`The Tide of the War'

Before this week Richard Bausch was only the name of a fiction writer and protégé of William Maxwell whose work I had never read. A review by Ron Slate sent me to his new novel, Peace, about an American infantry squad following the Germans north as they withdraw from Italy in the winter of 1944. This is not an action story, though it begins with an abrupt, shocking scene of violence. No romanticizing or cut-rate philosophy is evident. This is a war story as Maxwell or Chekhov might have written one, though composed with idiomatic fluency and extreme compression, beginning with the first sentence:

“They went on anyway, putting one foot in front of the other, holding their carbines barrel down to keep the water out, trying, in their misery and confusion – and their exhaustion – to remain watchful.”

The deftly critical word is “anyway.” The narrative voice – and this remains true throughout the 90 pages of the 171-page novel I have read – is cool, measured and scrupulously observant of what happens and fails to happen, what is spoken and remains unsaid. On the third page, the squad comes upon a cart pulled by a donkey and two boys who run away. Sgt. Glick orders two of his men to overturn the cart and dump the straw, and out tumble a German officer and an Italian “whore.” The German shoots and kills two Americans before Cpl. Marson kills him. The woman screams and gestures at the soldiers and Glick shoots her in the forehead. Bausch picks it up from there:

“She fell back into the tall wet stalks of grass by the side of the road, so that only her lower legs and her feet showed. She went over backward; the legs came up and then dropped with a thud into the sudden silence. Marson, who was looking at the Kraut he shot, heard the fourth shot and turned to see this. And he saw the curve of her calves, the feet in a man’s boots where they jutted from the grass. For a few seconds, no one said anything. They all stood silent and did not look at one another, or at Glick, and the only sound was the rain.”

Such tight-lipped precision should not be confused with so-called “hard-boiled” prose, the doleful legacy of Hemingway and Hammett. Bausch’s words bear a moral heft disproportionate to their sometime elliptical brevity. Bausch’s young, burned-out infantrymen spend a lot of time not looking at one another, and brooding much while saying little. Here’s Slate:

“This story is told with startling subtlety. The characters are seemingly unexceptional, their thoughts and reactions predictable, their speech ordinary. Peace is a lesson taught by Bausch, a master novelist, about compression. By drawing a close circle around his materials, Bausch lets the reader feel both confined by circumstance and unmoored by the effects of the unrelenting cold, wetness, pain, boredom, abject fear, and spookiness of this almost otherworldly scene.”

There’s an unexpected intimacy, almost claustrophobia, in Bausch’s strict unity of time and place. The image of the dead woman’s legs frequently recurs, accompanied with Glick’s execution-like killing of the “whore.” The image recalls a passage in “Clothes,” a poem by Edgar Bowers included among the new works in Collected Poems. Here’s the relevant passage, in which Bowers, a young soldier stationed in Bavaria in 1946, sees the body of a woman, once a secretary for the Gestapo, has committed suicide with poison:

“Within the outer office, by the row
Of wooden chairs, one lying on its side,
On the discolored brown linoleum floor
Under a Gl blanket was the lost
Unmoving shape; uncovered, from a fold,
A dirty foot half out of a dirty shoe,
Once white, heel bent, the sole worn through, the skin
Bruised red and calloused, uncut toenails curved
And veined like an old ivory. No one spoke.”

A woman’s feet, I suppose, suggest a semi-public glimpse of sexuality, but feet are somehow the humblest part of our bodies, hinting at vulnerability and comic awkwardness, in life or death. Bowers was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit with the 101st Airborne Division, and was stationed at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. Bausch dedicates Peace “in loving memory” of his father, Robert Carl Bausch, “who served bravely in Africa, Sicily, and Italy.” Slate says his father “served in the Army Air Force as a B-17 ball-turret gunner, flying out of the airbase at Foggia, Italy, 50 miles northeast of Naples.” My father, too, served in the Army Air Corps, from 1942 to 1946, and was stationed in North Africa and France. Bausch writes in his excellent novel:

“You marched into the tide of the war and arrived nowhere.”