ELEVEN DECLARATIONS OF WAR

Eleven well-intentioned if rather frugal short stories -- incidents of war on many battlefronts from the American Revolution to Vietnam, from India to one of those little revolucions to the south of us, but primarily taking place in the air during World Wax I and II. (Mr. Deighton, you may remember, wrote Bomber.) There's the ""Adagio"" between a Hurricane and a Heinkel; the tough survivor of all the fresh-faced boys who come to serve under him, Major Winter, who knows only too well that the real ace is the real assassin; the youngster who makes it home across the Channel in his Sopwith Camel just in time for his nineteenth birthday; the old General, a residual of the first war, who becomes the ""Paper Casualty"" of the next. Victims, almost all. . . . Obviousness aside, they barely graze the skin.