War have no such message of simple pacifism as we find in many books of the 1920s. There are still rebellions, but they are on a smaller scale and have limited objects of attack: racial prejudice among soldiers, the military caste system, and the self-centeredness of American women. Many of the novels especially those written after 1950, under the shadow of another world conflictare not rebellious at all; instead they are celebrations of squadroom comradeship, Navy traditions, or the fighting Marines.

The novelists write as if they were wholly immersed in the war and as if, instead of being an exterior event to describe, it had become an inner condition of their lives. Sergeant Holloway, one of the two principal characters in Point of Honor, goes into action with a battery of howitzers. As the guns fire, "Holloway eases into a kind of peace. Now he lives compact within the space of action. He can eye the present the way he saw a small snake eye a bird's nest once before the war." Many of the novels give us just such a narrow-focused, intent, and snake's-eye picture of the fighting. Even when they soar over the battlefront, the picture remains narrow. Lieutenant Evans, the other hero of the same novel, is an artillery observer in a Piper Cub who muses as the battle unrolls beneath him. "Had he thought once that the war had an issue? Anti-fascism, perhaps? Under aerial observation, war shed issues. War was Fact, Thing-in-Itself, Existence sheer beyond argument; it spoke from the Rapido and beyond. 'I AM THAT I AM,' it declared to you. 'I AM MY OWN JUSTIFICATION.' "

In general the new novelists do not presume to judge the war. They do not suggest that it was foolish in its aims or that, given the temper of the people, it might have been avoided by wiser statesmanship. They are not in revolt against the war itself so much as they are disappointed by the fruits of victory, and more than disappointed: some of them are heartbroken at the contrast between our aims and efforts on one hand and our achievements on the other; between soldiers dying in the jungle and soldiers drunk in Japanese houses of prostitution; between the delirious joy with which our men were greeted as they marched into a liberated city and the despair of the inhabitants when they learned that we could be to quote from John Horne Burns-"just as ruthless as Fascists with people who'd been pushed around already. That," he says, "was why my heart broke in Naples in August 1944."

Many of the novelists have begun to question the whole idea of progress through collective effort. It was the idea that dominated

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Their conservatism, or conservative liberalism, is also expressed in their literary technique. Here they offer a contrast with many novelists of the First War, who were always trying experiments and hoping to make discoveries on the order of Hemingway's method for describing battle scenes. Novelists of this later group are apparently more concerned with using and perfecting discoveries already made by their predecessors.

Many war novelists of the 1920s were deeply influenced by French literature and especially by the French Symbolist tradition. Speaking in the broadest terms, one can say that Flaubert was their model, either directly or else as his ideals were refracted through the work of James Joyce and others in the same line. Like Flaubert they wanted to achieve the qualities of precision, economy, and formal balance in hard, new books that shocked the middle classes-books in which, as Edmund Wilson said, "every word, every cadence, every detail, should perform a definite function in producing an intense effect." That was a European ideal, or so it seemed at the time, but the young writers also wanted to use American subject matter and a new literary idiom developed from American speech. They were determined to write truly what they really felt, as Hemingway said, "rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel." The result was that their novels, when they finally appeared, were so different from anything in the past that no French critic could recognize the source of their inspiration. They illustrated an old rule of comparative literature, that the same methods translated from one culture into another are likely to produce radically different results. They may even produce a literary renaissance, and that, in a modest way, was what happened during the 1920s.

In the novels of the Second War I can find very few signs that their authors have been reading French, German, or even English books. There is a touch of Joseph Conrad in The Gesture and a few other novels; a touch of Graham Greene in some of the stories

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about occupied Germany; a suggestion of Kipling's atmosphere in Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Although Kafka, Gide, and Sartre were the Continental authors in fashion during the 1940s, and although they influenced many novels about civilian life, they had no effect on the war novels I have been reading-unless there is a hint of Gide in The Gallery, and of that one can't be sure. American influences, on the other hand, are easy to recognize. They even form a sort of pattern that was evident as early as John Hersey's A Bell for Adano, published in 1944. One might say that a great many novels of the Second War are based on Dos Passos for structure, since they have collective heroes, in the Dos Passos fashion, and since he invented a series of structural devices for dealing with such heros in unified works of fiction. At the same time they are based on Scott Fitzgerald for mood, on Steinbeck for humor, and on Hemingway for action and dialogue.

