02/09/2025
Have you read a book that walks into your hands the way a memory drifts into your mind on a sleepless night? Steinbeck’s Once There Was a War is one of those books. It reads less like history and more like an overheard confession, the kind soldiers might make when the night is too long and the silence is unbearable.
The book is not a grand declaration of war’s glory or horror, but a collection of dispatches: small stories that, like pebbles, fill your pocket until you feel the weight of the whole world dragging you down. Each fragment feels alive, urgent, as though Steinbeck wrote with his pen pressed against the pulse of the men he met.
Steinbeck himself went to the war not as a soldier, but as a correspondent. That distance, and his instinct for human detail, make the writing unique. He did not chase explosions or strategy. He listened, he noticed. He carried back to us the overlooked, men making coffee, waiting for mail, patching their boots, or trying to laugh through the ache of longing.
What struck me most is how Steinbeck refuses to romanticize. His prose has no polish of propaganda, no cheap sheen of heroism. He writes about boredom and absurdity as much as bravery. One moment you are reading about men joking around a table, and the next you feel the undertow of grief, because you know some of them will not live to joke tomorrow.
The title itself: Once There Was a War, feels like a lullaby gone bitter. It suggests that what we are reading is already past, but Steinbeck never lets us forget that while wars end, their shadows linger in people’s bones, in memory, in silence. He is not just telling us “there was a war,” but “once,” as though to remind us of the fairy-tale rhythm, the cruel irony of repetition.
Reading these dispatches, I found myself remembering my grandfather’s stories, how he would sometimes fall quiet in the middle of a sentence, his eyes fixed on something I could not see. Steinbeck captures that same hesitancy, that refusal to give us a neat conclusion. War, for him, is not a single story. It is a thousand unfinished ones.
The humanity in the book rests in its smallest gestures. A soldier lending another his last cigarette. A nurse writing letters for the wounded. A cook stirring soup in a battered pot while artillery rumbles in the distance. Steinbeck knew that history is written not only by generals and treaties, but by ordinary people who endure the unbearable by doing the ordinary.
His writing also reveals his moral vision. He does not judge the men for their flaws: cowardice, cruelty, fear, but he notices them, and in noticing, honors them as human beings rather than faceless soldiers. War, in Steinbeck’s view, is less about ideology and more about endurance, about what happens to a man’s soul when he is thrown into chaos.
And yet, Steinbeck is not entirely without hope. He shows humor, resilience, the way men create pockets of life in the middle of destruction. A broken guitar strummed in a bunker can feel like a hymn. A letter from home becomes more powerful than any weapon. These glimpses remind us that even in the darkest hours, humanity flickers.
For readers today, the book does something quietly radical. It refuses the distance of time. Wars may have different names, but the emotions remain the same: the waiting, the dread, the fragile laughter. To read Steinbeck is to realize how close we always are to repeating history, and how fragile peace really is.
The prose itself has that characteristic Steinbeck simplicity: direct, uncluttered, but with currents running beneath. He does not tell us how to feel; he hands us the rawness and lets it ache in our hands. That restraint makes the sorrow sharper, the moments of kindness more luminous.
When I closed the book, I felt I had been entrusted with something, not knowledge in the academic sense, but fragments of memory, like someone pressing photographs into my palm and saying, “Keep these safe.” That is what Once There Was a War feels like: the safekeeping of lives, gestures, and voices that would otherwise vanish.
And so Steinbeck leaves us with the truth that war is never truly over. The guns may fall silent, but the stories remain lodged in us, shaping the way we look at a quiet street, a boy in uniform, a name on a list. War, he reminds us, is not only about what was destroyed, but about what survives, half-broken, trembling, human.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4m5dXtK
