Book Review : Fighting, Loathing, Loving at the Front

No Man’s Land by Reginald Hill (St. Martin’s Press: $17.95)

After Reginald Hill reminds us that the British army suffered 54,540 casualties on the first day of the Allied Somme offensive in July, 1916, a grand total of 420,000 by November of that year, all for a strip of wasteland less than six miles wide, every incident in this melodramatic novel acquires instant plausibility.

Long haunted by the certain knowledge that 60 British soldiers were condemned to death for desertion during each month of the war, and that 24 were executed, Hill hypothesizes the desperate underworld existence of the men who somehow eluded capture; the deserters who survived in the ghastly corridor known romantically as “No Man’s Land”; more precisely as “The Desolation.”

Just such a band of men were rumored to have hidden for the duration of World War I, concealed in the abandoned trenches of the battlefield; foraging, stealing, eventually disguising themselves as French peasants. Hill has turned that legend into grim actuality, constructing a hierarchy of command headed by the blustering, tormented renegade Viney, absolute ruler of an outlaw force composed of the sometime clerks, yeomen idealists, artisans, and ne’er-do-wells conscripted into the ranks of the British army.

Hermetic World

As the story begins, this hermetic world is enlarged by an unlikely duo--Lothar Von Seeberg, an aristocratic German noncommissioned officer, and the 17-year-old English farmer Josh Routledge, whom Von Seeberg found dazed in a field some distance from the British compound.

Routledge had followed his idolized older brother Wilf into the army and witnessed Wilf’s execution for refusing to obey the order of a superior, an order certain to have been fatal. More traumatic than any of the horrors of the war itself, this incident has shocked Josh into near-catatonic silence. For various complex reasons, Von Seeberg has also “given up the war,” and when he encounters the stunned English boy, Von Seeberg throws away his Mauser, thrusts a British rifle into Josh’s hands, and poses as a prisoner of war. Wandering through the Desolation in that guise, the two tumble down the rough stairs leading to Viney’s underground hide-out.

Set upon by the outlaws and harshly interrogated, Von Seeberg manages to gain respect for himself and sympathy for the boy. Von Seeberg’s English is excellent; his argument persuasive. The Australian Viney’s hatred of the British army is so intense that harboring a German deserter seems merely another form of mutiny against the authority he loathes. Von Seeberg and Josh slowly, grudgingly are accepted into the ill-assorted company of deserters. The novel doubles back and forth from the background of these men to their bizarre secret existence beneath the fury of the war, concentrating upon the shifting but always symbiotic relationships developing among Viney, Von Seeberg and Routledge.

Strong enough in itself for most novels, the drama of this story simultaneously is expanded and diffused by the introduction of a French family consisting of a mother, Madeleine, a daughter Nicole, her shell-shocked brother Auguste and Madeleine Gilbert’s aged parents. Discovering Nicole at her chores in a field untouched by battle, Routledge gradually is drawn out of his fugue by the girl’s gentleness and beauty, falling predictably in love with her.

A tentative liaison is formed between the French family and the deserters; uneasy at first, later ripening into mutual dependence. Given a cast composed of the non-English speaking Gilberts, the inarticulate youngster Routledge, Von Seeberg, whose speech has a stiff, second-language formality, and the various secondary characters drawn from all strata of English provincial life, the dialogue necessarily struggles to transcend these obstacles, becoming secondary to plot and character.

Curious Separate Peace

The introduction of the Gilberts diverts the focus of the novel from the brutal expediency of the deserters’ lives to the curious separate peace established between Viney’s men and the French family. Von Seeberg and another of the band, Hepworth, work the fallow farm in return for food, rebuilding their lives as they shore up the ruins of the homestead. The farm work heals and restores, creating a bridge from hell to a semblance of normalcy. That metaphorical bridge is another sort of No Man’s Land, the place where fear meets trust, faith confronts reason, and despair blends into the beginning of hope.

By the end of this ambitious novel, these artificial distinctions are all but obliterated and valor in war is permanently re-defined.