Points Summer Book Club

Dr. Allums, your question about war being in some sense humanizing for some people reminds me of Paul Fussell's World War II memoir, "Doing Battle." Fussell, who wrote the second book we'll take up in our summer series, was a vain, brilliant and callow suburban California boy who was sent to fight in Europe. He begins his narrative with this note to the reader:

Late in the afternoon of March 15, 1945, in a small woods in southeastern France, Boy Fussell, aged twenty, was ill treated by members of the German Wehrmacht. His attackers have never been identified and brought to justice. how a young person so innocent was damaged this way and what happened as a result is the subject of this book.

Fussell is being sarcastic. The subtitle of the book is called "The Making of a Skeptic." He was seriously wounded on that day, in an attack that killed the men fighting next to him. His memoir tells about how his war experience turned him into an ironist obsessed with sailing "the gulf between youth and age, innocence and experience, levity and seriousness."

Fussell's war experience also turned him into a ferocious critic of those who would valorize war. He writes:

In some letters and diaries from the [Second World] war edited by Ronald Blythe, we find a London air-raid warden describing a little boy fetched out of a fire who kept saying, "My little widdle, my little widdle," as he searched for it with his hands. But it had been burnt off. Blythe ends his anthology with a famous letter of farewell written by a flight officer to his mother. He says, "For all that can be said against it, I still maintain that this war is a very good thing; every individual is having his chance to give and dare all for his principle like the martyrs of old." Tell that to the boy who lost his widdle.