Privates Can't Win

THE REVOLT OF GUNNER ASCH (311 pp.) -- Hans Hellmut Kirst -- LH-fle, Brown ($3.95).

Any army, to a soldier serving unwillingly, is apt to seem a carefully designed tyranny. Writers, especially, see military life as a kind of conspiracy to fracture their sensibilities. A lot of German soldierwriters seem no different from novelistsin-uniform anywhere when it comes to heaping scorn on barracks life. What is surprising in this book is not that the Wehrmacht produced a novelist who protests against the army, but that he makes his protest with a sardonic sense of humor.

German Author Hans Hellmut Kirst spent a decade in Hitler's army, and though he does not play his experiences for the routine laughs of No Time for Sergeants, he is able to marry his resentments to a sense of the ridiculous. Perhaps that is why his book has sold 1,200,000 copies in German and various translations.

The story is as old as reveille. In a prewar barracks town, Gunner Asch and his friend Vierbein run afoul of discipline and authority in an artillery battery. The trouble with Vierbein is that the mere sight of a corporal or a sergeant is enough to reduce him to terrified obedience. He is an unsoldierly-looking fellow with a built-in knack for getting into trouble (when he is detailed to beat carpets for the sergeant major's wife, she offers herself to him on a carpet just as her husband comes along). Inevitably, he is a butt for all the sadistic tricks that a bullying noncom can devise. He is brought to the brink of suicide.

His friend Asch suffers from no such fears of the military. A bright, thoughtful type with a gyroscopic sense of self-preservation, he hates the whole military setup but manages to land all the cozy details while creating the impression that he is a first-rate soldier. While Vierbein works himself to death without reward, Asch's brilliantly planned loafing brings him a recommendation for corporal.

Using the army regulations themselves, taking advantage of the machine's very unwieldiness, he sets out to make fools of the men who run his life. Through devices that any old soldier can only admire, he gets his noncoms and even his captain into so much regulation trouble that they earn the contempt of the battery commander. Gunner Asch wins his corporal's stripes and shows up the simple-mindedness of the goose-steppers. But by a superb irony, he is the final loser; through the simple expedient of throwing all the Asch-inspired reports into the waste basket, the commander restores discipline, and the battery reverts to glacierlike army routine.

Author Kirst's picture of barracks life is only mildly caricature: he knows that the everyday facts are so close to comedy that there is no need to invent the ludi crous. Above all--almost for the first time since Hitler's rise, when the shadow of horror fell on all writing by and about Germans--this book makes at least one group of Germans seem truly human and amusing. For whatever else they were, Gunner Asch suggests the Wehrmacht soldiers were also members in the brother hood of the gripe, card-carriers in the great privates' international.

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