Books: War, First Degree

PATHS OF GLORY—Humphrey Cobb—Viking ($2.50).

War, which is sometimes spoken of as murder, is more often thought of as manslaughter in self-defense than as murder in the first degree. But in peacetime, when thoughts of the last war can be retroactively sober, it is possible to analyze the impersonal hecatombs of battle into individual instances of coldblooded killing. Since the World War, writers who are also veterans have been resurrecting many an unknown soldier. Their grisly finds make a pile of evidence more terribly impressive (though more ephemeral) than any neat, white, euphemistic...