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150 / Soldiers Well-Known and Unknown or “Blub blub, bloo bloo. . . . . . .” or any bubbles of shell shock gibberish from the gashes of no Man’s land.88 These snippets of soldier’s speech, ranging from the sacred (“Thank God”) to the profane (“For Christ’s sake”) to the lunatic (“Blub blub, bloo bloo”), suddenly evoke the physical experience of warfare in the midst of a ceremony that has buried that experience in euphemism and platitude. eating, drinking, killing, going insane—here, Sandburg suggests , is the visceral reality behind the syllables “sac-ri-fice.” By the same token, Dos Passos employs his own form of colloquial subversion, condensing all the terror and sadness of war into a lonely request, a crude but forceful musical signature sung by a ghost, that no one among the “honorable orators” can hear. The gothic tradition of Unknown Soldier writing—earlier given shape by Barton, holmes, and others—here reaches its chilling climax. A symphonic summary of themes and motifs introduced by various literary artists over the course of a decade, “The Body of an American” is arguably the one true masterpiece to emerge from the subgenre of American war literature (and peace literature) that utilized the Unknown Soldier as a multidimensional symbol. however, Dos Passos hardly offered the last word on this American icon. One year after the publication of 1919, the Unknown Soldier appeared in another major novel of the First World War—William March’s Company K. A Marine Corps veteran who received the Distinguished Service Cross, along with other medals, for his courageous actions during the battle of Blanc Mont in 1918, William March (the pen name for Alabama-born William edward March Campbell ) had more combat experience and more decorations than perhaps any other American First World War writer. however, readers expecting a gung-ho tribute to the Old Breed, along the lines of John W. Thomason’s popular memoir Fix Bayonets! (1926), were shocked by March’s highly modernist and blisteringly antiheroic text.89 Consisting of 113 vignettes, each narrated by a different member of a fictional Marine Corps company , Company K presents war as the ultimate irredeemable social evil. here, more than in any other American First World War novel, violence and depravity reign supreme. As critic Philip Beidler points out, “[i]n narrative after narrative [in Company K ], 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 bayonet. They are liter- Soldiers Well-Known and Unknown / 151 ally disintegrated by high explosives. They commit suicide. They murder prisoners. They murder each other.”90 Along with repellent and pointless violence, the theme of memorialization permeates this grim work, determining even the physical appearance of the text. For example, the first edition features a military insignia on the front cover—crossed rifles over the letter K. A veteran glancing at the volume in 1933 might easily have mistaken it for a company history . As we saw in chapter 1, hundreds of these histories—textual memorials , in effect, that record a specific unit’s movements and battles—went to press even before the soldiers who wrote them returned from europe. Many were produced in France, still more in Germany, during the Army of Occupation’s long and tedious watch on the Rhine. March further reinforces this connection with supposedly nonfictional company histories by calling his table of contents a “Roster”—rosters were, of course, standard in unit histories—and by actually parodying the style of such texts. in one of the novel’s 113 vignettes, Company K’s would-be historian, Cpl. Stephen Waller, offers a laconic account of the company’s overseas service that might have come from almost any unit-produced history published between 1919 and 1933: “Company K went into action at 10:15 P.M. December 12th, 1917, at verdun, France, and ceased fighting on the morning of november 11th, 1918, near Bourmont, having crossed the Meuse River the night before under shell fire; participating, during the period set out above, in the following major operations: Aisne, Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne.”91 ironically, nothing could be further from this dispassionate chronicle than the catalog of horrors that March presents in the other vignettes. The rest of Company K, filled with killing and suffering, shows what phrases like “went into action” and “major operations” actually mean at an experiential level. And we catch Corporal Waller in a lie...

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