Literary Land Mines : FICTION : BIRDSONG,<i> By Sebastian Faulks (Random House: $25; 402 pp.)</i>

Judging by this century’s literature, we have been (certainly since 1914) and we remain deeply haunted by the shocking images, like shell fragments, of the first World War: the trenches, the shell holes and barbed wire, the mud and excrement, the terrible wounds and the casualties beyond calculation. To this day they are still digging up dangerous unexploded shells in parts of Belgium and France.

Meanwhile, we have had plenty of other wars, large and small, to experience, to read and write about; indeed there has been hardly a day in our bloody century without some form of murderous warfare going on somewhere. But the one that has lasted beyond the last of its survivors and public and private memories is the one that was once named the Great War and later, in vain hope, the Last War.

During the war and immediately thereafter, we had the work of poets--Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and many others--who first recorded and reported the sorrow and the pity of it, even before the novelists and historians rose to the occasion. And even though we have a wealth of poetry, fiction and nonfiction about some of our other wars, especially World War II and Vietnam, we keep coming back to the beginning, imagining and re-imagining it, still trying to make some sense out of that senseless and unspeakable slaughter.

The problem is and has been always the same. For those who experienced it most fully, the war was indescribable, ineffable; and for those coming along later, who could only imagine it, the experience was unimaginable. What the soldiers of that war were required to do, and what they obediently did, for the most part, staggers the imagination and tests belief to the quick. To write honestly and well about the first World War remains a great challenge to writers as the century ends. Last year novelist Pat Barker concluded her trilogy of novels about the Craiglockhart War Hospital with “The Ghost Road,” which won her Britain’s Booker Prize and was widely praised over here.

First published in England last year, “Birdsong,” by former journalist Sebastian Faulks, received highest critical praise, became a bestseller and earned Faulks the author of the year citation of the British Book Awards. “Birdsong” proves to be worthy in every way of its success and honors. Essentially it is the story of a young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, who goes to France in 1910 on a business trip, impulsively falls into a passionate and adulterous love affair and chooses to remain in France.

When the war comes, Wraysford joins the British army and by 1916 is in combat. He serves and suffers until the end. Both the publisher and any number of early reviewers have erroneously described the protagonist as the commander of a group of miners who tunnel under the battlefield to set off underground blasts beneath the German lines (in fact, he becomes an officer in the infantry). Some of the most vivid writing deals with the dangerous work of the sappers, and this element is a less familiar part of the story of trench warfare. The commanding officer of the sappers, Capt. Weir, is Wraysford’s best and closest friend; Wraysford makes some underground forays with them, including an incredible venture in the war’s last days, but he is an over-the-top infantry officer.

The accounts of combat both above and below ground, ringing with credibility and authenticity, are among the finest that I have ever read. The sensuous, affective surfaces, the details, the fully imagined physicality of life and death are so powerful as to be almost unbearable. That these things are borne with pride and honor by fully dimensional characters who engage us, first to last, stands as a tribute to the author’s remarkable skill and tact and, at moments, dazzling virtuosity.

For example, the final combat scenes of the novel suddenly and adroitly shift to the points of view of several German characters. Everything changes, refocuses, clicks into place. As a war novel, “Birdsong” can surely stand among the best of our age.

But Sebastian Faulks is after something more than that. His story aims to be larger, more inclusive, much more ambitious. Some sense of the scope and purpose of the story is shown in the structure. There are seven parts of the story, each identified by time and place in the following sequence: “France 1910,” “France 1916,” “England 1978,” “France 1917,” “England 1978-’79,” “France 1918,” “England 1979.” We see the world before the war--provincial, industrial France, Amiens on the river Somme. Here the young Wraysford falls in love with the beautiful Madame Isabelle Azaire with passionate and disastrous consequences.

Intercutting with a chronological story of Stephen Wraysford’s war experiences, we have England in the late 1970s and the story of Elizabeth Benson, who proves to be Wraysford’s granddaughter.

With a busy modern life and troubles of her own, she acts on (genetic) impulse to find the story of her grandfather--thus, in a sense, creating the story of this book. In the final chapter, she is fully involved, in a scene as vivid as any other in the book, as she gives birth.

After a hard unflinching look at the past, the story turns around in earned celebration of the future. The future is set free, not by ignorance of the past but by digging deep there (as did the miners under no-man’s land). In a diary that Elizabeth decodes, her grandfather had written: “No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.” Elizabeth Benson and her creator, the greatly gifted Sebastian Faulks, prove him wrong about that.