Three Soldiers (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By John Dos Passos and John Trombold

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.  The shock of the First World War defined the twentieth century for John Dos Passos and many others of his generation. After serving in a French volunteer ambulance service and then with the American Army in France, Dos Passos wrote his novel Three Soldiers (1921). The novel follows the intersecting lives of three Americans as they suffer the war's monotonous and dehumanizing military routine and contemplate escape or revolt against its grinding discipline and extraordinary horrors.

Three Soldiers demonstrates the guiding principle shared by Dos Passos and other expatriate American writers that a new age called for a new art, one schooled by new ways of seeing afforded by modern technologies. His recognition of the machine age placed Dos Passos at the center of his century's new artistic developments, and for his literary accomplishments Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467026

John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) was a writer, painter, and political activist. His service as an ambulance driver in Europe at the end of World War I led him to write Three Soldiers in 1919, the first in a series of works that established him as one of the most prolific, inventive, and influential American writers of the twentieth century, writing over forty books, including plays, poetry, novels, biographies, histories, and memoirs. 

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THREE SOLDIERS

JOHN DOS PASSOS

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN TROMBOLD, PH. D.

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2004 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-6702-6

INTRODUCTION

THE shock of the experience of the First World War defined the twentieth century for John Dos Passos and many others of his generation. After serving in France and Italy in a French volunteer ambulance service in 1917 and then with the American Army in France in 1918, Dos Passos wrote his novel Three Soldiers, which was published in 1921. The novel follows the intersecting lives of three Americans—Andrews, Chrisfield, and Fuselli—as they suffer the war’s monotonous and dehumanizing military routine and contemplate escape or revolt against its grinding discipline and extraordinary horrors. Three Soldiers demonstrates the guiding principle shared by Dos Passos and other expatriate American writers, like e. e. cummings, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, that a new age called for a new art, one schooled by new ways of seeing afforded by modern technologies. The horrific, total war that Dos Passos experienced —a war that was captured by photography, and for which soldiers were prepared by viewing propaganda films—seemed to have radically overthrown past ways of thinking and feeling. His recognition of the machine age placed Dos Passos at the center of his century’s new artistic developments, and for his literary accomplishments Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as the greatest writer of our time.

Dos Passos is best known for his 1937 trilogy of novels, U.S.A., which begins with The 42nd Parallel, follows with 1919, and ends with The Big Money. The trilogy, which includes spatialized, prose poems called Newsreels and Camera Eyes (conveying public and personal experience, respectively) constitutes the most mature expression of his avant-garde aesthetic. Assimilating experimental artistic approaches came naturally, perhaps, as a result of his position as both an elite American insider and outsider at a number of different levels. Born in Chicago in 1896, Dos Passos was raised outside of conventional, respectable nineteenth-century family arrangements as the illegitimate child of the attorney John R. Dos Passos (of Portuguese descent) and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison. His parents finally married after the death of John R. Dos Passos’ first wife, Mary Dyckman Hays Dos Passos. He received an excellent education, attending Choate and Harvard. After his first wife, Katy Smith Dos Passos, died in a terrible car accident in 1947, Dos Passos married Elizabeth Holdridge in 1949, and lived with her at his inherited farm in Virginia until his death in 1970. By the time of his death, Dos Passos’ career had come to encapsulate—with its political affiliations first on the left and then on the right—the intellectual history of the century. His revolutionary political views aroused during the First World War significantly changed after the Communists executed his friend the Spanish poet José Robles as a suspected fascist spy during the Spanish Civil War and word of the Moscow show trials in the Soviet Union reached the world in 1937. Disillusioned after many years of holding leftist views, Dos Passos reacted quite differently than Hemingway, who thrilled to the Spanish cause and replaced Dos Passos for a time as the literary lion of the American left. Whereas Dos Passos had published in the New Masses and criticized capitalism in his earlier years, he wrote for the National Review and criticized the New Left in his later years. Dos Passos began as an expatriate—of a spirit canonized in Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises—and ended as a writer devoted to American history and supportive of U.S. foreign policy. Yet throughout his life Dos Passos always regarded the First World War, which killed and maimed millions of young men, as an immense, unjustifiable human catastrophe.

Dos Passos’ artistic sensibility was profoundly shaped in the period during and immediately after World War I, first in Greenwich Village, following his graduation from Harvard in 1916 at the age of twenty, and then on the battlefields of France and Italy. Within two years of his graduation Dos Passos would face such experiences as evacuating the wounded at the battle of Chateau-Thiery in 1918. This raw episode, a repetition of previous encounters with the fighting at Verdun, followed hard on years of classical education at Harvard and Choate; like other well-educated, genteel volunteer drivers of the war, Dos Passos delivered the previous century’s learning to no-man’s land, something of a challenge to the belletristic afterglow of the nineteenth century. Sanguine acceptance of official views of the war could not survive the encounter. Two of the short biographical sketches found in 1919, the central novel of the U.S.A. trilogy—one of President Woodrow Wilson and another, The Body of An American, portraying a composite, multi-ethnic soldier buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery—dramatize Dos Passos’ passionate rejection of the war as administered by Wilson and other statesmen. While crossing the Atlantic by ship, Dos Passos overheard Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest son, Major Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Archie Roosevelt marveling over how the war would make the United States one of the greatest military nations of the world, one ready for something more that Dos Passos could well imagine. Rather than sharing in the excitement of emerging world power, Dos Passos was sobered by the arrogance of the growing American empire as personified by young Roosevelt. Like other expatriates, Dos Passos came to detest the cultural provincialism that dominated the American scene, to admire the French and Italians, and to respond to the literary and political currents of Europe. When Dos Passos served in the Norton-Harjes volunteer ambulance unit near Verdun in 1917 and in the Red Cross ambulance service in Italy 1918, he was attentive to the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and its prospects for changing the world. His need to express his admirations and hopes sometimes led Dos Passos into political trouble. For example, a letter he wrote to José Giner Pantoja in Madrid suggesting that military service meant slavery to stupidity and that only revolutionaries protected the good things in life prompted a Red Cross official to recommend that Dos Passos be dishonorably discharged. The threat of serious consequences was a real one: e. e. cummings had been arrested in 1917 as a result of political remarks in the correspondence of his friend Slater Brown. (Cummings depicted his prison experience in his 1922 novel The Enormous Room, which Dos Passos heralded in the literary review The Dial.) Instead of being discharged, Dos Passos was inducted into the American medical corps and fully experienced the American military drill at Camp Crane in Allentown, Pennsylvania, before returning with his unit to Italy.

