My Ten Favorite War Novels
For a change of pace, I thought I’d write not about current events but rather my favorite war novels. I can’t claim to have read all war novels, so there may be even better ones out there that I just have not gotten to. But of the ones I have read, these have left a mark. They are the ones I remember long after reading them. I’ve put links to the books on Amazon.com and Amazon.fr for the books that were written in French. Schoendoerffer’s work has not been translated into English, nor has Gardel’s Fort Saganne. I present them in reverse order, ending with the works I consider the best and the most consequential.
Louis Gardel, Fort Saganne, https://amzn.to/3VRqbeU
I read this book because two French generals, one a former commander of Operation Barkhane, told me to read it. It’s a wonderful story about a young French officer who served in the Sahara shortly before World War I. I cannot decide what it means that senior French officers of a certain age treasure this work, but I suspect it speaks to their romantic vision of the colonial past. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate. But the book is a fine read. Also, it was made into a terrific movie, sort of a French Lawrence of Arabia. Only instead of Peter O’Toole in mascara, viewers are treated to Catherine Deneuve and a young and achingly beautiful Sophie Marceau.
Henri Barbusse, Under Fire https://amzn.to/4074hab, or Le Feu https://amzn.to/49TOYF3.
French soldier Barbusse was a combat veteran in World War I and published Le Feu in 1916, during the war, making it that war’s first novel. It consists mostly of anecdotes about the members of a single squad as they experience life and death on the front. If there was a narrative arc, I do not recall. This book’s value is in its impressions; the glimpses of first-hand experience, or at least the images he chose to share. Barbusse reportedly based the novel on his journal entries, but he makes no claim to the veracity of any of it. What’s “true” here is the subjective experience.
Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers, https://amzn.to/3ZPxdCf
This 1959 Sci-Fi classic is set in the distant future but reads like many of the classic war novels and films we are used to: A young man joins up, goes through boot camp, and then experiences combat. Notwithstanding the futuristic technology and setting—a war against an insect-like species—there is a cold realism to the book that reminds one of Full Metal Jacket. The book has a lot of politics in it, including lectures about military service and patriotism, that can all be ignored without diminishing one’s appreciation for the story telling. This is one of the rare books I’ve reread several times. It holds up.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, https://amzn.to/3VSNjKm
Catch-22 is an American classic that all should read, although I hesitate to call it a war novel. Yes, it takes place during World War II and is about bomber crews, but Heller arguably was more interested in satire than in portraying the experience of warfare. It is a bitter take on war and on the military. Nonetheless it is powerful and memorable, not to mention the origin of the term “catch-22.”
Ahmadou Kourouma, Allah is not obliged, https://amzn.to/49QxM3m
Kourouma’s novel depicts the fictional experience of a child soldier in the Liberian Civil War (1989-1997). The story is horrific. The protagonist is witness to and sometimes guilty of unimaginably horrors. And yet Kourouma manages to portray him as human; as readers, we want the best for him rather than judge him. We never lose our sympathy. At the very least, read this book to learn about Liberia and what happened to it. The truth defies imagination, and this novel arguably captures that truth better even than a documentary.
Väinö Linna, Unknown Soldiers, https://amzn.to/41QtKWC
This is a magnificent novel about Finland’s Continuation War (1941-1944) published in 1954. I knew next to nothing about the war, which makes this book all the more valuable. It follows the lives of several characters as they fight their way victoriously into the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war, and then as the war turned into a long stalemate, and Finnish soldiers’ subsequent retreat. The book, which is a major reference for Finns, has been made into films. I’ve seen the 2017 version, which is excellent.
Pierre Schoendoerffer, La 317e Section, https://amzn.to/3PaNU68
This 1963 novel about the Indochina war recounts the story of a young French officer and his non-commissioned officer as they attempt to lead a group Laotian militia overland to safety in 1954. The author, Pierre Schoendoerffer, served in Indochina as a film maker for the French Army and in fact parachuted into Dien Bien Phu during the siege. The 317e Section, besides being an excellent novel, is a homage to the valor of France’s young officers who sacrificed so much for a doomed war. The book was adapted into a movie by the same name, which came out in 1965. Both the book and the movie are major references for French officers today. If you happen to meet one, ask them. To my knowledge this book has never been translated into English.
A still from the movie, La 317e Section
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, https://amzn.to/4iTfF0W
This extraordinary novel by the Soviet novelist is part two of a story that began with Stalingrad. Unlike the first work, which ends with the beginning of the war, Life and Fate details the battle in that city and much, much more. At the center is a middle class Stalingrad family whose members and friends experience much of the horrors first of the Stalinist purges and then the war itself. Grossman did for the 1930s and World War II what Tolstoy did for the Napoleonic Wars in War and Peace. I cannot recommend this book highly enough both on its literary merit and as a way to learn about what life was like in the Soviet Union at that time. This may be one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes, or The Kindly Ones.
The American author Jonathan Littell wrote Les Bienveillantes (2006) in French, and it swept up all of France’s most prestigious literary awards. It subsequently appeared in English as The Kindly Ones. The book is shocking for its power and its violence. I found it deeply disturbing, but I also could not put it down. It perhaps the only work of fiction I have read that has prompted me from time to time, while reading, to say out loud, “oh my God.” Littell must have given himself nightmares while writing the thing. Perhaps the only book that comes close in terms of horror is José Saramago’s Blindness.
The book is the fictional memoire of a sociopathic gay SS intelligence officer who plays a direct part in many of the war’s most horrifying aspects. He serves with the Einsatzgruppen and later Stalingrad. He spends time at Auschwitz. Most of the time, the horrors barely touch him. Indeed, the book is largely a riff on Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale, with its famous scene in which the self-absorbed hero wanders through the street battles of 1848 without it unduly distracting him from his internal dialogue about his life. Rather, Littell’s anti-hero is subtly affected by the horrors in which he is involved. He is not unaware. Indeed, part of what makes one keep reading despite the violence is the ever-present possibility of redemption: Somewhere in there is a decent man, one whom other characters at various times attempt to draw out. More often than not, he ends up killing them.
1. Erich Maria Remarque, All’s Quiet on the Western Front, https://amzn.to/3P8o96u
Could this 1928 German novel be the greatest of all war novels? Quite possibly, yes. All’s Quiet on the Western Front follows the story of young Paul, an enthusiastic young man who joins up with his schoolmates and then, after the obligatory training sequences, goes to fight the French on the Western Front. There all his youthful optimism and jingoistic support for the war gets blasted out of him by constant shelling, death, and an unforgettable scene in a shell hole alone with a dead French soldier. The 1930 movie adaptation gets my vote for the best war movie ever made. Still.