The Boys' Crusade

Our local library has several savvy librarians - and one happy consequence is that I frequently see books that interest me on one of the "Staff Selections" racks. In this way, I was attracted to The Boys' Crusade by Paul Fussell, an account of the very young men (as the title suggests, really boys) who fought in northwestern Europe during the late stages of World War Two. Having just finished the Orwell book, it also seemed interesting to hear another perspective on life on the front lines.

Well, Orwell's book was clear-eyed, but he saw little actual combat. Fussell's short book, though very well-written, and light on rare occasions, is largely grim:

Now, almost sixty years after the horror, there has been a return, especially in popular culture, to military romanticism, which, if not implying that war is really good for you, does suggest that it contains desirable elements - pride, companionship, and the consciousness of virtue enforced by deadly weapons. In this book I have occasionally tried to confront this view with realistic details. Some readers may think my accounts of close warfare unjustifiably pessimistic in implication, but attention to the universal ironic gap between battle plans and battle actualities will suggest the ubiquity of much of my joyless material. There is nothing in infantry warfare to raise the spirits at all, and anyone who imagines a military "victory" gratifying is mistaken.

As this quote indicates, Fussell is a masterful writer - among his other books are Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. All his talent is evident here, forcefully illustrating the horror of war. Not so much the carnage, though there are some vivid descriptions of that, but especially the utterly terrifying and hopeless situations into which so many of these boy recruits were thrust. Not a light read, but powerful and great.

At any rate, there was a distinct difference between American and German reactions to the desertion impulse, which any soldier must have felt occasionally. In the American army, the idea of soldiers running away was considered as not unlikely: thus the institution in infantry platoons of the guide sergeant in the rear, whose duty (never discussed) was to catch and dissuade youngsters reacting to a powerful impulse to run to the rear. In the German Army, such soldiers would be shot on sight. The difference is surely one of the things the war was about.