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  • Race and War
  • Clay Lewis (bio)
Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter Pouncey (Random House, 2006. 240 pages. $13.95 pb)

Forty-nine years ago in Fredericksburg, Virginia, I read Bruce Catton's Glory Road. A half-century later my hunger for war-related literature remains strong. The motives driving this interest reside in the dark; a childhood during World War ii and three years of military service do not account for its depth. Now, however, Peter Pouncey's Rules for Old Men Waiting opens a perspective on why war is enthralling. In the foreground of this short novel is the complex relationship of the teller to the tale of war.

The central character, McIver, is an eighty-year-old Scotsman. He has firsthand knowledge of the wars of the twentieth century. His father, a British aviator, was killed in World War i; he himself commanded a Royal Navy destroyer in World War ii in a daring action resulting in many casualties; as a military historian in the U.S. he studied British veterans who had been gassed in World War i; and his son died of wounds received in Vietnam. Now an old man, his wife recently dead, his health failing, alone in their remote Cape Cod summer house "older than the Republic" (and in bad repair), McIver notices that his "ability to focus, to fix on a detail and hold it," has deserted him. "An actual cloud, he felt, was stealing across his brain, evening mists across marshy ground." In response he resolves to "take back his life" by setting up "rules to hold himself together." One requires him to do meaningful work. In order not to fall victim to the "random images that invade you," he decides to write a story. Doing so would drive out the "undisciplined storm of images, which had bludgeoned him into a helpless spectator." The storm would be channeled into the "advancing wedge of his coherent story." The method echoes Cervantes, Borges, and Poe; but Pouncey's execution of it is nevertheless strikingly original.

We must remind ourselves that McIver is not the author, Pouncey. The vigor and quiet authority of the third-person voice, the depth and resonance of the memories, and the vividness of McIver's day-to-day life and his fiction about World War I, cause us to forget that Pouncey has lived a quite different life. This is a novel.

The story McIver undertakes to tell is set in the trenches of World War I, not in the air war that took his father's life. (The effects of the father's death on the young boy are a presence throughout.) As a military historian he has conducted oral-history interviews with British victims of gas during World War I. The first character he creates is Sergeant Braddis, a warrior with a talent for killing. Even [End Page lxxxii] his fingernails are honed for killing. When a rat happens by, he grabs it and drives his razor-sharp thumbnails into the "small bright eyes and on into the brain." At night and alone Braddis prowls no-man's-land for Germans to kill swiftly and silently. Worried that he might lose his tough guy reputation, he kills a British officer, skillfully shooting him in the back, "quite high up and to the left of the spine; the powerful large-caliber bullet shattered the bone of the rib cage front and back, and tore out a piece of the heart on its passage through the chest." McIver writes: "The animal schooled for predation on instinct had scant room for moral judgment." Braddis has become disconnected from, or has always been ignorant of, civilizing moral values.

McIver compares Braddis to Achilles, citing the opening passage of the Iliad: "Rage was the necessary word; perhaps the first word onto the page in Western literature [was] Achilles' menis [rage] in the Iliad." He finds his character Braddis to have, like Achilles, "uncensored savagery that made soldiers and hunters kill on reflex, implacable." McIver continues: "Three thousand years and more after the Trojan War, it's still possible to show an Achilles at home guiding his reluctant men through his own...

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