fear. The others leave little personality impression behind them. The translation by Mr. Marks is excellent and displays a remarkable knowledge of the English language and a great facility in American slang.

The appeal of the book lies in its delineation of a repulsive, animal type of existence, the product of political chaos, poverty, and moral degeneration which is probably, and moral degeneration which is probably better understood in France than in America. Thus, though it seems to strike a traditional response in the French public, we predict that in America it will not rise far above a secondary position as a "best seller."