The Wine of Astonishment

The novel follows an American company through the winter fighting of the Battle of the Bulge and on into Germany, and it settles on two men: Lieutenant Colonel John Smithers, who commands, and Jacob Levy, his driver, a young Jewish soldier from St Louis who has spent the war keeping his head down and thinking mostly about a girl and a car. The war is rendered at the level of cold, mud, orders and boredom rather than strategy. Then the company reaches Dachau, days after the camp is opened, and Levy walks into it.

Everything the book has established about him gives way there, and the last movement is about what a man does with knowledge he cannot put down. Gellhorn reached Dachau herself a week after the American soldiers found it, and she wrote in the afterword that she had first heard the camps described during the Spanish Civil War and had not believed the scale of it. She wanted to call the novel Point of No Return, after the moment a pilot can no longer turn back; her editor at Scribner's thought it too bleak and it went out as The Wine of Astonishment. It was a New York Times bestseller, she restored her title in the 1989 reissue, and she considered it her best book.

Jacob Levy drives for Colonel Smithers through the Ardennes in the winter of 1944 and across Germany in the spring. He is twenty-something, unheroic, privately preoccupied with a woman in Luxembourg and with the car he intends to own after the war, and the novel spends a long time on the ordinary texture of a soldier's months — the vehicles, the billets, the officers' quarrels, the deadening cold.

That accumulation is the setup. When the company arrives at Dachau, the novel's register changes and does not change back, and the remainder follows Levy through what the camp does to a man who had been managing the war by not looking at it directly.