Word: blanches
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...Sabres of Paradise, by Lesley Blanch. This history of Russia's struggles to subdue the wild tribesmen of the Caucasus in the 19th century is hardly an orderly chronicle, but its digressions are fascinating, and its heroes are thundering horsemen and high-bouncing lovers...
...SABRES OF PARADISE (495 pp.)-Lesley Blanch-Viking...
This book's heroes all seem to be sixfoot-three, thundering horsemen, invincible sword fighters and high-bouncing lovers; if the story were fiction, critics could complain that the earth does not breed such men. But Author Lesley Blanch has discovered an episode-Russia's efforts to subdue the Caucasian mountain tribes during the first half of the 19th century -which abounds in authentic hell-and-crinoline raisers, and she describes it with enormous relish. Not much romanticizing is necessary; the source material is generally incandescent...
Historian Blanch (The Wilder Shores of Love) finds her subject perhaps too fascinating for an orderly, steady-pulsed narrative, and now and then the reader is vexed by her somewhat florid digressions. But the period is little known and the players absorbing. Mme. de Stael's remark is quoted: "In Russia, if they do not attain their objective, they always go past it." The author can be forgiven if she does both...
...spoof the other end of the Wehrmacht hierarchy. To General von Puckhammer, peace is a prelude to war, life a dress rehearsal for death. He regards a soldier's calling as holy, for he believes that God is a fellow Prussian. When his monocle glints, junior officers blanch. But just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no general is a demigod to his driver. Sergeant Major Horlacher is as common as dirt, and plays an ironic Sancho Panza to Von Puckhammer's Don Quixote...