Scan barcode
A review by bookishwendy
A Midnight Clear by William Wharton
5.0
I first read this book many years ago, in seventh grade during one of my earliest forays into war fiction. I must have affected me deeply because a few vivid scenes and images still stand out in my brain over 15 years later: a snowball fight between young German and American soldiers isolated in a forest (the Germans stuck sticks into their own snowballs to mimic the shape of their grenades), red crosses painted with blood to mimic medical personnel, frozen bodies "dancing" with one another, and the narrator's "legendary" case of the runs. I finally read it again, and I'm so glad that I did.
A Midnight Clear tells the (purportedly sorta true) story of a depleted squad of intelligence & reconnaissance specialists who are sent to man and monitor a forward location at an isolated chateau at the start of the Battle of the Bulge. Narrator Will Knott (aka Wont) informs us that these guys are insanely smart, had all received special training and then were transferred to the front as cannon fodder thanks to a bureaucratic error. Wont's own chatty yet introspective style seems to prove his intellectual prowess. Normally I like cleverness, but my biggest issue with this book is that there is a little too much of it--the endless bridge hands and trivia that fill the soldier's many hours of boredom force the pace to a crawl. Also, the six American GIs all talk with the same witty, smart-ass soldier tone as Won't himself, and it's impossible to tell them apart without dialogue tags. Even by the end, the reader only knows most of these characters by the stereotypes they represent: the NY Jew, the almost-pastor, the sensitive weakling, the mechanic. Despite this, the situation of their isolation, the creeping terror they experience cut off from anything familiar, makes it impossible not to identify and empathize. Soon they make accidental contact with a similarly isolated, strangely submissive group of German soldiers who call "Schlaf gut, Ami!" (sleep well, Yank!) each night across the clearing. This isn't a black & white war story where good fights evil, but it's still a gripping, sometimes terrifying, always thought-provoking yarn.
A Midnight Clear tells the (purportedly sorta true) story of a depleted squad of intelligence & reconnaissance specialists who are sent to man and monitor a forward location at an isolated chateau at the start of the Battle of the Bulge. Narrator Will Knott (aka Wont) informs us that these guys are insanely smart, had all received special training and then were transferred to the front as cannon fodder thanks to a bureaucratic error. Wont's own chatty yet introspective style seems to prove his intellectual prowess. Normally I like cleverness, but my biggest issue with this book is that there is a little too much of it--the endless bridge hands and trivia that fill the soldier's many hours of boredom force the pace to a crawl. Also, the six American GIs all talk with the same witty, smart-ass soldier tone as Won't himself, and it's impossible to tell them apart without dialogue tags. Even by the end, the reader only knows most of these characters by the stereotypes they represent: the NY Jew, the almost-pastor, the sensitive weakling, the mechanic. Despite this, the situation of their isolation, the creeping terror they experience cut off from anything familiar, makes it impossible not to identify and empathize. Soon they make accidental contact with a similarly isolated, strangely submissive group of German soldiers who call "Schlaf gut, Ami!" (sleep well, Yank!) each night across the clearing. This isn't a black & white war story where good fights evil, but it's still a gripping, sometimes terrifying, always thought-provoking yarn.