While focusing on the life of ordinary men of the kind Dos Passos had come to know well, Three Soldiers contends with worldly twentieth-century pressures on artistic representation by appropriating industrial machinery as motifs for different stages of the army’s preparation for and engagement in the war. The various parts of the novel, named after a mechanical production process, document the making of soldiers who, like automatons, constitute a military colossus, the American Expeditionary Force, which was hard pressed to distinguish the Argonnes Forest from the Oregon forest. In the writing itself Dos Passos displaces some conventions of verisimilitude with fragmented subjectivities of the war’s participants in much the same way that a Cubist or Futurist painting formally disrupts a unitary perspective. Dos Passos was also influenced by the innovative Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s disruptive montage technique (Dos Passos later met the director in the Soviet Union), and this principle of disruption is found at the level of the characters’ actions in Three Soldiers. Although Chrisfield does take action by killing an American officer, the moment of his individual defiance arrives in isolation from others; there is little dramatic build-up to this revolt and there is little suspense, though there is also little surprise. Readers expecting a plot driven by heroic action will be disappointed by this artistic approach.

Dos Passos wished to convey soldiers truthfully—complete with their personal desires for freedom and authority, their expressed prejudices, profanity, and ethnic slurs, as the novel sweeps them all to their individual fates. Thus the three soldiers—one from San Francisco, one from Indiana, and one from New York City—represent three actual but individually incomplete responses to the military machine: Fuselli seeks self-advancement, Chrisfield kills, and Andrews escapes for a time to the freedom of Paris. Yet, taken together and in context they express a muted popular will. In keeping with his convictions about regular soldiers during the war, Dos Passos later asserted the view in a 1929 review of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms that [g]reat literature can only be grown out of the loam of a rich and sprouting popular life. For Dos Passos this meant defending profanity and controversial scenes in his fiction (some of which were ultimately expurgated from Three Soldiers) against the constraints of his publisher. Dos Passos’ ideas of popular life and culture, like his politics, were at odds with conventional taste, not to mention religious conservatives of his time.

For example, the job of uplifting the popular spirit of patriotism, democracy, and Christian values in what was known, in President Wilson’s words, as the war to save democracy, fell largely to the Young Men’s Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.) and the Salvation Army, who provided songbooks to soldiers. Their efforts were not universally appreciated by the troops, according to Dos Passos and others. In H.L. Mencken’s ironic assessment of the Y.M.C.A.’s heroes of the war for democracy published in the New Republic in 1920, Mencken remarks that the Y.M.C.A. men sent to France were not entirely popular: The veterans of the line, true enough, dislike them excessively, and have a habit of denouncing them obscenely when the corn juice flows. They charged too much for cigarettes; they tried to discourage the amiability of the ladies of France; they had a habit of being absent when the shells burst in air. In Three Soldiers John Andrews—a somewhat autobiographical figure, despite Dos Passos’ protest to the contrary— appears to offer an antidote to the Puritanism of the Y.M.C.A. Andrews, a songwriter who recalls popular Tin Pan Alley tunes, rejects the worldview of the Y-man and plans to compose a song called the Queen of Sheeba based on the seductive temptress of Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptations of St. Anthony. Reading Flaubert in the hospital ward after being wounded in the leg by shrapnel, Andrews witnesses how a Y-man urges all of the soldiers in the ward—including the legless ones—to sing the hymn Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus. The novel relates how [t]he men got to their feet, except for a few who had lost their legs, and sang the first verse of the hymn unsteadily. The second verse petered out all together, leaving only the Y-man and the Reverend Dr. Skinner singing away at the top of their lungs. The Y-man is apparently oblivious to the situational irony in this scene. And it is a legless man in the ward who comments that men like the parson found on both sides of the conflict were as much to blame as anyone for the war.

Clearly, Dos Passos is at pains to show soldiers preferred other songs to hymns, and Three Soldiers could have been aptly called The Soldiers’ Chorus, the name of a song in Charles Gounod’s opera to which Dos Passos alludes in his later novel The Streets of Night. Three Soldiers depicts soldiers picking up, for example, Bon Soir, Mademoiselle in parody of Mother, Take in Your Service Flag and the erotically charged The Mademoiselle from Armentieres. Other popular songs that appear in the novel, such as There’s A Girl in the Heart of Maryland (With A Heart That Belongs To Me), Smiles, and Home, Boys, It’s Home We Want to Be, were the kinds of tunes that appeared in the songbooks issued by the U.S. Army, the Salvation Army, and the Y.M.C.A. While this might not seem surprising today, the popular songs contained in these booklets were not permitted in school curricula until 1940. The U.S. government actually banned the songs I Don’t Want to Get Well (I’m in Love with a Beautiful Nurse) and There’ll Be a Hot Time for the Old Men When the Young Men Go to War.

