Believers & Infidels

THE CRUSADERS (642 pp.)--Sfefan Heym--Little, Brown ($3.50).

To avoid the possibility that The Crusaders might be passed over as "another story about the war"--a danger which constantly worries book publishers--Little, Brown & Co. printed a limited edition of 500 copies and sent them to the buyers for the leading bookstores throughout the U.S.

Their responses were enthusiastic beyond the call of duty. One called it: "Undoubtedly the biggest and best novel yet written about the American War in Europe." Added another: "No other war novel . . . (except the one and only War and Peace) has made so deep and moving an impression on me." Obviously it is a book that is going to be talked up.

The only trouble with such enthusiastic tributes is that they are too enthusiastic. The Crusaders is a good, readable novel, conscientious and sober, dealing principally with a group of officers in what is called Propaganda Intelligence. It is distinguished primarily for its level-headed and generally balanced view of a conflict that few writers have been able to write of with detachment. Stefan Heym is a 35-year-old refugee who fled from Hitler in 1933, edited an anti-Nazi newspaper in New York from 1937 to 1939, wrote a bestselling novel (Hostages), and came out of the war a lieutenant in the Army's Psychological Warfare Branch.

Racketeers. With all its many subplots and minor characters, The Crusaders is essentially the story of Lieut. David Yates, a professor of German in a small college in private life, of his conflict in his own ranks with a group of petty criminals, loud-mouthed incompetents, and scheming opportunists. Yates runs into a black-market operation conducted by a tough little crook named Pete Dondolo, working in the kitchens. He soon discovers that this operation also involves Yates's superior, Major Clarence Willoughby, master of the alibi and the runaround, with heavy jowls, small sharp eyes, and a determination to make his fortune, and a Captain Loomis, big, beefy, bluffing, a radio salesman at home.

These three men form a fraternal order of theft, a brotherhood of deception and evasion, something seldom specific enough to be attacked outright. They are apparently interested only in graft (as when Loomis collects a 10% tax on all the business in an occupied city he helps administer), but actually cause deaths through the necessary functioning of the racket. Over them all is General Farrish, a bold showman, with white, cropped hair, and a reputation for audacity gained through his rapid advance to command of an armored division. He is never a part of the black market; he simply finds its members congenial and closer to his ideal of what the tough, practical American soldier should be.

The opportunists are distinguished from the people who believe in the war as a crusade (like Lieut. Yates or his friend Sergeant Bing) not because they do not know what they are fighting for, but because they do not need to know. Author Heym follows them through the liberation of Paris (barricade scenes, snipers, girls giving themselves to the conquerors in hotel rooms and in jeeps); through the Battle of the Bulge (scenes of slaughter at the front, the shooting of American prisoners); to the liberation of the first concentration camp (emaciated prisoners, panic-stricken Nazis, the guards killed by the prisoners). He follows the same group, picking up a few camp-followers, through captured Neustadt, Sergeant Bing's home town (street fighting, the establishment of a civilian administration, the recapture of the town by the Nazis and the hanging of the American-appointed mayor); through the occupation of Kremmen (pop. 200,000), with Loomis and Willoughby falling into the clutches of a Marlene Dietrich-like vampire in whose arms they find bliss never known at home.

Idealists. The believers in Author Heym's crusade are a long way from Richard the Lion-Hearted. Yates is hesitant and unsure of himself, even when his suspicions of Willoughby and Loomis have been proved; Bing is youthful and selfconscious. It is almost a matter of blind luck that the guilty are at last found out, and that a kind of rough justice triumphs.

The Crusaders is a novel with a theme: that there was a tangible connection between the cost of the war and the uncertainty in American war aims. It is less a war novel, in the sense that The Naked and the Dead is one, than it is one of those old-fashioned cycloramas like the Battle of Gettysburg, in which every part of the action and the features of every officer were painted.

Author Heym's uncertainty with American idiom and American psychology is frequently apparent. His prose is surprisingly matter of fact and informal for an acquired language, but it is nevertheless flat and lacks any quality of suspense. Americans are not likely to think of themselves as having worked for "the great chemical trust." They are not likely to say to a girl in the morning: "The night was in your face." They would not characterize a Nazi: "[He] belonged to the strata of activists." The characters have a constant consciousness of position, prestige and appearances that Americans do not generally feel; the book often seems an expression of German psychology in terms of American vernacular.

The Crusaders is interesting for its scope, for the ambition that Author Heym reveals, for his boldness in attempting a major work, and for the odd foreign quality, sometimes engaging, of his observations. But The Crusaders would need much more to justify the praise that the booksellers have given it.

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