SOURCE: “An Unending Circle of Pain: William March's Company K,” in Ball State University Forum, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 33-46.

On 25 July 1917, just over three months after America's entry into World War I and a fortnight or so after the first contingent of the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in Paris, William Campbell, then aged twenty-four and employed as a clerk and subpoena server for a large law partnership in New York, applied for enlistment in the United States Marine Corps. He was accepted on 31 July, joining Company F, Marine Barracks, Parris Island, South Carolina, and was subsequently transferred to 133rd Company at the Marines' new base at Quantico, Virginia, in early January the following year. In February, the company sailed from Philadelphia in the USS Von Steuben, arriving in Brest on 24 February 1917.

Four weeks later, Campbell joined the 43rd Company (“Company F”) in the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Regiment. On 18 June at Belleau Wood, as a result of machine gun fire, he received wounds to his left shoulder and to his head which hospitalized him for nearly three weeks. He was subsequently appointed company clerk and, after taking part in the St. Mihiel salient offensive, was rapidly promoted, first to corporal on 24 September and then to sergeant exactly one week later on 1 October. In later years, Campbell, in his typically whimsical fashion, was to attribute his service promotions to “right living and clean thinking.”¹

In the early days of October 1917 the company was engaged in offensive operations in the Champagne sector and on the Blanc Mont Ridge. It was during the latter operation that Campbell, while detailed on statistical work, voluntarily assisted in giving first aid to the wounded and when, on 5 October, the counterattacking Germans advanced to within three hundred yards of the dressing station, he took up a position in the lines helping the defense. Although he was “twice wounded, he remained in action under heavy fire, refusing to be evacuated, until the enemy had been repulsed.”² For his “extraordinary heroism” during this action he was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Navy Cross.

In the last days of the war, the company participated in offensive operations in the Argonne Forest and, with the declaration of the armistice, marched towards the Rhine on the heels of the retreating German army, finally arriving in Segendorf, Germany, in mid-December.

At the beginning of March 1917 Campbell was detached for duty at the University of Toulouse, being one of the 1,136 in the School Department taking advantage of the several courses of training provided by the university. As light relief from his studies, he coauthored the lyrics of the musical comedy Getting Toulouse, a show entirely devised and presented by the student body.

In July 1917 he rejoined Company F, which toward the end of that same month sailed from Brest on the USS George Washington, arriving in Hoboken on 3 August. Campbell received his discharge in Quantico on 13 August on the expiration of his enlistment.

Although at the time the armistice was signed Campbell had been in poor physical condition,³ he came back to America “in good shape.”⁴ He returned to his birthplace—Mobile, Alabama—and joined the Waterman Steamship Corporation, a rapidly developing local company, as an employee in its Traffic Department. Within two years, he was made the company's traffic manager and established an office in Memphis, Tennessee, then one of the world's largest hardwood and cotton centers. He travelled widely on company business—Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cincimnati—and in 1930 was back in New York, having opened up another company office at 11 Broadway. His good work was rewarded when in 1931 he was elected a vice president of the company and thus, as he put it, “elevated to featured roles.”⁵ In November 1932 he sailed to Hamburg on the SS President Harding to act as Waterman's European representative. His arrival in Germany antedated by approximately two months Hitler's coming to power as Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

In the years following his discharge from the Marine Corps, Campbell began writing short stories, initially, so he said, as an antidote to boredom. He had written poetry and prose as a youth and had seen some of this early work published in a southern newspaper. In the postwar years it is possible that, to begin with, he did not seriously contemplate becoming a professional writer. His principal energies were still being directed towards furthering his business career.

What is certain, however, is that he could not escape the memories of the things he had witnessed and personally experienced in France during those catalytic months in 1918. As O. B. Emerson has observed: “His experiences in the war were to be the single greatest influence on his life and literary career.”⁶ Clint Bolton, a New Orleans newsman who knew Campbell intimately during the last two years of his life, has written: “[Campbell] saw the savagery and the utter human waste in war as a young man with little or no experience in man's true brutality. Until he entered the service he had never seen violent death … but … [he] saw then and knew forever we humans are truly violent people.”⁷ Campbell was by no means unique in arriving at this conclusion—a basic truth, if ever there was one—but he was endowed with a very considerable creative gift and, working from the war letter-diary he had sent from France to his older sister, Margaret, he began composing the episodes and vignettes which were eventually to become collectively his first book, Company K.

