Small War Remembered

MEMOIR OF THE BOBOTES (154 pp.)--Joyce Gary--University of Texas Press ($3.50).

It was only a little war, but in 1912 a young Anglo-Irishman named Joyce Gary was afraid that it might be the last, for the world was getting too civilized for war, or so it seemed. Only a few months out of Oxford, and hungry for adventure, he set off with a British Red Cross unit for the Balkans, where Turks and Montenegrins were doing their best to exterminate each other. It would be 30 years and several distinctly uncivilized wars later before Gary began to produce that superb string of novels (Mister Johnson, The Horse's Mouth) in which lust for life all but swamps even the prospect of death.

Memoir of the Bobotes* was found among Gary's papers after he died in 1957. It is an unfinished and unpretentious book, but rich with observed truth about war and men, totally unconcerned with calculated effects. It reads, in fact, like the author's reminder to himself that he was there.

Old Men Go First. Almost half a century later, the war Gary saw seems primitive. It was fought over a stunning mountainous terrain, so arid and devoid of shelter that the troops were almost constantly exposed. Cannon and shells were hauled by hand to summits where only the native goats were at home, and since the Montenegrin army had no stretcher bearers, the casualties often simply crawled off to die. The troops were spectacularly brave, attacking with gusto at point-blank range and accepting decimation with stoicism bordering on indifference. Before one attack, volunteers rushed forward to blow the Turkish wire with bombs. Gary saw them advance, old men who had volunteered because they felt that it did not matter if they were killed. Half of them were, but the survivors threw their caps up in the air to signal that the wire was broken.

Later, Gary noticed that leaves were fluttering from the trees, realized that bullets were cutting them down. "We might have run--but it is not etiquette to run, and very little good." Often the target of snipers, he created a truism about them: "The sniper waits for the failure of the imagination and shoots you because you have forgotten that you must believe in him."

Old Soldiers Understand. The Montenegrins finally won, and Gary witnessed the surrender. Piece by piece the siege artillery was handed over by a crying Turkish officer who bent down and kissed each gun. The hardy mountaineers set about picking up their lives, and Gary set out for home. In his notes, he has almost nothing to say about the cause or cure of war; he neither reviles nor glories in it. Already the future novelist was simply recording human experience, usually with a painter's touch that gives the Memoir its most notable quality. Gary's own drawings illustrate and complement a text that owes as much to the eye as to the mind.

The book is best when it describes the waits between action, the stolid troops, the squalor of encampments, the casualness with which a field kitchen is constructed from gravestones, the pulpit of a mosque broken up for firewood, the everlasting search for provisions and the solid enjoyment that comes from the windfall that is a well-cooked meal. Old campaigners will appreciate Gary's admiring definition of an old soldier, later echoed by Bernard Shaw in Arms and the Man: "A man who always has something eatable in his haversack and drinkable in his bottle, a reserve of tobacco and matches, a warm hole to sleep in."

*The Bobotes were Montenegrin villagers from a tiny settlement near the southwestern shore of Lake Scutari (now in Albania).

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