Last Coppers

PATROL (149 pp.) -- Fred Majdalany --Houghfon Mifflin ($2); Ballontine Books (35-c-).

In his career as an infantry officer, Major Tim Sheldon had poured "a gallon of living into a pint pot of time." Battle-beaten at 24, he felt like an old man. What Tim Sheldon was really looking forward to, when his North Africa sector quieted down one day, was two, maybe three successive nights of sleep. But Division HQ wanted to know whether the Germans had pulled out of White Farm. There was only one way to find out. Somebody had to cross no man's land and look.

British Novelist Fred Majdalany tells how Tim Sheldon took that walk at the head of a night patrol. Majdalany, himself a onetime infantry major in North Africa, knows about patrols and can recreate their tension. But much of the peculiar tension of Patrol comes from a peculiar thesis: "Courage is moral capital," and the more a man spends the less he has.

When the patrol begins, Sheldon doubts that he has more than a few coppers of capital left. Nonetheless, he prepares for his job like the technician he is, studying the terrain from an observation post, taking compass bearings, making map notations, and darkening his face and hands with cocoa paste.

The moonless night is"seven men wide"; it is so dark a man could be two yards from a crouching figure and not know it. Moving toward the enemy by compass, instinct and hope, the patrol covers 3 1/2 miles in 3 1/4 hours. With another mile to go, Sheldon is so obsessed with the task of getting there that he hardly thinks of what he must do when he arrives. The Germans take care of that. Spotting the patrol, they open up. The fire is that of a battalion; by serving as a target, Sheldon gets the information he is after. Scrambling back under enemy guns and at daybreak under enemy planes, Sheldon is wounded in the leg and dies after reaching his own lines.

The ending follows from Novelist Majdalany's thesis rather than from his story. Why did his hero die of a minor leg wound? "Tim Sheldon was--used up. Just used up."

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