Sunday,
April 20, 2008
Book:"Peace"
by Richard Bausch: US Soldiers in
The
ANNOTICO Report
"Peace" is
a novel that tells the story of a company of American soldiers scrabbling up an
Italian mountainside in the closing days of World War II. The Germans
are retreating and Bausch's crew has been sent
on a thankless reconnaissance mission: to confirm the retreat without being killed.
Peace is just around the corner. To die now would be to die a pointless death.
What
"Peace" makes stunningly clear, though, is that - stripped of talk of
honor, duty and a clash of civilizations - death in war has no point, indeed,
no value.
A view of wartime suffering
By
John Freeman
April
19, 2008
Peace. By Richard Bausch. Knopf. 193 pages.
$19.95.
This riveting new
novel by Richard Bausch is a terrible but true reminder in a season of war.
It tells the
story of a company of American soldiers scrabbling up an Italian mountainside
in the closing days of World War II. The Germans are retreating, and Bausch's
crew has been sent on a thankless reconnaissance mission: to confirm the
retreat without being killed.
Peace is just
around the corner. To die now would be to die a pointless death.
What
"Peace" makes stunningly clear, though, is that - stripped of talk of
honor, duty and a clash of civilizations - death in war has no point, indeed,
no value. The book begins in the aftermath of one horrifically illustrative
event.
Nine soldiers
came upon a cart full of wet straw by the road that concealed an escaping
German and a woman. The German sprang from hiding and killed two Americans
before he was shot and killed by a corporal. When the woman began screaming, a
sergeant walked over and shot her in the head.
This death
overshadows every scene in "Peace," lending their mission a cursed
quality. The moment - the bullet they cannot hear - waits for them around every
corner, beneath every civilian cart. And perhaps no one would care, or even
report it?
Bausch uses this
tension to great advantage. It chisels his 24 chapters down to minute-by-minute
essentials, dialogue whispered and hissed across the eerily desolate hillside
as Bausch's seven soldiers, whom he brings vividly to life, creep toward an
enemy they cannot see and barely hear.
Bausch is best
known as a short story writer, and his skills at compressive drama are on full
display here. In a short time a reader comes to know these soldiers quite well:
Marson, the former baseball star turned infantry
captain; Joyner, the bigoted, paranoid, expletive-spewing teetotaler; Asch, a
young Jewish man who responds to the stress of constant vigilance by summoning
up bleak trivia.
In moments like
this, Bausch's perfectly balanced little novel opens up and becomes about much
more than whether or not seven young Americans will survive the night alive.
He uses such
rhetorical asides wisely, though, keeping the book's focus on the taut
particulars of a forest at night and the soldiers' rising paranoia that an
elderly Italian man they dragged from a cart and brought with them as a kind of
guide might actually spell their downfall.
These
interactions - coupled with flashbacks of a relationship the soldiers enjoyed
with a young Italian boy who brought them wine - conjures the vast, unspooling chaos of war.
All the rules of
normal conduct have been suspended. Generosity can be lethal; sleep will get
you killed. Through much of the novel Bausch's characters don't know exactly
where they're going. Once you start reading this tale it's very difficult to
put it down. Peace, it makes clear, is not complicated. Peace is when the
killing stops.
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