Places Discussed
(Critical Guide to Settings and Places in Literature)
Army camp
Army camp. U.S. training camp in which the novel’s three soldiers prepare to be sent overseas. In the boring, restrictive confines of army camp life, Andrews, Chrisfield, and Fuselli chafe under the dull monotony of daily training and routine designed to force them to perform their tasks in lock-step automation. Ill-trained for combat, their unit departs by ship to France, where the three young men begin another period of boredom while awaiting their assignment to the war front.
*France
*France. While waiting for orders to move to the front, the men get their first look at the shell-shocked and wounded men returning from a battle at the Argonne Forest. As they confront the realities of battle injuries and exhaustion, their ardor for fighting the “Huns” begins to cool, and they resent even more the endless routine and orders to march here and there seemingly without purpose. When their orders finally come through, Fuselli’s spirits lift. He wants to move up in the ranks to corporal and is eager for the glory that frontline combat will give him a chance to earn. However, his sergeant’s promises are false and the promotion he expects goes to another. Fuselli gives up on himself and insults the sergeant, and is arrested for insubordination.
As the troop train moves slowly through the darkness, it passes a hospital train returning from the front, and a rumor spreads that Germans have...
(The entire section is 558 words.)
