Country of No Answers

THEY CAME TO CORDURA (213 pp.) --Glendon Swarthout--Random House ($3.50).

This is a study in the anatomy of courage. The specimens first dehydrated, then dissected by the author are U.S. cavalrymen of the 1916 punitive expedition against Pancho Villa. The setting is the arid hills of Chihuahua, and the enmity of the alien country itself becomes clear in the first sentences: "The land is carrion land ... A man wishes for a sound. It is a country of no answers."

The book's leading characters are, on the face of it, five heroes and one coward. Major Thomas Thorn--stocky, undistinguished, middle-aged--is the coward. Dur ing his first skirmish, he had crept trembling into a culvert. Partly in deference to his dead father, a crop-thwacking cavalryman, Thorn was not court-martialed. Instead, with thickly sabered irony, he was exiled from his outfit to become a writer of awards for the Medal of Honor. Without cynicism, Commanding General John J. Pershing (in an imaginary conversation) explained to Thorn the pressing need for medal winners: with U.S. entanglement in the World War looming, the public should have some heroes to idolize.

Disillusion at Dawn. At the novel's outset, the major--driven by a pitiable need to search for whatever goads some men to bravery--has got hold of one medal candidate. Thorn gets permission to escort him, and whomever else he finds worthy of the medal, back to the rear-area encampment at Cordura. Next day he watches his old regiment clatter through a last cavalry charge, and with judgment perhaps clouded by shame, picks the four most spectacular performers of the battle to receive the medal. With his five picked soldiers and a saddle-toughened woman prisoner of war, he begins the long ride to Cordura.

Disillusion sets in almost with the first broiling Mexican sunrise. Thorn's first hero, a boy browbeaten into memorizing the Old Testament by an evangelist father, says in shame and confusion that he outshot 30 Villistas because "the Lord took hold of me" (actually he hates his father and loathes religion). Another makes it apparent that he charged an almost impregnable position alone because he thought it would look good on his record. A foolish, dull-eyed boy vaulted a gate and opened it under hailing fire because he was too stupid to imagine being shot.

Across the Badlands. So, one after the other, the "heroes" are stripped, and their courage is put in question. Thorn writes out his citations without mention of motive. doggedly leads his surly band through the parched badlands. Food and water run short, a chance band of Villistas pins down the party with rifle fire, and Thorn, rather than risk one of his heroes, hands over their horses. The men call it cowardice. The plot becomes as thorny as a Chihuahua cactus until, with the last shreds of his officer's prestige. Thorn flogs the men and the woman toward Cordura. By the time the wanderers, addled by the sun and gut-racked by the alkaline water, reach the hideous end of their journey, Novelist Swarthout has sketched a powerful case against the military. Some of the characters, including the woman prisoner and a fugitive criminal, have a prefabricated, Hollywood patness. But Novelist Swarthout writes in a workmanlike style that only occasionally recalls the toothless tigers of the men's magazines. He explores a dark quadrant of the mind, and if he has not solved its paradoxes--coward's courage and hero's cowardice--it may be because, as he says of Chihuahua, it is a country of no answers.

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