In the October 1929 issue of the magazine The Forum, Campbell published under the pseudonym William March, his maternal family name, his first important short story, “The Holly Wreath,” a work also based on his war experiences but not forming part of the Company K cycle. From then on, the inner conflict for ascendancy between William Campbell, the businessman, and William March, the writer, lasted until he summarily ended it in the late thirties by resigning his position with the Waterman Steamship Corporation. By that time, thanks to his judicious acquisition of Waterman stock during the company's early years, March found himself a comparatively rich man and could afford to devote all his time to writing.⁸

Following “The Holly Wreath,” a steadily growing number of March's stories began appearing in American literary magazines, including several collections of related episodes from the Company K cycle. “The Dappled Fawn,” an earlier third person version of the eighty-seventh section of Company K (“Private Leo Brogan”) was published in the Winter 1930 Prairie Schooner. “Fifteen from Company K” appeared in the November-December 1930 issue of The Midland; “Nine Prisoners” in the December 1931 number of The Forum; “Sixteen and the Unknown Soldier” in the Spring 1932 Clay; and “Two Soldiers” in Contempo for May 1932. “Fifteen from Company K” was reprinted in both the Best Short Stories of 1931 and the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1931, and “Nine Prisoners” was included in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1932. Company K was published in the United States by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas on 19 January 1933, a few weeks after March's arrival in Germany. The British edition was brought out by Victor Gollancz Ltd. on 20 March of the same year.

During the twenties and the early thirties a veritable flood of war books had issued forth from the publishing houses, and it was no wonder that by 1933, after more than a decade of so saturated a market, one reviewer even went so far as to suggest it would be preferable to fight another war than to have to read another war book. For all that, Company K was enthusiastically received. Many reviewers referred to it as the Spoon River Anthology of the trenches. The University of Alabama Alumni News regarded it as the “Book of the Year.” Three months later, the British reviews proved to be equally enthusiastic.

Inevitably, the question must be posed: to what extent is Company K based on fact? As Richard Crowder observes, although March maintained that Company K was not autobiographical, the book surely had its roots in events that March had personally experienced, witnessed, and felt.⁹ This Clint Bolton confirms. March confessed to him, “I've used people, places and incidents in my fiction from real life.” When Bolton, referring specifically to Company K, asked March if any of his old marine comrades got in touch with him after the book had been published, March replied: “A couple wrote me in care of the publisher, wanting to know if this or that person was So-and-so. … I never answered their letters. What good would it do? I would only get involved in needless correspondence.”¹⁰

There is no doubt that the composition of Company K was in part an exercise in self-therapy, but quite obviously the writing of the book could not entirely eradicate the scars the war had ingrained on March's mind. Dr. Edward Glover, the Scottish analyst March consulted in London in the mid-thirties, has recalled: “He would occasionally give you a Company K reminiscence, but it wasn't [a] dominating feature. … His reaction to the war was, ‘What do you expect of life?’ It wasn't cynical exactly. It was as if he said, ‘I know the worst. It's unprintable, but there it is.’ He filtered these disillusioned convictions through the osmotic filter of literary activity, combining it, however, with creative and reparative impulse.”¹¹

A skeleton history of the fictional Company K's war exploits is given in the novel by Corporal Stephen Waller, the company clerk, the post that March himself held in Company F. “Company K went into action at 10:15 P.M. December 12th, 1917, at Verdun, France, and ceased fighting on the morning of November 11th, 1918, near Bourmont, having crossed the Meuse River the night before under shell fire; participating during the period set out above, in the following major operations: Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne. … The percentage of casualties in killed, wounded in action, missing or evacuated to hospital suffering from disease, was considerably higher than average (332.8 percent).”¹²

The history of Company K is, however, told in greater detail in the 112 other sections which together with Waller's report make up the book, each section being narrated by a different member of the company and being of a length varying from a mere nine lines to ten pages. When asked if he had been influenced by Dos Passos when deciding upon the technique he would use in writing the book, March replied: “I think both of us arrived at the style without even knowing about the other. Immediately following World War I there were great changes. Newspaper headlines and stories had more impact. More shock power, if you like. The film newsreel with the short, choppy but telling captions was an influence. The leisurely, literary pace of the 19th century just had no place for us. So our style, particularly when we wrote about a war we knew intimately, took on the immediacy, the urgency of the stepped up events of the period. No, I think we all had the feeling and that's how it came about.”¹³

Most critics and reviewers accepted the book's episodic structure as a valid and indeed potent literary technique. But some reviewers, L. P. Hartley among them, were disturbed by it: “Looked at from the aesthetic standpoint Company K has this defect: the individual pieces are so short, and have so little relation to those that precede and follow them, that they give no impression of continuity. The book is a collection of fragments.”¹⁴

On the contrary, Company K is in many ways a superbly ordered book. Despite the apparent looseness of construction its fragmentary surface aspect suggests, it possesses an underlying density and unity. Corelating thematic threads weave their courses in and out of the individual narratives, linking them and binding the whole into a structure of remarkable tensile strength. The deliberately pithy style succeeds in saying more in 250 or so pages than is normally said in a volume of three or four times that length. It is a considerable achievement for a first novel and could surely have been attained only by the most selective and preserving distillation.

