"Ninety-nine percent" of American troops "would have escaped if there had been any non-shameful way out." Historian and literary scholar Paul Fussell reaches this conclusion not about America's most hated war - Vietnam - but World War II, a war that has taken on...

New York: The Modern Library 208 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0-679-64088-6 Publication Date: September 2003 Paul Fussell, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the greatest living chroniclers of World War II. Trained as a literary historian, he established a...

This is based on Paul Fussell's claim that the best way to interpret the Great War is by the use of Irony in the writing. The written account of a specific battle amidst an ongoing war, gives the people who are away from the front a glimpse into the soldier's life. Vera Brittain's account as a nurse, gives a nurse's perspective, and also the details about the injuries, and the magnitude of the destruction a war causes physically, as well as mentally. Irony, therefore, is the best way to depict all the horri