Hazel Hutchison
In early April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to approve a declaration of war against Germany and its allies. “The world,” he explained, “must be made safe for democracy” (New York Times, 3 April 1917). In the early months of the war, there had been little to suggest either this event or its rhetoric. Since August 1914, Wilson had positioned himself and his administration as potential brokers of peace. He ran for reelection in the fall of 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of the war.” Besides, choosing sides in the squabbles of other nations was not the American way. Since the 1820s, the United States had followed the Monroe Doctrine which stated that Europe and the Americas should not meddle in each other’s spheres of influence. Moreover, in the 1910s, the Civil War of the 1860s was still fresh in the collective memory. With a large ethnic minority of German immigrants, particularly in the Midwest, the nation could not involve itself in the conflict tearing Europe apart without risking doing the same to itself. Wilson was determined that America should stand back from the violence. Even the sinking of the ocean liner RMS Lusitania by a German torpedo on 7 May 1915 with the loss of 124 American lives could not change Wilson’s mind. There was such a thing, he declared, as being “too proud to fight” (New York Times, 11 May 1915). History, however, was laying other plans.
Britain’s dominance at sea meant that, despite Germany’s U‐boat campaign in the Atlantic, it was still easier for America to trade with Britain and her Allies than with the Central Powers. By 1917, the Allies were reliant on American munitions. The depleted governments of Britain and France had also borrowed heavily from Wall Street to pay for these supplies. America, with a population approaching 100 million, had a standing army of fewer than 120 000 men and was not prepared for war. Financially, however, it had already tied itself into backing an Allied success. When the Zimmerman Telegraph was intercepted in the spring of 1917, revealing that Germany was attempting to recruit Mexico as an ally against the United States, Wilson was forced to act. War was formally declared on 6 April 2017.
Other drivers, too, were pushing America toward closer engagement with the conflict. Cultural forces played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion. Unhindered by the censorship regulations that stifled open debate about the war and its consequences in combatant nations, American writers and artists were free to voice radical and disruptive views. American readers were also able to access more honest and questioning accounts. Censorship is often blamed for prolonging the war, by hiding the true scale of the misery and loss at the front from those at home in Britain, France, Germany, and Austria. So, one might assume that the greater flow of information in the United States in the early months of the war would have fueled resistance to military intervention. If anything, however, the opposite was the case. The cultural response to the war was initially balanced, with many newspapers and magazines attempting to offer coverage of both sides of the conflict. Poems and prose writings also contributed to a lively political discourse about the war’s legitimacy and about America’s role. However, as the first months of the war drew on into years, the cultural mood shifted toward the Allies. This was partly because the Allies, particularly the British, made much more sophisticated use than the Central Powers of publishing channels, and placed sympathetic materials where they would fall under the gaze of the political and intellectual classes, in broadsheet newspapers and literary journals such as the Atlantic Monthly or Scribner’s Magazine. Those decision‐making classes were already, by training and experience, predisposed toward British and French culture – from the top down. John Dos Passos notes that Woodrow Wilson, “like most literate Americans, was prejudiced in favor of the British by the whole course of his education.” Others in that class cherished a “nostalgic geography of civilized and cultured Europe where existence was conducted on a higher plane than the grubby materialism of American business” (Dos Passos 1962: 114, 101). France, that other great republic, and its capital Paris, were especially revered as totems of high culture and political equity. For the many upper‐class Americans who had traveled or lived in France before the war, that nation exerted a powerful appeal both to deeply held social values and to personal memories of pleasure and refinement. Wilson’s rallying cry of “democracy” tapped into this cultural and political kinship with France – even as it deftly overlooked the monarchist and imperialist agendas of its Allies. During the early years of the twentieth century, Britain and its vast colonial empire could hardly be called “democratic.”
Wilson’s rhetoric also masked the fact that America in the 1910s was deeply divided, troubled by fault lines between classes, ethnic groups, and political ideologies. As the war progressed, and as George Creel’s Committee on Public Information swung into action in May 1917 to bolster public support for the war effort, this diversity of viewpoints was countered by a new, homogenized version of American identity – what Teddy Roosevelt dubbed “one hundred percent Americanism” (Roosevelt 1918: vii). Creel, a former advertising agent, rallied poets, artists, musicians, and filmmakers to his war‐marketing program, carefully crafted to persuade the American public to accept a full‐scale military draft and the censorship of private letters, to fund a massive expansion of federal governance, and to freely donate millions of dollars to the Allied cause in the form of Liberty Bonds. What Creel could not control, however, was the impact that the experience of war would have on an entire generation of young Americans, male and female, from every ethnic group, to whom the war offered an opportunity to travel across borders, to acquire new skills, and to rub shoulders with people from beyond their own class and country. These young people also experienced the suffering, frustration, incompetence, and brutality that the war fostered. What they saw, felt, and learned would powerfully shape not just their own futures, but the whole tone of mid‐century American culture.
