Company K (Library Alabama Classics) Read online

  COMPANY K

  COMPANY K

  BY WILLIAM MARCH

  With an Introduction by

  Philip D. Beidler

  The University of Alabama Press

  Tuscaloosa

  Copyright © 1933 by William March

  Introduction Copyright © 1989 by

  The University of Alabama Press

  Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ∞

  The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

  ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  March, William, 1893-1954.

  Company K / William March : with an introduction by Philip D. Beidler.

  p. cm.—(Library of Alabama Classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 0-8173-0480-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8173-0480-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. World War,-1914-1918-Fiction. I. Title II. Series.

  PS3505.A53157C6 1989

  813'.54—dc200 89-38395

  CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-817-38687-0 (electronic)

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Philip D. Beidler

  ROSTER

  PRIVATE JOSEPH DELANEY

  PRIVATE ROWLAND GEERS

  CORPORAL JERRY BLANDFORD

  CORPORAL PIERRE BROCKETT

  PRIVATE ARCHIE LEMON

  CORPORAL WALTER ROSE

  PRIVATE SAMUEL UPDIKE

  SERGEANT MICHAEL RIGGIN

  SERGEANT THEODORE DONOHOE

  CAPTAIN TERENCE L. MATLOCK

  FIRST SERGEANT PATRICK BOSS

  PRIVATE ROGER JONES

  PRIVATE CARTER ATLAS

  PRIVATE LUCIEN JANOFF

  PRIVATE THOMAS STAHL

  SERGEANT JAMES DUNNING

  SERGEANT WILBUR TIETJEN

  PRIVATE JESSE BOGAN

  PRIVATE PHILIP CALHOUN

  PRIVATE EDWARD ROMANO

  LIEUTENANT EDWARD BARTELSTONE

  PRIVATE JACOB GELLER

  PRIVATE WALTER LANDT

  PRIVATE GRALEY BORDEN

  LIEUTENANT THOMAS JEWETT

  PRIVATE STEPHEN CARROLL

  PRIVATE CARROLL HART

  PRIVATE WILLIAM ANDERSON

  PRIVATE MARTIN DAILEY

  PRIVATE HENRY DEMAREST

  CORPORAL LLOYD SOMERVILLE

  PRIVATE LAWRENCE DICKSON

  PRIVATE NATHAN MOUNTAIN

  PRIVATE CHRISTIAN GEILS

  PRIVATE MARK MUMFORD

  PRIVATE BERNARD GLASS

  PRIVATE JOHN TOWNSEND

  PRIVATE WILBUR HALSEY

  PRIVATE HARRY WADDELL

  PRIVATE BENJAMIN HUNZINGER

  PRIVATE PLEZ YANCEY

  LIEUTENANT ARCHIBALD SMITH

  PRIVATE EDWARD CARTER

  PRIVATE EMIL AYRES

  PRIVATE MARTIN APPLETON

  PRIVATE LESLIE WESTMORE

  PRIVATE SYLVESTER WENDELL

  PRIVATE RALPH BRUCKER

  PRIVATE BYRON LONG

  PRIVATE PHILIP WADSWORTH

  PRIVATE ALEX MARRO

  PRIVATE JOHN McGILL

  PRIVATE SIDNEY BORGSTEAD

  PRIVATE ALLAN METHOT

  PRIVATE DANNY O'LEARY

  PRIVATE JEREMIAH EASTON

  PRIVATE WILLIAM MULCAHEY

  SERGEANT JULIUS PELTON

  CORPORAL CLARENCE FOSTER

  PRIVATE WALTER DRURY

  PRIVATE CHARLES GORDON

  PRIVATE ROGER INABINETT

  PRIVATE RICHARD MUNDY

  PRIVATE HOWARD NETTLETON

  PRIVATE HARLAND PERRY

  PRIVATE ALBERT NALLETT

  PRIVATE ROBERT NALLS

  PRIVATE OSWALD POLLARD

  PRIVATE MARTIN PASSY

  PRIVATE LEO HASTINGS

  PRIVATE SILAS PULLMAN

  PRIVATE SAMUEL QUILLIN

  PRIVATE ABRAHAM RICKEY

  PRIVATE WILBUR BOWDEN

  PRIVATE EUGENE MERRIAM

  PRIVATE HERBERT MERRIAM

  PRIVATE PETER STAFFORD

  PRIVATE SIDNEY BELMONT

  PRIVATE RICHARD STARNES

  CORPORAL FREDERICK WILLCOXEN

  SERGEANT MARVIN MOONEY

  PRIVATE OLIVER TECLAW

  PRIVATE FRANKLIN GOOD

  THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

  PRIVATE CHARLES UPSON

  CORPORAL STEPHEN WALLER

  PRIVATE LEO BROGAN

  PRIVATE ROBERT ARMSTRONG

  PRIVATE CHRISTIAN VAN OSTEN