The book is roughly divided into seven principal parts or phases, these being, like the sections of which they are constituted, of unequal length. The first part consists merely of the section narrated by Private Joseph Delaney. It is a section of general and philosophical reminiscence in which the purpose and the main themes of the book are stated. Delaney, who in many respects may be regarded as March's alter ego, reflects on the book he has just finished writing, the story of the men of his own company, and wonders if he has succeeded in what he had set out to do. “I wish there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a huge wheel, each story hung on a different peg until the circle is completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until the things of which I have written took life and were recreated, and became part of the wheel, flowing toward each other, and into each other; blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending circle of pain. … That would be the picture of war. And the sound that the wheel made, and the sound that the men themselves made as they laughed, cried, cursed or prayed, would be, against the falling of walls, the rushing of bullets, the exploding of shells, the sound that war, itself, makes. …” (pp. 13-14/p. 2.). The whole section is permeated with a sense of the horror and the futility of war and of the guilt that war, and participation in war, engenders. “You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the cornflowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there” (p. 16/p. 4). And so, with these words, the central traumatic episode of the book—the senseless execution of the twenty-two young German prisoners—is anticipated.

The next five sections of the book cover the period of training in America and the fourteen-day voyage by transport across the Atlantic to France. There is an almost idyllic episode in Virginia. In another section, a group of marines, attempting to evade the ban imposed by the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, on the sale of liquor to service men, visit a remote bar, only to find, when the bartender tauntingly refuses to serve them, that the arm of authority is long and all-embracing. On the transport, Corporal Walter Rose is instrumental in bringing about the sinking of a U-boat. The atmosphere throughout this part of the book is almost heady with a sense of enthusiasm and purpose, typifying the romantic ideal of the man going off to fight for his country, sure in the belief that God and right are on his side. Even the girl Corporal Jerry Blandford picks up in a drugstore eventually succumbs to his propositions when she learns he is going overseas the following week: she is prepared to sacrifice her virtue and her reputation, as he is prepared to sacrifice his life, for the good of the cause.

The third part of the book, that covering the period between arrival in France and immediately before the attack through Belleau Wood, takes up the next eleven sections. The relationship between the troops and the French civilians proves to be somewhat uneasy. The men find it difficult to understand why it is they are not being greeted with open arms, unable to appreciate that their almost childlike exuberance and their vastly different standard of values can arouse only resentment in the minds of the war-weary and war-bereaved French. The regular soldiers, realizing now that the crunch is near, begin to question anew the worth both of the officers who are to lead them into battle and of the men whom they are themselves to lead—and find officers and men equally wanting. The company is engaged in some minor skirmishes: loosing off a few rounds at an unseen enemy in the trenches at Verdum, and some impersonal, but highly successful, sniping by Sergeant Wilbur Tietjen. No one is killed. It is all still rather fun.

In the next part of the book—the longest—the mood radically changes. War, for the company, begins in earnest. Man's basic cruelty, as well as his basic nobility, is vividly exemplified in the following sixty-nine sections. Private Christian Geils, crazed with fear and fleeing from the battlefield at Soissons is shot in the back by Sergeant Donohoe. Three marines capture a frightened young German soldier and delight in telling him they have been given specific orders to mutilate each prisoner they take. Lieutenant Archibald Smith is murdered by Private Edward Carter, who believes the officer to be persecuting him. Private Bernard Glass defiles the hospitality shown by the old couple on whom he is billetted in Blenod-les-Toul. Private Richard Starnes gives up his gas mask to a German prisoner during a gas attack. Sergeant Marvin Mooney, finding a wounded German soldier who pleads for water, clubs the man to death. The Unknown Soldier suffers his horrible, lingering passion on the barbed wire. But the central episode, the episode which stands as the emotional peak and pivot of the whole book, is that recounting the shooting of the German prisoners, a deed that has its inevitable reprecussions long after the war has ended and the various perpetrators have returned to civilian life.

The fifth phase of the book, consisting of five sections, relates certain incidents that occur during the period from the declaration of the armistice to the time the company finally leaves France for home. The men attend a Y.M.C.A. dance. A rich lady and her husband call at a hospital and offer to entertain three soldiers for the day, stipulating however that the three chosen should not bear visible gruesome wounds. Private Albert Hayes buys a sweater at the canteen, paying ten dollars for it, only later to discover it contains a note from the old lady of seventy-two who had knitted it as a gift through Ladies Aid.

