Company K (Library Alabama Classics) Read online

  Emblematic of this grim omnipotence is an incident, described early in the text, in which a patrol, on the word of a stupid, inexperienced, obstinate lieutenant, is ordered into a forward position where their movement will be observed and their location registered by a distinguishing clump of trees. Across the way, unseen enemy observers issue forth an instant communication. Minutes later the patrol has received a direct hit from artillery they will likewise never have seen or engaged. One body will be found wholly eviscerated, split from belly to chin, its vitals exploded in an instant by metal death from miles away. When the other dead are found, they are all without faces (62). The single survivor, spared apparently for no reason in particular, stands silent and erect, “looking down at his hand, from which the fingers had been shot away” (62).

  The other feature of Company K contextualizing so much of American war fiction is the degree to which its thematic center—random, mindless, mass-production death—finds its precise formal correlative in a single dominant mode: irony. Sometimes particular ironies are gross and overt, such as in the chapter entitled “The Unknown Soldier.” A mortally wounded young American hangs entangled in the barbed wire of No Man's Land and plays out the rage of his dying. He rails against the monument-makers and speech-givers. His name at least, he assures himself, will not be thus profaned. With a dying gesture, he flings away his identification tags, insuring his anonymity. What he cannot know, of course, is that it is exactly this anonymity that will lead to his dead body's enshrinement as the ultimate icon of patriotism (178–181). Or, in a scene highly reminiscent of Snowden's death in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Private Wilbur Bowden carefully bandages what he believes to be a relatively minor leg wound sustained by a comrade and then, banteringly, urges the latter to rest until a rescue party arrives. Bowden recalls that the wounded soldier, even as he speaks, has seemed to have fallen into a peaceful sleep. Eventually, the rescuers come. The soldier has been found, but it turns out that he has died a good deal earlier of an enormous wound in his side that has gone wholly unnoticed (159–161). His legs are completely intact.

  Most of the ironies, however, in Company K are not nearly so spectacular. Rather, the atmosphere is one of something like ironic matter-of-factness. To use the telling phrase applied by Paul Fussell—himself echoing that master ironist of the matter-of-fact, Thomas Hardy—to describe the British experience of the trenches, the war is likewise in the main for the Americans of Company K largely “a satire of circumstance.” Indeed, much of the horror of the book lies in the fact that horror itself ultimately comes to seem so everyday. Narrative after narrative unfolds, the one at hand often compounding or elaborating on matters contained in one or a number of others. For the most part, they are simple, sober, queerly unemotional. One after another, average men talk about terrible things that generally seem to have happened mainly just because they have happened. After taking a machine-gun nest, Private Carroll Hart empties his pistol into a badly wounded German who has tried to reach inside his coat. Hart opens the man's palm and finds no grenade, no pistol, but only the photograph of a little girl (65). A group of Private Philip Wadsworth's comrades conspire with a French prostitute to help the demure Wadsworth lose his virginity. He contracts a venereal disease, and is courtmartialed and sent to a labor battalion (105–107). Private Leo Brogan tells of how a young French girl's pet fawn mysteriously cleaves to the company chowhound, Private Hymie White. In a touching scene, the child refuses to sell the fawn to White, but subsequently gives it to him as a present. Later that night the soldier cuts its throat with a breadknife. He has wanted it all along for stew (185–194).

  So throughout Company K, the narratives of individual soldiers become a litany of callousness, brutality, and degradation. This is most clearly reflected in a single incident lodged both literally and figuratively at the center of the book, something that might be thought of as the novel's primal scene: the execution of twenty-two German prisoners. The order, as a series of narratives tell us, is passed down from Captain to Sergeant to the Corporal who leads the detail. Otherwise good and decent men recoil, yet now participate in mass murder. Private Walter Drury, the one soldier who refuses the order and runs is subsequently sentenced to twenty years in prison (128–129). His friend, Private Charles Gordon, remains, and, as he fires, sees the enormity of the deed in all the fullness of its awful truth. “ ‘Everything I was ever taught to believe about mercy, justice and virtue is a lie,’ ” he thinks. “ ‘But the biggest lie of all are the words, “God is Love.” That is really the most terrible lie that man ever thought of’” (130–132). Meanwhile, the thing done, Private Roger Inabinett rummages nonchalantly among the bodies for valuables and souvenirs (133–134). On Sunday, we are told by Private Howard Nettleton, they are all ordered to go to church (138–139).

