Extinction of a Species

COUP DE GRACE (151 pp.) -- Marguerite Yourcenar -- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3).

Until a few years before the Bolshevik Revolution, it appears, herds of aurochs roamed the fictional forest of Kratovits, a great feudal estate in Baltic Kurland, founded as a fortress in the Middle Ages by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. The aurochs were the last of their kind surviving from prehistoric times. What the lords of Kratovits did not know was that they were soon to be as extinct as these primitive bison.

Bleak Theme. Marguerite Yourcenar has set down the story of the doomed Baltic civilization in a fable so barely told (in translation from the French) as to suggest basic English. It suits her bare, bleak theme. Her narrator is Erick von Lohmond of the Teutonic gentry. Too young for World War I, he grows up into one of the crudest of civil wars. The Red soldiers who come sweeping through the Baltic birch forests so hate the Czarist military system that when they capture a White officer they nail his hated epaulets to his shoulders or, because the officers had once worn white gloves, flay his hands while he still lives. "Our men were not lacking in invention either," the White narrator laconically admits. It was a war in which few prisoners were spared, but all were prisoners of its outcome.

Erick's Francophile father had been killed fighting with the Germans against the French. His own fate is equally clouded. With no faith or much hope he fights as a young officer against the Reds. Symbolically, the fortunes of war drive him to Kratovits, where he had spent a happy boyhood as a friend of Conrad, heir to the Counts of Reval. For Conrad and Erick there is nothing to do but to fight on fatalistically. Conrad is all gallantry, but his sister Sophie almost welcomes the destruction of their life.

The Second Shot. As a student, she had been half-carried away by the dream of a free, liberal Russia, and much impressed with the political ideas of a Jewish fellow student, now a Red officer. Sophie's new and growing love for Erick is rejected and she crosses class, family and historical lines to go over to the Reds. Presently, Conrad is killed; his sister is captured and sentenced to death as a turncoat. In a scene of cutting irony the White soldier, who usually performs the executions with his pistol, comes to Erick and reports: "She orders . . . that is, Miss Sophie asks . . She wants it to be you." Erick obliges. His first shot blows half her face away. "On the second shot everything was over." With this, Novelist Yourcenar (Hadrian's Memoirs, TIME, Nov. 29, 1954) contrives to inject her own sharp sense of history in what is told within the emotional limits of three private destinies.

Everything was over with the Baltic barons. Erick goes on to international adventuring with a gun for hire in Spain, the Gran Chaco and Manchuria, not with any ideological passion but simply because for one of his birth and background, there seems to be nothing else to do. His is a fable of one who survived--but did not live on.

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