FIVE BEST
War Is Hell
And these are a hell of a quintet of books.

BY JAMES J. CRAMER
Saturday, October 7, 2006 12:00 a.m.

1. "The Irish Guards In the Great War" by Rudyard Kipling (Doubleday,
1923).

In this history of the unit his son fought and died for in World War I,
Rudyard Kipling recorded details, no matter how minor, because "where
death ruled every hour, nothing was trivial, and bald references to
villages, billets, camps, fatigues and sports, as well as hints of tales
that can never now be fully told, carry each their separate significance
to each survivor, intimate and incommunicable as family jests." His one
sentence on the battle of Loos delivers a Spartan epitaph for his son.
"Here 2nd Lieutenant Clifford was shot and wounded or killed--the body
was found later--and 2nd Lieutenant Kipling was wounded and still
missing." To encounter this searing book is to be struck permanently by
its single-mindedness and the exquisiteness of its prose.

2. "Lost Victories" by Erich von Manstein (Regnery, 1958).

Generals don't make the best memoirists, mainly because they embellish
while writing for posterity; the higher the rank, the worse the tome.
The exception is the breathtaking autobiography of Field Marshal Erich
von Manstein, the brilliant author of many Germany victories against the
Soviets in World War II. Dismissive of oft-cited "turning points," such
as the German defeat at Stalingrad, von Manstein contends that the war
was never winnable for Germany because of the leader prosecuting it. As
for Hitler's once much-vaunted kinship with regular soldiers, he says
the Fuehrer had "as little in common with the thoughts and emotions of
soldiers as had his party with the Prussian virtues which it was so fond
of invoking." Coming from Hitler's greatest general, it's a most
effective filleting.

3. "Some Desperate Glory" by Edwin Campion Vaughan (Henry Holt, 1981).

The fame of "Goodbye to All That," Robert Graves's account of his
experience as a British officer in World War I, has obscured the far
superior work of Edwin Campion Vaughan, a diary of the eight months he
spent in the deadly tedium of the trenches, sipping tea between
shellings, trying to maintain civilities in his corner of hell. Vaughan
captures the First World War's random, mechanistic horror. At
Passchendaele, he crawled into the thick of it, dodging bullets, shells
and a menace that could be nearly as lethal, artillery-created
sinkholes: Vaughan describes the screams of the wounded who had sought
refuge in the freshly gouged holes only to find themselves slowly
drowning as rain fell and the water level rose. A relentlessly stark
account of the war's bloodiest, most futile battle.

4. "Storm of Steel" by Ernst J|nger (1920).

Ernst J|nger's "Storm of Steel" captures the sense of pointlessness felt
by soldiers on both sides in World War I--and the lack of animus they
held for one another. His profoundly evocative memoir (definitively
translated by Michael Hofmann in 2003) is infused with its own steely,
poetic force. J|nger has been fighting for Germany for months without
having seen an enemy soldier. Then he comes face to face with one;
J|nger holds a gun to the wounded man's temple, about to shoot, but then
his quarry pulls out a photograph--a picture of himself with his family.
"It was a plea from another world," J|nger writes. "Later I thought it
was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward." Tell me you
aren't rejoicing that our author-soldier spared him and that he, too,
was spared to give us "Storm of Steel."

5. "But Not for the Fuehrer" by Helmut Jung, with Mike Nesbitt
(AuthorHouse, 2004).

Helmet Jung's self-published memoir is the most shocking of the quintet
of books covered here. A private in the Seventh Panzer division caught
up in the retreat from Russia, Jung was no Nazi. These soldiers hate
Hitler. But fighting for survival apparently can include the thirst to
commit atrocities. Jung provides reasons for this hunger: Captured
German soldiers have been viciously tortured by Russian women soldiers.
The Germans take a terrible vengeance, but cruel as it was, Jung says,
he and his comrades all "felt better" afterward. As brutally honest a
picture of war on the Eastern Front as we have had.

Mr. Cramer is the host of CNBC's "Mad Money" and the markets commentator
of TheStreet.com.