Books: Moral War

THE CROWNING OF A KING—Arnold Zweig—Viking ($2.50).

In Tolstoy's War and Peace, war is essentially a moral struggle. From top to bottom of the army, each individual soldier is shown making his choice, determined by his sense of right & wrong, in moments of crisis. But in most World War novels, soldiers are shown caught in a vast impersonal military machine that operates blindly, automatically, uninfluenced by their individual actions. Simple privates or intellectual officers, they are alike in their helplessness and confusion: the machine of which they are part continues to operate...