You can feel the cold in this novel like you can feel the cold in Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'. It terrifies you with thoughts of what the body can put up with. Like McCarthy, Bausch's language is as spare as the landscape he describes - in this case an Alpine mountain ascended through rain and snow. Unlike McCarthy's notorious book, though, this story is not particularly original and the twist at the end insufficiently surprising to make you re-appraise what has gone before. A well-crafted read, but if you want WWII how it really was, watch Band of Brothers. ( )

A novella set during 1944 on the Italian front -- 3 soldiers of very different character forced by the randomness of war to rely on each other. The quality of the writing is lovely, especially passages that explore intense emotions of terror and dread.

"He had the sense, again without words, that life -- all life, the life he had led and the life he had come to -- had never been so suffused with clarity, a terrible inhuman clarity, made utterly out of precision, like the precision of gear and tackle in a machine. Except that he understood, in a sick wave, that this was utterly and only human." (153)

I found this difficult to review. On the surface this is a World War II story with some moral ambiguity. The Allies are advancing through Italy, Italy has surrendered and the Germans are retreating. In the opening scene a group of nine US recon soldiers are marching in freezing rain ahead of the main US army . They are wet, cold, exhausted, and, as the first ones to come across any German resistance, and are getting picked off. When a German soldier and a woman fall out of cart they are searching, the German shoots two men dead before he is killed. The Sergeant looks at the dead men, walks up the woman, who is screaming, puts a gun to her head and shoots . "This is all one thing," he says. This is page 4.

I think that gives some flavor of what Peace has to offer. There is an authentic feeling war story here, it's brief, straightforward. Yet the reader has to pause, and check, and think "wait a minute, does that mean..." After finishing this book and finding myself unable to sleep that night for thinking about it, I know there is a lot more here than moral ambiguities of war. Bausch has very carefully sketched his characters, using some simple dialog, and some history, and then left quite a bit up to our imagination. He has intentionally led us to sit on this story and wonder about it. This is not wholly a compliment. In some ways there is some kind of impressive skill used to create and convey all this. In another way I feel a little worked over, and I'm a little annoyed at not being able to put the story to rest. ( )

The horrific and awe-inspiring details in this book were amazing. Bausch's exploration of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual abuse soldiers at war go through in the heat of battle are extremely well depicted and realistic in this book. Quick read, great book. ( )

Very well written. Plot moves nicely. Complex characters and vivid descriptions. ( )

Gritty details keep this story moving forward. Told from Corporal Marson's POV during a frigid 2 day period in Italy in the pouring rain and snow as he and his crew witness things no one should and flashback on happier times. ( )

Richard Bausch's taut novel tells us what happens when civilian soldiers go to war. It's a powerfully atmospheric story about three American soldiers sent up a mountain in Italy near Cassino during the brutal winter of 1944. Their mission: see what the Germans are doing on the other side. Their mental state: conflicted by the shooting of a German woman they witnessed just before they left. Was it murder? An act of war? Should they report it when they return or simply fold it into their psyches? They struggle with the moral dilemma while they slog their way up the cold, miserable mountain.

Bausch's ability to bring the reader fully into his story is well-demonstrated in this book. The tension builds page by page until the wholly satisfying climax, the niggling arguments among the men are just repetitive and just disconcerting enough to make the reader angry, and the perfectly-mounted descriptions of the cold, hard rain, the wet, view-obliterating snow make you wish (just like the soldiers) that you were somewhere else.

Ambiguity is a beautiful thing in Bausch's hands. The squad's guide, Angelo, could be a simple peasant or a German spy--or something else entirely. The protagonist, Corporal Marson, could be a baseball-playing All-American hero or a morally-bereft corporal looking for the easy way out. How these and the other sources of tension in the book are resolved propels the reader through to the end. ( )

I read this novel the same day I read the children's novel Jimmy's Stars by Mary Ann Rodman. Both so poignant and relentless and beautiful -- the blood of the soldiers flows and flows... ( )