The next twenty-one sections make up the sixth phase of the book and tell what happens to the men after their return to civilian life. Just as the second phase of the book was imbued with a sense of enthusiasm and purpose, so this penultimate phase is full of a sense of bitterness and disillusionment. The cowards and the malingerers are feted equally with the heroes, as Private Howard Bartow observes with some cynical satisfaction. A physical wound, preferably slight, is sufficient to make a man a hero in the eyes of people at home, whereas a psychological wound is at best misunderstood or at worst leads inevitably to the asylum or to suicide. People's memories tend to be conveniently short. Once the initial welcoming home ceremonies are over and the returning vets reabsorbed into the life they abandoned a couple of years or so before, it is what they are now that counts, not what they were or what they did during the war. Loans for prospective business ventures are only advanced if adequate collateral can be offered in return. A man is recognized as a hero only so long as there is need for him to be one.

The last section and the last part of the book complement the first section and part as an episode of general reminiscence. Many years after the war has ended, Private Sam Ziegler revisits the company's old training camp, hoping perhaps to recapture some of the atmosphere and spirit that existed in those long-ago days. He asks to see the camp roster and recognizes the name of Sergeant “Pig Iron” Riggin. When they meet, Ziegler finds that he and Riggin have become strangers to each other. They walk round the camp together and go into the bunkhouse the company had once occupied. Little silver plates on the walls record the names of the men who had once slept in the various bunks. But, for the most part, the names are only names and cannot now be related to faces or deeds. In the end, Ziegler regrets having returned to the camp at all. On this sad and muted note, the book ends.

Company K, then, has a true beginning, middle, and end. Although here and there, principally in the postwar sections, the individual narrators adopt a retrospective viewpoint, the book progresses, after the semi-authorial opening section, in consistent chronological sequence.

Possibly March's most impressive achievement however, despite Hartley's strictures, is demonstrated by the book's intricate weaving of both narrative and thematic design. In the second section, for example, Private Rowland Geers tells of an incident which occurred during the days of training in Virginia. The men are full of exuberance, excited at the prospect of sailing to foreign shores and of becoming inevitable heroes in the war. Returning from a route-march over the snow-covered hills, they see the lights of the camp in the valley below and Ted Irvine, giving a shout, breaks rank and runs down the hillside to the bunkhouse. Infected by his high spirits, the rest of the men follow suit. Later, Rowland Geers and Walt Webster go to the bath house for a shower, but find there is no hot water. They decide to shower in cold and then, like a pair of schoolboys, begin wrestling with each other. Webster picks Geers up and tries to throw him into a bank of snow outside the bath house. They both end up wallowing and struggling in the snow and soon the whole company is rolling around naked in the snow with them. “Walt stood up, slapped his thighs, and began to crow like a cock. ‘Bring on the whole German army!’ he shouted. ‘Bring them all on together, or one at a time. I can whip them all!’” (p. 18/p. 6).

Rowland Geers' exuberance is still manifest when the company lands in France. One of his first actions at setting foot on foreign soil is to hand his pack and rifle to Corporal Frederick Wilcoxen and then to perform handsprings in the street, clowning around to the general disgust of the civilian population looking on. Geers' exuberance is short-lived, however. As a member of Sergeant Prado's ill-fated squad, he is one of the first men to be killed.

Ted Irvine, who provoked and led the wild run down the hillside back to the camp, is slightly wounded in the legs during the war. An infection of the bone sets in. For ten years he suffers operation after operation as flesh and bone are slowly and inexorably whittled away. In terrible constant agony, he ignores the overdoses of morphine the doctors deliberately leave within his reach, determined to live as long as he can because of his dreadful fear of death.

The third of the trio of protagonists in the Virginian idyll, Walt Webster, is also earmarked for suffering. He returns from the war facially disfigured and stubbornly holds his fiancee to her promise to marry him, even though he is warned, and indeed knows, that she no longer has any love for him. The girl goes through with the wedding ceremony, but on their wedding night she tells him: “If you touch me, I'll vomit” (p. 227/p. 157). It is a far call from that image of only a year before of the lusty naked man standing in the Virginian snow, hurling challenges at the as yet unencountered enemy.

In some ways, the parallels between the actions of the individual characters during the Virginian idyll and their subsequent fates are possibly somewhat overstated.¹⁵ But the pattern is there. In the very last section, when Ziegler and Riggin meet years later in the self-same training camp, they see the silver plate which bears Geers' name. With their faulty memories they credit him as being the man who, on the day before the armistice, swam the icy Meuse to anchor the pontoon bridge to the opposite bank, even though Geers had been dead for many months before that action took place. It is possible that Geers' personality was of the kind that men find hard to forget and, indeed, although he plays but a small part in the book and is killed early on, that personality does come through strongly to the reader.

