A different kind of war novel, well worth the read. ( )

A haunting novel about US GIs in the Ardennes forest towards the end of WW2. This is really character driven and the fear and confusion of the young men who were really little more than boys during the war makes for a story that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. ( )

An evocative war novel like no other I've read. It has a melancholy feel, with a cry for peace. Well written. A great page-turner that can be read in one sitting. A winner for Wharton! ( )

Is William Wharton’s A Midnight Clear the greatest war novel ever written?

Very likely.

Having said that, I’ve no doubt there is an army of my colleagues—both here on this site and elsewhere—mobilizing forces and preparing to launch a mortar attack in my direction. Their artillery? Novels like The Naked and the Dead, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad (a poem, yes, but as versifiers go, Homer was the Tom Clancy of his day), All Quiet on the Western Front and anything by James Jones.

But, peace, fellow critics! While those are all fine examples of military fiction, I must confess that, with the exception of Homer, they are all works I haven’t read. Perhaps my opening question should have been “Is William Wharton’s A Midnight Clear the greatest war novel I’ve ever read?â€?

The answer rings like reveille: YES!

Of course, A Midnight Clear, like many of those other titles listed above, should be more properly called an anti-war novel. You won’t find trigger-happy, Rambo-ish militants basking the glory of killing for the good of God, country and apple pie in these pages. No, A Midnight Clear is a gentle hymn calling for men to lay down their arms and unite in global brotherhood. Yet, it’s all set so persuasively in the milieu of combat that you’d swear you can smell the fear in the soldiers’ undershorts.

I’m a long-time fan of the writer who goes by the name of William Wharton, a pseudonym that his publishers say masks a “well-known writer.â€? Over the years, there have been rumors that Wharton is actually J.D. Salinger. Of course, those are the same gossips who think that Salinger is actually Thomas Pynchon.

No matter what his real identity is, make no mistake about it: Wharton writes novels the way they used to make movies—with clarity, purpose and beauty. He’s a slow writer, often lagging years between novels (which leads me to think that maybe he’s really one of today’s top-drawer mass-market writers…perhaps Stephen King “gone legitâ€? [and, hmm, didn’t the Horror King name one of his characters “William Whartonâ€? in The Green Mile? Let the rumors start flying…]). But when he does produce a book, it’s a cause for celebration.

I’ve been a devoted reader since his first novel, Birdy, and continuing on through his later works like Dad and Pride. But I think the moment I knew I was really onto someone special was when I read A Midnight Clear upon its release in 1982.

Set in the midst of World War Two’s Battle of the Bulge, the novel follows a platoon of recon soldiers which has just seen half of its unit blown away in combat. Still reeling from shell-shock and battle fatigue, they’re sent to an abandoned seventeenth-century chateau in the Ardennes Forest to watch for German troop movement. They find the “Krautsâ€? all right—a patrol of Germans just returning from the Eastern Front. The two sides make contact and find that they are not so different after all. There’s accidental camaraderie, a snowball fight and the Germans make a snowman that looks like Der Fuhrer. Without spoiling any of the genuinely moving moments of the plot, let me just remind you that this does take place during the Christmas season, a time when both miracles and tragedies happen with equal frequency.

Like most books and movies of this type, each of the characters seems ladled directly from the melting pot. The platoon is comprised of diverse and, at times, stereotypical figures, but to Wharton’s credit their unique personalities glow through the book’s pristine prose. Especially unforgettable are the novel’s narrator, Will Knot (cleverly nicknamed “Wontâ€?) and the too-sensitive Wilkins (nickname: “Motherâ€?) who opens the novel by running through the forest screaming and shedding his clothes in a vain effort to get a Section Eight discharge. Through their voices, we realize that this was truly a war fought by untested teenagers—a battle-hardened group which, as it turns out, is still soft enough to make friends with the enemy in a French forest one Christmas Eve.

What sets Wharton’s novel apart from others of its genre is the style of writing which comes at us in sharp, staccato sentences like an urgent radio transmission:

Briefing, in the army, means explaining. The army mind wants everything short and simple, except wars. Maybe that’s why they call it briefing. But sometimes it’s hard to be short and simple.

Yet, even in his compressed construction, Wharton is as lyrical and deep as anything you’d find in the windier writings of that other William, Faulkner. Evidently, Wharton (whoever he is) served in World War Two and had a profoundly traumatic experience. He once told an interviewer: “After the war, I had a lot of nightmares. I would get up in the middle of the night and just write, handwrite, and then tear it up when morning came and flush it away. And that helped.â€?

Well, thank goodness he didn’t shred any of what we find in A Midnight Clear! Otherwise, we’d have been robbed of moments like this, when the platoon comes across two bodies in the wintry forest:

I’m almost ready to believe anything; but I have a hard time with this. They look like a statue. They’ve been standing long enough so the last snows have sprinkled helmets and shoulders like powdered sugar…Somebody’s propped an American and German soldier against each other in the final of final embraces. Their arms and legs are cocked so they look like waltzers, or ice skaters about to move off into some intricate figure. I stop; I don’t want to look.

Ten years after the novel’s publication, film director Keith Gordon made one of the best book-to-screen adaptations I’ve ever seen. A Midnight Clear, the movie, starred Ethan Hawke, Gary Sinise and Peter Berg (all at the beginning of their careers) and is well worth hunting for at your local video rental store. Both book and movie are eloquent persuasions for peace which everyone, hawk or dove, should read and see at least once. ( )