Pro- and anti-war sentiments were still fierce when Three Soldiers first appeared in print. One hostile review in the Chicago Tribune written by a war veteran was introduced by the headline, THREE SOLDIERS BRANDED AS TEXTBOOK AND BIBLE FOR SLACKERS AND COWARDS. The writer, an anonymous member of the First Division, viewed the novel as a blow at Americanism. In his view, Dos Passos has become the Knight Errant of all that America does not stand for. Indeed, the characters Andrews and Chrisfield entertain the possibility that protests on May 1, International Workers Day, might truly test the stability of the French government, and the character Eisenstein speaks openly of social revolution in France. Coningsby Dawson’s page-one review in the New York Times Book Review chimed in that [t]he book fails because of its unmanly intemperance both in language and in plot. Three Soldiers also received more mixed reviews. Henry Seidel Canby noted in the Literary Review that the novel was [b]y no means a perfect book, but it is a very engrossing one, a firsthand study, finely imagined and powerfully created. Its philosophy we may dismiss as incomplete; its conception of the free soul tortured, deadened, diseased by the circumstances of war, we cannot dismiss. Heywood Broun offered praise in the Bookman and a more guarded review in the Atlantic’s Bookshelf, calling it aesthetically honest and quite fearless but criticizing its propaganda. The African-American writer Claude McKay in The Liberator expressed appreciation for the novel and analyzed its social typology. Three Soldiers and Dos Passos’ later Manhattan Transfer (1926) influenced McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928), a story about an African-American soldier’s return from serving in the A.E.F. in France that generated controversies among African-American reviewers. Fully engaged in the characterization of Dos Passos’ novel, McKay wrote that [w]hoever has been up against the granite of our industrial life should recognize Fuselli and Chrisfield. McKay’s strong (and negative) reaction to these two particular characters testifies to his understanding that Dos Passos had not written a high modernist aesthetic object at a remove from the hubbub of real life but rather a novel closely connected with a recognizable social world. While some reviewers have complained that Dos Passos’ characters usually find despair and little joy, in Three Soldiers people have a good time—but usually only by breaking the rules in Paris.

Thus Dos Passos, absorbing avant-garde ideas while also recording in his diaries the songs that soldiers sang and the world that they experienced, defies the received wisdom that high Modernism was antithetical to popular culture. To be sure, this position involved some personal contradictions. While undoubtedly an intellectual himself, Dos Passos wrote in a moment of extremity to his friend Rumsey Marvin: As for an intellectual class it can go f—itself. Dos Passos found many intellectuals of his time to be less than critical of power. This class, he wrote, is "merely less picturesque and less warmhearted than the hoi polloi and a damn-sight eagerer to climb on the band wagon in time of need. The war’s the example. Why they had to run special trains to get the intellectuals to Washington they were in such a hurry to run to cover. And those that didn’t went into the spy service." Such intellectual complicity was less attractive than the perhaps rougher sentiments that could be gleaned from popular culture. Thus in this period when Dos Passos was viewing the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger; listening to the music of Stravinsky; reading James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Henrik Ibsen’s and Flaubert’s works; he was also recalling the sound of artillery, airplane bombings, and soldiers’ songs. This conjunction in his own experience braced him for combat against what he called in Vanity Fair in 1925 the idiotic schism between Highbrow and Lowbrow. While the epigraph of the Y.M.C.A. Victory Songs asks, Give me the man who goes to battle with a song in his heart, Dos Passos sought to discover which song the soldier might be singing and what his heart might reveal. Three Soldiers provides an answer. Indeed, some of the most vibrant currents of this intriguing experimental novel can be found in popular culture as expressed among the soldiers, and their aspirations intermingle and conflict with the powerful forces arrayed against them. Three Soldiers, as Dos Passos wrote in his 1932 introduction to the novel, was merely the first step in a process, continued in later years, that began to strip the bunting off the great illusions of our time. It is valuable to recall Dos Passos’ early perspective on what he then named imperial America, now that the American bunting has returned to the world stage in our own time.

John Trombold holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. A Dos Passos scholar, he has published in numerous academic journals and also co-edited a collection of fiction and nonfiction about Seattle.

CONTENTS

PART I - MAKING THE MOULD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

PART II - THE METAL COOLS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

PART III - MACHINES

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

PART IV - RUST

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

PART V - THE WORLD OUTSIDE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

PART VI - UNDER THE WHEELS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

SUGGESTED READING

PART I

MAKING THE MOULD

Les contemporains qui souffrent de certaines choses ne peuvent s’en souvenir qu’avec une horreur qui paralyse tout autre plaisir, même celui de lire un conte.

STENDHAL

CHAPTER I

THE company stood at attention, each man looking straight before him at the empty parade ground, where the cinder piles showed purple with evening. On the wind that smelt of barracks and disinfectant there was a faint greasiness of food cooking. At the other side of the wide field long lines of men shuffled slowly into the narrow wooden shanty that was the mess hall. Chins down, chests out, legs twitching and tired from the afternoon’s drilling, the company stood at attention. Each man stared straight in front of him, some vacantly with resignation, some trying to amuse themselves by noting minutely every object in their field of vision,—the cinder piles, the long shadows of the barracks and mess halls where they could see men standing about, spitting, smoking, leaning against clapboard walls. Some of the men in line could hear their watches ticking in their pockets.

Someone moved, his feet making a crunching noise in the cinders.

The sergeant’s voice snarled out: You men are at attention. Quit yer wrigglin’ there, you!