The episode, however, which more than any other gives thematic shape to the book is that which tells of the inhuman execution of the German prisoners. The specific thesis at the root of the episode, stated by Private Walter Drury, “We're prisoners too: We're all prisoners. …” (p. 129/p. 84), which is made explicit in the “Nine Prisoners” version published in The Forum, was, as William T. Going has observed, inevitably dissipated when the various narratives were incorporated into the book and scattered throughout its length.¹⁶ Yet the impact of the concept is so potent that it is not entirely lost. The men who are involved in the killing of the unarmed prisoners become, through an irredeemable sense of guilt arising from the remembered horror of the crime they had perpetrated, prisoners of the deed itself

March's use of the first person narrative form gives the book an immediacy and a unique flavor it would otherwise have been difficult to achieve. But it is in some respects a restricting technique and here and there one gains the impression that March himself probably found it so. Occasionally, he has to resort to rather clumsy devices to sustain the first person viewpoint.

The device of having the narrator describe his own death is also not altogether a successful one. When it is used to advantage, as for example when Lieutenant Archibald Smith relates how he is accosted by and then murdered by the distraught Carter in the communications trench, it produces a powerful, shock effect. It is nevertheless a device in which March unfortunately overindulges and by the end of the book the reader's credulity becomes somewhat strained by this series of self-related deaths. When Qualls commits suicide by putting the barrel of a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger twice, March describes the sensation of death in the following manner: “There came blinding pain and waves of light that washed outward, in a golden flood, and widened to infinity. … I lifted from the ground and lurched forward, feet first, borne on the golden light, rocking gently from side to side. Then wild buffaloes rushed past me on thundering hooves, and receded, and I toppled suddenly into blackness without dimension and without sound” (p. 223/pp. 154-155). Such a purple passage contrasts unfavourably with the spare prose style in which the greater part of the book is written and serves to expose even more the patent artificiality of the device.

In addition to the thematic interlacing, the book's structure is further strengthened by the roles played by certain characters whom March seems to have endowed with special significance. Some of these characters appear again and again, others make only two or three brief but telling appearances.

Of the officers, for instance, Lieutenant Bartelstone is frequently given importance. It is he who announces to the men that they are to attack through Belleau Wood and it is he who gives them the news that the war is over and issues the orders to cease firing. He is the most sympathetically drawn of all the officers. Driven almost to suicide by the conditions in the trenches, he seems subsequently to find a certain rapport with the men he leads. Yet, ironically enough, his very consideration for the men's well-being results in the death of one man, Private Townsend, possibly in the death of another, Private Eugene Merriam, and the agony of anti-tetanus serum poisoning for yet another.

Lieutenant Jewett, too, plays the part of an agent who first unwittingly and later wittingly sets in motion events which result in the deaths of many men. It is Jewett who, in his blind ignorance and pride, sends Sergeant Prado's squad to its doom. It is Jewett who gives the signal for the company to commence the attack in which Private Pullman, even from his restricted viewpoint of the fighting, sees at least four men killed and two men wounded.

The old sweat Sergeant Michael “Pig Iron” Riggin also plays a significant part in several of the sections. An orphan, he silently resents the fact that he receives no letters from home like the other men and consequently rejects the idea of love between one human being and another. An empty shell of a man, he is nevertheless resourceful and keeps his head in an emergency. It is he who tries, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to quieten the panicking galley mule, Mamie, when the German planes bomb the column on the road to Soissons. It is he who persuades the crazy would-be suicide Fallon to come down from the trench parapet by issuing the incongruous threat that he, Riggin, will shoot Fallon dead if he persists in exposing himself to possible enemy fire. It is Riggin who Ralph Nerion, demented by persecution complex after the war, imagines is a member of the secret service spying on him. It is Riggin whom Ziegler meets in the very last section, giving the book its semi-elegaic conclusion.

