Richard Bausch’s 11th novel “Peace” (Knopf, $20), begins with a burst of gunfire on a road in Italy during World War II. Nine American soldiers discover a German officer with a “whore” in the straw bed of a gypsy cart.  Two of the soldiers, the “Kraut” and his female companion are dead within minutes. As the remaining soldiers carry on, their thoughts about what happened fester. The three men were killed more or less by the rules, but the squad sergeant had executed the woman.

All the men have a backlog of nightmare images, scenes of horror they’ve accumulated in the previous months. The distinction between war and murder could be important, or merely absurd.

We get the story from Corporal Marson, the man who “put down” the German. He is wary of his fellow “witnesses,” beaten down by the immersion in carnage, but still sentimental about honor and God. Like any sentient being in his circumstances, he’s traumatized, a victim of a still under-appreciated disorder, once diminished by the term “combat fatigue.”  At 26, Marson has a wife and 1-year-old baby at home, and is the oldest of the men in the squad.  A star athlete in high school, he invested some years playing baseball on a farm team, and — how times have changed – he’ll regret at some point that he waited so late in life to start a family and accept adult responsibility.

A few hours after the initial shootout, Marson is ordered to lead two of the men over a hill, which it soon becomes clear is a treacherous mountain, to look for Germans.  They commandeer the services of an old Italian man they’ve snatched from his horse cart on the road as “guide,” a function that for all they know this man may subvert.

Of course there is no “Peace,” in a tale of a recon foot patrol in Italy in 1944: The assignment, essentially, is to walk until they fire or are fired upon. Marson’s only experience of peace is a momentary contemplation of faraway stars in the night sky. The soldiers feud as they make the strenuous climb through freezing rain and snow. Marson is a Catholic from Washington, D.C.; Asch is a Jew from Boston; and Joyner is a mass of unconfronted contradictions, a clarinet-playing farm boy from Michigan, a racist and anti-Semitic teetotaler with a foul mouth. Their common bond as young men fighting fascism far from home does nothing to melt their petty differences. Soon Marson, and the reader, have to despair that any future evolution among humans will resolve into world peace. As the men discuss whether to report their sergeant’s crime, Asch quantifies it this way: “Between 1600 and 1865, you know how many collective years of peace there were? Years where nobody was killing anybody in armies anywhere in the world? Eleven. Eleven little years, bud.”

Bausch, who teaches writing at the University of Memphis, where he holds the Moss Chair of Excellence, has long been recognized as an important American short-story writer. “The Stories of Richard Bausch” (HarperCollins, $30) published in 2003, makes the case beautifully for his standing. His grasp of sustained narratives is sure as well: The previous year’s “Hello to the Cannibals” (HarperCollins, $40) weighed in at 700 pages. “Peace” feels like a long short story, a series of direct and simple lines that propel the reader to a conclusion of vast importance.