For Whom the Bell Tolls, Inc.

THE END OF IT (285 pp.)--Mitchell Goodman--Horizon ($4.50).

Most war novels are not much deeper than foxholes. What gives this one its unusual quality is that Author Mitchell Goodman is at bottom concerned with men at peace rather than men at war. In exploring the nature of the war, he has produced an effective satire on the nature of the society that wages it.

Following the Fifth Army in 1944 from the winter standoff in the mountains south of Rome to the headlong drive through the hills of Tuscany, he stays clear of both the trench-foot and the snafu schools of war writing. He explains why things worked rather than why they did not. His target is the "armed corporation" that has crossed the ocean to send U.S. steel flying at the enemy, bringing shiploads of filing cabinets and efficiency experts whose battle cries are phrases like "production quota" and "good management."

These "soldier-industrialists" hold "sales conferences" and order subaltern flacks to tailor the corporate image. A photographer is told to do a general "from his good side only." From relatively safe distances, the symbolic big guns pump shells at the enemy. At the apex of this busy wedge of "middlemen," the "common laborers" at the front die in anonymous perplexity, to be replaced at once by other men whose dog tags were stamped at the same factory.

The novel deliberately omits the development of individual characters in favor of the character of the war itself. The hero is the unknown soldier, alive. Little is given but his name (Gilbert Freeman), rank (second lieutenant) and serial number. But when the 155-mm. guns of his artillery unit redden the night "with their long barrels sliding, howling, slashing the black air with smears of flame," the war he lives through becomes altogether real. And what saves Mitchell Goodman's war from being just a long grisly metaphor is that, despite its absence of individual identification, he successfully turns it into drama.

A self-conscious note on the dust jacket informs that Author Goodman saw Army service during the war "but all of it in the U.S.," suggesting that The End of It might be just another attempt to ring the bell of Adano with a ballpoint pen. But he has collected his material with all the thorough absorption of a Walter Lord assembling data on the voyage of the Titanic, and after a turgid beginning in which the book nearly founders in the rhetoric of Why and Wherefore, he writes closely and often superbly, offering on the side a fascinating lesson in tactical warfare.

The story reaches its horrifying climax when the hero, serving as a forward observer for his artillery unit, finally gets a chance to bring down the great hammer of the corporation behind him on the visible enemy. The ending, wherein Goodman twists the knife perhaps a bit too hard, deserves to be left unrecorded in a review except to say that the hero loses his mind and wins the Silver Star.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.