Word: crosses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...CROSS OF IRON (456 pp.)-Willi Heinrich-Bobbs-Merrill...
...novelists are getting their second wind. In two months, half a dozen or so tales of combat action have seen print. The latest, a German entry titled The Cross of Iron, is the most savagely powerful portraiture of men at war on the eastern front since Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad. Possibly because they belonged to the winning side, U.S. writers tend to see war as a personality-developing experience in which a man can forge his own identity. As a loser, the German writer must salvage for his hero both identity and meaning from a lost cause pursued beyond...
...logic (or a lunacy) all its own: "To fight for a conviction does not require heroism. Heroism begins where the meaninglessness of the sacrifice remains the last, only message the dead can leave behind." You Mustn't Bawl. The simple footslogger passes this test best in The Cross of Iron. Novelist Heinrich's officers are petty martinets, Nazi careerists, or weary Wehrmacht regulars who have long since sent their consciences on permanent leave. Steiner tangles with one of them, his Führer-minded C.O., and exposes him for the cowardly lump of jelly...
German infantry division, he marched across 8,000 miles of Russian soil, was severely wounded five times, saw his division lose twelve times its original manpower. In The Cross of Iron, Heinrich does what a good war novelist should and few can. He makes the private inferno of his war roar all over again, but as if for the very first time...
Bill McAllister will play at one for the varsity golf team this afternoon as it meets a strong Holy Cross team and an Amherst squad of unknown strength...