For many decades, a handful of these “Lost Generation” writers, especially John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, were judged to provide the most representative examples of American literature from the war – a judgment which diverted attention away from female, African American, and working‐class views of the conflict (Hemingway 2004: 18). This has changed in recent years, as more overlooked texts resurface. One of the remarkable things about the American literature of World War I is just how much of it there is – or perhaps this is not remarkable, given that more than two million Americans served in France during the war, and many more labored to get them there. Initially, there were volunteers in the Allied forces; after 1917, there was a flood of soldiers with the US Army. Young men from German‐American communities also volunteered to serve on the opposing side. Nobody knows how many. There were also non‐combatant witnesses, including nurses, journalists, and ambulance drivers. Millions of Americans also worked in the farms, factories, and shipyards that supported the Allied war effort. Thousands of war books – memoirs, collected letters, poetry collections, official records, spy thrillers, political histories, military analyses, and novels – were published in America during and after the war. As Dos Passos notes, there are “astronomical quantities of printed matter” to wade through: “Everyone remotely connected with even the most distant aspects of the conflict managed to get some volume printed celebrating his exploits” (Dos Passos 1962: 499).
However, opinions vary as to whether such volumes make the grade as “war literature,” and what that term encompasses. A romance in a munitions factory, a memoir of active service, a newspaper poem about food control, an autobiographical novel set in a rehabilitation hospital, a fictional novella set in postwar Paris – all these texts rely on the war of 1914–1918 for their imaginative energy, but beyond that it is hard to say what they, or their writers, have in common. They employ different methods, work in different genres, and voice profoundly opposing attitudes. Such range and variety has, over the past century, made it difficult for anyone to discuss American writing from the war – when they have discussed it at all – as a unified body of work. Some of the most interesting American texts to emerge from the conflict, such as Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), or William March’s Company K (1933), defy categorization – literary or otherwise – precisely because they address the problem of what kind of text it is possible to write about World War I, and operate through unconventional forms. These compositional choices generate impact and immediacy, but they have not made it easy for such texts to find a niche in the critical canons of the past century.
One way in which the wealth of American literature about the war can perhaps be better understood is to think less about genres and genders, and to consider the kinds of viewpoints available to writers. From Edgar Allan Poe to Lydia Davis, a self‐conscious awareness of the privileges and limitations of narrative perspective has been an underlying preoccupation for generations of American writers. This has something to do, no doubt, with the problem of consciousness embedded within the nation’s foundational Edenic myth. It also has something to do with the accent on the visual within its culture. The American artist is consummately an observer, one who not only sees, but also appreciates both the power and the vulnerability of that role. There were of course as many perspectives on World War I as there were people caught up in it. However, given the critical role that photography played in the war, both as a propaganda tool and as an element of military strategy, it is perhaps appropriate to understand American texts about the war as focused through different kinds of lenses: long‐range or close‐up, reflective or oblique. Texts which considered the war from a distance often have more in common with each other, in terms of subject matter and approach, than with those composed with direct knowledge of the front. Texts written during the war generally strike a sharper, more urgent note than those composed in retrospect. Many authors commented on the war from more than one angle, changing methods and judgments as the years passed. For the writers of World War I, as so often in American literature, it was the quality of perspective that set the tone and shaped the response.
For Americans in America, the war in Europe represented many different things: a battle for the survival of civilization, a struggle for supremacy among the great races of the world, the destructive yet logical outcome of capitalist oppression, an opportunity to remold Europe free from monarchist tyranny, a chance for adventure and personal fulfillment, a crisis of gender politics, a humanitarian tragedy, or a direct threat to peace on the North American continent. This range of views surfaced in the political poetry of the day, from pacifist protests such as Al Piantadosi’s bestselling lyric “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier” (1915) and the labor movement songs of Joe Hill to the “patriotic” verse produced by the “Vigilantes,” a syndicate of pro‐interventionist poets, including Vachel Lindsey, Edith Thomas, John Curtis Underwood, Hamlin Garland, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Alice Corbin. A similar disparity of views is visible in the fiction of wartime America, from Cleveland Moffett’s counterfactual fantasy The Conquest of America (1916), which imagined a German invasion defeated by American pluck and technological innovation, to Susan Glaspell’s account of one woman’s search for fulfillment in Fidelity (1915), which merely glances toward the war at its close. Despite glaring political differences, these writers addressed the same fundamental questions. How should America respond to the war in Europe? And how would that response redefine the nation’s sense of itself and shape its internal struggles?
