Funeral March

A PASSIONATE PRODIGALITY by Guy Chapman, 281 pages, Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $5.

If you want to find the ol' battalion

I know where they are; I know where they are; I know where they are;

If you want to find the ol' battalion, I know where they are;

They're hangin' on the ol' barb' wire.

War changes all tunes. When Guy Chapman, a fledgling lawyer from the best of schools--Westminster and Oxford--marched off to war in 1915, his ragged battalion of London clerks, shopkeepers and dockers kept more or less in step to the bombastic brass of The British Grenadiers. Three years later, when, statistically, they were all dead, they marched better, but sang less nobly. Yet Chapman's battalion had earned the right to its cynical gallantry. In an introductory note to the reissue of his 1933 classic documentary of World War I, Chapman marks the score: "At the Armistice in November 1918, just under eight hundred [in the battalion] had been killed in action, including thirty-two officers, which is in fact almost exactly the combat strength of an infantry battalion. And of course, there were the wounded, not less than another fifteen hundred."

With exceptions such as Robert Graves (Goodbye to All That), Arnold Zweig (The Case of Sergeant Grischa), or Frederic Manning (Her Privates We), few survivors had the will or talent to write truly of the death of their generation, and with it the death of an old European society. It was left to the historians to assemble what they could from the records and statistics. At 76, Survivor Chapman is one of a dwindling group of 150 old comrades who share his memories. He is a historian (at the Universities of Leeds and Pittsburgh), but his academic work contains nothing so grim and memorable as this memoir of his battalion of the Royal Fusiliers.

World War I was notable for the testing of many inventions. Thermite came along, mustard gas and the flamethrower, but the prime change in warfare stemmed from the ability of modern industry to turn out an unlimited quantity of high explosives. What this meant in chilling human terms is the burden of Chapman's fine book. It is grave and sardonic, but not extravagantly so, about staff officers and others who contrived cushy jobs out of the war; it is pious toward the dead, and the living are sketched cleanly in a line or two, unforgettably and unsentimentally.

Chapman was briefly a staff officer, map-making in a safe chateau but, to his own mild surprise, he found that he was happier when he was back in the trenches. At the Armistice, he discovered that he had so completely identified himself with his battalion that he refused demobilization to spend a year with the Army of Occupation. The experience is so subtly conveyed that the reader is not surprised. Chapman's war is told without bitterness (though with an almighty disdain for the political bunglers and profiteers and civilian patriots who prolonged the agony), and this sets it apart from the more famous Goodbye of Graves or the tone of braggadocio-disguised-as-cynicism that taints Hemingway's Farewell to Arms.

The book survives as more than a memoir of a battalion; it stands as a funeral service for a generation, the somber record of all men who not only bore themselves well in the face of a great calamity, but found their lives enhanced by it. There is no rhetoric; Chapman puts out no flags, but guards the human honor of his battalion like a mourner concealing his grief from strangers at the graveside.

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