Patriotic gore

In Paul Fussell's newest World War II chronicle, the GIs who defeated the Nazis fought an ugly, dirty, bloody war that brutalized them all and ennobled no one. That doesn't mean it was pointless.

By Charles Taylor

Sep 22, 2003 | Paul Fussell can't keep himself out of trouble. He doesn't exactly seek it out, in the manner of a provocateur who's looking to start a fight. Fussell finds trouble because he has no tolerance for cant, sentimentality, euphemism or waffling. As a critic, he has lived by two maxims. One is George Orwell's description of the critic's job as "a power of facing unpleasant facts." The other is an advertising slogan he once glimpsed on the side of a New York bus: "In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher's is the great experience."

Fussell has long insisted that for the critic and the historian the importance of experience, "sheer, vulgar experience," as he calls it, trumps received ideas of propriety, niceness and comfort. Working as both a critic and a historian, Fussell has long relied on the testimony left behind by memoirs, journals and letters, history written by those present at the events they are recording. Valuing ambiguity and contradiction over judgment, he sets out to demonstrate Virginia Woolf's observation that nothing is one thing.

More than anything else, Fussell's view has been shaped by his combat experience during World War II. War has been his recurring theme in "The Great War and Modern Memory" and "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War" (one of the books I return to most often and a model for the book that, 30 or 40 years from now, needs to be written about this moment in American culture); in a number of essays, the best of them being "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" (the title alone proclaims its willingness to upset accepted notions of civility on a subject about which civility is not possible); in his editing of "The Norton Book of Modern War"; in the introductions he has provided to war memoirs like E.B. Sledge's "With the Old Breed" and Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That."

He has returned to World War II in a new book from the Modern Library Chronicles series, "The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945," his recounting of the experiences of the largely teenage conscript American infantry during the awful land battles of the final year of the war.

A faithful reader of Fussell might wonder what he has left to say about that war. Publisher's Weekly has already proclaimed the book "slight," which shows only that its critic was unable to distinguish between size and scope. At just 169 pages of text (plus a bibliography, index and suggestions for future reading), "The Boys' Crusade" moves in short chapters from topic to topic. But those brief chapters, relying as is customary for Fussell on memoir and eyewitness testimony, add up to a sustained and bitterly contrarian view of the experience of combat for America's teenage soldiers during World War II.

Nothing better justifies Fussell's approach than the irony that this view, while markedly at odds with the official version of the American can-do spirit as exemplified in World War II, is the one shared by the men who experienced the war. Perhaps not the ones who, stationed at a division headquarters, were miles behind the front lines, but the ones who actually engaged in combat. With the generation of World War II veterans approaching 80 and older, Fussell has decided once again to speak for the dwindling numbers of the living, as well as those who never came home at all.

To understand why "The Boys' Crusade" goes off in your mind as a series of explosions, you have to take into account not just what Fussell is saying here but the fact that he's saying it now. We are less than 10 years from the nostalgia that accompanied the 50th anniversary of D-Day, still in the glow of "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Greatest Generation." Of the Spielberg movie, Fussell recommends the "retention of and familiarity with the first few minutes ... depicting the landing horrors" while consigning the rest to "the purgatory where boys' bad adventure films end up." You can assume that what he's objecting to is that a film with the guts to reduce the actual fighting of "the good war" (those ironic quotation marks added to the phrase by Studs Terkel in his book of the same name) to brutality, sadism and unrelenting horror winds up embracing the clichés of duty and honor and sacrifice that Spielberg's opening sequence bloodies.

In addition, we are still in the post-Sept. 11 revival of patriotism, which has entailed much that is moving as well as much that is false and meretricious. It's not hard to imagine that, for Fussell, the most objectionable thing is the reliance on euphemism and distance from experience by which a necessary undertaking is transmuted into a noble cause.

Fussell is perhaps the truest antiwar writer we have. Not in the pacifist way in which that description is almost always used. Fussell is antiwar because he has seen war, because he knows that no matter how justified it is and no matter how honorable the ends, the means are always brutalizing, traumatizing, always a waste, always a mockery of every decent human impulse. In "Wartime," he quotes an American private who fought at Anzio as saying, "Whatever we were fighting for seemed irrelevant," and another saying, "It took me darn near a whole war to figure what I was fighting for. It was the other guys. Your outfit, the guys in your company, but especially your platoon."

Fussell's critics have been quick to misread that view. Some of the reviews of "Wartime," notably Simon Schama's moronic piece in the New York Times Book Review, picked up on these sentences from the book: "It was a war and nothing else, and thus stupid and sadistic ... It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning." According to Schama and others, that meant that there was no difference between the Allies and the Axis, that fighting the war was pointless.

Next Page: Did the Greatest Generation include "plenty of criminals, psychopaths, cowards and dolts"?

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