["Pied Piper" is] shrewdly contrived and, I suppose, sort of sentimental, but a great many sentimental things happen in a war and somehow Mr. Shute gives not the slightest impression of forcing the pathetic note.

The narrative has to do with John Howard, a seventy-year-old Englishman who is peacefully fishing in a Jura mountain village as France begins to fall. On his homeward journey, through a series of circumstances too complicated to detail, he is compelled to attach to him six children of various nationalities and backgrounds, all of whom he must bring safely to England. The adventures on the way, horrible, whimsical, and touching, make a first-rate yarn. The children themselves are not too real … but the quietly heroic old Howard comes out quite in the round, and the subordinate figures, especially a French girl who had been the mistress of Howard's dead son, are clearly sketched...