Dangerous Alliances : Of moral conflicts visited upon the ordinary during wartime : RESISTANCE: A Novel, <i> By Anita Shreve (Little, Brown & Co.: $21.95</i> ; <i> 240 pp.)</i>

Claire Daussois has been married to her distant cousin Henri for four years. They live in Delahaut, a French-speaking village in southern Belgium.

Claire is 24 years old as Anita Shreve’s new novel, “Resistance,” begins, on Dec. 30, 1943. Belgium has already fallen to the Nazis and a B-17 has just fallen in a Delahaut field. Claire and Henri are part of the Belgian resistance, the Maquis. Their tiny attic hiding place has been an incremental step to the French border for several (fortunate) Jews and airmen. But Henri is secretly ambivalent about having joined the resistance.

“You couldn’t say no. If you were asked, you had to join. He didn’t like to think too long about what might have happened to him if Anthoine hadn’t asked. Ride the war out is what he’d have done. And there would have been some shame in that. If he had any motivation, and it wasn’t much, it was that when this goddamn war was over he wanted to have done the right thing. Not the same as wanting to do the right thing. Not like Anthoine. Not like Claire. With her nursing and her languages.”

The moral conflicts in the village are visited on the ordinary; only the stakes have changed. Frail folks who might once have gossiped unkindly could now easily have a neighbor tortured, even murdered by the Gestapo. Common decency can take on a heroic proportion. Now, in Delahaut, people are transformed (or unveiled) by circumstance. Anthoine, for instance, bereft of physical grace, leads the local Maquis. His new role has seeded uncharacteristic authority and deftness. How could such a fat, ungainly man move so fast?

Henri grouses as he reluctantly follows Anthoine to the fallen plane. Later, Claire wonders: “Before the war, she had not known of Anthoine’s stamina or his intelligence, yet because he had changed so during the war, she could not predict how he might act in other matters as well. She thought also, that had it not been for the war, she might never have discovered that Henri, for all his steadiness, was, in crises, physically afraid.”

And Jean, a 10-year-old boy, is realistically confused and thrilled as he follows the pilot’s trail. “What he would do when he found the man he didn’t know. He pictured himself giving the flyer bread and cheese and water, and then leading him to safety. His imagination was suddenly excited as he envisioned helping him to escape to the French border, shaking hands with him like a grown man. But when he thought about this hard, doubts began to cloud his mind. Where could he offer the man shelter? He thought of his own barn, and then felt the hot flush of shame on the back of his neck. At school, some of the older boys had begun to whisper, in his hearing, ‘le fils du collabos , ‘ the son of a collaborator.” Jean ultimately brings the injured pilot (in a wheelbarrow) to the Daussois farm, where Claire is horrified that this boy had somehow correctly guessed she was a partisan.

Before reading “Resistance,” I knew it concerned a World War II affair between an American flyer and a Belgian farm wife. An acknowledged pathos-phobe I got an icky feeling: thoughts of the “Bridges of Belgium” snickered by. Mea culpa. I reached the last chapter with hungry eyes, wanting more than a few dwindling pages. A hot lump was in my throat. My eyes were moist. Astonishingly, I was moved.

Anita Shreve’s perceptive novel relates a simple story set in terrible times in a clear dispassionate voice. There is no romance here, even in the lovemaking. In this love story the thrusting emotion is fear. And fear illuminates each character individually--with courage or betrayal, greed, passion, selflessness. It is the pedestrian routine of death and survival in “Resistance,” that is finally heartbreaking.

The writer’s respect for her characters (even the ignoble ones) is striking, as is the meticulous attention to detail. And Shreve’s lyrical prose offers a keen counterpoint to the often grim settings. During the graphic cleansing of war wounds on a kitchen floor we read: “The morphine as always, was miraculous. She had never ceased to be moved by its power, by the way it could transform a face, remove years, give beauty to the wounded. Pain twisted a man’s features, made him ugly; but the morphine erased the pain.”

The emotional wallop of this novel snuck up on this unwary reviewer. Long after the events are over (the last chapter catches up with our characters 50 years later) the power and persistence of memory is conveyed as intense and universal. I couldn’t come away from “Resistance” without feeling compelled to wonder about other anonymous stories smoldering behind unfamiliar aged faces.