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why his work is so often filled with what Owen, in his famous “Preface,” had called “the pity of War”: “It was the Professor, riddled with bullets, dead,” whose body Bird came upon at Passchendaele: “He was covered with mud, had lost his steel helmet, had evidently got lost in the darkness, and there he lay, after years of study and culture, with glassy eyes and face upturned to the sky, a smashed cog of the war machine, with not a hope of burial excepting by a chance shell” (81–2). At war’s end, Bird’s friend Tommy, dying of the Spanish Flu and wanting only to “join the Boys” beneath the sod, will pity the poor survivor: “As long as I have memory I’ll not forget Tommy’s look as he watched me go from his ward. It was almost as if he pitied me, were sorry that I could not share his joy” (228).
    Just as often, fraternal pity extends beyond Bird’s band of brothers, for instance when he expresses empathy for the German officer he had let go at Vimy, or a German youth still in uniform and hiding in the closet of Bird’s billet at Mons: “‘Kamerad?’ he whimpered. I shook my head, motioned him to be still. No use to put him out on the street for that crazed bunch of celebrators. Even the Belgians would kill him” (221). So he scrounges civilian clothing to disguise the defeated “enemy” and letshim escape: “The change was effective. He appeared a young Belgian and would never draw a second glance” (221). At the same time, Bird can’t forget what the invaders have done to ordinary French folk: “We saw refugees with great, sweat-dried Percherons drawing farm carts heaped with mattresses and furniture, with lean cows tethered to the rear, and old men following with barrows and push carts piled with other possessions, nearly everyone dressed in his or her Sunday best, usually black, and very tired, foot sore and pathetic” (198). These are a type of victim rarely seen in All Quiet or in Generals Die in Bed . For good or ill, Bird acknowledges, if he does not condone, the thirst of non-combatants for reprisal: “The Frenchman stamped on the battered face [of a German officer] until we spoke sharply to him and walked away” (198). In Mons, he watches a German officer trying to escape: “He had to pass a big gate to get outside the yard and as he did a burly Belgian rose from where he had been waiting and struck with a sledge, crashing [sic] the German’s head like an eggshell. No one rebuked him or went near the body” (218).
    Turnabout is also fair play. When the pursuing Canadians came upon a German soldier in grey-green field dress resting from flight in Raismes Forest, one of Bird’s men, Giger, crept “up behind the unsuspecting Hun like a great, blood-thirsty tiger,” showing no mercy to the surrendering prisoner as he stood up with raised arms. Giger, who had always been disappointed in his failure “to kill a Hun,” viciously drove his bayonet into his prisoner’s belly:
    It was a ghastly, merciless thing, and I shuddered. Tommy stood, white-faced, and looked around for an officer. Giger grinned back at us. “How’s that?” he called. “I …”
    A second German shot up from some hiding place at the far end of the logs. He had not his bayonet but the woodman’s axe that had been left there, and before Giger could jump from danger or withdraw his bayonet he was cut down by a fearful blow on the neck and shoulder. Then the German ran like a deer – and no one fired a shot at him. (206–7)
    This representation of war seems less one-sided, less ideological, and more honest than those other narratives of passivity. It is also a vision of war that is less blinkered and far more complicated in terms of the moraldilemmas that individuals face in the field. And yet one cannot doubt the moral decency of the memoirist