Books: The Gargoyle Screamed

CASTLE KEEP by William Eastlake. 382 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

The castle stands deep within the Ardennes Forest, and in it dwells an aging nobleman who broods over his ancient lineage, his child-wife, and his priceless art collection. It is also occupied by the 314th Replacement Cadre, a foul-spoken band of American fighting boon-dogglers, including a cowboy, an Indian, a composer, a Negro intellectual, an art historian and an ex-preacher. The cadre is commanded by a sex-and-glory-hungry major. It is December 1944, the Germans are preparing to launch the Battle of the Bulge, and the castle bars the road to Bastogne.

At first the castle seems safe behind the lines, and the most warlike objective of the soldiers is to drink up the wine cellars and conquer the village whorehouse. The enlisted men fraternize with a stray German patrol. The nobleman, crafty and impotent, pursues his plan to get his wife impregnated by an American officer so that his thousand-year-old family will not die out. The fanatic Major Falconer refortifies medieval fortifications against a German tank attack that nobody else believes will come; the scholarly Captain Beckman buries the statuary and moves the paintings to the ancient dungeons to protect them.

Yet in the minds of all, the castle is the symbol and focus for uneasy atavistic dreams of combat. Then the big guns begin to sound. Out of the falling snow, through a village straight out of a Breughel painting, comes the American army in headlong retreat, and the misfits of the 314th find themselves the only organized defense short of the Meuse. Bumbling and burlesquing the role of soldiers, they fight. For what? A confused dream, a bit of bread, a friend, a stone wall, a laugh.

The strength of Author Eastlake’s design is in the massing of details and moments—bizarre, farcical, obscene, recondite, but always vividly pictured —into a whole that is truly tragic. There are drunk scenes that spin with laughter and nausea. There are battle scenes crackling with the unreality of sudden death. And at the end, the Germans scale the castle walls, while the gargoyles scream and drops of blood blossom like roses. Superbly and movingly, the men of the absurd 314th Replacement Cadre die. For what? Perhaps four hours’ stemming of the German onslaught.

Gothic mystery, savage modern satire, heroic epic—Castle Keep interweaves all three to create a surreal small masterpiece about the horrors and grim humors of war.