Book Reviews

PEACE

Richard Bausch

Those who write best about war ask the reader many questions, but none more powerful than this most basic one: What would you have done?

Richard Bausch's much-lauded, 171-page novel asks this question by taking us back to Italy in 1944, as Allied soldiers fight a harsh winter campaign. A unit of American troops stops a farmer's donkey cart, full of wet straw, on an icy road. When they tip over the cart looking for weapons, an escaping German soldier and his woman fall out. The German shoots two of the men before being killed in turn by Robert Marson, the protagonist. When the woman attacks the men with her bare hands the Sergeant, Glick, casually places a rifle to her head and kills her.

From then on the novel deals with the moral conundrum that this murder forces on the other men. As they wade through more and more death, questions niggle at them: Was such an act necessary or defensible? Should it be denounced or expediently forgotten? Likewise, readers are forced back to the all-important question: What would we have done? This is a book of great power, though not without tenderness. Bausch has dedicated the book to his father, who 'served bravely in Africa, Sicily and Italy', so it is possible that there may be more to this small masterpiece than meets the eye. But Bausch isn't saying.

Atlantic Books, 12.99 pounds