The Way It Really Was

BRAVE COMPANY (246 pp.)--Guthrie Wilson--Putnam ($3).

"To my right a line of blasted trees linked our area with the enemy. I knew each tree intimately, like old and hated enemies. The first, two feet of thick stump only; the next, twisted like a witch's nightmare; the third, a slender sliver in the half-light; the fourth, broad and black like soot. . . And there, against the soot, I saw him move.

"Something white that moved.

"My lids raised, the pain of my eyes forgotten, immobile and scarcely breathing, my head bent forward till my eyes were scarcely above the lip of my trench, I watched him. This was no error, no trick of the night. This was a Hun--a living and spawning Hun, in snow suit and hood, crawling on his belly toward us."

No World War II infantryman who fought Germans in the snow will stop at this early point in Brave Company, a first novel by New Zealander Guthrie Wilson. Of all the books about the war so far written, it gives the truest picture of infantry fighting and living, has the clearest, least arty grasp of the fighting man's whole response to his smashing experience.

Imminence of Death. Brave Company is the story of a New Zealand infantry outfit on the Italian mountain front. Mostly it is about a single platoon, and it concentrates on a single squad. It is written by a New Zealand schoolteacher who fought in the infantry for three years, was wounded and commissioned on the battlefield. He writes about his bruised, battle-numbed foot soldiers with enormous compassion and an understanding that shades into love.

Wilson's book is called a novel, but it hardly matters that it is really a tribute and a reminiscence, wholly lacking in the artfulness of true fiction. There is no plot, just as infantry fighting has no plot. There is no special hero; Narrator Considine is just a member of one squad who Jived to tell the story. But there is tension, excitement and the imminence of death that needs no assist from tricks of fiction. The result is a blend as true as Bill Mauldin's best drawings and Ernie Pyle's best dispatches.

Luxury of Floors. The company fights, constantly loses men whom their comrades hardly have time to mourn. Once in a while, they are sent back for a rest where a dry floor in a shattered building is a treasured luxury and each fighting robot becomes briefly an individual with opinions. Wilson's dialogue is good and true, peppered with obscenities that do not offend because they are used with a naturalness free of novelist's guile.

But there is always another attack, and finally there is the one that every seasoned combat unit has at some time, or many times, experienced, the one where the odds are too great. Brave Company ends with such an attack, and Wilson's description of it can stand as a document. Writers of realistic war novels, most of whose realism is the product of imagination, can find out what is missing from their books by reading Brave Company.

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