Two Views of War

THE WARRIORS (242 pp.)--A Glenn Gray--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

WAR Is A PRIVATE AFFAIR (192 pp.) --Edmund G. Love--Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

There is no evidence that 2nd Lieut. Glenn Gray and Major Edmund Love ever met during World War II. Gray, now philosophy professor at Colorado College, served as a counterintelligence operative in the European theater, while Love, now a professional writer (Subways Are for Sleeping), served in the Pacific as an Army historian. But if they had met, the conversation might have gone something like this:

Lieut. Gray: The bare, cold, prophetic words of Auden--"We must love one another or die"--have rung in my mind on several of these frigid, sleepless nights of late.

Major Love: Oh yeah?

The accounts of these very different men's wartime experiences make for vastly different books. Yet both in a sense try to answer the combat soldier's battlefield question: "What am I doing here?"

Delight in Destruction. To Author Gray, war is at once an ecstasy and an agony, and he examines both with a philosopher's brooding eye. War, he believes, has enduring appeals: "Some scenes of battle, much like storms over the ocean or sunsets on the desert or the night sky seen through a telescope, are able to overawe the single individual and hold him in a spell." There is also the "communal joy" of comradeship and, sometimes, the delight in destruction: "Men who have lived in the zone of combat long enough to be veterans are sometimes possessed by a fury that makes them capable of anything . . . They storm against the enemy until they are either victorious, dead, or utterly exhausted."

The Warriors is marred by the feeling that Philosopher Gray was more an observer than a participant. Though he writes of his own fears in combat, there is a curious parchment quality, underlined by a self-conscious literary style ("The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm"). Still, there are brilliant flashes: the appealing face of a young German deserter, smiling in death after being cut down from a tree where the SS had hanged him; the bewilderment and misery of French girls who had "collaborated" simply because they had fallen in love.

Riddle of Cruelty. If war was agony to Gray, it was often a lark to Army Historian Love. War Is a Private Affair would make light reading for a bus ride to an induction center. Yet Love, like Gray, has a serious theory about men at war: "A man may deliver his body to the authorities, but he still maintains a will and a life of his own. In most cases he fits his private interest into the world in which he finds himself, but he does not give it up." To prove his point, Love tells ten stories of enlisted yardbirds and commissioned oddballs.

Among these was Private Stephen Prosniak, a kleptomaniac who was suffered by his comrades only on the promise that he would give back on Saturday everything he had stolen during the week. Prosniak became a bona fide hero, killing dozens of Japanese--so he could collect souvenirs from their bodies. Then there was Lieut. Peter Claver Kenton, a delightful dipsomaniac with a habit of absenting himself from duty to work part time as a bowling-alley pin boy and as a desk clerk in a whorehouse.

If he were writing more seriously, Author Love might well include a soldier who certainly led his own life, constantly asking his comrades how they felt about death, marveling at the spectacle of war, wondering at man's urge to destroy. That man would have been Lieut. Glenn Gray, writing to a friend on the riddle of cruelty: "Joy and beauty have many different faces, but brutality and hatred have but few. I have come to the extremity of knowing beyond all doubt that there is no other way for me to survive this period except the hard Christian way of finding the finer points in my associates and loving th.jm for those characteristics."

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