  At war's end, the survivors go home, nearly all, save those too stupid or callous to know better, carrying with them their private horrors and, in many cases, moving ahead as well into new ones. Private Everett Qualls, who has participated in the massacre, sees a blight on his farm and his family as retribution and dies a suicide (221–223). Private William Nugent, telling of the same incident and spewing his hatred of “cops” and “preachers” dies in the electric chair for murdering a policeman (209–211). Private Ralph Nerion, edging ever toward terminal madness, writhes in old army memories of petty persecutions and in new paranoiac dreams of sedition (212–213). Private Arthur Crenshaw comes home a hero who can't get a loan for a chicken farm from the banker who, the day before, has served as toastmaster at a banquet in Crenshaw's honor (219–220). Private Walter Webster returns to his intended only to find that he is too maimed to marry (226–227). Private Leslie Jourdan sits in Birmingham running a paint factory, a once-brilliant pianist with a wrecked hand (230–231). Artillery still in his head, Private Howard Virtue protests his sanity—the very cousin of Christ, he proclaims himself—sitting alone in a madhouse (241–242). Private Manuel Burt is driven to insanity by dream visitations of a young German soldier whom he has bayoneted in the roof of the mouth (245–253).2 In the incident itself, he has been unable to remove the knife that he has driven into his enemy's brain. Now, in the aftermath, neither is he able to remove the knife of memory lodged in his own.

  Meanwhile, the world goes on. Private Colin Wiltsee tells a Sunday-school story about battlefield conversion and beautiful death and ends with a paean to “the Creator of the Universe and President Hoover” and the injunction “that we must always obey their will without asking questions! . . . ” (225). A warmongering ex-officer, Lieutenant James Fairbrother, inveighs against “pacifist propagandists” and heaps venom on Japan, England, Germany, France. He is running for Congress (255–256).

  So ends Company K on a note of literal prophecy, and one that links it with other prescient works such as Dos Passos's 1919 or Hemingway's in our time. At home, it is soon political business as usual. Abroad, the armies quickly again begin to march.

  In contrast, for the literary prophecy of Company K to be realized, it would take yet another highly experimental novel of yet another great war to come. That novel would be Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Furthermore, it would not be insignificant that Catch-22 itself would wait to be produced and find fame not in World War II's immediate aftermath or in the complacent and prosperous decade of the fifties that followed but rather in the turbulent sixties. For Catch-22, as Alfred Kazin has so eloquently put it, if “ostensibly about the 1941–45 war,” is also “really about The Next War, and thus about a war that will be without limits and without meaning, a war that will end only when no one is alive to fight it” (Bright Book of Life, 83). And, in retrospective light of the particular Next War about to be fought, the bitter, unpopular, endlessly destructive one committing to the flames a new lost generation—as well as everything in its path—in the jungles of Vietnam, this may well be the main reason why Catch-22 in particular seems to image itself forth in so significant a number of ways as Company K's thematic and formal correl
ative.3 For despite all the magnitude and slaughter, World War II would remain for most Americans, in terms both moral and political, an essentially acceptable war, even, as Studs Terkel has put it, “The Good War.” Accordingly, in most of the “big” novels of the war—The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity, and later, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, would be notable exceptions—while the individual combatant in most cases might undergo the most violent and graphic forms of disillusionment and brutalization, there would still be about the war itself a sense of overall justification subsuming particular ironies and brutalities into larger notions of individual and collective necessity. It would take Vietnam to bring most fully into relief once again the old ironies, the betrayal of young men by speech-makers and policy-mouthers, brass hats, bureaucrats, ideologues, and political time-servers. And it took Heller's book, standing on the boundary between World War II and Vietnam, to remind Americans that the old ironies had probably not gone away at all, but had simply been assimilated into a war-breeding system so all-sufficient and monolithic as to absorb and subsume virtually any form of human objection. The result, as with March, is a totalizing irony, and with concomitant thematic and formal results.

  The basic textual resemblances alone between Company K and Catch-22 are often in themselves startling and suggestive. Although not narrated in the first-person used by March, virtually all the chapters in Catch-22, for instance, bear the names of individual combatants. As the book unfolds, we find that a good number of them are already dead, their names and their experiences totally absorbed into the dismal roll-call of sacrifices to a whole vast, impassive, war-breeding system. This fictive-temporal arrangement also enables, as with Company K, a narrative structure capable of moving backward and forward in the order of events and actions, with incidents, scenes, episodes, images, often prefigured far before the moment of their particular depiction and often later reduplicated in multiple, prismatic after-image. In both novels, such strategies of recurrent imaging culminate themselves in a focusing of symbolic energies on a single primal scene—in Company K the execution of the prisoners and in Catch-22 the death of Snowden—that becomes a master-image of the war-world at large. In sum, a novel formed again, as with Company K, from a collocation of individual fragments, becomes a vast, enormous testament to the utter insignificance of individuality in a world of modern, mass-production war.4