  PRIVATE ALBERT HAYES

  PRIVATE ANDREW LURTON

  PRIVATE HOWARD BARTOW

  PRIVATE WILLIAM NUGENT

  PRIVATE RALPH NERION

  PRIVATE PAUL WAITE

  SERGEANT JACK HOWIE

  PRIVATE ARTHUR CRENSHAW

  PRIVATE EVERETT QUALLS

  PRIVATE HAROLD DRESSER

  PRIVATE WALTER WEBSTER

  PRIVATE SYLVESTER KEITH

  PRIVATE LESLIE JOURDAN

  PRIVATE FREDERICK TERWILLIGER

  PRIVATE COLIN WILTSEE

  PRIVATE ROY HOWARD

  PRIVATE THEODORE IRVINE

  PRIVATE HOWARD VIRTUE

  PRIVATE LESLIE YAWFITZ

  PRIVATE MANUEL BURT

  PRIVATE COLIN URQUHART

  LIEUTENANT JAMES FAIRBROTHER

  PRIVATE RUFUS YEOMANS

  PRIVATE SAM ZIEGLER

  INTRODUCTION

  Philip D. Beidler

  The Text of Company K

  IN its simple physical presence, the revised final typescript of William March's Company K in the University of Alabama Special Collections Library speaks silently, yet movingly, of the cost of struggle it must have exacted upon the man who wrote it. The cover is a reinforced brown binder, of the sort available in any business supply or stationery shop. On the front, neatly traced out in ink—the sort of thing someone can do carefully with a pen and a ruler—is a small frame design, a rectangle-within-a-rectangle pattern looking faintly art-deco. Within the rectangle, again very neatly traced out in ink, are two lines of bold, yet simple lettering: the top one reads, COMPANY K; and the one just below it, WILLIAM MARCH.

  After two blank pages of good quality bond, we come across the first printing, from a sound typewriter of clear, even impression. The ribbon ink is blue. Today the text is faded sufficiently to be mistaken for carbon copy; looking closely, however, one sees that it is clearly original. In the upper left corner, we read:

  William March

  Apartment 16-G

  302 West 12th St.

  New York, N.Y.

  Below, centered on the page and underlined, is once again the title: Company K.

  There follows a dedication page, which reads: “To Ed Roberts, An Unchanging Friend.” We then move immediately into the first narrative. In the published text, it is headed, as are all the chapters, by the name of the individual narrator, who is “Private Joseph Delaney”; but here, in the typescript, there is no such heading. We simply begin to read: “We have had supper and my wife and I are sitting on the porch.”

  The narrator of the section, we also quickly find out, happens to be the “author” of the book. He wonders what he has accomplished. He has wanted it to be not just about his company of men in war but about any company of men in any war, about nothing less than war itself. His wife observes that he might do well to omit the part, at least, about the shooting of the prisoners. She also ventures a theo
ry about the way nature seems to concentrate special powers of regeneration upon the landscape of old battlefields. “Delaney,” as we will come to know him only in the published text, disagrees. “To me,” he concludes, “it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible.”

  If one looks at the pagination of the typescript as one reads this opening section, one observes that the omission of Delaney's name was probably not accidental. The four pages in question are lettered, not numbered. They are pages A, B, C, and D. The typescript then takes up the other individual narratives of which the text is composed. Each is headed by the narrator's name. The pages are numbered consecutively, from 1 to 198.