Perhaps the most pressing problem that such writers had to grapple with was the position of German‐Americans in wartime America. The rising levels of distrust among neighbors, relatives, and whole communities was expressed in books such as Zane Grey’s novel The Desert of Wheat (1919), which set romance against a backdrop of German spies and saboteurs in league with local socialist organizers. However, Grey’s novel also generated empathy for many of these characters and underscored the complexities of the time. The protagonist Kurt Dorn, who breaks up the saboteurs’ ring, distinguishes himself on the battlefields of France, and returns home to marry his sweetheart is himself of German‐American farming stock. The journalist and thriller writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, who served in Belgium as a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, tackled a similar theme. In Dangerous Days (1919), set in 1916, Rinehart explores the interactions of the Spencer family, owners of a Pennsylvania munitions factory, with the family of a German‐American employee who quits because – reasonably enough – he will not make shells to be fired at his own people. Other voices came out more stridently in favor of the German cause. George Viereck’s poems, such as “The Neutral” (1915) and “The German American to His Adopted Country” (1914), called for solidarity with Germany against the colonial powers of Britain and France (Van Wienen 2002: 55). The critic and journalist H.L. Mencken remained outspoken against the Allied cause throughout the war, but found it increasingly difficult to get his work into print. Other disruptive voices decried the hypocrisy of a government that could celebrate democracy abroad while ignoring the needs and rights of workers, women, and African American citizens at home. Lucian Watkins’s poem “The Negro Soldiers of America: What We Are Fighting For” (1918) notes the irony of black soldiers fighting for Liberty in Berlin, when it is not available to them in Tennessee:
In Tennessee – where Wrong is Might
With Hate and Horror on the throne,
Where God’s DEMOCRACY of LIGHT
AND LOVE, it seems, has never shone.
(Van Wienen 2002: 222)
As Mark Van Wienen shows, poetry, which was published daily in many of the nation’s newspapers, remained a vehicle for dissenting voices, even after April 1917. For example, Bernice Evans’s series of comic, free‐verse poems in the New York Call, published as “The Sayings of Patsy” (1917), highlighted the absurdities of expecting poor families to join the government’s drive to conserve food for the Allies:
Some people
Are certainly
Funny.
It flatters them
To death
To be told
That they can
Feed the allies,
When really
They know
Perfectly well
That they’ve never
Managed to feed
Their own children
Enough.
(Van Wienen 2002: 184)
Evans’s sarcasm was biting; it was also shrewd. Disguised as quirky, light‐hearted verse, apparently poking fun at the experimental new patterns of modernist expression, and accompanied by stick‐figure cartoons, Evans’s poems deftly identified key areas of American society that would be permanently changed by the war. Increased government regulation in many areas of private life, including food standards; new employment opportunities for women, though not necessarily with pay to match; a tougher stance by the establishment toward the complaints of the working poor; a more strident form of “patriotism”: all these would be part of the legacy of the war in America, as would the nation’s new sense of itself as an international moral and political arbiter.
Americans in Europe may have been geographically closer to the action at the front, but for most, the reality of the war still seemed remote – even when its consequences became visible in the pitiful forms of refugees, casualties, and damaged homes. Henry James was old enough to recall the Civil War, to recognize the similarities between the two conflicts, and to guess at what lay ahead. Based mostly in London, he raised funds for the American Volunteer Motor‐Ambulance Corps – later the Norton–Harjes Ambulance Corps. In July 1915, he renounced his American citizenship and became a British subject, partly in protest at Wilson’s neutrality. To many Americans, James must have appeared relatively close to the action, but as he explains in his essay “Within the Rim” (1915), for anyone behind the lines, the war could only be experienced in the imagination, much like the changeable phenomenon of national identity. James presents his sense of Englishness through the metaphor of an elaborate castle‐in‐the‐air – although he still affirms his loyalty to that constructed idea (James 1918: 21). From his support of refugee organizations and his visits to wounded soldiers in London, James knew the human cost of the war. He lost several young friends, including the poet Rupert Brooke, to the conflict. His own valet Burgess Noakes was badly wounded in action. However, as an experienced artist, whose long career had been a series of experiments in point of view, James understood, better perhaps than anyone, that people took sides and made moral judgments based on their own experiences and within the limits of their perspective – the perceptual “rim” of the essay’s title. He also recognized that the gulf between those who imagined this war and those who experienced it could not be bridged by traditional forms of communication. “The war has used up words,” he declared in a rare newspaper interview in 1915. “They have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires” (Lockwood 1915: 3). Distressed and depressed as James was in these last months before his own death in March 1916, his personal letters also show that he could not help looking ahead to the new writing that he felt sure would emerge from the conflict.
