Knights in Limbo

THE LAST SQUADRON (251 pp.) -Gerd Gaiser -Pantheon ($3.50).

This book makes Germany's losing war in the air seem like a poet-painter's vision of mankind in limbo. Only by literary license can The Last Squadron be called a novel. Using the pointillist method of French Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat, Author Gaiser puts his characters on paper like isolated dots, makes their destinies random and meaningless until the reader can draw back and view them against the broad canvas of total war. The last squadron, a fighter outfit, is stationed at Janneby West, somewhere on the Western front, and its only task is the increasingly hopeless one of stemming the Allied tide of bombers and fighters. Pampered "knights-of-the-air" with extra rations, flashy scarves and cock-of-the-walk manners, the pilots go up to drink the "black champagne" of death. Up in the "blue shell" of the sky with "the needles on the instrument panels as light as ghosts' tongues," the fighter pilots "hammer their woodpecker's tune, exact, refined and cruel," and they die. Civilians blunder into the nightmare at Janneby West like extras stumbling onstage at the wrong cue. A wife, summoned to her husband's funeral, finds it was all a mistake; after his plane plummeted to earth there was nothing left to bury. An aging father comes to visit his son only to find that he is missing on a long-overdue mission. As for the flyers, they are overwhelmed by no vision of their Fuehrer's "Gotterdaemmerung," just a nagging sense of failure ("They meant to defend a Thermopylae, but there was no Thermopylae to defend"). Himself a fighter pilot in World War II, Gerd Gaiser puts a peculiar mystique about Hitler in the mouth of one of his characters: "God has sent him to us and he has come to corrupt us. I understand that and yet I don't." More easily understandable are onetime Painter Gaiser's word pictures of a flyer's lonely communion with sun, sky and sea, which at their best might have been mixed on the palette of the late mystically minded poet of flight, Antoine de St. Exupery.

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