Soldiers Will Write

WE SHALL MARCH AGAIN (374 pp.)--Gerhard Kramer--Putnam ($3.75).

One of the occupational hazards of war, perhaps even greater than boredom, danger or fear, is the compulsion to write novels about it. Victors are apt to be spoilsports who decide that victory was less important than the fractures suffered by their fragile psyches (The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity). The losers wryly argue that they were pushed around in a brawl they never made (All Quiet on the Western Front). As two-time losers, Germans have become experts in the blues of defeat. The latest sample to reach the U.S. is Gerhard Kramer's first novel, We Shall March Again.

The book's U.S. publishers advertise it as having sold 70,000 copies in Germany, although the German publishers more modestly correct that figure to just under 10,000. Lawyer-Author Kramer, now the state's attorney of the city of Hamburg, who used to defend anti-Nazis in court when Hitler was riding high, was usually in trouble with the regime. As a translator in the German army he was busted from captain and shipped off to the Russian front as a machine gunner. Out of that experience he has written an awkward though well-intentioned book to illustrate what has by now become a cliche: that many a German soldier hated Hitler and the war but played it down the middle and did what he was told.

Hero Victor Velten, like Author Kramer a lawyer and translator, despises his Fuehrer, hates war. He loses a cushy occupation job in Paris and his officer's rank when he takes up with an old girl friend who is in the resistance. Shipped to the Russian front, he does nothing more dangerous than guard and kitchen duty, manages to escape handily when the great retreat gets under way. He becomes a chauffeur at headquarters, and he always manages to keep just out of reach of the Russians. At the end he joins a group that deliberately deserts and chooses the British as the most desirable captors.

Author Kramer thinks of Hero Velten as a culpable intellectual whose crime is to "take the line of least resistance." Poor Velten is really rather commonplace, but in him Kramer has fashioned a figure of unheroic reality, the moral goldbrick constantly leaning against war's back door. We Shall March Again reaches a telling climax as the spokes fall out of the German war machine. Fuzzy-cheeked youngsters try to hold positions that crack divisions could not defend, commanders cannot reach the Fuehrer because he is dillydallying at his own birthday party. But these vivid vignettes cannot quite redeem the novel's major flaw--that its men whine louder than its bullets.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.