Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THREE SOLDIERS” by John Dos Passos (first published 1921)

            Only once before on this blog have I dealt with the works of John Roderigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) (See posting on Number One). He was a highly-esteemed American writer in the first part of the 20^th century, but his name has tended to be eclipsed by other American writers of his generation (Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck etc.). Author of 88 books, best known for his USA trilogy, Dos Passos probably wrote too much that had immediate topical appeal, but that now looks like dated journalism. More worrying for some readers (and for his reputation in academe) was his gradual shift from left-wing positions to a very firm conservatism.

Published in 1921, when he was 25, his second novel Three Soldiers was the book that first gained him a large readership. It is a direct reaction to America’s role in what we now call the First World War, in the last year of which Dos Passos served in the medical corps in France as an ambulance driver. Overwhelmed as we often are by British (and to a lesser extent French and German) works written during or after that war, we often forget the pivotal role of America. The French Army was always the major force on the Western Front, with Britain as its chief ally; but it is clear that the war would not have been won without American intervention in the last crucial year 1917-18. With Russia knocked out of the war by revolution, Germany no longer had to fight on two fronts and was able able to rush more troops into France and Belgium, in the hope of striking a decisive blow against the Allies. But this was countered by the fact that, by early 1918, over one million American troops had arrived in France, the balance of forces was radically altered, and Germany’s last major offensive was stopped dead.

Three Soldiers deals exclusively with America’s Great War experience, but it is not what might be considered a conventional “war novel”. There are a few brief scenes of battle, but the focus is on the training and discipline imposed upon ordinary soldiers by the army. The Armistice occurs almost exactly halfway through the novel, so the second half is post-war. Dos Passos’ aim is always to show the army as a fearful machine which crushes individuality out of men and alters their thinking, even in peacetime.

The title Three Soldiers is a little misleading, as one character alone comes to dominate the novel. We are introduced to three privates early in the novel. They are all in their early twenties. Daniel Fuselli is an Italian-American clerk from San Francisco, always angling for promotion and having the ambition to become a corporal or even a sergeant. His attitude towards the war is purely opportunistic, but he is singularly inept in reaching his goals and gradually becomes the enemy of the officer class that harrasses him. Chrisfield is the more naïve hayseed from Indiana, with simplistic patriotic views that are gradually knocked out of him. He becomes insubordinate in the most extreme way. Then there is John Andrews, the college-educated New Yorker, whose well-off family came from Virginia. Andrews is the intellectual who reads high-brow literature and hopes to become a composer. He is also clearly the character with whom Dos Passos most fully identifies, and whose experience (especially his post-Armistice life in Paris) has a strong autobiographical element. The fact is that Andrews takes over the novel, and the other two privates become minor characters in the background. Indeed, other troopers sometimes have more importance in the narrative than either Fuselli or Chrisfield. There is, for example, the soldier Henslowe, who influences Andrews in the later parts of the novel when he is trying to find means of escape from military servitude.

Three Soldiers is very much a grunts’-eye-view of the army. (Maybe “doughboy” would be the more era-appropriate word for American soldiers than the later “grunt”; but to my surprise I found the word “doughboy” used only twice in this 383-page novel). Apart from one sympathetic sergeant, officers and NCOs are seen as officious or threatening or effete. There are scenes of unnecessary punishments for small misdeameanour and scenes of well-turned-out officers enjoying better meals than the troopers, swanning around in staff cars and casually breaking rules for which the rankers would be put on a charge (absenting themselves, getting drunk etc.) It is interesting that in this environment, even the naïve Chrisfield dreams of being court-martialled or fighting with the sergeant.

The first thing that strikes you in reading this novel is its documentary realism. The army is deglamourised from its earliest chapters. Still in America before embarkation for France, John Andrews has to clean windows around a military camp.