James did not visit France during the war, but other Americans did. Almost 40 000 US citizens had been in Europe when the war broke out, around 8000 of these in Paris. While the majority scrambled for passages home, many chose to stay. They involved themselves in the humanitarian and medical relief efforts that were hastily organized to support the official French and British facilities, which had been completely overwhelmed by the scale of the conflict. Edith Wharton, who had lived in Paris since 1910, took a lead role in organizing work, housing, and medical care for Belgian refugees. She also gained permission to tour near the front, and gathered material for a series of essays for Scribner’s Magazine, later collected as Fighting France (1915/2010). In these, Wharton offers an emotive depiction of the war zone, with its shelled towns, inadequate hospitals, and displaced civilians. Wharton’s tour was probably carefully organized by her French Army minders in order to elicit sympathy for the French cause, but she needed no converting. Wharton also martialed her dazzling artistic and literary contacts to contribute to The Book of the Homeless (1916), a fundraising volume for her war charities. These projects demonstrated that writing in wartime could be put to both political and practical uses, but Wharton would also return to the war as a fictional subject in The Marne (1915) and A Son at the Front (1922).
Grace Fallow Norton toured in Brittany with her husband, the painter George Herbert Macrum, in the summer of 1914. Based on her impressions of the mobilization of French citizens, Norton wrote a series of poems titled The Red Road, a section of her anthology Roads (1916). Like Bernice Evans, though in very different style, Norton turned her gaze to the lives of women left at home to manage. She also considered what it would be like when the men came home again, wounded beyond repair or brutalized by their own actions. In “The French Soldier and His Bayonet” (1916), the speaker, perhaps home on leave, has overwritten his own relationships with the mythology of war. His wife stands forgotten and dismissed as the soldier sings out his passion for his “mistress,” Rosalie the bayonet:
On the long march you will cling to me
And I shall love you Rosalie;
And you will laugh, laugh hungrily
And your lips grow red, my Rosalie
(Norton 1916: 70)
Norton’s calculated use of mono‐rhyme and repetition and the poem’s couplet form reinforce the claustrophobia of the soldier’s self‐destructive and sexually charged war fantasy. “My cry when I die will be ‘Rosalie!’” he calls at the climax of the poem (Norton 1916: 71). It is as frightening a text about the psychological impact of war as anything by Wilfred Owen.
In contrast, Dorothy Canfield’s view of life behind the lines offered quiet hope. Canfield, who followed her husband to France when he volunteered in 1916, and who worked with refugees and blind veterans, depicts the French people around her as resourceful and resilient, ready to keep going in the face of adversity. Her collection of short stories, Home Fires in France (1918), focuses on the small battles and triumphs of civilian life: the soldier who spends his week of leave rebuilding the home and farm that he may never see again; or the hospital directrice, who day after day searches out support, housing, and employment for the damaged men sent home from the front. Canfield’s stories are not glorious – deliberately so. Instead they offer a vision of the French people as self‐reliant, neighborly, and determined, a vision that struck a chord with the values of American readers. To many, this was a more powerful argument for the cause of France than any high rhetoric.
One of the most celebrated American observers was also perhaps the most unlikely. In June 1914, Mildred Aldrich, a little‐known American journalist based in Paris, retired in her sixties to the countryside. She bought an old farmhouse, in the hamlet of Huiry. The house was old and quaint, but she chose it for its panoramic view out over the peaceful, pastoral valley of the Marne. When the war broke out in August, Aldrich hung an American flag at the gate and resolved to take her chances. She also began her account in letters that would become a literary sensation. A Hilltop on the Marne, first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and then published in October, would be in its sixth reprint by December. It was a dramatic account, which would later be followed by On the Edge of the Warzone (1917) and The Peak of the Load (1918). Over the first few weeks of the war, Aldrich’s sleepy hamlet would be at the very crisis point of the first German advance toward Paris. A troop of German cavalry called one day, then camped in the woods at the bottom of the hill. Later, the British showed up, drank tea in her garden, and used her house as a look‐out point across the plain during a bombardment. A few days after that, the French arrived and made camp on their way into action. From her vantage point, Aldrich had a “front‐row stage box” view, as the French major puts it, of one of the most decisive moments in the war. As she watched, the German Army was halted in its advance toward Paris:
It was just about six o’clock when the first bomb that we could really see came over the hill. The sun was setting. For two hours we saw them rise, descend, explode. Then a little smoke would rise from one hamlet, then from another; then a tiny flame – hardly more than a spark – would be visible; and by dark the whole plain was on fire […] There were long lines of grain stacks and mills stretching along the plain. One by one they took fire, until, by ten o’clock, they stood like a procession of huge torches across my beloved panorama.