Private Leslie Yawfitz's role encompasses both the narrative and the thematic design. Before the company goes into action he is already talking contemptuously about the mismanagement, waste, and stupidity of the war, but is, according to Sergeant Donohoe, to whom Yawfitz is as red rag to a bull, sullen and dissatisfied when promotions and decorations fail to come his way. A college type, he argues with Albert Nallett in the bunkhouse about the war and “how it was brought about by moneyed interests for its own selfish ends … [and] that idealism or love of country had [nothing] to do with war. It is brutal and degrading … and fools who fight are pawns shoved about to serve the interest of others” (p. 96/p. 59). His cynicism is borne out. During the attack described by Pullman, Yawfitz is hit in the face and blinded. Toward the end of the book, we meet him again, back home now, living with and dependent upon his sister. She reads him a report in the newspaper that the French Academy has conferred an honorary degree on the German scientist Einstein and how during the ceremony many speeches were made on the theme that the war had been a mistake and that the old wounds of hatred and mistrust should now be healed. Yawfitz rails bitterly: “Since they're all apologizing and being so God-damned polite to each other … I think somebody should write me a note on pink stationery as follows: ‘Dear Mr. Yawfitz: Please pardon us for having shot out your eyes. It was all a mistake. Do you mind awfully?’” (p. 243/p. 169).

This theme of the futility of war and of how men's minds are poisoned by those who seek to benefit from the war's continuance recurs constantly throughout the book. The seeds of hatred sown by propaganda are implanted firmly in the more receptive and unquestioning minds. They provide Corporal Foster with the justification for shooting the prisoners. They trigger off the murder of the wounded German soldier by Sergeant Mooney. “It was different when you were raping Red Cross Nurses and cutting off the legs of children in Belgium, wasn't it?” Mooney says, as he pounds the German's face to a jelly with the butt of his rifle (p. 173/p. 116).

But the thinking men, like Yawfitz and Nalls, do question the validity of what they are doing. After church service on the transport en route for France, Nalls remarks: “I've been thinking over what [the chaplain] said about this being a war to end injustice. I don't mind getting killed to do a thing of that sort. I don't mind, since the people coming after me will live in happiness and peace …” (p. 23/p. 9). A few months later, however, after he has experienced the reality of war, his views have radically changed: “If I have to listen again to that chaplain praying to God to spare all the American Galahads and destroy their ungodly enemies, I'm going to get up and say:‘Who was telling you? Where do you get all this inside information? …’ If he does that again, I'm going to ask him if he doesn't know that the Germans are praying too.—‘Let's be logical about this thing,’ I'm going to say;‘Let's pick out different Gods to pray to. It seems silly for both sides to be praying to the same one! …’” (pp. 138-139/p. 91).

Whenever they can free their minds from the immediate influence of the hypocritical exhortations of politicians and the pseudoidealism expounded by religious leaders and mentors, the soldiers of both sides find they have more in common than otherwise.¹⁷ On either bank of the Moselle, the men of the two opposing armies set up a program of “club rules,” each allowing the other during specified hours the unmolested use of the natural facilities afforded by the river. As Private Plez Yancey observes: “If the common soldiers of each army could just get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week” (p. 90/p. 55).

Many of the sentiments expressed by Yawfitz, Nalls, and Yancey are similarly voiced by Remarque's German troops in Chapter IX of All Quiet on the Western Front. The dialogues can be transferred from one book to the other almost without seeming out of place. The pity is, of course, that all too often logic and reason have apparently little or no defense against the accomplished propagandist's art. Even counteraccusations can be summarily and angrily dismissed, for, as everyone knows, atrocities are actions committed only by the enemy. The “fat little German boy” captured by Glass, Brauer, and Mumford tells them he would “rather be killed outright than taken prisoner, because the Americans chopped off the hands and feet of all their prisoners.” Bernie Glass is incensed by this: “Well, the dirty little louse … to say a thing like that when everybody knows it's the Germans, and not ourselves who do those things. Christ Almighty, that's what I call crust!” (pp. 78-79/p. 46). But the domination of the propagandists does work both ways, and when, in jest, the Americans tell the terrified boy they are going to carve their initials on his belly, the German is convinced they are about to do just that. As Jakie Brauer reaches forward to unbuckle the prisoner's Gott Mit Uns belt he wants as a souvenir, the uncomprehending German, in a gesture of final panicking desperation, slashes Jakie's throat with a trench knife.

The war propagandists are not alone in inviting March's anger and scorn. He exposes the profit-making activities of the Y.M.C.A. canteens which extract payment for goods given to them for free distribution to the troops. He points to the hypocrisy of a government which, while implementing a prohibition for men in uniform in the States, allows the troops access to drink when overseas. He deplores the lip service paid to such home-based organizations as the Women's Temperance Union and the Methodist Board of Temperance and Public Morals whose influence is such that when some of the marines are temporarily assigned to French units they are denied the wine and cognac which are issued to the French troops as part of their normal daily rations.

