Foxhole Fiction

BEACH RED--Peter Bowman--Random House ($2.50).

In Beach Red Sergeant Peter Bowman has established a literary beachhead. His brief (122-page) book, December Book-of-the-Month Club co-choice,* is the first novel by a combat author to describe the seizure of a Pacific island from the Japanese. It is the first time that such an action has been narrated in a medium which looks like unrhymed verse but which Author Bowman stoutly insists is sprung prose./- Prose or verse, it is the best form in which to tell Author Bowman's story--the thoughts that pass through a soldier's head during one hour of battle.

The action begins on the transport when Captain MacDonald steps to the deck, looks at the luminous dial of his wrist watch and says:

"All right, men, twenty-five seconds to hell!"

"Twenty!" . . . Time was inducted into the Army. . . .

"Fifteen!" . . . Time was insured into perpetuity against its ultimate stoppage. . . .

"Ten!" . . . Time trained in accordance with War Department circular 187 which states that after any similarity it may have had to its past, present or future is rendered purely coincidental. . . .

"Five!" . . . So Time now expresses itself from midnight to midnight in groups of four digits ranging from 0001 to 2400. . . .

"Get set, men." The captain's arm drops. "0600. Let's go!"

Would there be armies if clocks had never been invented?

In landing on Beach Red (the Army's designation for the assault beach) Author Bowman makes almost as much noise as the Navy guns:

There is sickeningly green water beating itself in frothing desperation,

trying to escape the restraining ministrations of reef and sandbar,

and lurching in giddy drunkenness and vomiting on its clothes.

There is the rich, resonant cough of the Navy's guns,

as trim cruisers and destroyers clear their throats and spit,

streaming their shattering saliva into the turbulent cuspidor curving ahead.

There are carrier-based divebombers screeching like hordes of dishonored women,

bloodstreaking their ravishers with outraged claws of machine-gun strafing,

and biting with explosive teeth. . . .

Most of Beach Red describes the painful advance of a four-man reconaissance patrol toward the Japanese lines, their fear, their comradeship, their gallantry, their courage, and the thoughts that stream through the mind of the narrator (the only remaining member of the patrol) as he himself lies wounded:

. . . Oh, yes--he'd put up a war monument

all right. It would be a little plot of ground

in the middle of the main drag, fenced in by

barbed wire, and in the center of it there would

be a drainage ditch dug with a pole over it

and a crudely lettered sign saying 'Latrine.' And all the

Joes would come and urinate in it and empty their

bowels in it and throw garbage in it and fill

it with red liquid that looks like blood. And people

would watch it flowing like a public fountain and they

would smell it and they would be reminded of war.

In the traditional sense Beach Red is scarcely a novel at all. It is a prime cut of human suffering. But as an attempt to put in a fresh form an ageless experience (war), and as a clue to what soldiers think in battle and even what they are thinking in peace, it is as hot as a shell fragment and worth careful inspection.

*The other choice--Lovely Is the Lee, Robert Gibbings' foggy-dewy Baedeker of an Irish river (Dutton; $3).

/-Also in near-prose: competent Author MacKinlay Kantor's contrived verse-novel of the returned veteran, Glory for Me (Coward-McCann; $2.50), which was written to order for Hollywood's Sam Goldwyn--and reads like it.

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