Books: The Fourth Horseman

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THE BLACK DEATH by Philip Ziegler. 31 9 pages. John Day. $6.95.

THE BLACK DEATH: 1347 by George Deaux. 229 pages. Weybright & Talley $7.50.

The horror was too great to catch and hold with words, but a Welsh poet named Jeuan Gethin set down some measure of it: "We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance . . . It is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob . . . " The phantom he described was bubonic plague, the Black Death that reached Sicily from the East in 1347 and within three years killed nearly half the population of Europe.

There were other steady-eyed observers who also described correctly the buboes, or underarm swellings, that told of death in five or six days, and the congested lungs of the even deadlier pneumonic form of the plague that killed within two or three days. Gethin's lament is remarkable because it makes the pain and terror vivid 600 years later. The authors of these two books on the Black Death mention the consistently abstract, numb quality of most contemporary chronicles.

Not that details are lacking; there are too many details, piled like bodies. The Rhone River was consecrated by Pope Clement VI so that corpses could be thrown into it; the living abandoned virtue in one town and sin in another; doctors and clergymen fled and hid at their country estates, or they stayed courageously with the dying and died themselves. Columns of flagellants, convinced by the Death that God had found them guilty, marched through German towns whipping themselves. Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells and were burned in their ghettos. But the emotions—then as now—can only touch and feel a single death, or the death of an entire family. At the death of half an Italian village, or half a continent, emotion withdraws, and the mind is left mumbling numbers.

Partly for this reason, neither of these new histories is satisfactory. Each uses the same contemporary accounts, though each author clearly senses their inadequacy. Deaux, a sometime novelist who now teaches English at Temple University, is useful only for the material borrowed from the past between quotation marks (including Petrarch's moving account of the death of his love, Laura, struck down by the plague). Author Zeigler a former British diplomat confronted with the numbness induced by the contemplation of too much death, simply dives into his papers and surfaces with another forty facts.