Books: Life & Death of a Battalion

FROM THE CITY, FROM THE PLOUGH (224 pp.)—Alexander Baron — Washburn ($2.75).

The 5th Battalion, Wessex Regiment, British Expeditionary Force, was assembled in England in January 1944 and destroyed in Normandy six months later. From the City, from the Plough is the chronicle of its infantrymen’s life & death. Published last year in Britain, the book was both a bestseller and a critical success. Some reviewers described it as the All Quiet of World War II; others were reminded of Journey’s End. Critic V. S. Pritchett, one of Britain’s best, called it simply “the only war book that has conveyed any sense of reality to me.” Published now in the U.S., it conveys, unabated, a sense of quiet reality more remarkable than any American World War II writer has yet achieved.

The Putative Medal. For the first half of the book, the story hops through the tense spring before Operation Overlord, landing with disarming casualness on its characters in their individual postures and predicaments:

Corporal Charlie Shuttleworth is grinding his teeth with anguish over his wife (“the cow!”) who “jacked me in for a civvy”; Major Maddison is exulting as his platoon-in-training comes crashing through a barbed-wire obstacle with blood running from their face scratches (and he furtively pins a putative medal to his chest in the secrecy of his room); Colonel Pothecary, a plain man, stumbles warmheartedly through his announcement of the invasion: “Well, my lads. This is it. At last. You know, I’m damned if I know what to say to you . . . Eat when you can, and keep your bowels open . . .”

In the first days of Overlord, the members of the sth crash ashore in France, and death begins its steady tithing. Corporal Shuttleworth dies with a snigger: “The cow, she’ll get my pension.” Major Maddison, leading a rash reconnaissance into disastrous ambush, is shot by one of his own infuriated men. Colonel Pothecary’s turn comes too. “[He] rose to his feet . . . ignoring the bullets that squealed around him . . . They saw him stoop, pick a white flower from a hedgerow and fasten it, without haste, in his lapel. Everywhere in the meadow men rose and moved forward with him.” And so the bridge is taken, and so the Colonel dies, and so the battalion comes to “The Hill,” a point beyond Caen, where the Germans had held long and stubbornly.

The Winkled Guns. When the hill is finally taken, and the battalion is reduced to less than a company, the brigadier in command says cheerily: “I’ve got a job for you . . . We want to get our armor on the move . . . but they’re held up until we can get infantry to winkle the guns out.” When the winkling is done, all that is left is “a pair of boots protruding from a roadside ditch; a body blackened and bent like a chicken burnt in a stove; a face pressed into the dirt; a hand reaching up out of a mass of brick and timbers . . .” and very little else of the sth Battalion. But the British tanks, “their commanders standing like conquerors in their open turrets,” rumble through, towards Germany.