The Army Stereotype Again
Face of a Hero.
by Louis Falstein.
Harcourt, Brace. 312 pp. $3.00.
One day, the first sergeant came out to watch us on the drill field. We were green. Being green, we were mortally afraid of non-coms. Especially of top kicks. This one was tall, bony, with leathery face, bull-frog voice, and a large wad of tobacco working like a nervous tic in the middle of his cheek.
When it came to doing push-ups, many of us fell on our face. The sergeant stared at us with a succulent unbelief. “Jeez!” he said. “What in hell is the matter wi’ you young guys? It’s no trouble. I can do it. An’ I was forty-three yesterday.” Whereupon, all the men, two hundred and sixty men, sang “Happy Birthday to You.”
Happy birthday, dear sergeant,
Happy birthday to you.
This is something I remember every time I read a war book. It’s a side of army life which our writers won’t discuss.
Writers did not like the army. They knew they shouldn’t and they wouldn’t before they even entered it. In a sense, their books were written before they ever were experienced. The time spent in the service only added local color.
Their ideas of what would happen, though they were far from being accurate, did contain a core of truth. The army had a lot of evils. The writer put them in his book. But, because of his preconceptions, the writer also managed to see many ills that were not there. He put these in his novel too. Nor was he at all restricted to things which he thought he had seen. Any rumor or surmise, just as long as it was hostile, had in it the ring of fact. It went into his novel too. If, after all this, he still had a memory of something that was pleasant, he knew it was proper to delete it.
Of a thousand meals a year, surely one or two were edible. Of a thousand mess halls, surely one or two were adequate. But, since it is dogma that the army food was bad, no soldier in a war book ever is allowed to get a single decent cup of coffee.
Give the author a kleptomaniac, a dope fiend, or a rapist. Or give him the poor fellow who murdered the children in Düsseldorf. He will drench them with compassion. He will show they’re not to blame. They are products of heredity, of environment, of these awful times we live in. Give the writer a lieutenant. He will show you an obscenity without the ghost of a redeeming trait.
The GI’s, on the other hand, are the writer’s fellow victims. As such, they get his sympathy. But they also are a part of the writer’s army experience. As such—he views them with distaste. They’re the people: little people. In a way, they are fine. Certainly, as opposed to the officers. At the same time, he himself is a sensitive, intellectual, and idealistic liberal. And, compared to that, they have such narrow minds, small perspectives, mean horizons.
Put him in the heart of China. He’ll respect their local customs. Give him a tribe of Solomon Islanders. He will try to feel at home.
Give him sailors, loggers, riveters; give him a couple of truck drivers; a few Cape Cod fishermen. He will turn a double cart-wheel because they are so Rabelaisian. However, once these men put on an army uniform, their swearing, drinking, wenching, suddenly become the marks of a tawdry poverty of spirit.
In his scenes of combat, he will show you farmers tilling while the tanks lunge through the furrows. He will show you the civilians while the bombs fall over London. He will show you refugees caught between two hostile armies. Fire, blood, famine, fever—nothing has the strength to faze them. The people are indestructible.
Put these people in the army. They immediately lose their fiber. In a book like Louis Falstein’s, the majority of the soldiers are merely hysterical pushovers.
In his novel, he describes life in a bomber. Ben Isaacs, the narrator, is a fellow like the author. The members of the crew are the traditional samples of heterogeneous men coming from every section of the country. It begins with their first mission. It ends with Sergeant Isaacs after he completes his fiftieth. In between, his colleagues suffer a wide assortment of disasters, both physical and psychological.
The life in a heavy bomber was not any kind of joy ride. Falstein proves it. Over-proves it. He has one man blow his brains out. A second uses his parachute before he even reaches the target. A third one gets obsessive guilt. Something striking happens to every character.
I am sure these happened somewhere. He puts them in a single plane. It is like the Grand Guignol. Once you get the idea, you sit and wait for Tut’s curse to strike the next one.
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It’s the same, same old book. This is strange. For the writer, Louis Falstein, isn’t at all the usual writer.
He has neither gall nor guile. He is gentle and judicious. The sort of a scholarly fellow who engages in meditation as he fingers his machine gun while they zoom above Ploesti.
But, instead of writing the book that he might have written, he has taken as his model the clichès of his predecessors. We still get a sense of a fair and thoughtful man. But this merely serves to add a rather incongruous touch to the immoderate proceedings.
Though he follows the precedent of using the Jewish soldier as his chief victim-spokesman, one stereotype which Falstein forgoes is that of using anti-Semitism as the chief symbol and vehicle for the GI’s resentment at his fate. He does not close his eyes to it. But when he shows its presence, he does so without that querulous hypersensitivity which we find in so many war books. For this we can be grateful.
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