The Small General

by Robert Standish

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256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Pen name of Digby George Gerahty

Digby George Gerahty (June 1898 – 6 November 1981), who wrote under the pen-names of Robert Standish, Stephen Lister, George Digby, and George Echlin, was the prolific English writer of short stories and some 80 novels. He was most productive during the 1940s and 1950s. He was also a featured contributor to the Saturday Evening Post. His novels include Elephant Walk, which was later made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor. In the semi-autobiographical Marise (1950), Gerahty (writing as "Stephen Lister") claimed that he and two publicist colleagues had covertly "invented" the Loch Ness Monster in 1933 as part of a contract to improve business for local hotels; he repeated his claim to Henry Bauer, a researcher, in 1980.

Gerahty was the elder brother of Leslie March Gerahty (1902-1981), a prolific character actor known to audiences as Garry Marsh.

Gerahty died at his home in Valbonne, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in the South of France, aged 83.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digby_G...

Reviews

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much in the style of Pearl Buck, The Small General has a Western author, Standish, providing an intimate look into the lives of Chinese farmers, merchants, bureaucrats, and even pirates. The title comes from the nickname given to the elder son of Sung of Sung's Island. Most of the story takes place from the time of the death of the Chinese Dowager Empress and the establishment of the Republic to the end of the 1920s. The final chapter forms sort of a coda in which the guns of the Japanese are heard in the distance as the 1937 Battle of Shanghai commences.

Standish published this book towards the end of World War II, in 1945. It's clear that he, as with most of the populations of the Allied Nations, felt sympathetic towards the Chinese cause. More than that, perhaps even optimistic. But then the events of 1949 were far in the future. And that last chapter of Standish's hoping and predicting for national unity and the triumph of a just government probably didn't seem so impossible. Hence the parable he incorporates of the woman who has her father, husband, and son eaten by a tiger but she herself refuses to move to another location. Why? Because she feels she has a government of justice underneath her feet where she resides. It is better to be eaten by a tiger than live under the tyranny of a corrupt and unjust government.

The balance of the book is given over to frequent examples of Japanese perfidy and how the looming colossal empire requires an open market to exploit and dump its "cheap goods" upon. For that is how the military machine will be built--off the profits of the commercial interests such as the House of the Three Bamboos. Note that Standish details the nature of Japanese mercantilism and empire building more thoroughly in his novel, The Three Bamboos, which traces the rise of the barons of Fureno to a position of industrial dominance. Here, the Furenos are more tangential to the story. Nevertheless, it's rewarding to have read his 1942 work, Three Bamboos, before The Small General.

I continue to enjoy Standish's work. He appears to be one of those writers who enjoyed some degree of popularity and a prolific output of novels but who is gradually becoming more and more forgotten. Gradually, I intend to track down most of them, almost all of which are not available as ebooks. We'll see if I have enough years left to get through them.