Books: Authentic, Damning

SQUAD—James B. Wharton—Coward-McCann ($2).

"Christ, you can't tell no one how bad it is. ... How th' hell're you gonna tell anyone what a bullet sounds like, er a shell, an' what it's like to walk all night on a empty belly . . . ?"

Author Wharton does it by following the fortunes of that tightest of cliques, an infantry squad, on its way from the Pas de Calais to and through the front, 1918, early summer. Nor is the squad demolished, at fell swoop, but eroded piecemeal, beginning with the Texan who caught a...