‘War’ offers true portrayal of soldier in battle
War novels come in several stripes: the tragicomic, the polemical, the cinematic.
But the most intriguing variety might be the hyper-realistic, the ones that try to render battle so precisely that the reader can only escape the horrors by shutting the covers.
That’s the category that “Articles of War,” a slim debut novel by Nick Arvin, falls into. Indeed, it redefines the type, so perfect is its sense of what a single soldier might feel as the shells come whizzing in – and what that soldier might do to escape.
The soldier is George Tilson, an Iowa boy sent to Omaha Beach in 1944. His bunkmates call him Heck, because that’s the strongest swear word he uses.
Heck is arriving in France long after D-Day, but that doesn’t mean that his assignment is any less risky. And it doesn’t mean that the Army is any better prepared to direct him:
“Each morning Heck reported for a roll call where some of the waiting replacements were pulled out by number and name, assigned to a unit, given orders, and sent toward the front on a deuce-and-a-half.
“The mechanisms of the army bureaucracy were beyond logical penetration and these processes had the air of a lottery of ill fortune. Some men were sent forward after only a day or two at Omaha while others had already loitered here for two or three weeks.
“Occasionally Heck was pulled into some task – KP, perhaps, or unloading rations and ammunition from a truck or landing craft – but until the lottery picked his number he largely existed in a military limbo, essentially without responsibility or practical direction.”
Of course, Heck’s limbo can’t last forever, and he is eventually plunged into hell in a brief skirmish through a nearby village. He is terrified, and the terror paralyzes him, with consequences that continue for weeks.
And that is where the novel turns and where Arvin stakes his ground. Would you or I react as Heck does? Could we summon courage, when needed?
Arvin offers plenty of evidence that Heck behaves as he must. He has wandered dazed through his previous life, unable to talk with his father, unable even to voice his anger. So he wanders through the war, too, dazed and passive.
In that, Heck is also following the advice given him by an English World War I veteran he meets holed up in the French countryside. The man seems full of vigor, yet he tells Heck to do as little as possible during the coming battles:
“The best thing to be done is to keep to yourself, stay away from the others, keep the stupidity to a minimum. Because the stupidity accumulates. One or two people are manageably stupid. A handful of people are, collectively, dumb as your average dog. A mob: stupid as an insect. Armies, nations: stupidest things on this earth.”
It’s in the second half of the book that Arvin shows he is a master of human psychology and the uses of irony. The battle scenes are claustrophobic and too accurate: You’ll be smelling cordite before the end and throwing yourself to the ground at every unexpected noise.
Heck’s platoon-mates are economically rendered, yet without the cliches that a lesser writer might succumb to.
I admire many things in this novel, but none more than Arvin’s refusal to shrink from the dark psychological torment that Heck must logically endure.
War is cruel in many ways, and Arvin has uncovered ones that make “Articles of War” a necessary addition to war literature and a book I won’t soon forget.