Authentic, Damning

SQUAD--James B. Wharton--Coward-McCann ($2).

"Christ, you can't tell no one how bad it is. ... How th' hell're you gonna tell anyone what a bullet sounds like, er a shell, an' what it's like to walk all night on a empty belly . . . ?"

Author Wharton does it by following the fortunes of that tightest of cliques, an infantry squad, on its way from the Pas de Calais to and through the front, 1918, early summer. Nor is the squad demolished, at fell swoop, but eroded piecemeal, beginning with the Texan who caught a stray bullet before he ever reached the front, and ending--after the armistice--with the callow corporal who was clearing debris that chanced to conceal fatal explosives. Of the other six, Allen, shellshocked, deserted to the rear. Serbian Marzuluk, Pennsylvania miner, flung himself madly into a hand-to-hand skirmish raving and cursing revenge "fer it all --de hikin'--de night work, an' de empty bellies. . . ." Whittaker, exhausted from trench overtime, finds a peaceful garden and a passionate girl only to be called away by the platoon whistle. Jewish Waglith of the Bronx shoe-store, heard a frantic hiss--"keep low, for Christ's sake keep low"--but too late. Novelli, "the Eye-talian" that "bin buddies for six monts now, an' he don't say a dozen words a mont'," got his on risky patrol duty, and still silent, stoical, clenched his perpetual cigaret as they littered him rear. O'Connors, Irish day-laborer, endured with cheerful garrulity until the day before the armistice.

Such was the individual toll, and the aggregate a nightmare of endless unnecessary tramping, digging in (literally) for the night, getting up and staggering on, listless, numbed, too tired to rebel. Squad is unusually graphic, authentic, damning.