The literature is enormous but it remains essentially narratives of military actions: The Battle of Stalingrad, The Fall of Berlin, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Tet Offensive and so on. Sometimes these diaries, letters, reports are also stories of young men’s lives, as much about growing up as about the actual fighting. Wars, after all, force the participants to raise the fundamental questions of life and death, to confront the question that life would put to them at some point or another, but not so bluntly: Am I a coward? What constitutes courage? When required to act, will I fail? What constitutes success or failure? Does the winner or the loser take all? What does it mean to win the war but to lose the peace?

Letters and diaries or frontline despatches therefore record what is memorable or what the writer thinks is important to him at the time, what could be action in the field of battle or plain simple introspection.

Vietnam, combined with the school of new journalism (combining facts with a fertile imagination) produced some of the finest war writing of recent times like for example the following extract from Michael Herr who had been sent to do a piece on the Americanisation of Vietnam but ended up doing one on the siege of Khesanh, after the Tet Offensive when the war was nearly over:

"Khesanh was a very bad place then, but the airstrip there was the worst place in the world. It was what Khesanh had instead of a V-ring, the exact predictable object of the mortar and rockets hidden in the surrounding hills, the sure target of the big Russian and Chinese guns lodged in the side of Coroc Ridge, 11 km away across the Laotisa border. There was nothing random about the shelling there, and no one wanted anything to do with it. If the wind was right you could hear the ... calibres starting far up the valley whenever a plane made its approach to the strip, and the first incoming artillery would precede the landing by seconds. If you were taken there to be taken out, there was nothing you could do but curl up in the trench and try to make yourself small, and if you were coming in on the plane, there was nothing you could do, nothing at all.

"There was always the debris of one kind of aircraft or another piled up on or near the strip to be closed off for houses before... the engineers did the cleaning.... But obviously passengers had to be flown in or picked up on ground. These were mostly replacements, guys going to or returning from R and R’s ... and a lot of correspondents... If the barrage was a particularly heavy one, the faces would all distort in the most simple kind of panic, the eyes going wider than the eyes of horses caught in a fire. What you saw was a lucid blur, sensible only at the immediate centre, like a swirly chic photograph of carnival... If you were on board, that first movement was an ecstasy. You’d all sit here with empty, exhausted grins, covered with the impossible red dust that laterite breaks down to, dust-like scales, feeling the delicious after-chill of the fear, that one quick convulsion of safety. There was no feeling in the world as good as being airborne out of Khesanh.

But this writing, like many others including Harrison Salisbury on the Battle of Stalingrad and James Fenton’s classic account of the Fall of Saigon, remains (when all is said and done) reportage that you read and move on but do not necessarily go back to again. There is another and more complex kind of a personal narrative — the remembered war of The Memory of War that persists in the mind through a lifetime. Shakespeare imagined such a memory in a veteran of the English army in the battle of Agincourt in 1415:

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot.

But he’ll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day.

It is in these remembered wars that the great literature of war has to be discovered because it is always the deepest memory that digs into the subconscious and which combines with imagination that creates something new and enduring. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Robert Grave’s Goodbye to All That, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, How Green Was My Valley, some of the classics of World War, some of which I mention later in this column, did not appear till the mid-and late 1920s.

On the purely fictional side that drew much of the material from the war, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front, Louis Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, William Faulkner’s Victory and so many others were written many years after the sound and the fury of battle were over.

Clearly in this literature the time that separates the events and the writing about them is the decisive factor. The experiences recounted are those of a young man — the uncertainties of life and death, the close comradeship in arms, the meaning and exhilaration of fear — that have changed him for ever. But it takes time for the changes to become part of the new "selves" and it is the older "selves" who have been metamorphosised by the trauma of war and life who write the memoirs and the novels. They look back on themselves when young and innocent, as though on another life, and the questions they ask of memory are not the kind that the young ask.

Of course the usual narrative questions are asked — what happened there? What happened then? — but much more important are the deeper philosophical questions that are the underpinnings of all great literature: who was I then? What happened to me? How did I become what I am? The whole definition of the meaning of courage changes altogether. Courage is no longer the challenge (of facing the enemy, the hostile environment, "keeping the chin up"); courage now becomes truth, the ability to come to terms with yourself. Put in another way, courage means coming to terms with your own memories!

To perceive the changes that war makes in any individual requires the passage of time and it is not surprising then that the great classics of war come later when memory falters and is gradually replaced by imagination. War, as well as life, Erich Remarque had written to a friend, requires something more than realism. For most men, understanding comes very slowly and "imagination must wait upon memory to reveal itself," as Latin American writers are so fond of saying.

And when memory and imagination meet, the true heroes it picks are not war’s favourites, the heroes who win medals. The conventional heroes are by and large no good for war novels: They stand to close to the centre of the values of war ("my country, right or wrong") and whether they mean it or not, they act out the mottos on flags and slogans.

It is the anti-hero, the nondescript private soldier who emerges as the real hero, who to paraphrase the words of the poet Herbert Read "fights without hope and (hence) fights with grace." What suits memory best is a war life lived close to the action, but some distance from the values, lived by a man who is by nature or circumstances of life an outsider, who can be a witness as well as a soldier, Memory always likes a man without medals.

Memory also has a style, a plain way of telling that leaves the emotions and the drama to emerge from the events themselves. In a preface to a little-known novel, Towards the Flame, the American author Hervey Allen set down what may be called the aesthetics of war literature:

I have tried to reproduce in words my experience in France during the Great War. There is no plot, no climax, no happy ending to this book. It is a narrative, plain, unvarnished, without heroics, and true. It is what I saw as nearly as memory preserved it, and I have set it down as a picture of war without comment.

Great literature of war is like that plain, unvarnished, unheroic. In a classic novel on the retreat of Napoleon from Spain in the Peninsular War, the author provides a vivid description of "a man and a woman lying clasped in each other’s arms, and dying in the snow.

I knew them both: but it was impossible to help them. They belonged to the Rifles, and were man and wife. "You get the same mix of death and weather in the best of the Vietnam memoirs and novels. Years later in his autobiographical novel Ways of Escape, Graham Greene wrote:

This is Indo-China, I want to exclaim... I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal of Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water.... But I know that argument is useless (against those who did not want to believe in the violence of the American War in Vietnam). They won’t believe that the word they haven’t noticed is like that.

In the ontology of the literature of war there are no abstractions: a situation is described so truthfully that the reader can no longer evade it. Great novelists know that the dramatic campaigns and historical campaigns and historic battles take place in history books but not in the memories of ordinary soldiers who bear the brunt of action. The literature of war deals with life in the raw — the unfamiliar, the unimaginable, the insane, the appalling. There is a meaningless incoherence that can only be described in a style close "to the bone" without frills because as Remarque says in his epigraph to "All Quiet on the Western Front," Death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it."

Wars unite individuals and societies while they are being fought but in the end they change and divide them. Every great novel talks about change, flux, metamorphosis, about what it means to be or not be something or someone; so does all the great literature of war from Andre Malrapex’s Man’s Estate to Stephen Zweig’s The Royal Game and Other Stories and the great novels of the holocaust of the drowned and the saved. But unlike other conventional novels, in the literature of war there is a real destructive nihilism where the individual is reduced to the role of a helpless, hopeless, important comic "who talks and talks only to postpone for a while the silence of his own desolation" like in Beckett’s Endgame or Waiting for Godot.

(To be continued)