The Killing Ground by Elleston Trevor

With some of the men, Lieutenant Pope had lost his authority; with others, his claim to their loyalty.  Among the N.C.O.s he had lost respect.  It had come about in small ways, with a word or an action, most of them forgotten until another came, reminding them.  No one disliked him; to be disliked, a man must have a character of a kind; in Pope, even that was lacking.

As followers of my twitter feed are aware, the wife and I go to many antique malls, flea markets and thrift shops.  At just such a place years ago I picked up a copy of Bantam A1835, The Killing Ground by Elleston Trevor, who, wikipedia is telling me, was a prolific writer of mystery, espionage and children's books under various noms de plume.  One of my on-again-off-again interests is British military history, so the purported topic of the novel, British tank crewmen fighting in Northwest Europe, appealed to me.  It looks like Trevor served in the Second World War, but in the Royal Air Force, not the British Army, so does he know a lot about tank warfare and the Normandy campaign?  Who knows?  Let's check it out regardless as a break from the voodoo and space alien stories that make up so much of our diet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  If we like this thing, Trevor has plenty of books for us to read including what look like crime/horror stories about an evil brother and sister and an evil nun praised by Robert Bloch and a gothic romance lauded by Mary Higgins Clark.

The Killing Ground has nine unnumbered chapters; this novel is episodic, and each chapter is almost like a complete short story that can stand its own.  The first, The Sea, introduces us to the crews of two troops of C Squadron as they ride a landing craft to the beach at Normandy.  (Each troop consists of three Churchill Mark 7 tanks; the entire Squadron totals eighteen tanks.  Each tank has a crew of five.)  Each of the soldiers has his own particular character trait; this guy is religious and prays, that guy is thinking about his wife, this one is thinking about a system for betting on the horses, that one loves to play cards, this officer feels inadequate because he hasn't seen action yet and other members of his troop fought in the Mediterranean, etc.  This novel doesn't really have a central character, but rather a large ensemble cast, and depicts human relationships but little--each character seems very self-contained.  War stories are often about camaraderie (the relationships of fighting men to each other) and/or the weight of command (the relationship between an officer and his subordinates) but the men in The Killing Ground are isolated, and we spend a lot of time in their heads examining their inner lives rather than observing conversations between them.  This is a result of, or symbolized by, how often the soldiers in the book are told to be quiet lest they reveal their positions to Jerry or clog up the radio network with pointless chatter, how often the sound of gunfire makes conversation impossible, and how often dust and smoke and the dark of night obscure vision.

A main theme of this first chapter is how rough the Channel is and how over half the tankers are sea sick.  I found the best part of the chapter to be the description of the bombardment by Royal Navy warships of the French coast as perceived by the tankers, the sound, the smoke; also good is the description of the fire from the German 88mm guns ashore and the fate of some of the smaller British craft, hit by mines or enemy fire, or stuck on obstacles.  Trevor is good at visual details, throughout the novel painting vivid pictures of the movement of dust and smoke and all the little detritus on the surface of the water and littering the battlefield.

In The Beach, our guys are on the shore exchanging fire with German anti-tank guns in concrete emplacements, with machine gun nests, with a lone M. E. 109; they even blast an enemy artillery observer in a ruined villa.  All around them MPs, sappers and infantry men are subject to a rain of bullets and mortar rounds.  The tank commanders keep jumping out of their vehicles to grenade an enemy position or retrieve some item, and we get lots of descriptions of wreckage and dead bodies and people trying to aid the wounded.

The Land, our third chapter, has the tankers advancing through a little town, then trading shots with Germans who are deployed on a ridge, and then immobile and inactive as they endure an artillery barrage.  This chapter is the least satisfying in the novel, as I was skeptical about many details of the German artillery barrage.  For example, a German shell lands every six minutes, like clockwork, and the tank crewmen can not only predict when it will arrive by looking at their watches but hear it coming.  One round every six minutes seems like a pretty low rate of fire, especially if the gun firing on them is an 88mm as they suspect, and I had thought artillery shells (not mortar bombs, which move relatively slowly) traveled too fast for you to hear them before they got to you.  Also, the officers decide the men should leave their tanks and take cover nearby, even though they haven't dug any trenches--wouldn't you be safer from blast and from shell fragments if you were inside a heavily armored vehicle like the Churchill?  There's also a lot of business with the men griping that HQ won't let them move their tanks or shoot back, even though they were shooting back earlier, and anyway, how could they shoot back if this is indirect fire from behind the ridge?  Maybe they want to drive up the ridge?  The drama of this chapter works, but it is a little hard to tell what is going on and easy to doubt the chapter's realism.  

