Angel Down

and so Bagger sits up with vision aswirl and shoos away the filthy pelt of air, the pigeon-gray smoke and eyeball-white fog, and beyond the hills of diarrheal mud and the pappy craters from whence those hills were upchucked, Bagger sees trucks and carts and wheeled guns crunching east, looks like the whole fucking U.S. First Army, III Corps, 43rd Division has vacated the scene with the likely exception of Bagger’s lowly Company P, forever dangled like a gonorrheal dick from the brigade’s leftmost flank,

Recently read The Sixth Nik which I enjoyed; but it didn’t win a Pulitzer so curiosity killed the cat. And in this case I think that might be a very literal reality because this book is the most graphic, hair-raising yet beautiful portrait of life on the front lines during WWI that I have read (and actually remember).

Cyril Bagger is the brutally cynical main character, an american soldier and well established malingerer who spends most of his time digging graves, thrown into a punishment squad tasked to “deal with” a “screamer” somewhere in no man’s land. “Deal with” is understood to mean that the screamer is presumed to be a badly wounded soldier who may need to be mercifully euthanized. But what Bagger finds in the middle of the battle field is a beautiful woman angel whose skin literally radiates bright mystical light and (we eventually discover) performs miracles. Bagger, along with his sidekick, mascot, 14-yo, orphan, naif and under-age enlister Arno, take it upon themselves to carry the “angel” who, for reasons never explained can not walk and barely speaks, back to their company’s HQ where they believe that she can somehow end the war. This return journey is immensely complicated because (on top of ongoing industrial warfare), except for Bagger and Arno, everyone in the squad has the delusion that the angel is some other real woman (wife, girlfriend, mother) they are devoted to and therefore decide to protect/steal the angel with fatal consequences as other squad members stop the theft.

If it’s not obvious, the book has a decidedly strong opinion on war and also God’s stance on war. The anti-war message may or may not land with every reader, but if you are not too squeamish, the prose is fantastic (I could find many dozens of pull quote candidates) and I think the Pulitzer isn’t an undeserved award (granted I have not read any competitors.) It’s been a long time since I read Catch-22 and I may have to re-read since it seems to be a possibly strong competitor in the best book about war category.