The last part of the book, which he describes as a "Dialogue with Death," is devoted to his own experiences when captured by the rebels, He was sentenced to death and kept in a state of anxiety from February 9 until May 12, 1937. The story he tells of the repeated nightly executions, of men being summoned, unwarned, from their cells to face a firing squad, of others beaten and ill-treated until they were reduced almost to an animal state, and of the poor wretch who was so men-handled that he sat for hours in h cell with a broken jaw, unable even to smoke a cigarette, and his own thoughts as he communed with death, which seemed a to be hanging over him, forms a document of enormous psychologies! and literary interest, It is one which deserves to be read, and if Mr.
Koestler does lay himself open to the charge that his book is written ithout that political independence which neutral readers would like to see, he has the excuse not only of the suffering he saw, but of that he himself endured.—R.T.P-c.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.