Singing Drunk takes place a week later, at night, as C squadron rests a half mile away from German positions.  The men hear someone, obviously drunk, singing loudly between them and the enemy.  Thinking the drunk one of their fellows, some of the British soldiers go out to try to rescue this guy, only to find he is a German willing to be taken prisoner.  The drunk German doesn't make it back to British lines alive, as a British lieutenant, Pope, mows him down with a Bren gun.  There isn't a lot of plot that carries over from episode to episode in The Killing Ground, but one plot strand is how Pope is changed by the experience of battle--his subordinates thought him a "right sort" back in Blighty, but here in France they lose respect for him as he grows corrupt and unsteady under stress.

The Start-line begins with a veteran noncom (in his own mind) assessing Pope, suggesting that the lieutenant killed the German prisoner in a panic and that courage is a finite resource and Lieutenant Pope is expending his and will soon suffer a total collapse.  It is a month since the landings and the British are going to launch a carefully prepared Corps-level assault on hardened German veterans; the first part of this chapter is a briefing given by a major to the tank commanders about the coming operation.  The second part is the start of the attack, a British artillery barrage followed by the advance of the British tanks into a German barrage.

Not Far to Where? picks up immediately after the previous chapter as C Squadron's Churchill tanks drive forward, negotiating mine fields, enduring fire from Nebelwerfers, and facing ambush by self-propelled guns.  Flail tanks and flamethrowing tanks of another squadron lead the way, blasting open a path for our characters to follow.  Our cast gets bogged down and here, half way through the book, we get some flashbacks to some of the characters' earlier lives that flesh out their personalities and help explain their behavior here on the battlefield.  For example, Pope had a distant relationship with his father and he feels he has no roots and so all through his academic and military careers he has been trying, without success, to build a stable identity for himself.  Pope, taking a walk outside his tank, encounters an injured man and helps him--this event has a remarkable, perhaps beneficial, effect on Pope's character.

Moonrise is a long chapter that focuses on one of the tank crews we've been following since the first chapter; these guys have gotten themselves lost behind enemy lines and now their tank has broken down.  Trevor does a good job describing their efforts to remain concealed at night and deal with the German armored vehicles that eventually show up.  An entertaining action chapter, more focused and less impressionistic than the earlier battle scenes and with a more traditional plot in which the characters face obstacles and strive to overcome them and in which Trevor provides a climax.

Three weeks later, in Peace, C squadron is resting some miles from the front lines, the men sleeping and banging French chicks.  One of the men who survived the against-overwhelming-odds engagement in Moonrise returns to the squadron from hospital--he survived because he ran away from the fight, and was in hospital for psychiatric reasons.  He lies about what he did in the fight--will he be found out?  A theme of this chapter is guilt, that felt by this liar and by the entire squadron as they rest, aware that their comrades in other units are fighting and dying while they are enjoying themselves, as well as the guilt felt by one of the tankers who has been having sex with a local teenaged girl--she has fallen in love with him and is heartbroken when the squadron has to return to the front line, and she makes him promise to return and take her away with him to England, something he has no intention of doing.

The final chapter is The Battering-ram.  C Squadron participates in the attack on the town of Falaise, taking part in the assault on a village that is a suburb of that town.  In the fighting between the British Churchills and the German armored vehicles and machine guns emplacements all of the squadron's tanks are knocked out but several of our characters survive, and live to hear that Falaise has fallen.  There is a measure of triumph in this chapter, as we see B Squadron and infantry exploit the opening made by the now devastated C Squadron and the surviving C Squadron tankers cheering them on and then participating in mopping up operations (in particular hunting snipers.)  The final paragraphs of the chapter and the book suggest Pope has learned how to be a good officer and has regained the respect of those of his subordinates who have survived and he will soon be issued a new tank and continue fighting the Germans.

But this final chapter also has lots of man's-inhumanity-to-man business.  There is a lot of talk of "taking no prisoners."  Some of the more fanatical Nazis refuse to surrender, and some wounded Germans even reject medical aid so the British leave them to die or even finish them off.  The British troops discover some Germans hanging from nooses--they obviously died by hanging and have not hanged themselves, so must have been murdered, hanged at gunpoint in an act of vengeance.  It is strongly implied that a Jewish member of C Squadron, a refugee from Germany, has committed these murders.

The Killing Ground is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, with many striking and memorable images, and some good action scenes.  As I have described, there are limitations when it comes to the plot and characters, but this seems like an artistic choice rather than a blunder, Trevor sacrificing the narrative tools of conventional entertainment in an effort to portray the haphazard nature and isolation of our real lives, characteristics of life more starkly evident in wartime.  If you are looking for a novel in which you get to care about a main character who appears on every page as he determines the curse of the plot and faces and overcomes obstacles you may be disappointed--several characters in The Killing Ground have little arcs in which they grow over time, but each of them only appears here and there, every so often, and their personalities are too flawed and their adventures are too distressing for you to really enjoy spending time with them.

The Killing Ground is good enough that I probably will read something else by Trevor; stay tuned.