The repetitive rhythm of his work makes him think of army life thus: “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 battalions going back and forth over the dusty drill fields.” (Part 1, Chapter 2) The journey across the Atlantic is particularly vivid. As men descend into the stinking hold of the troopship to find their sleeping quarters, and squabble over who will get the best bunks, a disgruntled private remarks: “It’s part of the system. You’ve got to turn men into beasts before you can get ‘em to act that way.” (Part 1, Chapter 4) And once in France, there is the grind, grind, grind of five weary months drilling and training before the troops are sent anywhere near the battle front. Typical is a route march described thus: “Men’s feet seemed as lead, as if all the weight of the pack hung on them. Shoulders, worn callous, began to grow tender and sore under the constant sweating. Heads drooped.  Each man’s eyes were on the heels of the man ahead of him that rose and fell, rose and fell endlessly. Marching became for each man a personal struggle with his pack, that seemed to have come alive, that seemed something malicious and overpowering, wrestling to throw him.” (Part 3, Chapter 1)

            Given that army life is so deglamourised, there is much in this book which would doubtless have shocked many of its first American readers. There is the fact that many soldiers are very sceptical about the war and some (such as the minor character Eisenstein) harbour very radical, anti-establishment ideas. There are examples of loudmouth, boastful soldiers, such as a doughboy nicknamed “Wild Dan Cohen”, who build up heroic stories about themselves which clearly have no basis in fact. There is a frank admission that soldiers readily resort to whorehouses – not that Dos Passos dwells on this in any salacious way. It is simply one of the realities he ticks off. In one sad episode, Private Fuselli, despite his sentimental memories of his girlfriend back home, foolishly believes he’s in love with a French girl, but she proves to be on the make and willing to sell her assets elsewhere.

Perhaps most shocking (for the novel’s first readers) is the way Dos Passos debunks wartime propaganda. In training camps in America, fresh recruits are shown (staged) films of spike-helmeted German troops bayonetting babies, raping women and shooting children and old people. Some of the more naïve soldiers take this to be documentary truth. But in France, such illusions dissolve. New soldiers get annoyed when a more experienced man says the Germans dropped leaflets, warning in advance of the bombing of a civilian area. They do not want to believe their enemies could be so considerate. The more experienced man also introduces the innocent ones to a nasty aspect of the war when he goes on to say: “It was where we took the shell-shock cases, fellows who were roarin’ mad, and tremblin’ all over, and some of ‘em paralysed like… There was a man in the wing opposite where we slept who kept laughin’  ”  (Part 2, Chapter 3)

Trying to keep up the morale of soldiers who are tired or becoming disillusioned, there are what the novel calls “Y” men – meaning men from the YMCA, attached to back-area units, who distribute chocolate and cigarettes and offer advice. But as the novel sees it, their advice rings hollow as they attempt to instill propaganda. When he is resting and out of uniform, Andrews says what he thinks about the prospect of resuming army duties: “I feel so clean and free. It’s like voluntarily taking up filth and slavery again… I think I’ll just walk off naked across the fields.” A “Y” man sternly rebukes him, saying “Do you call serving your country slavery, my friend?...You must remember you are a voluntary worker in the cause of democracy… your women folks, your sisters and sweethearts and mothers, are praying for you at this instant.” (Part 3, Chapter 3)

It is almost exactly halfway through the novel, when a “Y” man is trying to ginger him up, that Andrews makes what may be the novel’s key statement. He is responding to the “Y” man’s patriotic take on the war: “How these people enjoyed hating! At that rate it was better to be at the front. Men were more humane when they were killing each other than when they were talking about it. So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression.” (Part 4, Chapter 1) The sentence I have underlined has very much the same sentiment as Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Blighters”. It represents the disgust a soldier feels towards civilians who make big patriotic statements, and jeer at the enemy, without ever having experienced the reality of a killing ground.

