WOMEN AT WAR

GONE TO SOLDIERS By Marge Piercy. 703 pp. New York: Summit Books. $19.95.

THE battlefront has historically been the literary province of men and the home front that of women. Of course there have been exceptions, notably Virginia Woolf's ''Mrs. Dalloway,'' a slender novel in which she covered both fronts brilliantly in a single domestic postwar day. Now Marge Piercy attempts the same synthesis, but on a vast scale and with varying degrees of success.

''Gone to Soldiers,'' Ms. Piercy's most ambitious novel to date, follows the lives of 10 main characters, their families, friends and lovers throughout World War II. The extensively researched book gives the reader a strong sense of the war's events and locations, with sustained sections set in both the European and Pacific theaters as well as the United States. The disruption of civilian life and the weariness and terror of battle are shown in great detail. Occasionally, there is a distracting pedantic tone, as when the acronyms and full names of various organizations are given consecutively, or the action is halted for exposition.

The war is the focus for the novel's various characters, some of whose lives will converge before it is over. The most memorable are two larger-than-life heroines, a French-Jewish teen-ager named Jacqueline Levy-Monot and an American bomber pilot named Bernice Coates. Though they never meet, there is a vital connection between them: Bernice's brother, Jeff, becomes Jacqueline's colleague in the Jewish underground and her lover. The two women have other things in common, especially their need to escape domineering fathers. The widowed Professor Coates is oppressive in his control of Bernice, whom he has appointed his permanent housekeeper. Her long-dead mother, whose ''Latin and Greek were far superior to The Professor's,'' is only a vague role model; it is the war and Bernice's talent and love of flying that finally free her.

As the war progresses, Jacqueline becomes less antagonistic toward her Zionist Papa, partly because they are allied in their resistance work. We also learn, eventually, that Jacqueline's mother and her younger sister Rivka have both perished in the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp. (Rivka's twin, Naomi, had been sent while it was still possible to live with relatives in Detroit.) Their father is implicated in the twins' disparate destinies through a tragic decision, reminiscent of ''Sophie's Choice.''

In all novels, but especially in a war novel, the writer makes godlike choices, and it is to Ms. Piercy's credit that the casualties in ''Gone to Soldiers,'' except in the concentration camps, seem as random as in real life. She does not kill off her less interesting characters, as she might have done, as a matter of convenience, but gives them equal space, which made this reader impatient to return to the more interesting ones. Neither Louise Kahan, a popular-fiction writer; her former husband, Oscar; nor his young lover, Abra Scott, held my attention long. Despite their varied involvement in America's defense work, their self-involvement seems to overshadow the war.

The other major characters are more engrossing, but none so much, to my mind, as Jacqueline and Bernice. Most of Jacqueline's chapters are (in the tradition of Anne Frank and Etty Hillesum) diary entries. We watch her evolve from a rather vain and anti-Semitic young woman to a courageous worker for the Jewish underground. The wrenching account of her experiences in Auschwitz and on the Polish death march is the most powerful section of the book.