Man Under Pressure

LOOK DOWN IN MERCY (308 pp.)--Walter Baxter--Putnam ($3.50).

"Courage," Ernest Hemingway once said, "is grace under pressure." Look Down in Mercy is a tale of disgrace under pressure. In an uncommonly good first novel, Author Walter Baxter tells the story of an ordinary British captain and how his codes and courage crack wide open under the strain of retreat, ambush and torture in Burma in World War II.

Himself a company commander of a British outfit in the early Burma fighting, Author Baxter writes with authority and unblinking candor. His book is not for the squeamish. No one has brought back a truer, tougher fictional report on jungle warfare since Norman Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead. But the shocks in Look Down in Mercy are shocks of event minus droning obscenities. Novelist Baxter writes his story of the crackup of Captain Anthony Kent with what restraint he can.

Captain Kent begins dropping his ethical ballast well before he reaches combat. The first value to go is fidelity. Kent loves the wife he left in England and has told himself he will be faithful to her. But the night comes when, sodden with gin and boredom, he seduces a Eurasian girl, mistaking her gasps of pain for pleasure. Afterwards, he loathes himself and the girl.

Kent wants to be a good company commander, but when he is not panicky he is petty. Worse for him, capture and torture show him up as a coward. Kicked and loathsomely humiliated, Kent retches but refuses to reveal more than his name, rank and serial number. Then he is shown one of his enlisted men decapitated, and another strung up nude and bayoneted, "streamers of gut sticking to the bare legs." When the Japanese officer shouts, "You, now!" Kent blurts out everything he knows.

An air raid sends the Japs scurrying and allows Kent to save his skin. One man escapes with him, his young orderly, Anson. The two men make a long hike to safety, but one night, with shells and men screaming around him, Kent puts his arms around Anson. Before Captain Kent's war is over, he has sunk himself in a degrading attachment, killed a man who threatened to expose him, and made a fainthearted try at suicide.

Whether very much can be salvaged from the wreck of Captain Anthony Kent is problematical, but Author Baxter lets him live for a try. It is nearly the only mercy in Author Baxter's book.

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