Agony at Arnhem

THE CAULDRON by Zeno. 278 pages. Stein & Day. $5.95.

Books by convicts always have a certain curiosity value, if not a literary one. But this first novel by a British prisoner serving a life sentence for murder rises above its origins. The publishers will say nothing about the author, who uses the pen name Zeno (borrowed from the founder of Stoic philosophy), except that at various times he was a sailor, a soldier, a farmer and a timber merchant. More to the point, he was a World War II parachutist with the British 1st Airborne Division, which was trapped and methodically riddled to pieces at the Battle of Arnhem.

Zeno tells the grim story of a single pathfinder platoon in that battle. Heartened at first because they encounter almost no enemy opposition when they land in their drop zone, the 50-odd men in the platoon soon discover that they are in fact hopelessly trapped. After a few days of unrelieved agony, death becomes relatively unimportant. What matters more is how it will come. Using prose as direct and brutal as a trench knife to the gut, and with utter fidelity to military fact, the author meticulously ticks off the manner in which each man dies. The Cauldron may not win a prize as high art, but as an unsparing and authentic eyewitness account of the sights and sounds and pains of war, it is a bitterly superb tale.

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