The Way It Was
SMOLER, FREDRIC PAUL
The Way It Was Up Front By Bill Mauldin Norton. 240pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Fredric Paul Smoler Faculty. Sarah Lawrence; editor, "Audacity;" contributor, "American Heritage,"London...
...Contemporary comic strips, situation comedies and films (known as "service comedies") depicted an array of cartoon, and cartoonish, soldiers who tended to be mere shards of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik...
...I'm not so sure...
...Only in the wake of World War II did either society create peacetime conscription, and after a few decades both abolished it...
...he trails three equally dirty and exhausted German POWs, one with a wounded arm in a sling, another trying to keep his hands warm in his pockets...
...Mebbe I'll do a hitch in th' regulars...
...Whenever they manage to lay their hands on some alcohol they are in very good humor...
...The Army as such is not celebrated: "I wanna long rest after th' war," Willie tells Joe...
...In between, though, Willie and Joe saw the West through the blackest of times, making a mark on our historical memory that appeared indelible...
...cold, filthy, fatalistically horny ("Take off yer hat when ya mention sex here...
...Trying to cheer an Italian peasant crouching in a smashed hovel amid a shattered orchard, Joe urges Willie, "tell him to look on the bright side...
...It was at the dawn of the 19th century that mass conscript citizen armies made literal a ringing French Revolutionary slogan...
...Although the War is almost always onerous and sometimes very cruel, the cartoons are never antiwar in a politicized sense...
...I think we, their sons, knew very well we had done nothing so starkly needful, which meant that we could never know whether we were, in the fullest sense, men...
...Sergeant Bilko was a larcenous fraud, and Gomer Pyle was a moron...
...He's lookin' for a fight...
...Willie and Joe, the most famous cartoon soldiers of World War II, barely made it into the postwar mass culture...
...The one cartoon my father framed has the following caption: "Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners...
...He's talkin' in his sleep...
...But Willie and Joe arrived on the historical stage very late, and left it sooner than anyone believed they would...
...Everyone seems wet...
...Looking over the handsomely produced 50th anniversary facsimile edition of Up Front, issued to coincide with the commemorations of V-E Day, one surmises the reason was that Willie and Joe were not promising Cold War material...
...and dead on his feet...
...Great Britain and the United States held out against mass armies until World War I forced their adoption...
...Fifty years down the road we can see that Willie and Joe, once considered natural and eternal social types, are in fact shockingly rare: They are citizen soldiers...
...Willie and Joe always wear about 10 days worth of rough beard...
...But we learned what men were like, in part because Bill Mauldin had recorded them with unique knowledge, affection and respect...
...my students have very little consciousness of them...
...Beetle Bailey, a slight, scarcely potent juvenile figure, was feckless though not stupid...
...Higher Authority in Willie and Joe's Army was generally incarnated in either platoon or company level officers much like themselves, or in preening innocents on tourist jaunts from the rear...
...At the front the War is everybody's enemy, a point underscored with dark humor...
...The caption on a drawing that shows a squad trudging forward reads: "Maybe Joe needs a rest...
...1 thought everybody's dad seemed a bit like Mauldin's characters...
...In short, in some loose but unmistakable way they are profoundly masculine...
...Bone tired, except when startled by the sound of incoming artillery, they dismiss petty authoritarianism, noisy bluster and jingoism with a weary cynicism...
...contributor, "American Heritage,"London "Observer" AS A BOY, I was vaguely aware that Willie and Joe were the archetypal cartoon GIs of World War II...
...Oddly, the two most characteristically Western societies resisted a draft as long as possible...
...it is never suggested that the struggle is unnecessary...
...My childhood coincided with America's only peacetime conscript Army...
...Willie mildly observes of a bellicose, clean soldier striding about and sneering, "That can't be no combat man...
...It's a reverint subject...
...they were the "nation in arms...
...Their accents are demotic?gotta," "whutta," "jeez...
...This is Mauldin's military brotherhood: While war is a thing men must endure, only canting frauds glorify it...
...Sad Sack, dating from the War itself (in Yank magazine), conveyed mostly helpless, hapless vulnerability—Schweik without secret cunning...
...Above the bombast a ragged, whiskery, exhausted GI is stumbling through mud and what seems to be sleet, his rifle inverted over his shoulder, his eyes on the ground...
...Looking in my youth at battered snapshots from the '40s...
...But not until much later, when I came across my father's battered copy of the 1945 collection Up Front, did I actually see these characters created by infantryman and Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin...
...In a quiet way, however, Willie and Joe are quite determinedly warriors for the working day who would rather be anywhere else if they decently could be...
...They are pretty tough yet untheatrical about it...
...his trees are pruned, his ground is plowed up, an' his house is air-conditioned...
...Yet nowadays, teaching their grandchildren...
...The unheroic corporeal misery of combat is omnipresent in Up Front...
...Engaged in a labor that is usually unpleasant, fatiguing, lonely, boring, and sometimes deadly dangerous and frightening, they endure with voluble ritual complaint but never seem to doubt the importance of their task...
...This discovery is what has persuaded me that Willie and Joe's sons probably had a far clearer perception of them than was ever admitted to during all the Vietnam-era posturing...
Vol. 78 • March 1995 • No. 3
