[Measured] against classic war novels Dobrica Ćosić's massive work [A Time of Death], a shortened version of an even vaster cycle of novels about Serbia's struggle for survival during World War One, hardly qualifies as a masterpiece.

The author may have had War and Peace in mind all along; he may have wanted to communicate the reality of war even more graphically than Tolstoy did—in one battle scene a student soldier hears the screams of men hit by shrapnel, and exclaims: "I don't remember anything like that from War and Peace."—but the novel lacks Tolstoy's luminous and urgent realism. It, too, paints a broad canvas and fills it with a host of representative types, but Tolstoy's willed randomness is missing. There is too much crucial dialogue and revealing interior monologue here; too many neatly described scenes. Of course, it may be unfair to compare every...