From Here to Eternity was more directly influenced by Thomas Wolfe, and I have already remarked that The Naked and the Dead is written in the mood of James T. Farrell. Sometimes—though not in these two cases-the relation of a new writer with an older one is close enough to make the reader uncomfortable; for example, Mr. Roberts-the novel, not the play-is Steinbeck's Cannery Row towed out to sea. All Thy Conquests, by Alfred Hayes, and his later war novel, The Girl on the Via Flaminia, are convincing stories that would have been better still if the author hadn't adopted Hemingway's point of view along with his style, so that he seems to be looking at Rome through borrowed spectacles. In most of the books, however, the influence of older American novelists is a little less evident on the surface, though just as pervasive, and it suggests a conclusion about the two periods in fiction. During the 1920s writers were trying to create a new tradition in American literature because the older one had broken down or couldn't be accepted. Now, in the middle of the century, most American writers are trying to develop a tradition that already exists. Some of them, as we shall see, are entirely too faithful to the tradition as expounded by the newer critics.

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VII

Contemporary Military Novels 1945

World War II ended with a note of hope similar to that of the postwar period following World War I. However, we had learned some lessons and believed that the far greater havoc of the second war would bring a lasting peace. Three of the four totalitarian dictatorships had fallen. Hitler and Mussolini were dead and our peace policy chose to blame the Tojos of Japan, not the Emperor. Russia was considered to be an ally. The United Nations Organization came into formal existence in October 1945 and it was seemingly an improvement on the defunct League of Nations. The mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to make the United States the unchallenged great power, the only one with knowledge of nuclear weapons.

The United Nations met the first great challenge: the task of reconstruction and relief to prevent starvation, epidemics, and chaos. This was accomplished by UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). The repatriation of displaced persons was another tremendous task. These emergency measures were outstandingly successful. There were no epidemics and the European peoples were fed more or less adequately. Next came the long-term task of restoring the productive capacity of Europe by means of the Marshall Plan, launched in 1948. This plan was also successful, easing Europe through a difficult period.

Thus the climate of the late 1940's was harsher and more realistic than that of 1919. Of course, the United States followed its usual tradition of hasty demobilization and return to prosperity, politics, and other preoccupations. The Big Three (Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the U.S.A.) dominated the peacemaking conferences and their conflicting interests soon became apparent. The occupation of Germany; Russian desire to share in the occupation of Japan; the continued war in China between the Nationalists and

the Chinese Communists; the demands of the Asiatics for liquidation of the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese empires; the conflict between the Moslems and Hindus during the partition of India-all these incidents and events showed that we could not settle down to enjoy the fruits of victory. The formal parting of the ways between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. came over the issue of civil war in Greece, where the native Communists were receiving aid from Communist-dominated Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Britain, weakened by the war and the liquidation of her empire, announced that she could no longer assume responsibility for the continued defense of Greece. This put the matter up to the United States. Our reaction was prompt and decisive in the form of the Truman Doctrine, a policy of containing Communism throughout the world (March 1947).

Communist reaction was rapid, beginning with the blockade of Berlin by the Russians. It was thwarted by our successful but costly air lift (1948). The three western zones of occupation were merged, German reparations payments were ended, and in September 1949 the German Federal Republic (West Germany) came into existence. In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into effect, and various European economic communities (European Coal and Steel Community, Benelux, the Common Market, etc.) have grown up under its protecting aegis. Frustrated in Europe, Communism began to probe for soft spots elsewhere in Africa, Latin America, Asia.

Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government was finally evicted from the Chinese mainland in 1949 and set up a new government in Taiwan. The Chinese Communists presumably encouraged the Communist regime in North Korea to cross the 38th parallel and invade South Korea in June 1950. Once again, American reaction was prompt. With United Nations support, we moved occupation troops from Japan to bolster the Republic of Korea. The fighting ranged far and wide in Korea, from Pusan to the Yalu border, and the alternating fortunes of war eventually brought overt and massive Red Chinese intervention. Many excellent military novels deal with the Korean "police action," some of which we have listed for your convenience. We have selected James Michener's The Bridges at Toko-ri as representative of American reaction to the

war.

The French also had their difficulties in Southeast Asia, where a nativist revolutionary group, the Vietminh, opposed the continu