Parable of War

THE LAST VALLEY (176 pp.)--J.B. Pick --Little, Brown ($3.50).

The starving man hunts desperately through the burning village. He finds "dead legs, dead stomachs, dead fingers, but no boots, food or rings"; other soldiers have scavenged before him. Then he comes upon a corpse marked by plague, and runs from the village in terror.

"For three days after this," the author relates, "his legs dragged along a body unable to break the habit of survival." At last, hardly conscious, he staggers through a mountain pass. What he sees convinces him that he has gone mad: a peaceful valley, ripening crops and an unburnt village. Seeing no people about, he breaks into a house, gorges himself and falls asleep. Later he awakens in alarm, but the habit of survival has reasserted itself too late. The village is full of soldiers, and he is trapped.

The shattered land of Author Pick's grim novel is Germany during the fall and winter of 1637-38. The Thirty Years' War, which began two decades before, has long since degenerated from a conflict of comprehensible religious and political issues into a series of dogfights among irregular bands of mercenaries. Troops move about the country without pattern, leaving one hamlet in flames as they stalk out to feed on the next. It is the captain of such a rogues' company before whom Vogel, the author's protagonist, is dragged. With nothing more at stake than a life grown intolerable, Vogel speaks glibly. Instead of looting and marching on, he suggests, why should not the soldiers quarter themselves in the isolated village for the winter? Surely there are no battles worth joining for troops whose only allegiance is to survival.

Oxen & Wolves. What follows might be out of place in a war novel. But Author Pick's book, the reader begins to see, is largely a philosophical parable of war and therefore, by the author's reckoning, of man's fate.

Having made his proposal, Vogel stands listening for the fall of his own head, but the captain agrees to the scheme. Vogel shores up his shaky position by offering to act as intermediary between the village peasants, who are hiding, and the soldiers. The peasants are oxen, the soldiers wolves; Author Pick obviously intends his hero's predicament to represent that of humanity caught in a world of mindless placidity and meaningless violence.

For a time the quiet valley offers the shelter of illusion. Then, fearful that another army will discover the refuge, the captain leads his troops out through the pass. He returns alone, mortally wounded and grimly amused at the irony of his end: the general he had intended to support has won, but in the confusion of fighting, the captain has thrown his company into battle with the loser. "Yes, I can see the joke of that," says Vogel, also wounded. "You might put it that one always does join the wrong army."

Incomprehensible World. As the two men lie dying, they agree that at last life has some meaning. Author Pick (Out of the Pit, The Lonely Aren't Alone) makes his moral clear--and, finally, unnecessarily explicit. Man, saysPick in effect, is a creature of turmoil who, if he is doomed outside the sheltered valleys, is stifled within them. The view, powerfully expressed in a well-written book, is that of an existentialist, a romanticist who believes that a free man is one who accepts the world as incomprehensible.

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