Symbol of Doom

A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord. 209 pp. New York: Henry Holt and Company. $3.50

Mr. Lord reconstructs, so far as. possible, what actually happened on the night in 1912 in which the Titanic became the unforgettable symbol of a world which was rushing to its own doom with the same tragic blindness and arrogant hubris with which the great steamer hurled herself against the ice. In these pages we witness the disaster of the Titanic, from its inception in the folly of experts to its culmination in the gallant gesture of gentlemen who attired themselves in evening dress to await death with calm dignity. The world that died a few years later somewhere on the fields of France, where the West maimed it- self in fratricidal war, was a world of implicit faith in the supremacy of the white man’s civilization, the permanence of traditional standards of honor and decency, and the certainty of unlimited progress—an era to which our contemporaries are beginning to look back with hopeless nostalgia. All that is left to us of that world of lost illusions is a few phrases, now empty and meaningless, which are regularly mouthed in the chancelleries of London, Paris and Washington, where the successors of statesmen, smitten by the deadly sickness of mind and will that is called Liberalism, chatter incoherently on the bridges of their sinking ships.revilo Oliver

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Revilo Oliver

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A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord. 209 pp. New York: Henry Holt and Company. $3.50

Mr. Lord reconstructs, so far as. possible, what actually happened on the night in 1912 in which the Titanic became the unforgettable symbol of a world which was rushing to its own doom with the same tragic blindness and arrogant hubris with which the great steamer hurled herself against the ice. In these pages we witness the disaster of the Titanic, from its inception in the folly of experts to its culmination in the gallant gesture of gentlemen who attired themselves in evening dress to await death with calm dignity. The world that died a few years later somewhere on the fields of France, where the West maimed it- self in fratricidal war, was a world of implicit faith in the supremacy of the white man’s civilization, the permanence of traditional standards of honor and decency, and the certainty of unlimited progress—an era to which our contemporaries are beginning to look back with hopeless nostalgia. All that is left to us of that world of lost illusions is a few phrases, now empty and meaningless, which are regularly mouthed in the chancelleries of London, Paris and Washington, where the successors of statesmen, smitten by the deadly sickness of mind and will that is called Liberalism, chatter incoherently on the bridges of their sinking ships.revilo Oliver