The men nearest the offender looked at him out of the corners of their eyes.

Two officers, far out on the parade ground, were coming towards them. By their gestures and the way they walked, the men at attention could see that they were chatting about something that amused them. One of the officers laughed boyishly, turned away and walked slowly back across the parade ground. The other, who was the lieutenant, came towards them smiling. As he approached his company, the smile left his lips and he advanced his chin, walking with heavy precise steps.

Sergeant, you may dismiss the company. The lieutenant’s voice was pitched in a hard staccato.

The sergeant’s hand snapped up to salute like a block signal.

Companee dis . . . missed, he sang out.

The row of men in khaki became a crowd of various individuals with dusty boots and dusty faces. Ten minutes later they lined up and marched in a column of fours to mess. A few red filaments of electric lights gave a dusty glow in the brownish obscurity where the long tables and benches and the board floors had a faint smell of garbage mingled with the smell of the disinfectant the tables had been washed off with after the last meal. The men, holding their oval mess kits in front of them, filed by the great tin buckets at the door, out of which meat and potatoes were splashed into each plate by a sweating K. P. in blue denims.

Don’t look so bad tonight, said Fuselli to the man opposite him as he hitched his sleeves up at the wrists and leaned over his steaming food. He was sturdy, with curly hair and full vigorous lips that he smacked hungrily as he ate.

It ain’t, said the pink flaxen-haired youth opposite him, who wore his broad-brimmed hat on the side of his head with a certain jauntiness.

I got a pass tonight, said Fuselli, tilting his head vainly.

Goin’ to tear things up?

Man . . . I got a girl at home back in Frisco. She’s a good kid.

"Yer right not to go with any of the girls in this goddam town....

They ain’t clean, none of ’em . . . . That is if ye want to go overseas."

The flaxen-haired youth leaned across the table earnestly.

I’m goin’ to git some more chow. Wait for me, will yer? said Fuselli.

What yer going to do down town? asked the flaxen-haired youth when Fuselli came back.

Dunno,—run round a bit an’ go to the movies, he answered, filling his mouth with potato.

Gawd, it’s time fer retreat. They overheard a voice behind them.

Fuselli stuffed his mouth as full as he could and emptied the rest of his meal reluctantly into the garbage pail.

A few moments later he stood stiffly at attention in a khaki row that was one of hundreds of other khaki rows, identical, that filled all sides of the parade ground, while the bugle blew somewhere at the other end where the flag-pole was. Somehow it made him think of the man behind the desk in the office of the draft board who had said, handing him the papers sending him to camp, I wish I was going with you, and had held out a white bony hand that Fuselli, after a moment’s hesitation, had taken in his own stubby brown hand. The man had added fervently, It must be grand, just grand, to feel the danger, the chance of being potted any minute. Good luck, young feller . . . . Good luck. Fuselli remembered unpleasantly his paper-white face and the greenish look of his bald head; but the words had made him stride out of the office sticking out his chest, brushing truculently past a group of men in the door. Even now the memory of it, mixing with the strains of the national anthem made him feel important, truculent.

Squads right! came an order. Crunch, crunch, crunch in the gravel. The companies were going back to their barracks. He wanted to smile but he didn’t dare. He wanted to smile because he had a pass till midnight, because in ten minutes he’d be outside the gates, outside the green fence and the sentries and the strands of barbed wire. Crunch, crunch, crunch; oh, they were so slow in getting back to the barracks and he was losing time, precious free minutes. Hep, hep, hep, cried the sergeant, glaring down the ranks, with his aggressive bulldog expression, to where someone had fallen out of step.

The company stood at attention in the dusk. Fuselli was biting the inside of his lips with impatience. Minutes dragged by.

At last, as if reluctantly, the sergeant sang out:

Dis . . . missed.

Fuselli hurried towards the gate, brandishing his pass with an important swagger.

Once out on the asphalt of the street, he looked down the long row of lawns and porches where violet arc lamps already contested the faint afterglow, drooping from their iron stalks far above the recently planted saplings of the avenue. He stood at the corner slouched against a telegraph pole, with the camp fence, surmounted by three strands of barbed wire, behind him, wondering which way he would go. This was a hell of a town anyway. And he used to think he wanted to travel round and see places.—Home’ll be good enough for me after this, he muttered. Walking down the long street towards the centre of town, where was the moving-picture show, he thought of his home, of the dark apartment on the ground floor of a seven-storey house where his aunt lived. Gee, she used to cook swell, he murmured regretfully.

On a warm evening like this he would have stood round at the corner where the drugstore was, talking to fellows he knew, giggling when the girls who lived in the street, walking arm and arm, twined in couples or trios, passed by affecting ignorance of the glances that followed them. Or perhaps he would have gone walking with Al, who worked in the same optical-goods store, down through the glaring streets of the theatre and restaurant quarter, or along the wharves and ferry slips, where they would have sat smoking and looking out over the dark purple harbor, with its winking lights and its moving ferries spilling swaying reflections in the water out of their square reddish-glowing windows. If they had been lucky they would have seen a liner come in through the Golden Gate, growing from a blur of light to a huge moving brilliance, like the front of a high-class theatre, that towered above the ferry boats. You could often hear the thump of the screw and the swish of the bow cutting the calm bay-water, and the sound of a band playing, that came alternately faint and loud. When I git rich, Fuselli had liked to say to Al, I’m goin’ to take a trip on one of them liners.

Yer dad come over from the old country in one, didn’t he? Al would ask.

Oh, he came steerage. I’d stay at home if I had to do that. Man, first class for me, a cabin de lux, when I git rich.

