Word: embers
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...Night of Time, May 9, 1955); and to them Drohitz is something more than a well-fed peasant town. It is the focus of their tront-lme dreams, a city of dazzling peacetime riches, of sunny, soft-bodied girls strolling along the Corso. In entering Drohitz. exults Gravedigger Adam Ember of the army's medical corps "we belonged to life once more." Dead Wrong. Ember, the passive tattered Everyman of both novels is dead wrong At first. Drohitz girls and Drohitz gilt shops make the troops royally wel come. City fathers entertain the officers at an orgiastic banquet that...
...Mashinka's most fashionable bordello. Confinement quickly erases the difference between whore and housewife, who come to share each other's concerns: a prim matron tries a striptease, the prostitutes study cake recipes. Eventually quarantine proves ineffective. The infection rages through Drohitz and the surrounding countryside and Ember, promoted from subaltern to Commissioner of Deceased Persons, runs out both coffins and burial parties. At novel's end the army marches off to another regrouping point, still expecting 'ever new and more glorious victories." The surviving Drohitzers are left in a defenseless city, a death trap...
...script tries hard to play it fast and Loos, Jane and Jeanne, a couple of nightclub singers, take their act to Paris, where they are met by Scott Brady and Alan Young, two young men about down, and by Rudy Vallee, a fading ember who knew the girls when they were their own mothers-or so it looks in the flashbacks. For a while everybody vaguely engages in dialogue ("Allons, enfants! let's go cher-cher les dames!"), and then off on a CinemaScope tour of Paris...
...Adam Ember is a common soldier in a nameless army. Hill 317 is a hopeless position in a strategy never understood. The landscape flickers back and forth between realism and surrealism. The road along which the regiment marches "was not a marching straight into autumn . . . Under our marching boots the grass withered and faded." Through sucking mud and pathless rain, the soldiers march to Hill 317. They fight, joke, brawl, complain and die on the hill, forgotten by headquarters. Brooding over them is the gaunt figure of the Gravedigger Captain in his draggling coat, explaining to Adam Ember that...
...When food runs low, hunger destroys human feelings, levels rank, reduces commander and commanded to animals. By unspoken agreement, the commandant steps aside, and the mess sergeant ("The Dipper") takes over, inexorably dividing the remaining slices of bread. Each day the survivors eagerly await Adam Ember's count of the newly fallen, for each death of a buddy means more bread for the living. When the men plead for provisions, the squawking field telephone informs them that "there is no Hill 317"-in headquarters files, that is. Adam Ember, half delirious with hunger, has a vision of a huge...