The first war of my conscious life was the war in Vietnam. We marched in the Moratorium protests, attended teach-ins, and there were daily silent vigils. Years later, when I taught a remedial writing class at a college, I xeroxed an article from a Library of America anthology, Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959–1969.  This was a war the students had barely heard of.

 One student asked what the Vietnam war was about. How to answer that I couldn’t say.  The  government had claimed it was a war against  communists in North Vietnam, but we decided to look  at the article for deeper answers. 

These days I might assign a war novel rather than reportage: it is an excellent way to understand the emotional and psychological aspects. But the best war novel I’ve read is barely known in the U.S.,  Wallace Breem’s The Leopard and the Cliff, published in 1970, set during the Third Afghan War in 1919.

Based on an actual conflict that took place in 26 days, it is brilliantly told from the perspective of a sympathetic flawed hero, Sandeman, a 43-year-old officer who considers himself mediocre, and has been left in charge of a British fort in Waziristan while Chalmers, the political agent, is away.

Sandeman is a Graham Greene-ish character, and Breem’s style is as elegant as Greene’s. While Sandeman drinks lime juice on the verandah, he daydreams about his absent wife, due to give birth to their first child in a distant town. But the message that arrives on the wire is not from his wife; it is addressed to Chalmers, a government order to retreat from the fort because three tribes are waging war on the British. 

Organizing the march is a massive task, complicated by the fact that the majority of the men belong to the tribes. Some desert, others fight among themselves, there is a murder, and a mob threatens Sandeman’s life.  Sandeman, who often meditates on his  “mediocrity,” proves his heroism by controlling the chaos, and then calculates the minimum amount of food, meds, clothing, guns, and ammunition needed on the march.

On their march through difficult terrain, the enemy outnumbers them. Many die. He keeps going grimly, mechanically, out of respect for his position in the British army. And he has been trained for this particular brand of heroism.  Other men, including his friend Wynter, have also been trained with the military attitude that they are part of a whole. 

But then Wynter dies, and that threw me into a state of unconsolable grief. Wynter is one of the likable, ordinary, mediocre men who die in war.

Earlier in the novel, Breem writes: “Francis Wynter was 29 years old.  Tall and fair-haired, with a passion for horses, hawking, and girls – in that order – he was a good officer, unimaginative but reliable.”

That is how Sandeman sees himself:  unimaginative but reliable..  He keeps marching, fatigued, in pain, almost lame, wounded, determined to reach their destination before he dies.  By God, after all the losses he will save the few.

Sandeman and his men are caught between “the leopard and the cliff,” as his friends from the tribes say. This grim, tragic, hyper-realistic novel is beautifully-written, and deserves a wider audience..