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 regardless of their heroism or cowardice, their strength or weakness, their life or death.
The shining exception to this pattern of War fiction is Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa. It is an old-fashioned moral study, and Author Zweig is almost the only War novelist for whom armed conflict is only a part of the war between good & evil that rages as fiercely when the guns are silent. Last week Author Zweig published the fourth volume of Grischa's moral story. A long and involved book called The Crowning of a King, it deals, superficially, with the intrigues of the German general staff over the selection of a king for Lithuania. But in a deeper sense it is a dramatization of the moral conflicts that began years before, when the innocent Sergeant Grischa was executed. Aside from a few confusing passages about characters who appear in the previous books, it makes interesting reading in its own right. But it gains greatly if readers know the plan of Zweig's cycle of novels.
The scope of that plan was suggested in The Case of Sergeant Grischa. A goodhearted, simple Russian soldier, Grischa escaped from a German prison camp, hid in the woods, took the clothes and identity of a dead German deserter. He was caught and sentenced to be shot for desertion. Grischa proved his identity, was nevertheless ordered shot in his false identity as a German deserter. Gradually, as one soldier after another was shocked at the injustice, his case became the centre of a major conflict. A sergeant tried to save him, then a lieutenant, finally a general. They compromised their army careers, suffered the constant temptation to let the whole affair go. When millions of men were dying, what difference did the death of one more make?
Grischa was eventually shot, in one of the most powerful scenes in War fiction. In his next two novels Zweig turned back to trace the earlier careers of some of the people who had defended Grischa. Young Woman of 1914 told of the marriage of Werner Bertin, who had been one of Grischa's first defenders. Education Before Verdun told how Bertin had learned the facts of war life, and the savagery of conflicts between officers. Now, in The Crowning of a King, the consequences of their stand in the Grischa case are traced in the subsequent careers of people who were involved in it.