In his opening pages, Fussell recalls the famed Children's Crusade of the early 13th century, when 50,000 young people may or may not have marched into the Holy Land in an attempt to free it of Islam. It was an adventure that strikes modern sensibilities as nothing if not appalling.

He then points to Eisenhower's unironic invocation of the term "crusade" 700 years later, on the eve of D-day. It was an invasion that would cost 135,000 American boys their lives -- boys, Fussell points out, who were mostly still teenagers.

"I mean no disrespect to the memory of Dwight D. Eisenhower by examining his term crusade," Fussell writes. "It made some sense at the moment, even if many of the still unbloodied troops were likely to ridicule it. If they read or heard the Supreme Commander's words at all, they were doubtless embarrassed to have so highfalutin a term applied to their forthcoming performances and their feelings about them."

What the troops understood beforehand and what Eisenhower saw fit to forget even in retrospect (the title of his war memoir was Crusade in Europe) forms the bulk of Fussell's short book: a litany of the horrors of war experienced by and perpetrated by our boys in Europe.

There is mention, for instance, of the extensive Allied bombing of Pas de Calais in 1944 to further the ruse that this would be the D-day landing spot. "Even the Germans found it hard to believe that their enemy would kill so many civilians merely to maintain a deception," Fussell notes.
There is a revealing examination of American soldiers' attitudes toward the French and vice versa, as well as an acknowledgement of just how much better supplied GIs were next to the Brits (compare 22.5 sheets of toilet paper per day for the former to just three for the latter) -- a fact that resulted for the Americans in better hygiene and lots more sex with British girls.

There are many instances of gross incompetence -- incompetence that, for Fussell, was the rule and not the exception -- leading to countless military and civilian casualties alike. In one memorable chapter, ironically titled "One Small-Unit Action," Fussell narrates a platoon's doomed frontal assault on a superior German position. The order to attack may have been unintentionally precipitated by the platoon's lieutenant, who, in an argument with his superior, corrected the use of the word "revelant." The lieutenant was subsequently shot through the neck, and several soldiers were forced to painfully play dead for 12 hours before being rescued.

Fussell lets us see how talk of medals are used immediately after to cover up cowardice and ineptitude, and then how the unit's official history boils the horrifying encounter down to a "fracas," and a victorious one at that.

Fussell writes with characteristic anger, humanity and furious insight. His knowledge is wide-ranging -- he is by trade an English professor and has as much to say about poetry as he does about war -- but his voice thankfully lacks the somber, this-is-good-for-you quality of Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and What Every Person Should Know About War.

Still, The Boys' Crusade feels undercooked: too arbitrary in its choice of vignettes, too vague in its arguments. It's tough to figure if it's too short or, even at fewer than 200 pages, too long.

What redeems it in the end is its willingness to wonder about the complications of its title. In his chapter "The Camps," Fussell shows how the Holocaust provided, nearly after the fact, a viscerally powerful moral justification for the war's slaughter. On the other hand, discovery of the death camps also brought to the surface our own darkest impulses: "I will never take another German prisoner armed or unarmed," declared one American lieutenant at Dachau. "How can they expect to do what they have done and simply say 'I quit,' and go scot free? They are not fit to live."