But here he was in this town in the East, where he didn’t know anybody and where there was no place to go but the movies.

’Lo, buddy, came a voice beside him. The tall youth who had sat opposite at mess was just catching up to him. Goin’ to the movies?

Yare, nauthin’ else to do.

Here’s a rookie. Just got to camp this mornin’, said the tall youth, jerking his head in the direction of the man beside him.

You’ll like it. Ain’t so bad as it seems at first, said Fuselli encouragingly.

I was just telling him, said the other, to be careful as hell not to get in wrong. If ye once get in wrong in this damn army . . . it’s hell.

You bet yer life . . . so they sent ye over to our company, did they, rookie? Ain’t so bad. The sergeant’s sort o’ decent if ye’re in right with him, but the lieutenant’s a stinker . . . . Where you from?

New York, said the rookie, a little man of thirty with an ash-colored face and a shiny Jewish nose. I’m in the clothing business there. I oughtn’t to be drafted at all. It’s an outrage. I’m consumptive. He spluttered in a feeble squeaky voice.

They’ll fix ye up, don’t you fear, said the tall youth. They’ll make you so goddam well ye won’t know yerself. Yer mother won’t know ye, when you get home, rookie . . . . But you’re in luck.

Why?

Bein’ from New York. The corporal, Tim Sidis, is from New York, an’ all the New York fellers in the company got a graft with him.

What kind of cigarettes d’ye smoke? asked the tall youth.

I don’t smoke.

Ye’d better learn. The corporal likes fancy ciggies and so does the sergeant; you jus’ slip ’em each a butt now and then. May help ye to get in right with ’em.

Don’t do no good, said Fuselli . . . . It’s juss luck. But keep neat-like and smilin’ and you’ll get on all right. And if they start to ride ye, show fight. Ye’ve got to be hard boiled to git on in this army.

Ye’re goddam right, said the tall youth. Don’t let ’em ride yer . . . . What’s yer name, rookie?

Eisenstein.

This feller’s name’s Powers . . . Bill Powers. Mine’s Fuselli . . . . Goin’ to the movies, Mr. Eisenstein?

No, I’m trying to find a skirt. The little man leered wanly. Glad to have got ackwainted.

Goddam kike! said Powers as Eisenstein walked off up a side street, planted, like the avenue, with saplings on which the sickly leaves rustled in the faint breeze that smelt of factories and coal dust.

Kikes ain’t so bad, said Fuselli, I got a good friend who’s a kike.

They were coming out of the movies in a stream of people in which the blackish clothes of factory-hands predominated.

I came near bawlin’ at the picture of the feller leavin’ his girl to go off to the war, said Fuselli.

Did yer?

It was just like it was with me. Ever been in Frisco, Powers?

The tall youth shook his head. Then he took off his broad-brimmed hat and ran his fingers over his stubby towhead.

Gee, it was some hot in there, he muttered.

Well, it’s like this, said Fuselli. You have to cross the ferry to Oakland. My aunt . . . ye know I ain’t got any mother, so I always live at my aunt’s . . . . My aunt an’ her sister-in-law an’ Mabe . . . Mabe’s my girl . . . they all came over on the ferry-boat, ’spite of my tellin’ ‘em I didn’t want ’em. An’ Mabe said she was mad at me, ’cause she’d seen the letter I wrote Georgine Slater. She was a toughie, lived in our street, I used to write mash notes to. An’ I kep’ tellin’ Mabe I’d done it juss for the hell of it, an’ that I didn’t mean nawthin’ by it. An’ Mabe said she wouldn’t never forgive me, an’ then I said maybe I’d be killed an’ she’d never see me again, an’ then we all began to bawl. Gawd! it was a mess . . . . "

It’s hell sayin’ good-by to girls, said Powers, understandingly. Cuts a feller all up. I guess it’s better to go with coosies. Ye don’t have to say good-by to them.

Ever gone with a coosie?

Not exactly, admitted the tall youth, blushing all over his pink face, so that it was noticeable even under the ashen glare of the arc lights on the avenue that led towards camp.

I have, said Fuselli, with a certain pride. I used to go with a Portugee girl. My but she was a toughie. I’ve given all that up now I’m engaged, though . . . . But I was tellin’ ye. . . . Well, we finally made up an’ I kissed her an’ Mabe said she’d never marry any one but me. So when we was walkin’ up the street I spied a silk service flag in a winder, that was all fancy with a star all trimmed up to beat the band, an’ I said to myself, I’m goin’ to give that to Mabe, an’ I ran in an’ bought it. I didn’t give a hoot in hell what it cost. So when we was all kissin’ and bawlin’ when I was goin’ to leave them to report to the overseas detachment, I shoved it into her hand, an’ said, ‘Keep that, girl, an’ don’t you forgit me.’ An’ what did she do but pull out a five-pound box o’ candy from behind her back an’ say, ’don’t make yerself sick, Dan.’ An’ she’d had it all the time without my knowin’ it. Ain’t girls clever?

Yare, said the tall youth vaguely.

Along the rows of cots, when Fuselli got back to the barracks, men were talking excitedly.

There’s hell to pay, somebody’s broke out of the jug.

How?

Damned if I know.

Sergeant Timmons said he made a rope of his blankets.

No, the feller on guard helped him to get away.

Like hell he did. It was like this. I was walking by the guardhouse when they found out about it.

What company did he belong ter?

Dunno.

What’s his name?

Some guy on trial for insubordination. Punched an officer in the jaw.

I’d a liked to have seen that.

Anyhow he’s fixed himself this time.

You’re goddam right.

