Corporal's Inferno

THE CROSS OF IRON (456 pp.)--Willi Heinrich--Bobbs-Merrill ($4.50).

The war novelists are getting their second wind. In two months, half a dozen or so tales of combat action have seen print. The latest, a German entry titled The Cross of Iron, is the most savagely powerful portraiture of men at war on the eastern front since Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad. Possibly because they belonged to the winning side, U.S. writers tend to see war as a personality-developing experience in which a man can forge his own identity. As a loser, the German writer must salvage for his hero both identity and meaning from a lost cause pursued beyond any rational hope of victory. Thus, in The Cross of Iron, furious hand-to-hand fighting in bunkers, forests and streets forms part of a larger drama, a kind of existential tragedy of the absurdity of certain human situations.

A Cork for Svengali. The time is after Stalingrad; the place is the Black Sea area. The German situation is hopeless, and the task of Corporal Rolf Steiner's wounded platoon is near-suicidal. Its job is to stay behind as a rearguard while the rest of the battalion withdraws. In the fluid state of the front, this means only one thing, that the hapless platoon will soon be a cork abob in a sea of Russians. The platoon has small faith in its chances, but believes mesmerically in Corporal Steiner, who has assumed command from his wounded sergeant. Steiner is one of those incurably homeless men to whom gunpowder is oxygen, and war is a kind of inner peace. A maverick with a tongue like barbed wire, he is sloppy, insolent and broody, but a soldier's soldier when it counts, and a Svengali to his men.

Steiner's platoon is a batch of human putty. Among them are: trusty, pipe-smoking Schnurrbart, a born second-in-command; Dietz, a mamma's boy with the puppy-dog look; Dorn, an overage misclassified philosophy professor; Kern, a blowhard rookie; and Zoll, a pornography-minded tub of lard. "Anyone who gives out is going to be left behind," Steiner warns them. When their rations give out, Steiner tells them to eat tree bark, but he also shares the last of his own rations. When Dietz is critically wounded in a night skirmish, it is Steiner who holds the dying boy's hand to comfort him. Snaking their way back toward their own lines, the men capture an unarmed Russian women's mortar group. Zoll rapes one of the women. Steiner leaves him behind to be castrated and stomped to death by her avenging sisters in one of the more horrifying scenes in a book that is rarely short on horror.

One for a Decoy. Wearing the women's uniforms, Steiner and his men surprise four Russian front-line bunker crews, tommy-gun all of their sleepy-eyed occupants, except for one whom they use as a decoy in crossing over to their unbelieving buddies. Steiner is made a sergeant on the spot and gets a furlough, but all he and his men have really won is a brief reprieve, not a full pardon from death. The whole crumbling German front is itself a rearguard desperately parrying Russian advances and encirclements.

Out of the near-senseless attacks and counterattacks, Author Heinrich has his hero make two kinds of sense. One is the unspoken sense of togetherness in the brotherhood of suffering, or as Steiner tries to put it, "By himself a man is scrap iron." The other is that courage has a logic (or a lunacy) all its own: "To fight for a conviction does not require heroism. Heroism begins where the meaninglessness of the sacrifice remains the last, only message the dead can leave behind." You Mustn't Bawl. The simple footslogger passes this test best in The Cross of Iron. Novelist Heinrich's officers are petty martinets, Nazi careerists, or weary Wehrmacht regulars who have long since sent their consciences on permanent leave. Steiner tangles with one of them, his Fuehrer-minded C.O., and exposes him for the cowardly lump of jelly he is. In the meantime even the old soldiers die. Dorn and Kern are blasted to shapeless pulp by artillery shells. Schnurrbart is mistakenly murdered by a homosexual German officer settling a private score. It is a quiet day on the eastern front when a stray Russian shell catches Steiner. "Why are you bawling?" he asks the only old platoon member left to mourn him. "You're the last noncom. You mustn't bawl."

Willi Heinrich, 35, has written this first novel with the passionate intensity of a man plucking shell fragments out of his own memory. A corporal himself in a

German infantry division, he marched across 8,000 miles of Russian soil, was severely wounded five times, saw his division lose twelve times its original manpower. In The Cross of Iron, Heinrich does what a good war novelist should and few can. He makes the private inferno of his war roar all over again, but as if for the very first time and for all men.

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