AN END TO GLORY

In the flimsiest fictional form, this is more properly a moral, intellectual and philosophical analysis of the military mind and a soldier's conflicts, which reverse from a rather exalted dedication to his profession to his resignation, some twenty years later, Jean de Larsan, from an old family, viewing himself as one of the last of the Christian knights, relives and retells a sequence of incidents (in many parts of the world where he had seen service- Algeria, Indo-China, etc.) which lead him to realize that war is now depersonalized and mechanized to question whether the soldier is only a policeman or an executioners; to argue that combat is no longer a ""duel"" but a ""massacre""; that war-a ""horrible nonsense"" is only neutralized but not justified by the acts of blind courage it occasions; and to finally recognize that we are ""all caught up together in a vast sin"". Simon phrases his moral concerns and considerations in an epigrammatic prose (""It is not easy to live Corneille in a century of Kafka"") and his short, dialectical examination is more French in its character and appeal. Limited