Will you fellers quit talkin’? It’s after taps, thundered the sergeant, who sat reading the paper at a little board desk at the door of the barracks under the feeble light of one small bulb, carefully screened. You’ll have the O. D. down on us.

Fuselli wrapped the blanket round his head and prepared to sleep. Snuggled down into the blankets on the narrow cot, he felt sheltered from the sergeant’s thundering voice and from the cold glare of officers’ eyes. He felt cosy and happy as he had felt in bed at home, when he had been a little kid. For a moment he pictured to himself the other man, the man who had punched an officer’s jaw, dressed as he was, maybe only nineteen, the same age as he was, with a girl like Mabe waiting for him somewhere. How cold and frightful it must feel to be out of the camp with the guard looking for you! He pictured himself running breathless down a long street pursued by a company with guns, by officers whose eyes glinted cruelly like the pointed tips of bullets. He pulled the blanket closer round his head, enjoying the warmth and softness of the wool against his cheek. He must remember to smile at the sergeant when he passed him off duty. Somebody had said there’d be promotions soon. Oh, he wanted so hard to be promoted. It’d be so swell if he could write back to Mabe and tell her to address her letters Corporal Dan Fuselli. He must be more careful not to do anything that would get him in wrong with anybody. He must never miss an opportunity to show them what a clever kid he was. Oh, when we’re ordered overseas, I’ll show them, he thought ardently, and picturing to himself long movie reels of heroism he went off to sleep.

A sharp voice beside his cot woke him with a jerk.

Get up, you.

The white beam of a pocket searchlight was glaring in the face of the man next to him.

The O. D., said Fuselli to himself.

Get up, you, came the sharp voice again.

The man in the next cot stirred and opened his eyes.

Get up.

Here, sir, muttered the man in the next cot, his eyes blinking sleepily in the glare of the flashlight. He got out of bed and stood unsteadily at attention.

Don’t you know better than to sleep in your O. D. shirt? Take it off.

Yes, sir.

What’s your name?

The man looked up, blinking, too dazed to speak.

Don’t know your own name, eh? said the officer, glaring at the man savagely, using his curt voice like a whip.—Quick, take off yer shirt and pants and get back to bed.

The Officer of the Day moved on, flashing his light to one side and the other in his midnight inspection of the barracks. Intense blackness again, and the sound of men breathing deeply in sleep, of men snoring. As he went to sleep Fuselli could hear the man beside him swearing, monotonously, in an even whisper, pausing now and then to think of new filth, of new combinations of words, swearing away his helpless anger, soothing himself to sleep by the monotonous reiteration of his swearing.

A little later Fuselli woke with a choked nightmare cry. He had dreamed that he had smashed the O. D. in the jaw and had broken out of the Jug and was running, breathless, stumbling, falling, while the company on guard chased him down an avenue lined with little dried-up saplings, gaining on him, while with voices metallic as the clicking of rifle triggers officers shouted orders, so that he was certain to be caught, certain to be shot. He shook himself all over, shaking off the nightmare as a dog shakes off water, and went back to sleep again, snuggling into his blankets.

CHAPTER II

JOHN Andrews stood naked in the center of a large bare room, of which the walls and ceiling and floor were made of raw pine boards. The air was heavy from the steam heat. At a desk in one corner a typewriter clicked spasmodically.

Say, young feller, d’you know how to spell imbecility?

John Andrews walked over to the desk, told him, and added, Are you going to examine me?

The man went on typewriting without answering. John Andrews stood in the center of the floor with his arms folded, half amused, half angry, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, listening to the sound of the typewriter and of the man’s voice as he read out each word of the report he was copying.

Recommendation for discharge . . . click, click . . . Damn this typewriter . . . . Private Coe Elbert . . . click, click. Damn these rotten army typewriters . . . . Reason . . . mental deficiency. History of Case . . . .

At that moment the recruiting sergeant came back.

Look here, if you don’t have that recommendation ready in ten minutes Captain Arthurs’ll be mad as hell about it, Bill. For God’s sake get it done. He said already that if you couldn’t do the work, to get somebody who could. You don’t want to lose your job do you?

Hullo, the sergeant’s eyes lit on John Andrews, I’d forgotten you. Run around the room a little . . . . No, not that way. Just a little so I can test yer heart . . . . God, these rookies are thick.

While he stood tamely being prodded and measured, feeling like a prize horse at a fair, John Andrews listened to the man at the typewriter, whose voice went on monotonously.

No . . . record of sexual dep . . . . O hell, this eraser’s no good! . . . pravity or alcoholism; spent . . . normal . . . youth on farm. Appear-ance normal though im . . . say, how many ’m’s’ in immature?

All right, put yer clothes on, said the recruiting sergeant. Quick, I can’t spend all day. Why the hell did they send you down here alone?

The papers were balled up, said Andrews.

Scores ten years . . . in test B, went on the voice of the man at the typewriter . . . . Sen . . . exal ment . . . m-e-n-t-a-l-i-t-y that of child of eight. Seems unable . . . to either . . . . Goddam this man’s writin’. How kin I copy it when he don’t write out his words?"

All right. I guess you’ll do. Now there are some forms to fill out. Come over here.

Andrews followed the recruiting sergeant to a desk in the far corner of the room, from which he could hear more faintly the click, click of the typewriter and the man’s voice mumbling angrily.

Forgets to obey orders . . . . Responds to no form of per . . . suasion. M-e-m-o-r-y, nil.

All right. Take this to barracks B . . . . Fourth building, to the right; shake a leg, said the recruiting sergeant.

