Best-Ever
Antiwar Novel and Movie
by
John V. Denson
by John V. Denson
DIGG THIS
 This
summer I attended a weekend seminar sponsored by Auburn University
on the subject of World War I literature. I did not know what to
expect in regard to any antiwar literature but I was very surprised
to be introduced to what I now believe to be the best antiwar novel
and movie. William March is the author of this novel Company
K and the movie
goes by the same name. My favorite antiwar
novel and movie
prior to this was All
Quiet on the Western Front by Erich M. Remarque, a German
soldier who fought in the trenches during World War I. March wrote
about his similar experiences as an American Marine in the same
trenches. Both authors speak of the horror and brutality of the
experience of modern warfare and nothing about individual bravery,
patriotism or the "glory of war."
The real name
of William March was William Edward Campbell, who was born in Mobile,
Alabama and grew up in small towns in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.
He attended the University of Alabama School of Law and worked for
a law firm in New York City. When America entered WWI he enlisted
in the Marine Corps and saw extensive action in the hardest, bloodiest
battles, including Verdun and the Meuse-Argonne. He was highly honored
and decorated by both the French and the Americans by being awarded
the French Croix de Guerre and by America, with the Distinguished
Service Cross and the Navy Cross. He makes no reference in the book
to his individual actions or honors.
 After
the war, March returned to Mobile, Alabama and became one of the
organizers and a shareholder in what became an extremely successful
business by the name of Waterman Steamship Corporation. He served
as its vice-president and eventually became very wealthy as a result
of his investment. He resigned early and began to travel widely
in Europe, especially to Hamburg and London, and then returned to
New York City to write his first novel, Company K which was
published in 1933. He wrote several other novels including Come
in at the Door, The
Tallons, and The
Looking Glass. He finally returned to the South, living
in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he wrote his final novel,
The
Bad Seed. It was later made into a play and then a Hollywood
movie, which brought him some notoriety. This last novel is about
an eight-year-old girl who does not know right from wrong and becomes
a murderer. March died in his sleep in 1954 at the age of 61.
Company
K had apparently been out of print for several years when director
and producer, Roger Clem, who is mainly known for his documentary
films, made the movie in 2004, with an excellent cast, and can be
rented from Netflix. The movie faithfully captures the essence and
meaning of the novel about the futility and brutality of war, and
especially the psychological scars left on the soldiers. In 2006,
the University of Alabama Press reprinted the novel. Writer and
literary critic, Alistair Cooke has described March as "the
unrecognized genius of our time."
March tells
the stories of 137 members of Company K in the first person,
some describing contemporary events, some recounting the war long
afterwards, and some speak from the grave. A brilliant introduction
is provided by Phillip D. Beidler, a professor of English at the
University of Alabama. He describes the book as " . . . the
most furious novel of war ever written by an American up to its
time and quite arguably at least as furious and graphic as any written
since." Beidler goes on to say:
So throughout
Company K, the narratives of individual soldiers become
a litany of callousness, brutality, and degradation. This is most
clearly reflected in a single incident lodged both literally and
figuratively at the center of the book, something that might be
thought of as the novel’s primal scene: the execution of twenty-two
German prisoners. The order, as a series of narratives tell us,
is passed down from Captain to Sergeant to the Corporal who leads
the detail. Otherwise good and decent men recoil, yet now participate
in mass murder. Private Walter Drury, the one soldier who refuses
the order and runs is subsequently sentenced to twenty years in
prison. (128–129) His friend, Private Charles Gordon, remains,
and, as he fires, sees the enormity of the deed in all the fullness
of its awful truth. "Everything I was ever taught to believe
about mercy, justice and virtue is a lie," he thinks. "But
the biggest lie of all are the words, ‘God is Love.’ That is really
the most terrible lie that man ever thought of." (130–132)
Meanwhile, the thing done, Private Roger Inabinett rummages nonchalantly
among the bodies for valuables and souvenirs. On Sunday, we are
told by Private Howard Nettleton, they are all ordered to go to
church. (138–139)
Professor Beidler
also states:
As with Hemingway,
mixed with the violence and the brutalization, there is some talk
of loss of illusion, of betrayal through patriotic lies. Yet in
March, more than in any of his contemporaries, this too is ultimately
subsumed into a depth of horror that goes far beyond any Lost
Generation conceit. Here, individual soldiers come relentlessly
forward, one after the other, the living and the dead commingled,
to offer grim first-person testimony; and in narrative after narrative,
there is mainly just one fundamental fact of modern warfare: the
fact of violent, ugly, obscene death. Men die of gas, gunshot,
grenade. They die by the bayonet. They are literally disintegrated
by high explosive. They commit suicide. They murder prisoners.
