Here, for the first time in print, is Thomas Merton’s only existing pre-monastic prose work, a novel written before he entered a Trappist monastery. One earlier novel, written at about the same time (1939-1941), was destroyed by the author but he had always felt that My Argument with the Gestapo still represented his views on peace and war and he wanted to see this book published. It had already been scheduled for 1969 publication before he met his untimely death on December 10th, 1968. The novel is the story of a young man, told in the first person, who returns to England from America in order to cover the war in Europe from a poet’s viewpoint. This visit did not in fact take place, but as the young Merton moves around in London at the height of the World War II blitz; spends nights in the London subway with hundreds who use the underground stations as a bomb shelter; visits an elderly foreign lady who may or may not be a spy; is interrogated by the Allies and by the Gestapo in France, he recalls his earlier days in Europe. In the description of his school and college days the reader will find scenes that later appeared in somewhat different forms in The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton’s first published prose work, his autobiography that became an international best seller when it was published in 1949. There is a dreamlike—or nightmarish—quality to the story, heightened by the use of a weird composite language, a mixture of English and several foreign tongues, in which the young narrator converses with the old lady and her entourage, and with his notes. Hence the novel’s sub-title, A Macaronic Journal . Here then is the youthful Merton, asserting his abhorrence for war, which he re-affirmed in his more mature works. It is a picture of the full horror of war and its degradation of human existence, frighteningly real and beyond control, as apt today as when it was written.