Howard Fast is a historical novelist known for "Spartacus," "Citizen Tom Paine," "Freedom Road," "The American." If he is a chronicler of some of mankind's most glorious moments, he is also a register of some of our more senseless deeds.

His newest novel, "The Hessian," is a hard flint chip of a story, a shard preserved from the American Revolution. Mr. Fast holds up his flint to the present and says, in effect, this is what war does to men, this is the insane inflexiblity that war induces, that induces war.

As a result of a chain of singularly pigheaded circumstances, a Hessian boy is wounded and pursued into the swamps of colonial Connecticut. He is found and given shelter by a Quaker family living in a small Connecticut community, a society composed mainly of Puritans….

The Puritans who move against the boy are not evil. Mr. Fast...