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Melancholy Lessons Towards LivingThis is a novel of wartime realism, based on experiences in North Africa and Italy, on incidents and perceptions of the second world war.  It is a fictional re-creation of a combat engineer regiment in 1943-1944, participants in the invasions of Paestum and Anzio, in battle engagements traversing surging rivers and mountain chasms, in detecting and retrieving mines, in disarming anti-personnel explosives rigged in ditches and buildings, in clearing impassable roads strewn with shell debris, and in foxholes as riflemen in contested areas under threat.This is a war that unravels through a squad of enlisted men and non-coms, soldiers who are an open and subtle influence on each other, their characters affected by combat assignments, their observations filled with wry humor and forebodings, at times in reaction to self-defense and panic, when resting slipping from talk to tense silence.  The weather is contentious, fall graduating into rain and mud, winter into clouds that conceal the mountain tops of enemy, each day filled with minutes of discontent, with nights of frozen rain puddles, with hours of snowcapped trails leading to defensive medieval towns.The writing evokes the times, the sentences thrust forward into battle, into unsettling rest, descriptions freshened by scenes of worry, tempered by relief that another week has survived.  The phrasing is impressionistic, a structure often found in contemplative prose, a study of evocativeness, symbolic of war's mishaps and misadventures.This is an emotional novel of an essential part of the Italian campaign, a construction of events that marched many to wounds and death, others to recuperation that continued beyond war's end.