Several incidents are recounted in which the medical corps is shown in a bad light. It is possible that March himself experienced unfortunate treatment in the hands of the frontline medics. Private Janoff, for instance, prefers to undergo the agony of having Roy Winters scrape the pus out of his callused heel than to go to the dressing station. Private Landt, on the other hand, does go to the dressing station for a routine anti-tetanus injection and as a result of the administrations of two incompetent doctors ends up by receiving a massive overdose of the serum. “[They] tell me I hollered without stopping, for two days and two nights, and that I swelled up bigger than a dead nigger who has been lying in a shell hole for a week.” He adds reflectively, “Next time I get wounded, I'll have lockjaw and enjoy it” (p. 59/p. 32). Private Anderson demands an anesthetic when, in the dressing station, the doctor after giving him only two drinks of cognac to deaden the pain decides to sew up his foot which has been “split open from heel to toe.” When it is explained to him that the supply of morphine is almost exhausted and that what little is left is being reserved for the exclusive use of officers, Anderson creates such a scene, threatening even to write to the president himself, that he is eventually given a shot to keep him quiet. In an episode reminiscent of the closing paragraphs of Chapter Nine of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Private Martin Dailey records his journey in a hospital train through “the French countryside covered with poppies and mustard plants in bloom.” In the coach there is “a stench of disinfectant and dried blood … and that smell which comes from many men caged together. … We lay there, mostly in silence, and thought of our own misery, like newly castrated sheep, too tired to find comfort in curses” (p. 68/pp. 38-39).¹⁸ It is not until, far behind the lines, they reach the hospital that the men are at last treated like human beings.

March, however, reserves his deepest antipathy for officers like Lieutenant Fairbrother and Captain Matlock. These men and their kind, he seems to suggest, not the Germans, are the real enemy. They do not disgust him, nor do they fill him with the same sort of loathing as do so many of the men characterized in the book—such as Foster, Inabinett, Glass, White, Bartow, and Wiltsee. What he feels towards Fairbrother and Matlock is something far worse: a coldblooded hatred revealed by the scorn and, more particularly, by the ridicule he heaps upon their heads. They are, in their way, figures of fun and consequently, so March warns, all the more dangerous for that.

Captain Matlock is the archvillain of the book. Thirty-five years old, an ex-floorwalker in a department store, he sits around at night back of the lines in his underwear, scratching his feet, eating Fig Newtons, and reading East Indian love lyrics. He calls his two-hundred pound wife “Poochy” and she calls him “Terry-boy.” His men have a variety of other names for him: “that ass,” “Fishmouth Terry,” “Nit-wit Terry—that ribbon-selling wonder.” Few, if any, of the men in the company have any respect for him or any faith in his abilities. Private Albert Nallett considers that the company mascot, an ant bear named Tommy, has “more sense than Captain Matlock and all his officers put together” (p. 142/p. 93). When during an advance in a wheat field, an officer is killed, shot between the eyes, Private Abraham mistakenly believes that the company has lost its commanding officer. Later he tells the other men that when the body was turned over a teaspoonful of brains ran out of the back of the dead man's skull on to the ground. The immediate reaction of the men listening to Rickey's story is one of derision and disbelief. As Sylvester Keith remarks: “If that many brains ran out, it couldn't possibly have been our Terry!” (p. 158/p. 105).

But Matlock is, of course, the commanding officer of the company and his orders, however unreasonable, senseless, or even criminal, are to be obeyed. It is he who orders the shooting of the prisoners. Like all weak and incompetent characters in a position of power, he is a martinet. When the men are due to go on their first liberty after arrival in France, he insists that they must parade with all their spare clothing washed, their equipment shined, and their rifles cleaned and oiled. When, commencing his inspection, he unnecesarily finds fault with the first man's washed clothing, someone in the ranks blows a raspberry. Matlock takes each man's washing and, without even looking at it, throws it in the mud. Then he tears up all the liberty passes. “When you men have learned to respect your commanding officer, things are going to be better all the way round,” he tells them (p. 33/p. 16).

There is, therefore, a distinct touch of irony in the words used by Corporal Waller when, at the time of the armistice, he records the company's war history: “Our commanding officer, Terence L. Matlock, Captain, was able and efficient and retained throughout the respect and the admiration of the men who served under him” (p. 184/pp. 124-25).

In the penultimate section of the book, Private Rufus Yeomans meets Matlock in the street some time after the end of the war and invites both him and Mrs. Matlock home to dinner one evening. From Yeoman's faintly condescending tone it would appear that Matlock has fallen on somewhat bad times in the postwar world.

Although March was already thirty-nine at the time of the publication of Company K and despite the almost unanimous acclaim with which the book was greeted on its appearance, it is in many respects an apprentice work. There is a certain stiltedness about some of the dialogue. A few of the plot processes are a little too neat, even artificial. Now and then, awareness of technique intrudes and the reader finds himself questioning the validity of the events being described.

