War Is a Private Affair

KINGS GO FORTH (256 pp.)--Joe David Brown--Morrow ($3.50).

A suit of olive drab is popularly supposed to turn U.S. comrades in arms into brothers under the skin. That it frequently does nothing of the sort gives Novelist Joe David (Stars in My Crown) Brown the chance to mount a kind of two-front war novel in which the rasp of conflicting personalities can be heard above the whine of shells. The psychological combat in Kings Go Forth is sometimes emotionally blurred, though deeply felt, but the scenes of military combat flare across the pages as vividly as tracers stabbing the night sky.

Soon after their outfit gets a toe hold on the Italian boot, Paratrooper Lieut. Sam Loggins tabs his radioman T/5 Britt Harris as a grandstand soldier. Against Loggins' orders, the corporal guides some medics into an orchard mined by the retreating Germans and helps bring out ten dead and wounded G.I.s. The lieutenant breaks him to private on the spot. Days later, Loggins finds out just how phony the heroism was; Harris had already cased the mine locations on a previous apple-stealing foray.

Courage Is a Sometime Thing. Lieut. Loggins realizes, though, that wartime courage is a sometime thing, and as his outfit gets battle tired and combat weary, he begins to value Harris as a steady professional who gets on with the job in the face of paralyzing mud, disheartening casualties and raking German artillery fire. The two men even first-name each other in rankless camaraderie. Yet something about Harris always rankles in the back of Loggins' mind, something growing out of their backgrounds. Harris has an easy, aristocratic assurance bred on a large Southern cotton plantation; Loggins has the inbred insecurity of a boy reared in an orphanage and the tough-guy shell of an officer commissioned in the field.

Background becomes foreground when the two men share a recuperative leave on the French Riviera. Sam Loggins meets and falls in love with Monique, a raven-haired American beauty who has been brought up in France. With knowing French jokes and urbane, intellectual patter, Britt Harris parley-voodoos her under his spell and out of Sam's arms, and even proposes marriage. The whole affair takes a bizarre turn when Monique tells him that her father was a Negro. Britt rejects her in a drunken fury, Monique commits suicide, heartbroken Sam resolves to kill Britt. The last quarter of the novel has the flavor of a Hitchcock thriller as the two men, as cagily on guard against each other as against the Germans, go on a mission behind enemy lines. Sam gets his revenge, though not in the way he, or the reader, expects.

Raise the Dead. Himself a paratrooper and winner of a battlefield commission (and now a TIME correspondent in Britain), Novelist Brown paints combat in its primary colors of blood, mud and terror. He also etches telling vignettes of the lunatic grotesqueries of war, e.g., a paratroop major with 20 ft. of primer cord wrapped around him and 40 lbs. of explosives on him is hit in the chest by a tracer bullet as he stands ready to jump, and reels back into the plane with the primer cord smoldering, but a quick-witted sergeant kicks him out, and he explodes in mid-air like a giant firecracker.

The prose moves with machine-gun directness, yet maintains a subtle feeling about war as an affair of the private sensibility. Some novels fell the living; Kings Go Forth raises the dead to haunting life.

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