‘Getting in Bad’: One Man’s Initiation: 1917 and Three Soldiers

Abstract

‘The overwhelming majority of conscripts went into the army unwillingly and once there were debauched by the twin forces of official propaganda … and a harsh, unintelligent discipline. The first made them almost incapable of soldierly thought and conduct; the second converted them into cringing goose-steppers.’¹ In writing his analysis of the effects of the First World War on the drafted American soldier, Mencken naturally stressed what he saw as the craven and ignorant nature of the American people. He added that, although there might come a time when the slaves would revolt against their leaders, the American citizen pitched into a European conflict ‘got no farther than academic protests against the brutal usage he had to face in the army’.² Mencken does not specify any writers in this charge, but to look at Dos Passos’ two novels of the war is to understand how hard he strove to absorb his experiences as part of his non-academic education, to realise the horror he encountered as a means of forming his own view of the world. Though he was never a conscript and saw the war as a member of the celebrated ‘finishing school’ of the Lost Generation, the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, he was able to share the bewilderment and pain of the common soldier — and though he is exceptional in having the means to render this fact in literature, he does so in One Man’s Initiation: 1917 with a unique freshness.