The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War.

By Samuel Hynes Penguin USA $24.95

One of the things for which the 20th century will be remembered is some of the best war writing ever. In The Soldiers' Tale, Samuel Hynes, a World War II Marine pilot turned Princeton professor of literature, explains why. The common soldiers of previous centuries frequently were illiterate; their officers were professional soldiers who lacked the detachment that seems necessary to write a first-class memoir. "Until 1914 (the) recording and imagining class had not gone to war much--through the whole of the nineteenth century, for example, no major British writer had any direct experience of battle," Hynes observes.

Then came World War I. The 20th century's industrial-era wars of attrition required huge numbers of literate, middle-class civilians-turned-soldiers to fill the junior officer corps and the trenches. They retained the detachment of outsiders that permitted them to write about war as professional soldiers do not. What came marching back was an army of memorable novels, poems, and memoirs--A Farewell to Arms, the poems of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves' Good-bye to All That, Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Hynes is less satisfied with the literary results of World War II, which may be because he rather arbitrarily excludes most (but not all) novels from his survey. For reasons that would have been interesting for him to explore, much of the most noteworthy writing out of that war came in the form of fiction--Joseph Heller's Catch-22, for example. That's one reason I find his discussion of World War II less illuminating than his examination of World War I. The other reason is his generally spotty selection of World War II literature. How could he write about the air war over Germany, for example, and exclude the poems of Randall Jarrell? Why the arbitrary exclusion of the submarine memoirs of World War II--Edward Beach's Run Silent, Run Deep, or Eugene Fluckey's Thunder Below? Surely the German submarine experience of losing almost 90 percent of their operational boats could have been of interest as well.

The discussion of the literature of Vietnam is far stronger, and should be read by anybody who thinks he understands that war. Vietnam, writes Hynes, "lingers in American minds like the memory of an illness." It is, he asserts in a fascinating analogy that was new to me, to the United States what the First World War was to Britain--"a war of national disillusionment that changed the way a generation thought about its country, its leaders, and war itself." Every war leaves its lasting image, he says, rather awkwardly calling it "the war in the head." In World War I, it was the surrealistic trenches of the western front; in World War II, the bombed-out buildings of cities; in Vietnam, it was the dead civilians. "Those dead children are everywhere in Vietnam narratives," he notes.

What Hynes doesn't note is the lack of post-Vietnam military memoirs. Sure, there have been no big wars. But there have been several smaller actions, from Beirut and Grenada to the Gulf War to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti. But these are actions fought by an all-volunteer force, a professional military with little time for ironic detachment. To be sure, it is a military that does produce important books. In just the last year, two U.S. Army officers who served in the Gulf War have produced significant works--Col. Douglas Macgregor's Breaking the Phalanx, about the future of the Army, and Maj. H.R. McMasters' Dereliction of Duty, about the failures of the Vietnam-era Joint Chiefs of Staff But these are both professional studies, holding far more in common with the memoirs of General Grant than with those of Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon or Joseph Heller. We may have seen the end of those sorts of books in our military.

Thomas E. Ricks is the author of Making the Corps and the Pentagon correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.