Novels that show the sordid side of war are not scarce. Classics abound, but they do not glut; each book is as distinct as its war. Mariano Azuela’s “The Underdogs” (Penguin Classics, 148 pages, $8) realizes a war that we often forget, though it is relatively near at hand in time and space. Azuela (1873-1952) participated in the Mexican Revolution (1911-17), serving as a doctor in the army of Pancho Villa, before the fortunes of war sent him packing across the border to El Paso, Texas. Beginning in 1915, he serialized his novel in one of El Paso’s Spanish-language newspapers, El Paso del Norte.

“The Underdogs” was not published in Mexico until 1920, and it did not receive much attention until about 1925. But it now stands for the Mexican Revolution as “The Red Badge of Courage” stands for the American Civil War, and it represents a turning point in Latin-American literature itself. Because the revolution brought a host of regional armies together against a central government, Azuela’s novel necessarily undertook the portrayal of regional Mexican culture as meaningful territory, overturning decades of Eurocentric prejudice in intellectual Mexico.

Sergio Waisman’s new translation of “The Underdogs” therefore faces its biggest challenge in its treatment of Mexican dialects. Demetrio Macias, a local hero in the Sierras who becomes a general in Pancho Villa’s army, terrorizing the villages and cities of the plains, sometimes sounds like an American lug: “God willin’, … tomorrow, or perhaps even tonight, we will get another close-up of the Federales. What do you say, muchachos? Ready to show ’em ’round these paths and trails?”

Mr. Waisman’s translation of uneducated Mexican speech can be painful, but his version of educated speech is more masterful. After a token raid, Demetrio’s band of 20-odd rebels is approached by an intellectual opportunist, a self-mocking stand-in for Azuela himself, the ironically named Luis Cervantes. He tries to impress Demetrio with his rhetoric: “We are constitutive pieces of a great social movement that will lead to the exaltation of our motherland. We are instruments of destiny for the revindication of the sacred rights of the people.” Unhelpful neologisms such as “revindication” bring the satire of the original into clear focus.

It is not rhetoric that turns young Demetrio’s head, but Cervantes’s insinuating advice. He convinces the young rebels that tremendous rewards await them if they will only descend to the plains and take part in the great events of the revolution. As the short, cinematic chapters flick by, Azuela quickly brings his heroes from a state of relative innocence to one of chronic, uninspiring decadence. Bourgeois homes become stables, filled with manure from stolen ponies; libraries are burned, and, most hypocritically, the poor are spurned.

Azuela clearly admires his hero, Demetrio, who unlike most of his friends cares more for glory than for wealth. But the author seems ultimately to sympathize with Cervantes, a hateful coward who yet has the perspective to wonder if the revolutionaries are “nothing more than a bunch of bandits grouped together under a magnificent pretext.”

If Cervantes were merely a devil and Demetrio’s men were simply innocents suffering under his corrupting influence, “The Underdogs” would be no more than a footnote in literary history. But from the beginning even the most lovable of Demetrio’s friends, the oafish celibate Anastasio Montañés, is only as innocent as an animal. Here he is, just after he has slaughtered some wounded enemy: “His face still has that sweet look in his eyes, glowing with the ingenuousness of a child and the amorality of a jackal.”

“The Underdogs” is ultimately not a book about rooting for the little guy. It is a thoroughly discouraging account of human nature and especially of that little guy, he who doesn’t understand the big picture. Of all the book’s characters, Luis Cervantes is the only one who survives.

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There are many ways to be wry and cynical about war, the stories of Herman Charles Bosman (1905-51) show. In South Africa, Bosman is reputedly a household name, but “Mafeking Road” (Archipelago, 201 pages, $15) represents his stories’ first appearance here. Local color — a strong blend of Afrikaner jargon and cracker-barrel humor — makes him a difficult taste for Americans, though his English prose clearly owes a great deal to American classics by Mark Twain and, more dubiously, O. Henry.

The stories in “Mafeking Road” are told by Oom Schalk Lourens, an overly wise narrator who copies Twain’s trick of taking potshots at others in order to seem more human — more flawed — himself. He often mentions his own storytelling skill, giving each of his tales a self-conscious twist that often becomes his punch line. For example, the title story concerns one Floris Van Barnevelt, a man who can’t tell a war story because “he never knew the moment at which to knock the ash out of his pipe” and “what was still worse, he didn’t know what part of the story to leave out.”

Oom Schalk proceeds to tell Floris’s story, a pitiful account of an excursion during the Second Boer War, in which Floris’s grown son, Stephanus, deserted. We learn that Floris chased after Stephanus, but we do not learn what exactly happened. Oom Schalk mentions again that he, as a good storyteller, always leaves something out, and we surmise that Floris may have killed his own son.

Though sometimes cute, Bosman’s stories are intriguing. Readers of J.M. Coetzee, if they can stomach Bosman’s occasional corniness, will find something to ponder in these highly nested pieces, with their peculiar blend of brutal events and narrative invention.

blytal@nysun.com