(Aldrich 1914: 149)
Aldrich’s account is personal, vivid, authentic. However, it also acknowledges that sense of detachment which comes with the panoramic view. The vast scale of the battle scene hides the figures within it, and the violence done to the individual must be imagined: “I did not sleep a moment,” Aldrich notes after witnessing the bombardment. “I could not forget the poor fellows lying dead out there in the starlight – and it was such a beautiful night” (1914: 150). Like James, Aldrich understood that what one sees is not the only measure of reality. To see the war spread out at one’s feet was a very different thing to finding oneself in it.
Other American writers did see the war up close. Some responded with immediate impressions, published while the war was in progress; some found their attempts to speak out frustrated by censorship or peer pressure; others took years to process and consider what the war had meant. Before 1917, around 30 000 American men are known to have enlisted with the French, British, or Canadian Armies. In truth, this number was probably higher. While some were motivated by a sense of the political rightness of the Allied cause, many went in search of romantic excitement, or the “Great Adventure,” as former President Teddy Roosevelt described it (Roosevelt 1919: 1). At the heart of this attitude lay notions of manliness, self‐sacrifice, and glory, which had little to do with the reality of twentieth‐century warfare. Even after witnessing the hardship and absurdity of the front, many of those who related their experiences could not express themselves in any other vocabulary. Early war memoirs, and collections of poems or letters, such as those by Coningsby Dawson, Guy Empey, or Alan Seeger, are regularly condemned by modern‐day readers as naive, flippant, and overexcited. Such texts are accused of perpetuating outdated ideals of chivalry, or justifying brutality and racism with misplaced religious fervor. However, these were the registers which the public expected to hear in any soldier’s account – and the aspirations which prompted young men to enlist seemed real enough at the time. Indeed, it was almost impossible, certainly before 1916, to imagine any other method for writing about the war. In a study of some 400 war narratives published in America between 1914 and 1918, Charles Genthe notes that almost all of them struck a “romantic” tone, and projected onto the war a sense of moral purpose and organic unity that later writers would deflate (Genthe 1969: 107–108).
Dawson, an American citizen though British by birth, saw action at the front with the Canadian Field Artillery. His combat narrative Carry‐On: Letters in Wartime (1917) offered a vivid account of his experiences in the front line. These experiences reinforced his sense that the war was a mechanism for moral and masculine renewal. He found there was “something splendid and exhilarating in going forward among bursting shells.” He added, “We, who have done all that, know that when the guns have ceased to roar our blood will grow more sluggish and we’ll never be such men again” (Dawson 1917: 124). Dawson’s book was a bestseller, and was followed by two further volumes, Glory of the Trenches (1918) and Out to Win (1918). Similarly, Guy Empey’s book Over the Top (1917), the most popular of all the American war narratives, later followed by Tales from a Dugout (1918) and First Call (1918), offered an enthusiastic, at times light‐hearted account of Empey’s service in the British Army. The publisher’s blurb for Over the Top summed up exactly what the reading public hoped to see in a war book and, by extension, in its author: “His experiences are grim, but they are thrilling and lightened by a touch of humour […] And they are true” (Genthe 1969: 142). However, even those writers who were willing to provide American readers with just what they wanted could display acuity about their own motivations. James Norman Hall, a Harvard Law School graduate who served with the British Expeditionary Force and then later as a pilot in the Escadrille Lafayette, noted in his bestselling books Kitchener’s Mob (1916) and High Adventure (1917) that most recruits signed up not for reasons of politics, or outrage at alleged atrocities, or any sense of hatred for the Germans, but in response to the call of romance: “War itself was a manifestation of it, gave it scope, relieved the pent‐up longing for it which could not find sufficient outlets in time of peace” (Hall 1917: 135).
