The Enemy's Women

THE WINE OF ETNA (255 pp.)--Alexander Baron--Ives Washburn ($2.75).

American G.I.s were not the only ones to liberate Italy; the British were there too. In his second novel, Briton Alexander Baron (From the City, from the Plough) retells in fresh detail one of World War II fiction's most popular stories: what happens when invading Allied soldiers wash off the grime of battle and go out to meet the enemy's women.

Novelist Baron's soldiers belonged to a company of battle-worn British infantrymen who had fought their way across the Sicilian plain in the summer of 1943 and reached the seaport town of Catania, in the shadow of Mt. Etna. There they commandeered a tenement building and settled down to rest.

The signorine looked good to the infantrymen, and the infantrymen looked good to the signorine. "Men!" cried one lusty widow as she "smoothed the dress down over her body and stepped out of her house onto the pavement." In their own way, the British were equally enthusiastic : "This ol' street may niff a bit, but it don't smell as bad as . . . those unburied dead rottin' out there in the sun . . . Some of these judies aren't bad lookers." Before the week was out, many of the company had made themselves right at home. They dandled bambini on their knees, staged feasts with their rations and forgot the war for a while.

For The Wine of Etna's hero, hulking, hamhanded Sergeant Craddock, the order to move back into battle was heartbreaking. With war-widowed Graziella, he had discovered a passion which his own wife back in England had denied him. But Graziella got nowhere when she pleaded with him to desert and stay with her. Sergeant Craddock loved honor more. Said he: "I am a soldier. You have known that all the time."

Flecked with bright, buoyant writing, The Wine of Etna remembers Catania's brief occupation by front-line infantrymen as an idyllic pause in the bloody Italian campaign. Author Baron's fast-focusing snapshot technique discovers little depth or complication in his Tommies and Italians, but he manages admirably to capture the highlights of their brief encounter.

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