Books: Memento Mori

NO MAN'S LAND

by John Toland

Doubleday; 651 pages; $17.95

These days, American veterans who want to relive the horrid past make pilgrimages to Bataan or plan fraternal parties in Hürtgen Forest. But when it comes to war stories and patriotic gore, World War II trails well behind memories of another war, as John Toland amply proves in this plodding yet passionately detailed resurrection of 1918.

In the spring of that year, General Erich Ludendorff launched the greatest military assault in history (62 divisions, more than 600,000 men, a 6,000-gun artillery barrage), and after years of stalemate blew a wedge, at places 100 miles wide and 40 miles deep, in Allied lines. By early summer, Germany seemed within a hot breath of taking Paris, driving the British army into the sea and winning the war. Then the Americans, as Toland puts it, finally got a chance to "show the world that [they] could fight as well as talk," and the counterattacks began. The overextended German army collapsed. In November the Kaiser resigned, and a scrappy little corporal, twice decorated for gallantry, flung himself on his hospital cot and wept. On the spot, Adolf Hitler swore he would devote his life to avenging his betrayed country.

If none of this is news, it has rarely been so methodically worked over. Toland's main intent is to evoke the sweep of battle from the Chemin des Dames to the Marne, from Belleau Wood to the Argonne. He sometimes wrings from familiar historic horrors memorable touches of contrary humanity. What was it like to listen to 8,500 guns, a sound that no human ear had ever heard before? For Winston Churchill, who visited France to see the war firsthand, the crescendo rose "exactly as a pianist runs his hands across the keyboard from treble to bass." For Private Frank Gray the thunder was "one roll, one roar, which never diminished and never increased, and which, indeed, imagination refused to conceive could be increased." After listening to a similar barrage, a U.S. Marine exulted: "I never want to have a grander feeling or I'd just naturally die of joy."

How do you cope with fear? No less bellicose a personage than Lieut. Colonel George S. Patton Jr., 32, found himself trembling before a battle. Then he thought of all his martial ancestors looking down upon him. "I became calm at once," he recalls, "and saying aloud 'It is time for another Patton to die,' " he strode forward into a hail of fire. Brigadier John Seely turned his mind to boyhood sayings—"Death is better than dishonor" and "By Faith ye shall move mountains"—before leading a do-or-die attack. Once engaged in combat, men were often too absorbed to be frightened. When hit by shell splinters or .30-cal. slugs, some thought they had only been whacked by a stick or smashed a knee against a rock.