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Article Excerpt
One cannot legitimately discuss American anti-war novels without the inclusion of John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers (1921). Set in WWI, the novel entered a market hungry for tales of the war, but one unprepared for this depiction of the war and the military machine in general. In 1918 Dos Passos wrote to a friend: [W]ar, no matter where, consisted of boredom, slavery to all sorts of military stupidities, and an interesting sort of misery, and the need for warmth, bread, and cleanliness. It was no more than an enormous, tragic digression in people's lives which brought death to the intellect, to art, to everything that mattered. (152-53) His statement captures the essence of Three Soldiers. The novel, states David Sanders, "was the original example in subject matter and tone [war as unheroic] of the American war novel as thereafter developed by Hemingway, William March, John Hershey, Norman Mailer, and James Jones" (quoted in Walsh: 64), yet the novel is infrequently given the acclaim it deserves in college literature and/or history classes.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons the novel, with its potent anti-war message may be overlooked, to describe the novel's critical reception as a means to understand society's attitude toward war protesters, to show the novel's long arm of influence, not only on literature but also on film.
When reading a war novel or viewing a war movie, one expects physical action. Readers anticipate scenes of battles and the resulting carnage, but what they get in Three Soldiers is a different type of action in that the novel focuses on the effect the military machine has on different types of people represented by the three soldiers, Andrews, Chrisfield, and Fuselli. These three are followed as the machine aims to stamp out individuality in order to make each man function as a unit with a single mind. Although the three are close in age, twenty-two, twenty, and nineteen, respectively, they are worlds apart in socioeconomic status, education, geographic origin, and ethnic background; therefore, it should come as no surprise that each reacts differently to the shaping up. After absorbing page after page, one reader is always brave enough to ask: "When does something happen?" Translated this means when do the soldiers see action? Actually, much has happened. In reality a person is not drafted, given a gun, and sent to fight, for each individual must go through a process, a process that promotes conformity. In the novel John Andrews, pianist and composer in civilian life, is washing windows at a stateside army post. He looks out on the view below him:
It expressed the vast, dusty dullness, the men waiting in rows on drill fields, standing at attention, the monotony of feet tramping in unison, of the dust rising from the battalion going back and forth over the dusty drill fields, and he wanted to make it into music. (22) The waiting, the anticipation of what is to come is the action, albeit unheroic. In the first section of the novel, "Making the Mould," men pick up cigarette butts, fold their blankets in exactly the same way, and attend a movie that is used as propaganda, a part of their indoctrination. There were hisses and catcalls. When a German flag was seen and as the troops were seen advancing, bayoneting the civilians in wide Dutch pants, the old women with starched caps, the soldiers packed into the stuffy YMCA hut shouted catcalls at them. (27) When leaving the hut, one man said: "I have never raped a woman in my life, but by God, I'm going to. I'd like to rape some of those goddam German women." Chrisfield, the Indiana farm boy states, "Ah'd lahk to cepture a German officer an' make him shine ma boots an' then shoot him dead" (27). The men are ready to go.
Embark they do on an overcrowded ship, many seasick and others dying from illness, specifically spinal meningitis. This, too, is part of war, the unheroic part. Eager to get on land, eager to fight once in...
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