Peter Cawdron, 2024, 366 pages.
These are frightening times. Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu seem set on a course that could easily lead to wider wars in Europe and the Middle East. We’re already witness to the terrifying impact of drones and artificial intelligence in vast areas surrounding the conflicts in the Ukraine and Gaza, areas once assumed out of harms’ way. Add the nuclear arsenals and various unknown weapons and the capacity for world-wide horror and carnage has expanded to threat levels even exceeding those of the cold war.
That may seem a grim way to begin a book review, but “Anatomy of Courage” doubles as a warning from Peter Cawdron that the clouds of war are gathering, and as a reminder of just how horrible and futile war is.
His latest is inspired, as is often the case, by an earlier work. In this instance, though, it didn’t come from Hugo nominees of years past; it came from “Anatomy of Courage: The Classic WWI Study of the Psychological Effects of War” written by Winston S. Churchill’s personal doctor, Sir Charles Watson, Lord Moran. To this day, his 1945 work, based on his experiences in the trenches in WW1, is considered a seminal discussion of the psychology and trauma of war.
It’s very likely that Cawdron, who obviously never fought in World War I, read Erich Maria Remarque’s ‘Nothing New in the West’ (probably better known as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and probably saw at least two of the three movie adaptations (the most recent one, a 2022 German effort, is probably the best). He also mentions in his afterword that some of his intuition to the personality of the medical officer who is the viewpoint character comes from the television series MASH (he mentions a vignette that I remember seeing from when it first aired, a discussion between the surgeon Hawkeye (Alan Alda) and Father Mulcahy (William Christopher) in which Hawkeye says “They say war is hell. But it’s worse than hell”. Mulcahy asks why he thinks that. Hawkeye replies “Because in hell, there are no innocent bystanders.”
The basic plot is this: aliens land near Novobinsk in Russia. Nothing is known of them, but hostilities break out. The aliens, dubbed the “Novo” because of their landing site, can detect any electronics above the level of an LED light, and have a blue-lightning weapon that is immensely destructive. Stripped of any technology developed since about 1960, the humans resort to trench warfare to contain the alien threat. The aliens adopt the same tactics, and the battlefield, some 400 miles long, becomes a grinding destructive slog like World War I.
You might ask, as I did for much of the book, why a space-faring culture with obviously advanced technology adopts such primitive battle tactics. Cawdron does have an answer for that, of course.
The viewpoint character is injured on his first foray, and ends up in a crater with a Novo, who is also injured. He dresses his wound, and then applies a dressing to the injury the Novo has suffered. This leads to something heretofore no human had accomplished: communication with the enemy.
Can one doctor bridge the fear, mistrust and grievance that is the inevitable consequence of war?
Cawdron does his best to show the horror and disgrace of war. In one unforgettable scene, a character notices a white object sticking out from the churned-up mud surrounding a bombed-out farmhouse. Looking closer, he sees its the skeletal arm of a child, perhaps six years old. It’s a jarring, unforgettable image.
Read “Anatomy of Courage” and remember—the next war will be far worse than what Cawdron portrays.
Available at Amazon and Goodreads.