There are other moments that could have shocked readers in 1921. An officer tells troops directly not to take prisoners – the army can move faster if it doesn’t have to look after enemy soldiers who have surrendered or are wounded. (Part 3, Chapter 4). Soldiers often slow to a reluctant dawdle as they near the battle front, and there is much insubordination. Private Chrisfield has trouble with a Private Anderson, with whom he once brawled. Anderson is later promoted to sergeant, and bullies Chrisfield. In Part 3, Chapter 5, it is implied, without being directly stated, that under cover of the chaos of battle, Chrisfield takes the opportunity to kill the sergeant.

Moments of battle do occur in this novel, but they take second place to the grinding routine of army life. John Andrews’ encounter with battle ends swiftly when a shell explodes near him, knocking him unconscious and landing him (after an uncomfortable, bumpy ambulance ride) in hospital with damaged legs and suffering from delirium. The hospital is a large, old, re-purposed Renaissance hall. It is here that he has ideas of writing a great piece of music, inspired by reading Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine and conceiving sensuous images of the Queen of Sheba. He tries to realise his inspiration when he manages, after the Armistice, to wangle admission into a student course in Paris and is granted leave from the army.

Post-war, however, there comes the big let-down of expectations, chronicled in the second half of the novel. Dos Passos ultimately attributes this to the long reach of the army and the mentality war has instilled in both soldiers and civilians. In Paris, even the officers are on the booze; soldiers are chasing whores or talking about Prohibition back in America and the possibilities of the Russian revolution. Some are being drafted into the Army of Occupation in Germany. Others are trying to desert. There is a brief glimpse of Private Fuselli, who has achieved none of the promotion he sought and who appears to be on permanent KP. As for Andrews himself, his hopes for personal freedom are trumped in various ways. He thinks he has found love with a French woman. He mixes briefly with French and American intellectuals, lovers of literature and of the type of music he aspires to write; but they turn out to be superficial chatterers and dilettantes, many of them with conventional views about patriotism and the war. When he is caught by the military police without identity papers, he is forced into a work battalion for some months. He deserts and for a few weeks he thinks he has found, in the country, freedom to compose. But he is finally thwarted as he is grabbed back by the army and the last image of the novel is of his composition papers being scattered by the wind. Against the Juggernaut, you cannot win.

A couple of obvious things occurred to me as I read the second half of the novel. One is that Dos Passos anticipated, by a number of years, Hemingway and the self-pitying “lost generation” American crowd, who went to Paris in the mid-1920s and claimed to be suffering existential angst. Note that Three Soldiers appeared in 1921, five years before Hemingway’s “lost generation” novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). I also noted that Three Soldiers contains a scene where its main character escapes authority by jumping into a river and swimming for it. A similar scene occurs in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and I can’t help wondering if Hemingway didn’t get the idea from Dos Passos’ novel.

That said, there is an almost monotonous emphasis in Three Soldiers on the dehumanisation of men under military orders. The novel’s six parts have titles suggesting men as machines – “Making the Mould” (dealing with training in America); “The Metal Cools” (boredom and routine in army life in France); “Machines” (how the soldiers act in war); “Rust” (Armistice and weariness of war); “The World Outside” (glimpses of post-Armistice life outside the army); and “Under the Wheels” (which is where John Andrews eventually goes). Again and again the novel speaks of men as either slaves or machines.

Early on, Andrews reflects of the army: “It was only slavery that he had not foreseen. His race had dominated for too many centuries for that. And yet the world was made of various slaveries.”(Part 1, Chapter 3) When Andrews is in hospital in a Renaissance hall: “He felt at home in that spacious hall, built for wild gestures and stately steps, in which all the little routine of the army seemed unreal, and the wounded men discarded automatons, broken toys laid away in rows.” (Part 4, Chapter 1) When he thinks he has found freedom: “The exhilaration of leaving the hospital and walking free through wine-tinted streets in the sparkling evening air gave way gradually to despair. His life would continue to be this slavery of unclean bodies packed together in places where the air had been breathed over and over, cogs in the great slow-moving Juggernaut of armies. What did it matter if the fighting had stopped? The armies would go on grounding out lives with lives, crushing flesh with flesh.”  (Part 4, Chapter 2)