In the aggregate, too, March tends to overstate his case, producing a somewhat onesided and oversimplified view of the soldier's existence and his reactions to the exceptional circumstances of war.¹⁹ Just over one third of the 132 named characters in the book are either wounded, killed, commit suicide, or suffer mental breakdowns of one sort or another. One gains the impression that March was overwhelmed by the violence and the cruelty he witnessed almost to the virtual exclusion of everything else. One of his characters, Private Colin Urquhart, even goes so far as to declare: “… there should be a law, in the name of humanity, making mandatory the execution of every soldier who has served on the front and managed to escape death there” (p. 254/p. 178). This is very much an extreme view. The war could not have been—indeed surely was not—so consistently intense and dark an experience as March paints. Paradoxically, in the present day, after the pictorially-explicit documentation of Belsen, My Lai, and Ulster, and with the newsreel depiction of atrocities part and parcel of the daily television diet, the book cannot have the same overwhelming impact it had in 1933.

Nevertheless, for all its faults, Company K is surely one of the most considerable works of art to have emerged from the holocaust of World War I. As a casebook alone, it teaches us much about the dark side of human nature which too frequently gains ascendancy when men are subjected to almost unbearable stress, forced to do things and see things no man should be expected to do or see. It is one writer's lasting and virulent indictment of “men, and their unending cruelty to each other” (p. 16/p. 4).

Notes

1. Biographical note, The Forum, 82 (October 1929), lxiv.

2. Official citation, Distinguished Service Cross No. 1611.

3. Biographical sketch, Wilson Library Bulletin, 17 (June 1943), 786.

4. Alistair Cooke, “Introduction to William March,” A William March Omnibus (New York: Rinehart, 1956), p. vi.

5. Unpublished letter, Campbell to John B. Waterman, 8 October 1931.

6. O. B. Emerson, “William March and Southern Literature,” Faculty Studies, 1 (1968), 5.

7. Undated letter (July-August 1970) from Clint Bolton to the late Professor Lawrence William Jones.

8. “Free to Write,” Time, 20 March 1939, pp. 72, 74.

9. Richard Crowder, “The Novels of William March,” University of Kansas City Review, 15 (1948), 113.

10. Clint Bolton, “Bill March,” an unpublished memoir.

11. Dr. Edward Glover in conversation with me, August 1971.

12. Company K (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1933), p. 184, and (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), p. 124. All further citations from Company K refer to these two editions and are identified by page numbers quoted in parentheses in the text, e.g. (p. 184/p. 124). The Victor Gollancz first British edition was produced from the Smith & Haas plates, but with the spelling anglicized. The pagination of the text runs from page 15 to page 262 in the Gollancz edition, as compared with page 13 to page 260 in the United States first edition. For page references for the Gollancz edition therefore add 2 to the page references quoted for the Smith & Hass edition.

13. Clint Bolton, “In Memoriam Bill March,” Vieux Carre Courier, 5 (16 August 1968), 4.

14. Supplement to the Week-End Review 25 March 1933, n.p.

15. See also elsewhere, for example, the fates of Private Leslie Jourdan, the promising concert pianist, who loses his fingers, and Private Leslie Yawfitz, who acts as a lookout on the transport en route to France and who is later blinded on the battlefield.

16. William T. Going, “Introduction” to Some In Addition: The Uncollected Short Stories of William March, to be published in 1974 by the Southern Illinois University Press. It is interesting, however, that when March revised “Nine Prisoners” for the 1939 collection of stories, Some Like Them Short, he omitted Drury's explicit statement from the text.

17. See also March's fable, “The World and Its Redeemers,” in 99 Fables, ed. William T. Going (University, Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1960), pp. 18-19. In his excellent and informative introduction Going also traces the links between certain other of the fables and Company K.

18. This passage equating the wounded men to “newly castrated sheep” is surely one of the most powerful and poignant symbolic images in the book. Elsewhere March uses animal symbolism, as when the Unknown Soldier compares the men in No Man's Land to the horde of rabbits he watched being destroyed when he was a child. The rabbits were trapped in a field by a farmer and, because of their blind stupidity, allowed themselves to be killed off one by one as they frantically tried to escape.

19. It is noteworthy, too, that very few of the personal relationships and sexual encounters in the book are happy ones. Too often love turns to bitterness or betrayal (Webster and Howard). Hunzinger and Wadsworth, as a result of the natural pursuit of sex of the one and the carnal romanticism of the other, both find themselves in deep trouble: Hunzinger ending in prison for desertion and Wadsworth in a labor battalion for contracting venereal disease.