Andrews drew a deep breath of the sparkling air outside. He stood irresolutely a moment on the wooden steps of the building looking down the row of hastily constructed barracks. Some were painted green, some were of plain boards, and some were still mere skeletons. Above his head great piled, rose-tinted clouds were moving slowly across the immeasurable free sky. His glance slid down the sky to some tall trees that flamed bright yellow with autumn outside the camp limits, and then to the end of the long street of barracks, where was a picket fence and a sentry walking to and fro, to and fro. His brows contracted for a moment. Then he walked with a sort of swagger towards the fourth building to the right.

John Andrews was washing windows. He stood in dirty blue denims at the top of a ladder, smearing with a soapy cloth the small panes of the barrack windows. His nostrils were full of a smell of dust and of the sandy quality of the soap. A little man with one lined greyish-red cheek puffed out by tobacco followed him up, also on a ladder, polishing the panes with a dry cloth till

Reviews for Three Soldiers (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[randystafford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was rather disappointed with this novel. I’m an admirer of Dos Passos’ later USA Trilogy, but his modernistic style wasn’t fully developed yet when he wrote this novel though we do get a lot of snatches of music and a story allotted to several viewpoint characters. There’s also little of his experience as an ambulance driver in World War One. Indeed, there’s not that much actual combat in this novel at all.The novel follows, despite the title, more than three soldiers. Fuselli is an ambitious man from San Francisco. His desire to be promoted ultimately comes to nothing despite his good behavior. Sex and relationships were a big part of the USA Trilogy, and that’s true in this novel. Fuselli is engaged but a womanizer, and his fiancé ultimately marries someone back home anyway. There’s the Jewish Eisenstein from New York who is a Marxist agitator, and he’ll get involved with Reds in France. He’s in the garment trade and also older, 30, than most of the other draftees. We’re not exactly sure what happens to him except he gets in trouble for speaking out against the war. John Andrews, the novel’s main viewpoint character, is a would-be composer from a Virginia family and moved to New York City. We follow him from enlistment screening to the very end of the novel. He joins the Army thinking that it will somehow fix him; he is sick of his individuality. He needs, he thinks, to be scorned. Bill Grey is a former cowboy. He’ll be the first one to talk about desertion, a major theme of the book. Some of the soldiers are definitely not in the “making the world safe for democracy” mold. They talk about wanting to rape German women and humiliate German officers before shooting them. I suspect that must have been rather shocking in 1921. Chrisfield, from Indiana, is rather like this. On the ship over, there is talk of some onboard casualties (falling overboard, spinal meningitis), and Chrisfield will develop a murderous fixation on an officer he will eventually kill later. There is a brief appearance by a soldier from Minneapolis, a major setting in the USA trilogy. He comments on how he knows a lot less about what is happening in the war when he’s in France than when he was home. Eisenstein talks about the “system” and how you have to “turn men into beasts before ye can get ‘em to act that way.” It’s a similar metaphor to the machine one used for the titles of the book’s parts except the last two: “Making the Mould”, “The Metal Cools”, “Machines”, “Rust”, “The World Outside”, and “Under the Wheels”. There is a great deal of interaction with the “Y” men (as in YMCA), sometimes they are helpful, other times they come across unsympathetically as parrots of patriotic clichés who have never seen combat. There is mention of the YMCA distributing a pamphlet on German atrocities with pictures of children with their arms cut off, babies on bayonets, and women strapped to tables and being raped by Germans.There are a couple of men who have seen combat and disabuse, in a café, the newbie characters about the glory of combat. One of them frequently seems to be facing court martials including one for going AWOL. Another soldier literally can’t take the stress. One day he refuses to get out of bed. An officer places him under arrest, and he just dies. It isn’t until the third part of the book, “Machines”, (slightly more than a quarter into the book) that we get to combat and then, of course, not for all the characters.The battle seems to be the Meusse Argonne, and Dos Passos actually captures what little I’ve read about it. Fought in a forested area, American units often lost contact with each other, and, at times left the fight (either because they were lost or temporarily deserted). It is during this battle that Chrisfield gets to kill the object of his fixation, a wounded Sergeant Anderson. There is a line uttered by Andrews about how maybe the best thing that could happen to them is be killed in battle because they are a “tame generation”. He says this to Chrisfield who is anything but tame. Another moment that was probably shocking for 1921 readers of this novel was the part when an officer heavily insinuates, due to their shortage of rations, that surrendering Germans should be killed and not taken prisoner. The Y men refuse to believe any American solider would shoot a surrendering German. To them, barbarism is only a German trait. While hospitalized, several soldiers disparage making the world safe for democracy and how they are all suckers.Andrews also gets hospitalized and thinks, when discussing the war with another soldi,er that“Men were more humane when they were killing each other than when they were talking about it.” While hospitalized, Andrews learns the war is over, and the book isn’t even half done.The Army of Occupation in Germany is brought up a fair bit. Andrews even hears officers talking about going AWOL in Paris. Chrisfield is eventually promoted to a corporal, and Andrews makes the acquaintance of another “college man” who tells him about a program where soldiers can stay in Paris and study. The last third of the book is mainly following Andrews around Paris and the subculture of the deserters. He also takes a French lover and also falls in with the set of a rich French woman. (Paris of the Peace Conference was also a major part of Dos Passos’ 1918.) Andrews keeps trying to get discharged. Then, one day traveling with that French woman, Genevieve, he is arrested by some MPs for not having a travel pass. It’s implied they’ve been robbing supplies or army payroll. He is sent to a labor battalion, escapes, and falls in with a family crew on a river barge and then finds his way to Genevieve’s villa. Andrews starts to openly identify with the socialist/communists here, and Dos Passos’ ideological point becomes more blatant. Genevieve greets Andrews and he takes a room, but he has no money, the landlady turns him in as a deserter, and the novel ends with him jumping out a window to his death, the papers with his composition flying about in the breeze. The novel is interesting for the little asides that later Great War novels might leave out. Dos Passos has a lot of dialogue and most of his descriptions are of the landscape, particularly its light. While the cynicism, socialism, and bitterness are interesting, the novel goes on too long in the last part.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Author John Dos Passos came out of World War I believing that socialism and pacifism offered the world a better way forward. He finished writing Three Soldiers in the spring of 1919, but the novel was not published until 1921. Interestingly, the 1932 Modern Library edition of the novel that I read includes an introduction dated June 1932 in which Dos Passos laments the fact that he did not “work over” the novel much more than he did before it was first published in 1921. It is obvious from the introduction that the author was a disillusioned man in 1932 but that he had not given up on changing the politics of the average American. According to him:“…we can at least meet events with our minds cleared of some of the romantic garbage that kept us from doing clear work then. Those of us who have lived through have seen these years strip the bunting off the great illusions of our time, we must deal with the raw structure of history now, we must deal with it quick, before it stamps us out.”Three Soldiers follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has read even a few war novels, be those stories about WWI, WWII, or the wars in Viet Nam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We first meet the main characters as civilians and then follow them through their military basic training, their deployment to the field, into battle, and finally, to the aftermath of their combat experiences. While Dos Passos did take this approach in Three Soldiers, there are strikingly few pages dedicated to actual battle descriptions and the like. Instead, the author focuses more on what happens to soldiers when combat ends by showing his main characters as they recuperate from their wounds in war zone hospitals. In that way, it is easy for Dos Passos to contrast the disillusioned, sometimes physically and emotionally crippled, soldiers there to the patriotic, ambitious boys they were when they eagerly joined the army to serve their country. This is not an easy novel to read, mainly because each new chapter seems to open with long, dreary descriptions of the cold, wet days that the soldiers wake up to every morning. Those descriptions help set the tone for the mental state of the author’s three soldiers (although the bulk of the novel is really about only one of them) as they finally figure out how naïve they have been about how the system really works. Rather than winning promotions and pay increases, they find themselves doing menial tasks and reporting to men who simply gamed the military system better than them. They get bored – and the reader starts getting bored with and for them. Perhaps that is what Dos Passos was aiming for; if so it works beautifully.Bottom Line: Even to its last two pages, Three Soldiers is one of the most depressing war novels I’ve ever read. The argument that Dos Passos makes for socialism and pacificism is clear enough, but because the author sees everything in such black and white terms, he does not, in the long run, build a very effective case for either.Bonus Observation: This Dos Passos quote from the 1932 introduction could have easily been written last week:“Certainly eighty percent of the inhabitants of the United States must read a column of print a day, if it’s only in the tabloids and the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Somehow, just as machinemade shoes aren’t as good as handmade shoes, the enormous quantity produced has resulted in diminished power in books. We’re not men enough to run the machines we’ve made.”I can only imagine what Dos Passos would think if he were alive today when all of us have hundreds, if not thousands, of books at our electronic fingertips twenty-four hours a day?

