The New Yorker Book of War Pieces.

• Author: Schanberg, Sydney H.

The New Yorker Book of War Pieces. Anthology. Schocken Books, $12.95. One is tempted by the democratic urge to say that war reporting is no different than any other kind of reporting. But it wouldn't be accurate. True, you ask the same species of questions you ask when covering a story at city hall-who did what to whom, what were the motives, who's covering up information and why, etc.-and you employ the same skills of curiosity, doggedness, cunning, and occasionally arrogance to try to find out what's going on behind the official announcement. Yet when the story is about fellow humans being maimed and killed in large numbers, about whole nations thrown into disoriented confusion as they mobilize against imminent invasion, about cold fear as a constant in daily life and everyone struggling against it to achieve the appearance of normalcy, then the reponing does indeed take on a different quality-not least because the traditional teaching instilled in journalists to stay removed, not be touched, hold all emotion in check, finds itself, in wartime, thoroughly challenged and often stripped away.

Where traditional journalism speaks in a language that is controlled and sometimes veiled, reporting on war does not remit such remoteness. It demands intimacy. And it is this closeness, this attention to humanness, that makes the recent republication of The New Yorker Book of War Pieces, a collection of World War II articles from the magazine that was first issued in 1947, an occasion for applause. For while every piece in this anthology is not equally vivid or memorable, the overall aura of the book is one of distinguished, at times classic, journalism.

The collection also serves to remind us that magazines of quality like The New Yorker give writers a freedom they do not always enjoy on, say, newspapers, where too often the qualities of liveliness and flavor and the juice of real life are squeezed out of the copy in the rote-invoked names of objectivity and discipline. I myself, when I was overseas for a newspaper, had gifted editors who encouraged me to breathe, and I therefore suffered no such suffocation. But I think the norm on newspapers generally lies elsewhere-in homogenized forms more inhibiting than these chronicles of the second great war.

Here, as an example, is A.J. Liebling from Paris in the summer of 1940, as the German army draws closer and he is forced to make hasty plans to depart: "From the Spanish Consulate, I went to the Prefecture of Police, where I asked for a visa that would permit me to...