They murder each other. They kill wantonly and at random, at times
in error and virtually always against whatever small portion they
can recall of their better instincts. Killing and dying, dying
and killing, they have lost touch with any fact of life save the
fact of death’s absolute dominion. This final reality March insists
on to the degree that he often seems to have less in common with
his fellow Americans than with his British poet-contemporaries
such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Seigfried Sassoon. And,
as with the latter, the death depicted is never gallant sacrifice.
It is not grand, valorous, brave death. It is bowel-ripping, head-shattering,
body-rending death. It is the kind of death that makes men scream
for their mothers, soil their trousers, dissolve themselves into
whimpering wrecks. Moreover, it is death on the whole vast scale
of modern mechanization.
Beidler concludes,
"In sum, a novel formed again, as with Company K, from
a collocation of individual fragments, becomes a vast, enormous
testament to the utter insignificance of individuality in a world
of modern, mass-production war."
 Even
though, William March (William Edward Campbell), after the war became
a very successful and wealthy businessman and a brilliant novelist,
he suffered terribly for the rest of his life from what we now call
"post-traumatic stress" or severe depression, nightmares,
hysterical reactions related to his throat and eyes and required
frequent psychiatric assistance. This book is written by a soldier
who experienced the greatest horror in protracted and intense combat,
unlike the writer, Stephen Crane, who experienced no combat, yet
wrote the excellent book about war realism, The
Red Badge of Courage. This American classic about the Civil
War that has been read and studied by generations of readers, however,
is not the more brilliant and disturbing antiwar novel Crane
originally wrote. It is now known that the original publication
in 1895 was altered by the publisher, D. Appleton and Co. of New
York, by making many deletions, including an entire chapter to present
a less realistic picture of war so as to be more acceptable to the
readers of the time. Ernest Hemingway, who only experienced about
six days of combat as a Red Cross ambulance driver still wrote a
widely acclaimed novel, A
Farewell to Arms. Some critics say Hemingway suffered more
psychological trauma from being rejected by the nurse who cared
for him in the hospital and became his girlfriend and then left
him for an Italian officer, than from the wounds received in combat.
Other literary critics say
" . .
. his description of the German attack on Caporetto – of lines of
tired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized –
is one of the greatest moments in literary history."
 When
you read the stories told by March however, and see them depicted
in the movie, you can feel the passion and experience the horrible
pain of someone who had actually been there and suffered through
it all for a long period of time. In Company K March portrays
himself as Private Joseph Delaney, who writes a book after the war
and explains to his wife the reason for writing it:
I wish there
were some way to take these stories and pin them to a large wheel,
each story hung on a different peg until the circle was 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, and 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 . .
.
The book and
movie Company K are highly recommended and hopefully will
become widely known and understood in order to help stop the mindless,
unnecessary foreign wars and foreign policy America has engaged
in for so long. March recognizes that simply telling the horrors
of war will not be enough. It will also take a widespread understanding
of the false reasons and premises used to get America into unjust,
aggressive wars and knowledge of the real consequences of those
wars, especially the loss of freedom which occurs whether you win
or lose. Unfortunately, March does not address the alleged reasons
for the war, or America’s entry into it, but he has one of the soldiers
in the book state:
At first
I used to listen to Les Yawfitz and that fellow Nallett argue
in the bunk house. They’d been to college, and they could talk
on any subject that came up. But mostly they talked about war
and how it was brought about by moneyed interests for its own
selfish ends. They laugh at the idea that idealism or love of
country had anything to do with war. It is brutal and degrading,
they say, and fools who fight are pawns shoved about to serve
the interest of others.
 For
a while I listened to them, and tried to argue the thing out in
my mind. Then I quit thinking about it. If the things they say
are really true, I don’t want to know it. I’d go crazy and shoot
myself, if I thought those things were true . . . . Unless a man
does feel like that, I can’t understand how he would be willing
– how he would permit himself to –
So when they
start talking now, I get up and leave the bunk house, or turn
over to the wall and cover up my ears.
Regrettably,
most Americans protect their comfort level by naďvely believing
the patriotic political myths about all of our wars being just and
for the defense of our freedom. Most people do not want to be disturbed
or shocked by the real truth concerning the horrors experienced
by our soldiers in actual combat. William March certainly addresses
this last subject in Company K better than any other novel
I’ve read.
September
19, 2008
John
V. Denson [send him
mail] is the author of A
Century of War, and editor of The
Costs of War and Reassessing
the Presidency.
Copyright
© 2008 LewRockwell.com
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