Books: The Forgotten Hill

THE NIGHT OF TIME (338 pp.)—René Fülöp-Miller—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.75).

Adam Ember is a common soldier in a nameless army. Hill 317 is a hopeless position in a strategy never understood. The landscape flickers back and forth between realism and surrealism. The road along which the regiment marches "was not a marching straight into autumn . . . Under our marching boots the grass withered and faded." Through sucking mud and pathless rain, the soldiers march to Hill 317. They fight, joke, brawl, complain and die on the hill, forgotten by headquarters. Brooding over them is...