The poet Alan Seeger, whose poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” (1917) has often been the only American poem in anthologies of World War I verse, acknowledged his own desire for adventure. A volunteer with the French Foreign Legion, Seeger was killed in action on 4 July 1916. His poems were published later that year to instant acclaim, and were reprinted six times within a year. Seeger, who had lived in Paris since 1912, saw the war as a cleansing, enervating experience on an individual level, but also as a chance to set the world to rights. And, like many other volunteers, he felt the fear of missing out on the defining experience of his generation, as he explained in a letter to New Republic in 1915:
“Why did you enlist?” In every case the answer was the same. That memorable day in August came. Suddenly the old haunts were desolate, the boon companions had gone. It was unthinkable to leave the danger to them and accept only the pleasures oneself, to go on enjoying the sweet things of life in defence of which they were perhaps even then shedding their blood in the north. Some day they would return, and with honor – not all, but some. The old order of things would have irrevocably vanished. There would be a new companionship whose bond would be the common danger run, the common sufferings borne, the common glory shared. “And where have you been all the time, and what have you been doing?” The very question would be a reproach, though none were intended. How could they endure it?
(Seeger 1916: xxvi)
In his fellow French soldiers, Seeger found “hearts worthy of the honor and the trial” of active service (Seeger 1916: 133). And his final poems make no secret of his frustration with America’s reluctance to join the Allied cause. However, Seeger could also see imaginatively beyond the clichés and prejudices of wartime. In a late poem, “The Hosts” (1916), which considers the multitudes gathered at the front, Seeger hails fighting men of all sides as his “comrades in arms,” who play out a struggle scripted for them by a higher force, while “idlers argue the right or wrong.” The soldiers share a bond that transcends politics: “Friend or foe, it shall matter nought; / This only matters, in fine: we fought” (Seeger 1916: 139). Similarly, in “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” war is experienced as a personal contract; it is not a matter of glory but of integrity. While Love offers the temptations of rest and comfort, it is to Death that the speaker has made his promises: “And I to my pledged word am true, / I shall not fail that rendezvous” (Seeger 1916: 144). The tone may be higher and the imagery richer, but like the poems of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ivor Gurney, or like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Seeger’s poems ultimately locate value in the interior life of the individual soldier and his relationships with those around him.
This dawning awareness of a gulf between the advertised values of the war and the basic human needs of survival and companionship felt by those at the front is also evident in the writings of non‐combatants. From the outset of the war, American nurses and ambulance drivers volunteered in France, Italy, or on the Serbian front, some with the Red Cross, others with military medical units or independent charities. The American Field Service, run by A. Piatt Andrew, and the Norton–Harjes Ambulance unit, organized by Richard Norton, recruited university students and recent graduates. Such young men were the most likely to have driving experience or, even better, to own a vehicle that could be shipped to France and converted into a motor‐ambulance – the latest innovation in the logistics of warfare. Leslie Buswell’s memoir Ambulance No. 10 (1915) gave an enthusiastic account of the adventure and self‐sacrifice involved in the role. This text was highly successful, both as a literary product and as a model for the dozens of ambulance‐driver memoirs that would emerge over the next decade. In Exile’s Return (1934), Malcolm Cowley notes how many future writers served as ambulance drivers, including John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, William Slater Brown, Robert Hillyer, and Dashiell Hammett. Cowley argues that the endless hours of waiting, interspersed with moments of high danger and drama, the close‐up view of human suffering, and the sense of powerlessness to stop the carnage, taught valuable authorial lessons and fostered “a spectatorial attitude” (Cowley 1968: 38). However, as texts by medical volunteers often attest, the tension between this observing role and the intimate involvement with the physical consequences of the war was difficult to reconcile. This tension is evident in memoirs and semi‐autobiographical novels published after the war, such as Dos Passos’s first novel One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920), Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). It is also clearly outlined in nurses’ writing from the front, where the handling of the bodies of the maimed and dying is depicted in even more challenging language: “It is all carefully arranged. Everything is carefully arranged. It is arranged that men should be broken and that they should be mended […] We send our men up the broken road between bushes of barbed wire and they come back to us, one by one, two by two in ambulances, lying on stretchers” (Borden 1929: 117–118).
