The War 10 Years After:
COWLEY, JOSEPH
The War 10 Years After The Deathmakers. By Glen Sire. Simon and Schuster. 280 pp. $3.95 Reviewed by Joseph Coivley Contributor, "Prairie Schooner," "New Story," "A.D." THE DEATHMAKERS is a...
...It is the Colonel who gives the book its title and who provides the turn of the screw that keeps the men moving and fighting...
...One of these is a Frenchwoman...
...Cynical, bitter, disillusioned, he feels he has nothing to live for...
...At the third corner of the triangle is the dedicated, bitter Nazi, Lieutenant Raeder, fighting the losing battle, who in the process puts Brandon's manhood to the test...
...But his is one memorable portrait among many...
...The familiar soldiers and setting, the military objective to be taken, the flashbacks to civilian life (though these are kept to a minimum), and the facing of death add up to a conventional though extremely well-told story...
...Like the Passion play, the combat novel has come to have the same cast of characters and the same story told over and over...
...The immediate objective is the town of Zenderhausen, where elements of the 11th Panzer Division and the 159th Infantry lie in wait, prepared to fight a desperate, rear-guard delaying action...
...Through Captain Brandon we get to know intimately what it means to fear death and how it feels to kill...
...We are the men who make war...
...The craftsmanship is excellent, the motivation good, the background comes into sharp focus and the characters live and breathe...
...This book obviously comes out of lived experience and it is the vivid recreation of reality...
...THE DEATHMAKERS is a superior war novel...
...But if we doubt it we are dead...
...It is to Norman Mailer's book that The Deathmakers has the closest affinity...
...His wife has been killed and his country crushed...
...While the story and the people, as types, are familiar to us, they are not cliche...
...who sleeps with the Colonel at night and rides in one of the lead tanks by day...
...We are death-makers," he says...
...It is regrettable that it was not published 10 or 12 years ago, when it would have seemed less of a period piece, or, that, at this late date, it could not project a fresher vision of war...
...Chico, who murders and rapes because it is, for him, the natural thing to do...
...Here is the cynical, amoral colonel who represents "the System...
...The major flaw in an otherwise fine novel is that one has the curious sensation of having been here before, of having lived through this particular experience, known these particular people, seen this terrain...
...The story is of Captain Brandon, an American leading the point of a General Patton armored tank column spearheading into Bavaria during the closing weeks of World War II...
...As such it deserves a thoughtful reading and a place among the better World War II novels...
...This is just the way it is...
...Here is all the stink and feel and fear—the ugly brutality—of war told in deft, sure prose...
...I didn't make the rules...
...A hard-boiled professional soldier who sees war as the natural extension of man's aggressive instincts, the Colonel has his soft spots...
...The lesser dramatis personae include the tough, sadistic sergeant for whom killing is fulfilment, the green Pfc, the camp follower (who is quite out of the ordinary), the proper Prussian general, the German civilians and the hundreds of faceless, scared young men who are just doing what they have to do...
...The story begins the day before the attack, when men and machines are bivouacked in a forest a few miles from Zenderhausen...
...Sick of both, his only desire is to stay alive during the next few weeks of spasmodic fighting and to get home...
...Yet he elects to remain on the point out of a sense of duty, though Colonel Mullahy gives him the chance to back out if he wants...
...The action scenes, the sweep of the tanks into the various towns, the fire-fighting, the scenes of brutality are exceptional, as is the characterization of the psychopathic BAR gunner...
...Here is the educated, introspective civilian soldier, Captain Brandon, through whose more-or-less normal eyes we view war's lunacy...
...He is determined to die a soldier's death, killing as many Americans as he can, particularly the captain who has broken his roadblock and who wounds him as he retreats...
...This is our dubious mission...
...A woman who has lost husband and children at the hands of the Germans, her one reason for living is to kill les Boches, and her overriding fanaticism provides one of the key climaxes...
...We meet the principal antagonist, German Lieutenant Raeder, on a roadblock before Zenderhausen on the first morning of the attack...
...If I seem to stress the characterization and the writing, it is because no summation does this fine first novel justice...
...One is also not likely to forget the young German girl who is raped, the German matron who has her own way of getting back at the Americans, nor the Oberscharfuhrer, the SS officer in charge of the truck-loads of Jewish prisoners...
...The modern pattern was set, most notably perhaps, by The Naked and the Dead, though other books— Into the Valley, From Here to Eternity, The Long March, The Young Lions and a host of lesser novels—have all contributed to it...
...Jeanne Barbier...
...Now, if you want to change the rules, you go talk to God about it...
...The two men thus become involved in a relationship that can end only in the death of one of them...
...Our creative effort is to kill, or be killed...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 21
