=George Weller: International Communism.= In 1949 George Weller’s _The Crack in the Column_ drew attention to one of the widespread areas in which the Comintern was trying to extend Russian domination. The scene is Greece. The novel reaches its climax when ELAS, the army of the Communist-dominated EAM popular front group, fights the British in the streets of Athens while the American army contains the Germans’ last great effort in the Ardennes. Shot down earlier on a mission, American bomber pilot Tommy McPhail decides not to be evacuated by the underground net of British Major Walker. He remains to engage in similar behind-the-lines work. Walker becomes McPhail’s tutor in global politics as well as espionage. His primary subject is the need for the United States to accept responsibility for creating international conditions favorable to the West, as he says Britain has done. Walker tells McPhail that the United States must learn to recognize Soviet strategy and combat it by such means as permanent American bases in the Middle East. Once again, the most explicit statement of the book’s message is saved for the end: You Americans just pay your way out of the positions of the last war, then [help] your way back into the same positions in the next. You forget that war is continuous and this everlasting series of visits to the strategic pawnshop a wasteful streak of postponement of the eventual showdown. Like many other novels which can be regarded accurately as political instruments, this one, with its accomplished delineation of a complex situation, tangled relationships, and deep cross-currents, contains no direct appeals to the reader. Neither does it have any scowling villains or radiant heroes. But the portrayal of the growing political maturity of the naïve American under the tutelage of the able but weary Englishman may perhaps achieve the same effect, and do it better.