Books: Fading Embers

THE SILVER BACCHANAL (305 pp )Rene F৙ü;p-Miller—Atheneum ($4.50). Somewhere, some time, in southeastern Europe, the remnants of a beaten army shuffle into the city of Drohitz there to regroup before facing an unidentified enemy once more. These are the same weary, mud-stained troops who fought a hopeless battle for a useless hill in Allegorist F৙ü;p-Miller's The Night of Time, May 9, 1955); and to them Drohitz is something more than a well-fed peasant town. It is the focus of their tront-lme dreams, a city of dazzling peacetime riches, of sunny, soft-bodied girls strolling along the Corso. In entering Drohitz. exults Gravedigger...