Knowing that War and Peace is Richard Bausch’s favorite book, it seemed only right—especially considering its title—that I read his latest novel, Peace, on the heels of Count Tolstoy’s tome. Its brevity also appealed to me. After spending six months with the 1,136 pages that comprise War and Peace, the 171 pages of Bausch’s book tempted me as a tiny dessert might after an enormous meal. I finished it in a weekend.
Though Peace is Bausch’s eleventh novel, it is the first of his that I’ve read, having only been acquainted with his short stories. Some writers who excel in the short form often disappoint in the long, and vice-versa, but Richard Bausch evades this genre-snag with the utmost grace. Unlike its Russian predecessor, Peace hits the ground running, its tension elevated from the beginning and only rising with every turn of the page. The year is 1944. Our protagonist, Corporal Robert Marson, is “sick to his soul,” trudging through the fourth straight day of icy rain in Italy’s Dolomites, near Cassino. He and three other men (boys, really) are sent on a nocturnal reconnaissance mission with a seventy-year-old Italian as their guide. Angelo understands little English, or so he claims, and none of the soldiers are sure if he can be trusted as he leads them up a hill that they soon discover is a full-fledged mountain.
Each soldier suffers his own brand of physical torment throughout the novel. For Marson, it’s a blister on his heel. Early on in the book, he breaks the blister with the point of his bayonet and lets the rain pelt it until the agony is too great and he must put his soaking wet sock back on and continue his uphill trudge. A pain once concentrated in his foot travels up to his ankle, then his knee, then his hip. For Private Benny Joyner, corporeal provocation assumes the form of an insatiable itch on his forearm, which he’s scratched bloody. In one of the novel’s more heartbreaking scenes, he thrusts his arm into a snowdrift and whimpers. The bodily bane of Private Saul Asch’s existence is a hurt back from having fallen down the mountain and being stopped by a tree trunk.
And then there is the rain, relentless but for when it turns to snow. There is also the full moon, shining on them like a spotlight for any snipers who might be lurking. And there is the war itself: “Everyone was suffering a kind of low-grade shock, aware of the badness of being here, out of all the places there were to be in the world.”
As if all these elements didn’t create enough tension, the three men are also plagued by visions of a scene they witnessed the day before, when their superior, Sergeant Glick, ordered a passing donkey-drawn cart to be turned over, and out tumbled a German officer and a woman, the latter of which all presumed to be a whore. The officer immediately shot two of the soldiers, who died instantly, while the whore, weaponless and spewing German epithets, was detained by two other soldiers. Sergeant Glick then shot her point-blank in the forehead. Murder. Marson can’t stop picturing how the woman’s bare legs went up as she fell “and then dropped with a thud in the sudden silence.” He and his comrades all know they should have reported the crime. That they still might is a recurring source of contention amongst them.
But even in the thick of so much anguish and despair, Bausch manages to incorporate his characteristic humor. When Asch requests they slow down because of his hurt back, Joyner, who torments Asch as a matter of course because he’s Jewish, says, “Maybe you should head on back down, darling… we wouldn’t want you to get a boo-boo.”
“Fuck yourself,” Asch tells him. “Better yet, why don’t you stand up real straight, and then fall through your asshole and hang yourself?”
Quite frankly, Peace possesses everything I could want in a book: propelling plot, compelling characters, stunning sentences. For instance: “This that he felt now, stalking the dark, expecting every second to be shot, this was the kind of strain that overmastered the physical discomforts he was suffering at the ends of his toes, the shivering, and the feeling of wanting simply to lie down and rest, even knowing that to rest was to die.” Like most books on the subject, Peace does not glorify war. None of these men want to kill, and they especially don’t want to be killed. But you know at least one of them will suffer the former, and one of them the latter.
The same can be said of the characters in War and Peace. If the three soldiers from Bausch’s book demanded counterparts in Tolstoy’s, then Benny Joyner would be Andre Bolkonsky, Saul Asch would be Nikolay Rostov, and Corporal Marson would be Pierre Bezuhov. My hero. The love of my life. It is Pierre who says that “all ideas that have immense results are always simple… if vicious people are united and form a power, honest men must do the same. It’s so simple, you see.” It is Pierre who becomes a prisoner of war for saving a little girl from a burning house in Moscow, and who witnesses four executions, a trauma that crushes all his faith in humanity. Granted, Pierre is particularly susceptible to existential crises, but this one is the worst he’s ever experienced. “When such doubts had come upon him in the past they had arisen from his own fault. And at the very bottom of his heart Pierre had been aware then that salvation from that despair and from these doubts lay in his own hands. But now he felt that it was not his fault that the world was collapsing before his eyes, and that nothing was left but meaningless ruins.” What could possibly restore his faith now?
Why, the sight of a fellow prisoner unlacing his boots—“deftly, with rounded, effective movements following one another without delay… Pierre was conscious of something pleasant, soothing, and rounded off in those deft movements, in his comfortable establishment of his belongings in the corner, and even in the very smell of the man, and he didn’t take his eyes off him.” This man’s name is Platon Karataev, and he notices Pierre’s gaze and speaks to him in “a tone of such friendliness and simplicity… that Pierre wanted to answer, but his jaw quivered, and he felt the tears rising.” Platon doesn’t insist on conversation. Instead, he calls Pierre “dearie” and “darling,” tells him not to grieve—“They’re men, too, and bad and good among them”—brings Pierre some warm potatoes, and tells him the story of how he came to be a soldier. When it’s time for bed he says his prayers, addressing Jesus Christ, Saint Nikola, Frola and Lavra. Pierre enquires about the latter two, and Platon says, “They’re the horses’ saints. One must think of the poor beasts, too,” before lying on his side with a dog curled at his feet.
Tolstoy writes, “For a long while Pierre did not sleep, and lay with open eyes in the darkness, listening to Platon snoring rhythmically as he lay beside him, and he felt that the world that had been shattered was rising up now in his soul, in new beauty, and on new foundations that could not be shaken.”
If you need a reason to read War and Peace, there it is.
And there are so many others. All of the main characters endure suffering and profound revelation, and not just once. All of them are painstakingly portrayed as real human beings with the capacity to feel conflicting emotions and think conflicting thoughts. I cared so much about what would become of Princes Nikolay and Andre, Princesses Natasha and Marya, and of course Pierre, that I was able to slog through all those war sections, all the history and geography and philosophy, the many pages Tolstoy took to expound on his definition of power, his answer to the question, “What force produces the movements of peoples?”, his concepts of freedom and free will. I did enjoy some of these sections—General Kutuzov is a fantastic character, Napoleon is hilariously portrayed, and I find provocative such statements as “all men’s instincts, all their impulses in life, are only efforts to increase their freedom”—but for the most part I just wanted to know if Andre was going to survive his shrapnel wound, if Marya and Nikolay were going to wed, and if Pierre would win his heart’s desire: Natasha.
When I reached Part II of the epilogue and realized that the story was essentially over and all that remained was political and historical theorizing, my dangling carrot was the fact that in just thirty-six pages (which in modern books would probably equate to twice as many), I finally would have read all of War and Peace. Well-played, Count.