Borden’s memoir The Forbidden Zone presents a stark and disjointed series of sketches and stories from the mobile hospital unit that she ran for the French Army from July 1915 to the end of the war. In the section “Conspiracy,” Borden voices unease at the complicity of medical staff in the machinery of war. The nurses and surgeons who treat the wounded soldier do not save him; they merely “conspire against his right to die” (1929: 119) and “dig into the yawning mouths of his wounds” (1929: 120). At last, the man is mended and sent up the road “to be torn again and mangled” (1929: 120). This is the routine of war. As Borden’s narrator bitterly reassures the reader: “It is all arranged as it should be” (1929: 121). Largely written while she was serving in Belgium or at the Somme, Borden’s text was not published during the conflict. When submitted for consideration in 1917, it was politely returned by cautious publishers. Even when it came to print in 1929, public and critics alike found Borden’s dark, absurdist yet oddly beautiful vision of the war zone difficult to stomach. To modern eyes, it is one of the most powerful texts of the war.
However, an equally terse and cynical work was already in circulation. Ellen La Motte, a qualified American nurse, wrote a slim volume, The Backwash of War (1916), based on the months she spent working at Borden’s hospital in 1915–1916. La Motte was also haunted by the futility of her role. In “Heroes,” the opening section of her book, La Motte recounts how the nurses were expected to save the life of a failed suicide so that he might be brought to court martial:
To save his life, he must reach the hospital without delay, and if he was bounced to death jolting along at breakneck speed, it did not matter. That was understood. He was a deserter, and discipline must be maintained. Since he had failed in the job, his life must be saved, he must be nursed back to health, until he was well enough to be stood up against a wall and shot. This is War. Things like this also happen in peacetime, but not so obviously.
(La Motte 1934: 15)
In the end, the nurses conspire to allow the soldier to die of his wounds, rather than face justice. This breaks every code of their training, but in context seems like a triumph of common humanity. The incident, which also features in The Forbidden Zone, exemplifies the harsh ironies of nursing at the front. “Was it not all a dead‐end occupation,” La Motte asks, “Nursing back to health men to be patched up and returned to the trenches?” (1934: 22). Her steely honesty about the realities of military medicine, her plain language, simplicity of form, and dark humor set the tone for many later texts about the war. But despite good sales and several printings, her book met with hostility. In the summer of 1918, the book was withdrawn under pressure from the US government. “Truth, it appears, has no place in war,” La Motte surmised (1934: vii). The Backwash of War was not reprinted until 1934. However, by then, other writers had come to similar conclusions.
The postwar novels of the Lost Generation thus emerged out of a cacophony of wartime voices expressing every possible political and moral perspective. It fell to those who lived through the war to look back in retrospect and explain what it had meant – or had failed to mean. No accounts of the war by serving US Army soldiers came to print during the war, except those commissioned by the Committee on Public Information as guidebooks for new doughboys. Between January and October of 1918, serving US personnel were forbidden from publishing books or articles describing their experiences; American troops did not arrive in France until June 1918, and the war was over by November. In the immediate aftermath, publishers turned away from war books, as public debate shifted to the problem of how to repair the broken continent of Europe. However, as soldiers and other volunteers returned to civilian life, a series of vivid narratives – some fictional, some less so – began to emerge from writers who still felt the shock of their impressions, and who had had time to craft them carefully into forms of expression that suited the disillusioned mood of the postwar years.
The final five months of the war had been intense, and US Marines were at the heart of the action. In total, 50 280 Americans were killed in battle. Even more troops died in the accidents and illnesses that plagued the military operation, especially Spanish flu which ran unchecked through military camps and troop ships. Over 200 000 men returned home maimed or wounded. The distinctive experiences of these soldiers, including the chaotic and inhumane logistics of army life, and the difficult fighting on the wooded slopes of the Meuse‐Argonne region, were recast in postwar fiction as ciphers for the existential struggle of the individual within the modern world. The most vivid fictional accounts of the American Expeditionary Force all highlight the vulnerability of the soldier, not just as a target for thoughtless violence on the field of battle – though this is depicted unflinchingly – but also as a victim of the social machinery that duped him into risking his life to uphold a system that in return denies him his basic rights. Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921), Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923), and March’s Company K (1933) all present the war as an ironic perversion of its stated ideals of freedom and civilization. Like Seeger’s poetry, these works locate the significance of the war within the lived experience of the individual soldier. In retrospect, however, that experience appeared solitary and shorn of value or purpose.
This is most vividly so in Company K, which returns repeatedly to the killing of a group of unarmed German prisoners on the orders of an American officer. Each of the 113 members of Company K narrates his own episode. However, the novel projects neither coherence nor camaraderie. Private Joseph Delany, the authorial surrogate within the text, imagines its many stories as pinned to a wheel spinning faster and faster, “flowing toward each other, and into each other; blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending circle of pain” (March 2017: 4). However, the overarching theme of the book is not wholeness, as Delany hopes, but isolation. Each of the narrators finds himself locked inside the prison of his own recollection; some are cut off from others by injury or insanity, misunderstanding or death. As Private Sam Zeigler discovers when he meets an old comrade, there is no trace of a bond between them. “We didn’t have anything to talk about after all,” he remarks at the novel’s close (2017: 238).
