“Really, sir, I don’t belong on this battlefield at all,’ the tan soldier answered. ‘I’m strictly a non-combat man.’ I thought to myself we were two of a kind.” The first piece in this collection of A.J. Liebling’s World War II writings opens with a red herring: Liebling traveled extensively throughout France during the war, writing long, literary dispatches for The New Yorker that richly evoke the atmosphere of a country under siege—a battlefield.