  As may have been suggested, the dominant irony representative of Company K becomes, in Catch-22, global and all-consuming. March's literal, rather straight-faced “satire of circumstance” takes a final step in evolution into wholesale manic absurdity. War becomes a slapstick phantasmagoria of random annihilation, at once somehow giddy and terrifying in equal measure. There is no room here even for ironic indignation, but only sublime ironic indifference. Joke mixes with atrocity, pratfall with hideous incident and accident, often commingled and, horrifically, even conflated. A bungler-God who, in the words of the protagonist Yossarian, probably couldn't get a job “as even a shipping clerk” (178), presides over a vast black comedy of death ultimately absorbing all of creation into its teeming maw. Yet, as with the madness that comes to pervade Company K, the nonstop hysterics of Catch-22 should not blind us to the true center that unites it with its predecessor. It is all there, Yossarian sees, in the secret he reads in Snowden's spilled guts: “Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all” (429–430). It is but a post-modern variation on March's Private Charles Gordon. “God is Love.” “Ripeness is all.” The big lines in literature are empty self-parodic lies. The “literary” irony of Catch-22, as with Company K, points us relentlessly back toward its obsessive thematic center. As Alfred Kazin has again perceptively written, “the impressive emotion in Catch-22 is not ‘black humor,’ the ‘totally absurd,’ those current articles of liberal politics, but horror” (p. 84).5

  As might have been predicted, it would also be in the literature of the Vietnam war itself, however, that the prophetic dimension of March's work would find further creative realization; and it would do so, not surprisingly, in works that would represent the further issuing-forth of American war narrative into new forms hitherto unseen in its precincts. One would be the oral history. As in Company K, in works such as Al Santoli's Everything We Had and Wallace Terry's Bloods, the tale of war would be told by individual participants in their own voices, the composite effect of their narratives leading us toward larger patterns of insight and meaning.6 Another work, Mark Baker's Nam would go further, to put under various topical headings composite narratives of multiple anonymous voices speaking from a wide collocation of perspectives, all adding up to something like a master narrative of the war at large. John Clark Pratt's Vietnam Voices would in turn take this one step further to dissolve the very boundaries between fact and fiction, life and art, memory and imagining. The result would be a five-act narrative tragedy comprised of materials gathered from everything from journal, diary, memoir, novel, poem, play, to mission order, policy document, news report, popular song, G.I. anecdote, advertising slogan, and latrine graffito. The effect of this highly original work can perhaps best be described as something like mass-media assault. It is the whole dreadful blare and babble of noise, pain, confusion, and waste that was the war. Yet, not surprisingly, the germ of that idea turns out to have been spoken, almost to a word, nearly half a century earlier, and spoken, in fact, by the very first voice we hear in William March's Company K. Contemplating the book he has completed about the war—presumably the one we are reading—Private Joseph Delaney thinks, “ ‘I wish there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a large wheel, each story hung on a different peg until the circle was completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until the things of which I have written took life and were recreated, and became part of the wheel, flowing toward each other, and into each other, blurring and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending circle of pain. . . . That would be the picture of war. And the sound that the wheel made, and the sound that the men themselves made as they laughed, cried, cursed or prayed, would be, against the falling of walls, the rushing of bullets, the exploding of shells, the sound that war, itself, makes . . . ’ ” (13–14). Compare now, the latest evolution of the motif as we find it in one of the most accomplished experimental works about the war in Vietnam, Michael Herr's incomparable Dispatches: “Holy war, long-nose jihad like a face-off between one god who would hold the coonskin to the wall while we nailed it up, and another whose detachment would see the blood run out of ten generations, if that was how long it took for the wheel to go around” (45).

  To cite one of the popular songs of the Vietnam era, it is as ever, “the circle within the circle, the wheel within the wheel.” As the new literature of Vietnam continues even now to show, Delaney was right. And thus was the prophetic power of the artist who created him, William March.

  Notes

  1. It is instructive to note, for instance, that out of sixteen chapters in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore, only two address fiction. Similarly, it is notable that none of the three greatest postwar realists, Twain, Howells, and James, saw significant military action. Similarly, aside from Twain's account, in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” of his brief foray with border-state militia and from small echoes of the war in Howells and James, all three seemed to show an almost perverse lack of interest in the conflict—surely the most crucial experience of their American generation—as a subject of literary depiction.

  2. As suggested by the bayoneting incident described in my earlier remarks on March's own experience in the war, this episode must surely be autobiographical in origin—although now powerfully transformed with the wound, in a novel full of “voices” trying to speak the horror of the war, to the brain by way of the roof of the dead man's mouth. So also
one must consider the similarly powerful transmutation of autobiographical reference in an earlier narrative where Private Leslie Westmore suffers an episode of hysterical blindness. See Simmonds, 23 and 190–92.

  3. I have already remarked on the strong affinities of Company K with the works of British soldier-memoirists and soldier-poets such as Owen, Graves, and Sassoon. In this regard, it strikes me as significant that Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, also draws recurrent connections between Catch-22 and the literature of the British experience of the trenches.