March, himself a decorated veteran of the Marines who went on to a successful legal career, saw that for many soldiers the greatest difficulty was not surviving the war, but returning to normal life. Veterans often struggled to find work; many carried life‐changing injuries. In William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay (1925), the wounded aviator Donald Mahon returns home to die amid the petty quarrels of small‐town life. In Laurence Stallings’s semi‐autobiographical novel Plumes (1925), the veteran Richard Plume faces injury, disability, and economic hardship before regrouping and living on. In Claude Mackay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928), Jake Brown, an African American soldier, deserts after the Armistice only to face the racial prejudice of postwar society. In Thomas Boyd’s In Time of Peace (1935), the sequel to Through the Wheat, William Hicks comes home to the Midwest to be caught up in labor unrest and class division. Even Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, probably the most‐read American novel about World War I, seen by some as a celebration of action, masculinity, and romance, is better understood as a study of the negative themes of retreat, recovery, and grief.
It was not just veterans who found the war hard to leave behind. Either overtly or covertly, World War I echoes loudly through the literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize‐winning novel One of Ours, the story of a Midwestern farm boy turned soldier, was published in 1922. Wharton’s study about postwar exhaustion and grief, A Son at the Front, came out the following year. Both were sharply criticized by younger male writers who found their battle scenes unconvincing, and who resented the war being appropriated as a subject by these highly successful female writers. However, as Keith Gandal points out, one should remember how little war experience some of the Lost Generation writers actually had. Although Cummings and Dos Passos both enlisted in 1918, neither saw active service. Hemingway worked at the Italian front for less than six weeks before being injured while distributing chocolate and cigarettes in an Italian trench. F. Scott Fitzgerald was in New York ready to embark for Europe when the Armistice was called, a scenario which he reworks in The Beautiful and Damned (1922). Faulkner’s wartime injury, sustained while he was serving in the Canadian Air Force, may have been the result of a drunken prank in an aircraft hangar. Gandal posits that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner were motivated not “by their experiences of the horrors of World War I, but rather by their inability to have those experiences” (Gandal 2010: 5).
Certainly, much American postwar writing shows a reluctance to deal directly with the war, often choosing instead to view it obliquely, or simply to elide it within the narrative. Manhattan Transfer (1925), Dos Passos’s complex, fractured narrative of urban life in New York in the 1910s and 1920s, simply passes over the war between chapters. Similarly, in Main Street (1920), Sinclair Lewis’s sardonic exploration of small‐town America, the war provides a backdrop of suspicion and upheaval, and provides Carol Milford with a pretext for leaving her husband to work independently in Washington. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the war creates a cloaking silence between present and past. It is the event that separates Gatsby and Daisy from each other; it also allows Gatsby to reinvent his persona on his return. In Hemingway’s postwar novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), the war is barely discussed – like the wound that emasculates Jake Barnes – but it is an ever‐present element of the plot nevertheless. Such texts reflect a growing wariness in American culture about dealing with the war directly. However, they also operate on the assumption that the reader has already read enough war books to be able to fill in the blanks.
Getting hold of what World War I meant to Americans was not easy. In his trilogy U.S.A. (1930–1936), Dos Passos presents a narrative of American society from the 1900s to 1930s dominated by the war. Focalized through the perspectives of dozens of characters from all walks of life, Dos Passos examines how the individual operates within an environment permeated with the same violence and financial corruption that fueled the war. Between the personal accounts and the “Newsreel” sections of headlines, incidents, and popular songs, Dos Passos uses a fictional device that he calls “The Camera Eye” to interject unsettling, often semi‐autobiographical impressions that cut across the other narratives. A blend of the mechanical and the human, the intimate and the detached, “The Camera Eye” forcibly reminds the reader that what we see is who we are. Dos Passos wrote from a perspective informed by time; it allowed him a mature and considered view of the war. But even the magisterial U.S.A. does not make sense of World War I; it can only acknowledge that the war remains an event too massive to fully apprehend, and too chaotic to rationalize. Taken together, the American texts of the war remind us that, whether in history or fiction, this vast and violent episode in history will never be fully seen or known. It is better that way.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 7 (MODERNISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL); CHAPTER 9 (THE LOST GENERATION AND AMERICAN EXPATRIATISM).