[m.belljackson · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Dos Passos presents the varied backgrounds of his Three Soldiers and their early driving concerns: get to the front, get promoted to Corporal, andsurvive the battles, then follows only John Andrews as he attempts to write music, then deserts the Army.His personality evolves from anti-war and hatred of the Army to becoming a pretentious, tiresome, self-centered and selfish individual who careslittle about other people's feelings or his impact on their lives. Worse still, he proceeds to confound his friends and us with a sequence of stupiddecisions like traveling without required papers, dog tags, or a pass, all of which he has or can easily get. His choices lead to a really dumb conclusion.

[figre · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My guess is that the impact of anti-war books, that is anti-war books from a number of years ago, has diminished because of the volumes and volumes of such books that have been published over the years. Therefore, the impact of such a book as Three Soldiers is probably not as profound as it was when first published, coming out not too long after the First World War and with the US still fervently believing that armed conflict was the solution to so many of its problems.But today, after so many classics have been issued, this becomes an interesting story of soldiers fighting in WWI (actually, primarily focused on after the war is over but before being sent home), but not the profoundly moving anti-war story it was at one time.Don’t get me wrong; still a good novel. Starting with training before the war, the three soldiers of the title are introduced. However, the story doesn’t exactly follow the three of them through their voyages, but rather visits them at different points in their travels – shifting focus between them at various times. Of interest, there is very little focus on the actual battles (as one might expect in an anti-war novel). Instead, after the training we see them as they prepare for battle. Then the majority of the novel is taken up with post-war France – primarily after the Armistice.A different telling of a story than you might expect, which is why this novel is more interesting than it might have been (particularly, as I’ve already mentioned, with the fact that it is not as shockingly anti-war as it was in the past.) Interesting character studies, and a frank portrayal of those characters in a bad time. A book worth reading for all of these things, and in spite of what it used to be.

[michaelbartley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a interesting war novel, very little about war itself a lot about bing in the army. lot to think about about choices we make thoughtful novel

[bruderbane · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“Three Soldiers” by John Dos Passos is considered a literary classic published soon after World War I and encapsulating much of the disgruntled war fatigue many felt during and after the war. What I discovered was a rather piecemeal lethargic march through the lives of self-centered egocentric snobs not men who had been through the meat-grinder and had become rightly disenchanted and disgruntled. Mr. Passos did not enthrall or entice me and while the writing was quite descriptive the shear lack of character direction, which I do understand was purposeful and reminiscent of the era, encouraged me to put the novel down earlier than I would have liked.