  The chief impression one gets of all this is of decision and control. Everything seems to be in its place: binding, lettering, arranging, dedicating, entitling—and in the first instance, not entitling—paginating. It all strikes us as quite calm and businesslike—this text of the most furious novel of war ever written by an American up to its time and quite arguably at least as furious and graphic as any written since. And therein lies a great part of the story. (By curious coincidence, the final manuscript of its only predecessor to make any comparable claim to unflinching naturalistic honesty, The Red Badge of Courage, may be seen at the University of Virginia library in a comparably businesslike draft, where, in the early pages, one may see neatly crossed out names such as “Fleming,” “Wilson,” and “Conklin,” and neatly substituted generic phrases such as “the youth,” “the loud soldier,” “the tall soldier,” and the like.) Control, one senses, must have been enacted at an enormous price. And the story of how Company K came to be turns out to be just this: that for William March in particular the price came awfully high.

  William March and Company K

  THE biographical circumstances of the genesis of Company K are likewise attended with a similar strange sense of quiet, impervious enigma. We do know for certain that William Edward Campbell, to be remembered by the literary world as William March, was born in Mobile in September 1893 and experienced a fairly typical southern childhood of the period in the small towns of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. We know that after some study of law in the early years of this century at the University of Alabama and later at Valparaiso University in Indiana, and after a clerkship in law in New York City, March enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and saw action in some of its hardest campaigning in World War I in France. We likewise know for a fact that as a result of his actions specifically during an assault on Blanc Mont, March received the French Croix de Guerre and both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Navy Cross for valor. (The latter feat, one should add, to anyone with a knowledge of the military services, is literally mind-defying. The two decorations constitute the second highest awards, next only to the Congressional Medal of Honor, of what were then the two main branches of the American armed forces, the Army and the Navy.) We know that after the war he became an organizer and later vice-president of the Waterman Steamship Corporation, and then moved for an extended period to New York, where, eventually resigning the successful business position that also carried him abroad in the 1930s to such places as Hamburg and London, he became the author of Company K, of a large body of short stories including some of the most remarkable of his exceedingly talented American generation, and of several other novels, including most notably Come in at the Door, The Tallons, and The Looking Glass. We know that near the end of his life, he returned home to the South where, in a quiet house in the French Quarter of New Orleans, he composed his last book, The Bad Seed—ironically, as it became transmuted after his death first into a play and later into movie form, a work of a kind of semi-notoriety he would have found concomitantly amusing and faintly distasteful—and eventually died in his sleep one night in mid-May 1954.

  Of what happened to William Edward Campbell in France that specifically made him William March, the author of Company K, we have a general record. A member of the Fifth Marines in the United States Second Division, March saw his first action on the old Verdun battlefield near Les Eparges and shortly afterward at Belleau Wood, where he was wounded in the head and shoulder. He returned in time for Saint-Mihiel and for the attack on Blanc Mont, where he performed so extraordinarily as to receive the three major decorations for valor cited above. He then participated in the Meuse-Argonne and, along with his company, was preparing for a new assault crossing of the Meuse itself at Mouzon when the war ended.

  In addition to this summary view, we also have the more focused and suggestive record of March's own after-the-fact reminiscences and pronouncements, and particularly of his going back in conversation on repeated occasions, we discover, to a critical episode—one, it seems, in which while isolated from his company, he encountered face to face, a German youth, blond and blue-eyed, at whom he instinctively lunged with his bayonet. As Roy S. Simmonds, March's biographer, describes the rest of the incident, the young German “stumbled and the bayonet pierced his throat, killing him instantly, his eyes wide open and staring into William's face” (23). In this same connection, we also must adduce some few further facts of subsequent psychological history, particularly in light of what a current American generation of war now again attempts to come to terms with under the weighty clinical designation of “post-traumatic stress.” Again, Simmonds puts it succinctly: “It is certainly not without significance that at various stages of his life March experienced hysterical conditions related to both his throat and eyes” (23).

  Of information concerning the specific episode of bravery that won William March that chestful of medals, we have curiously little. Available to us at least, is the citation to the Croix de Guerre, which reads: “During the operations in Blanc Mont region, October 3rd–4th, 1918, he left a shelter to rescue the wounded. On October 5th, during a counterattack, the enemy having advanced to within 300 meters of the first aid station, he immediately entered the engagement and though wounded refused to be evacuated until the Germans were thrown back.”

