James McBride: Miracle at St. Anna

By MARGIE THOMSON

The further we get from the world wars, the faster come the books about them, but seldom are we treated to an account as humane as McBride's story (based around real events) of four black soldiers from America's 92nd division, trapped behind enemy lines in Italy in December 1944.

Those who have read McBride's earlier work, The Colour of Water - his memoir of growing up black with a white mother, which has sold millions of copies and won many awards - will not be surprised that in this, his first novel, he again displays luminous style and grace in a story that transcends race to touch on the miracle of the human spirit.

The book opens during a rout of an ill-prepared group of black American soldiers at the Cinquale Canal, as the Americans are trying to push back the Germans' ferociously held Gothic Line which stretched across the Italian peninsula, through the region which ironically we know today as idyllic Tuscany, destination of lifestylers and tourists.

There is a momentary lull in the Germans' brutal defence, and Sam Train - a "chocolate giant", huge, simple and innocent - is ordered to rescue a white boy hiding under a nearby haystack.

This he does, but runs with the injured boy in the wrong direction and is trapped behind the German advance. Three of his squad - all black, of course, but with very different takes on life - go to find him, and they too become trapped then lost in the freezing, rugged mountains of the Apuane Alps, and the scene is set.

The 92nd division, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, was the United States Army's black division, and it is part of McBride's purpose to explore its nature and deeds during World War II.

Made up of at least 15,000 soldiers, the 92nd was involved in many battles, despite a popular belief that blacks' main occupation during the war was on the sidelines, as cooks and truck drivers.

But it was fraught with division and distrust, most notably between the black soldiers and white commanders. Thus we see the soldiers caught in the middle, fighting an enemy in front, with white American racism at their backs.

McBride's book is a meditation on "enemy". "Which enemy?" one character muses bitterly. "The Germans? The Italians?" These black soldiers have been treated with more respect by the Italians than by their own officers, and they are struck by the fact that, come the end of the war, German "enemies" will be able to settle in the US and have more opportunities than the blacks who fought for their country.

"They said the Negro couldn't fight. We're proving he can. That's progress," one insists, and another replies: "Progress? How 'bout that time we was on training manoeuvres back in Arizona and we stopped at that restaurant for lunch, and them German POWs was being marched around out there, and they served them inside the restaurant while we had to stand outside at attention in hundred-and-ten-degree heat. And only after the so-called enemy ate inside did they serve us - from the back door, by the outhouse, on paper plates. You forgot that?"

Such shameful events awaken us to the texture of these men's lives, and are powerful shaping tools for McBride's characters, but are only a part of what his story is about.

Train, carrying the often-unconscious little boy, and accompanied now by the three other members of his squad, Stamp, Bishop and Hector, stumbles past the church of St Anna di Stazzema, where they soon learn that just a couple of days previously an SS unit has massacred 560 villagers, and into the village of Bornacchi. Here they stay, looked after by suspicious and frightened villagers, waiting for some communication from their commander, the lethally inexperienced and arrogant Captain Nokes.

Train, who initially rejects the injured boy - he's white, after all, and Train has never before even touched a white person - comes to love him fiercely and protectively, a love that is utterly reciprocated by the boy who, as innocent as Train, is lost in a hazy, frightening world of amnesia and incoherency. But, as history encroaches ever more insistently upon the village, in the form of a group of partisans hiding in the nearby hills, and the Germans who are storming down the mountains towards them, the boy begins to regain his memory, and as he reveals his past, the many strands of this story are beautifully, horrifically woven together.

Several miracles happen in this powerful book. McBride, who is indeed a devout Christian, has said that miracles happen when you believe in God. I would say that belief in God is itself one of the miracles of that time and place, where it would be easier to believe in the Dark than the Light. Yet McBride is determined to demonstrate the connective tissue that is the human spirit, and how the acknowledgement of humanity in those we might too easily categorise as the enemy, is also a miracle.

McBride is a great advocate for acknowledging the complexity of human affairs. He has said that truth lives in that grey space between black and white, and here he shows that to be startlingly true. Novels that carry the theme of the redemptive power of love are so common they're more the rule than the exception, but what is rare is the extraordinary beauty of McBride's demonstration of this simple yet profound idea.

Sceptre

$34.95