Profile of Paul Fussell

A wonderful profile of Paul Fussell in the Guardian, that has one of the best opening lines I have read in a while: "On November 11 1944, Paul Fussell woke up surrounded by corpses." This could be the beginning of an intriguing short story or novel, but is rather part of the biography of a talented man who has written some of the best work on the personal experience of the soldier in war. Unlike many histories of the First World War, that had until then focussed on the diplomatic errors of politicians and the strategic errors of generals, Fussell examined the literary work of the soldiers to express the individual's experience:

The horrors inflicted by and on ground troops, Fussell believes, are almost never acknowledged. "American readers needed someone to tell them what war was really like," he says, "because by the 1970s the romanticising of the second world war had already begun. And so I tried to cut away parts of it - tell them what a trench smelt like and what dead GIs smelt like and so forth."

For his friend Edmund Keeley, a retired Princeton English professor, Fussell's classic literary study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), is without question his most important work. In it, he set out his stall, emphasising tactical errors and blunders, drawing the reader's attention to the hordes of terrified, disgusted deserters. He described the everyday texture of life at the front, from freezing cold, rats, lice and terrible food, to horrific mutilations and murders. But what distinguished the book from other critical accounts of the world wars, or of Vietnam, was its literary emphasis. "I think he was the first to see the connection between those various wars and the way they were described and who was doing the describing," says Keeley. "Style, how you use words, how you use rhetoric, can end up being a kind of symbol of how a whole generation is thinking."

Fussell showed that the British were masters of a euphemistic diction whereby, in wartime, friends became "comrades", danger was "peril", to die was "to perish" and the dead were "the fallen" or "the dust". He suggested that to call the killing fields of the Somme a "battle" was "to suggest that these events parallel Blenheim and Waterloo not only in glory but in structure and meaning". In the work of the soldier-poets and memoirists who were the focus of his research, Fussell discovered a series of ironic contrasts. Poppies and roses, symbols of blood and passion spent, were reminders too of a pre-war pastoral idyll. Sunrises and sunsets, moments of ritualised terror in the trenches as soldiers were required to "stand-to", became, in the poems, ripe with moral and religious suggestion.

Military historian John Keegan, author of The First World War (1998) and a friend of Fussell's, calls The Great War a "simply superb book that will be read long after he's dead." He says its effect was "revolutionary", in that it showed how literature could be a vehicle for expressing the experience of large groups: "How many good books are there about the first world war at the individual level? What Paul did was go to the literary treatments of the war by 20 or 30 participants and turn them into an encapsulation of a collective European experience." Geoff Dyer, whose grandfather fought in the first world war and who cites Fussell as an influence on his book The Missing of the Somme (2001), sees him as a pioneer, "one of the first people to investigate the question of remembrance". Joseph Heller called The Great War "the best book I know of about world war one".

Paul Fussell's latest book, The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945, has just been published.