At the very moment that he is about to make love to the French girl Jeanne, and when he is about to take off his uniform: “Andrews thought suddenly of all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gesture of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy.” (Part 5, Chapter 3) When sitting opposite a chateau, he thinks of the glories of the Renaissance and asks himself “…would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today, everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper into slavery. Whichever won, tyranny above, or spontaneous organization from below, there could be no individuals.” (Part 5, Chapter 4)

In the end, his views become fatalistic. He comes to see himself as “A toad hopping across a road in front of a steam roller.” (Part 6, Chapter 4) He says to Genevieve, one of his French intellectual friends: “It seems to me… that human society has always [been]…and perhaps will always [be] organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush the old societies and becoming slaves again in their turn…” (Part 6, Chapter 4)

In the end, it is individualism and the freedom to be one’s self that Dos Passos most cherishes. In the 1930s, with Fascism and Nazism as the most obvious enemies, it was inevitable that Dos Passos would have stood with the Left, which seemed to align itself with liberal freedoms… but after exposure to Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War, Dos Passos turned Right and lost the friendship of those who took the “Popular Front” at face value. (See postings on this blog about Paul Reynolds’ Writer, Sailor,Soldier, Spy and  Stephen Koch’s Double Lives). As Paul West put it in his 1960s survey The Modern Novel, Dos Passos “gradually proves that the unaided, unscheming individual has little chance against any collectivity.” I do not think Dos Passos’ final, very conservative, political stances were an aberration. They were in direct line of descent from John Andrews’ rebellion against the crushing military machine.

I could say many negative things about Three Soldiers. It is repetitive and very insistent about its guiding ideas. Compared with what other novels have told us about horrors endured by soldiers and civilians in both World Wars, the trials and problems of John Andrews and his buddies seem light. Even so, this novel was for me a great corrective to the ancient, jerky black-and-white newsreels of marching doughboys, usually accompanied by an added soundtrack of “Over There”, which we have so often seen in documentaries about the First World War. Reading Three Soldiers, I felt the hard realities of these soldier’s lives, rescuing them from historical oblivion. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is often cited as the best-known American novel of the First World War. But Three Soldiers is a far more historically-honest account of the American experience in that war than the tough-guy romanticism of Hemingway’s novel.

One final point – Three Soldiers was a “first” in many ways. With its initial attempt to show a group of soldiers coming from different backgrounds (even if it fades into the story of one soldier), it is the ancestor of all those American war novels – such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead – which present a mixed company of soldiers from different parts of the USA. And how many Hollywood movies were made in the Second World War in which every company seemed to have an obligatory hilllbilly, an obligatory Jew, a rich boy, an Irish kid , a Hispanic and somebody from Brooklyn…? (No blacks, of course, because the US Army wasn’t desegregated until 1948.)

Three Soldiers also came most of a decade before the rush of novels and memoirs that debunked the war or were sceptical about it or even pacifistic. Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), Remarque’s Im Western Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1929), Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929) etc.etc. In his attitudes, Dos Passos was ahead of them all.

Two irrelevant and silly footnotes: (a.) Here is the best deadpan joke in Three Soldiers: When John Andrews is in hospital and says he wants to read Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine, another soldier at first thinks it’s a spicy French novel, and then asks what it’s about . Andrews replies “Oh, it’s about a man who wants everything so badly that he decides there’s nothing worth wanting.” To which the other fellow replies “I guess youse had a college education.” (Part 4, Chapter 1). Sounds like the perfect response to me.

(b.) Elsewhere in the novel, the soldier Henslowe dreams of going to various exotic places and suggests to Andrews “What do you say you and I go out to New Zealand and raise sheep?” (Part 4, Chapter 3) I guess this means that in the First World War, American doughboys saw New Zealand as a distant paradise, far from armies and battles.