  We have also the citations for the Distinguished Service and Navy Crosses, but they too are notably scant on particular information. We must simply know of William March's bravery, in the main, that he surely had it. And even without what we have of the biographical record or the medals or the certificates, of course, we would still know that he had it. It would still be there, inscribed in Company K, in a novel by a man who had clearly been to war, who had clearly seen his share of the worst of it, who had somehow survived, and who had committed himself afterward to the new bravery of sense-making embodied in the creation of major literary art. It is of that bravery that we still have the record of magnificent achievement, the brave and terrible gift of Company K.

  Context and Prophecy: Company K and the American Literature of War

  The history of the place of Company K in the tradition of American writing about war is at least to date a curious one. When it came upon the scene, it was in large measure unprecedented in a literature of battle that had been oddly reticent about its actualities. Out of print for some time until being returned to publication, it now sits before us in the peculiar strangeness of the neglected cult classic. The story that lies between is at once one of a book that effectively inscribed a literary context and in the process became the stuff of literary prophecy.

  Our nation is, after all, a nation born of war. It is also one that in 1861–65 passed through the most cataclysmic episode of mass fratricide known to history. One finds it curious, therefore, that its realistic fiction prior to the twentieth century shows an almost total neglect or denial of war as a literary topic. When it is treated in fictional works of the colonial or classic periods, it tends to be “literary” war, as in the romances of Simms or Cooper. Aside from a few chapters in John DeForest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion, portions of two or three other largely forgotten novels, and a scattering of sketches by Ambrose Bierce, one also looks hard for much fictional depic
tion of Civil War combat as well.1 The one celebrated American novel of combat about that war, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, was written, as is well known, by someone who had not been in it. In sum, to get a sense of what Americans, prior to the Great War, had written about what John Keegan has called the face of battle, one goes almost exclusively to unliterary sources—letters, journals, diaries, memoirs.

  World War I changed that. For the first time, in novels by John Dos Passos, Thomas Boyd, Ernest Hemingway, William March, and others, a realistic fictional depiction of the experience of modern warfare entered American literature as a significant, and even a central topic. From this opening has flowed an important tradition, including the works of James Jones, Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and, most recently, Philip Caputo, Tim O'Brien, Larry Heinemann, and a host of others.

  In such a tradition, Company K makes fair claim to a twofold importance. Given its reflection of virtually all the major themes and attitudes to be found among the first generation of works of American fiction to deal realistically, from the viewpoint of the combatant, with the experience of modern war, it may be said to be the work that as much as any other helps to define for that tradition a context. At the same time, given its complex and innovative literary experimentalism, it also may be said to offer a prophecy of a number of major American experimental war-fictions to come.

  Of all the features locating Company K contextually in the center of the nascent American tradition of war-realism engendered by the experience of World War I, the most important is the intensity of its commitment to bearing direct witness, first and foremost, to what actually happens to ordinary men in modern, mechanized, mass combat. It may in fact stand forth as the work of its generation which, more than any other, takes either the experience of combat itself or its concomitant effects on those who have undergone it as a single obsessive center. Only Boyd, perhaps, in Through the Wheat, is so consistently direct and graphic. But his depictions are also overladen with a naturalistic stylization that often, as with Dos Passos as well in Three Soldiers, works at the expense of one's sensation of the experiential and actual. As with Hemingway, mixed with the violence and the brutalization, there is some talk of loss of illusion, of betrayal through patriotic lies. Yet in March, more than in any of his contemporaries, this too is ultimately subsumed into a depth of horror that goes far beyond any Lost Generation conceit. Here, individual soldiers come relentlessly forward, one after the other, the living and the dead commingled, to offer grim first-person testimony; and in narrative after narrative, there is mainly just one fundamental fact of modern warfare: the fact of violent, ugly, obscene death. Men die of gas, gunshot, grenade. They die by the bayonet. They are literally disintegrated by high explosive. They commit suicide. They murder prisoners. They murder each other. They kill wantonly and at random, at times in error and virtually always against whatever small portion they can recall of their better instincts. Killing and dying, dying and killing, they have lost touch with any fact of life save the fact of death's absolute dominion. This final reality March insists on to the degree that he often seems to have less in common with his fellow Americans than with his British poet-contemporaries such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon. And, as with the latter, the death depicted is never gallant sacrifice. It is not grand, valorous, brave death. It is bowel-ripping, head-shattering, body-rending death. It is the kind of death that makes men scream for their mothers, soil their trousers, dissolve themselves into whimpering wrecks. Moreover, it is death on the whole vast scale of modern mechanization.