The Forgotten Hill

THE NIGHT OF TIME (338 pp.)--Rene Fueloep-Miller--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.75).

Adam Ember is a common soldier in a nameless army. Hill 317 is a hopeless position in a strategy never understood. The landscape flickers back and forth between realism and surrealism. The road along which the regiment marches "was not a marching straight into autumn . . . Under our marching boots the grass withered and faded." Through sucking mud and pathless rain, the soldiers march to Hill 317. They fight, joke, brawl, complain and die on the hill, forgotten by headquarters. Brooding over them is the gaunt figure of the Gravedigger Captain in his draggling coat, explaining to Adam Ember that he took the job because he wanted to be on the side of victory. "You don't imagine either we or the enemy are going to win a victory here, do you?" explains the captain coldly. "Death alone wins the victories."

The ordeals of the men on Hill 317 become the ordeals war imposes on any army or all armies, on any man or all men. When food runs low, hunger destroys human feelings, levels rank, reduces commander and commanded to animals. By unspoken agreement, the commandant steps aside, and the mess sergeant ("The Dipper") takes over, inexorably dividing the remaining slices of bread. Each day the survivors eagerly await Adam Ember's count of the newly fallen, for each death of a buddy means more bread for the living. When the men plead for provisions, the squawking field telephone informs them that "there is no Hill 317"--in headquarters files, that is. Adam Ember, half delirious with hunger, has a vision of a huge headquarters filled with urgent requests from desperate commanders, from the Assyrian and Punic wars through the Napoleonic and on to the wars of the future. "Here they all lay. pigeonholed and neglected, covered by the same fine, unearthly dust of eternity."

The Night of Time has an old-fashioned pacifist outrage about it that may sound strange in a world which has been forced to conclude that there are worse things than war. Rene Fueloep-Miller, 64, was born in a corner of Europe long and bloodily disputed between Hungary and Rumania, saw war when he fought with the Austrian army in World War I (he is now a U.S. citizen). Gifted and versatile (Rasputin, the Holy Devil, The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, Triumph Over Pain), he has now written a strange, heavily symbolic, sometimes embarrassingly earnest novel. The Night of Time is a kind of Kafkaesque parable. But Adam and the men of Hill 317 have a saving humanity and individuality that Kafka's sleepwalkers lack.

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