Although not nearly so long nor so ambitious as my other works, The Long March achieved within its own scope, I think, a unity and a sense of artistic inevitability which still, ten years after the writing, I rather wistfully admire. Lest I appear immodest, I would hasten to add that I do not consider the book even remotely perfect, yet certainly every novelist must have within the body of his writing a work of which he recalls everything having gone just right during the composition: through some stroke of luck, form and substance fuse into a single harmonious whole and it all goes down on paper with miraculous ease. For me this was true of The Long March, and since otherwise the process of writing has remained exceedingly painful, I cherish the memory of this brief work, often wondering why for a large part of the time I cannot recapture the sense of compulsion and necessity that dominated its creation.
Possibly much of the urgency of the book is due to factors that are extremely personal. As the reader may eventually begin to suspect, the story is autobiographical. To be sure, all writing is to some degree autobiographical, but The Long March is intensely and specifically so. I do not mean that the central figures are not more or less imaginary—they are; but the mortar explosion and the forced march, which are central to the entire narrative, were actual incidents in which I was involved, just as I was bound up, for a time, in the same desolating atmosphere of a military base in the midst of a fiercely hot American summer. If the story has a sense of truth and verisimilitude, it is because at the time of the writing all of these things—the terrible explosion, the heat of summer, and the anguish of the march itself—still persisted in my mind with the reality of some unshakable nightmare.
Perhaps it was an even larger nightmare which I was trying to create in this book, and which lends to the work whatever symbolic power it has the fortune to possess. Because for myself (as I do believe for most thoughtful people, not only Americans but the community of peaceable men everywhere) the very idea of another war—this one in remote and strange Korea, and only five years after the most cataclysmic conflict ever to engulf mankind—possessed a kind of murky, surrealistic, half-lunatic unreality that we are mercifully spared while awake, but which we do occasionally confront in a horrible dream. Especially for those like myself who had shed their uniforms only five years before—in the blissful notion that the unspeakable orgy of war was now only a memory and safely behind—the experience of putting on that uniform again and facing anew the ritualistic death dance had an effect that can only be described as traumatic. World War II was dreadful enough, but at least the issues involved were amenable to reasonable definition. To be suddenly plunged again into war, into a war, furthermore, where the issues were fuzzy and ambiguous, if not fraudulent, a war that could not possibly be “won,” a senseless conflict so unpopular that even the most sanguinary politician or war lover shrank from inciting people to a patriotic zeal, a war without slogans or ballads or heroes—to have to endure this kind of war seemed, to most of us involved in it at the time, more than we could bear. War was no longer simply a temporary madness into which human beings happily lapsed from time to time. War had at last become the human condition.
It was this feeling I believe I was trying to recapture when sometime later, in the summer of 1952, I found myself in Paris still unable to shake off the sense of having just recently awakened from a nightmare. My own ordeal and the ordeal of most of my Marine Corps friends (including one or two who died in Korea) was over—yet the persistent image of eight boys killed by a random mortar shell and of a long and brutal march lingered in my mind. Senseless mass slaughter and a seemingly endless march, the participants of which were faceless zeroes, were all that in retrospect appeared to me significant about this war without heroes, this war which lacked so utterly a sense of human identity, and which in so sinister a fashion presaged the faceless, soulless, pushbutton wars of the future. All right, I would write about this faceless, soulless march. Yet, all my intentions to the contrary, I began to understand, as I wrote, that even in the midst of an ultimate process of dehumanization the human spirit cannot be utterly denied or downed: against all odds, faces emerge from the faceless aggregate of ciphers, and in the middle of the march I was creating I found Captain Mannix slogging and sweating away, tortured, beaten but indomitable. A hero in spite of himself or me, he endures, and in the midst of inhumanity retains all that which makes it worthwhile to be human. I myself cannot be sure, but possibly it is the hopeful implications derived from this mystery—this kind of indefatigable man—which are all an artist can pretend to suggest, however imperfectly, in his struggle to comprehend the agony of our violent, suicidal century.
[Introduction to the Norwegian edition of The Long March; Cappelens, 1963.]