Blown up, shot at, spat out

A hundred years after the US entered the First World War, one novel bears witness to the awful truth, says Patrick Hennessey

One of the only recurring nightmares I can recall from my childhood is of a particular image from a school book about the First World War. Partially embedded in the muddy wall of what might be a trench or steep-sided shellhole is the corpse of a soldier. He is, for the most part, so decomposed as to be more recognisable as a comic-book skeleton than a real person. Presumably because he was wearing gloves when he died, his hands seemed to remain jarringly three-dimensional and grotesquely swollen in contrast to his shrunken cage and skull: an intrusion of life in a tableau of death.

It is rare to come across a single image or detail that moves so directly, or seems to convey a fundamental truth with such economy, yet somehow Company K, written by William March in 1933, so abounds with just such wrenching moments that at times the reader needs to pause for breath. The wholly unaffected joy of camaraderie; the surreal detachment of watching a bombardment from afar; the all-consuming intensity of close combat; the nearness of sudden, violent death; and, through all, an undercurrent of the trivial and mundane: the human.

With beguiling simplicity and minimal styling, March’s episodic rendering of the Western Front from the perspective of each and every one of the 113 Marines of the eponymous Company K, creates a kaleidoscope effect in which each vignette stands on its own, and yet the whole is greater than the disorientating sum of its parts.

Interviewed not long before his death, Harry Patch, the last surviving veteran of the Western Front, observed – not in anger, but as an explanation of a simple truth: “The younger generation, they can’t imagine what it was like.”

There is something particular about war that privileges experience: unless you’ve been blown up, shot at, dragged through and spat out by war you can no more imagine what it feels like than you can imagine how a bird feels when it flies. Company K, whose author was a highly decorated US marine, ranks alongside Goodbye to All That, Her Privates We, All Quiet on the Western Front and the poetry of Sassoon and Owen among the finest, most authentic and important renderings in literature of the First World War, a war now out of reach of actual memory.

It is, strictly, a novel, written by the fictitious Private Delaney, but it is obvious from the first story that Delaney was really March:

This is an extraordinary, powerful image and an extraordinary, powerful piece of writing. Like the dead soldier from my school book, it captures a truth about war that evades whole histories. Now that no one is left who can remember, we need books such as Company K all the more to force those of us left behind not to forget.

Iremember it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. The date was October 2 1918, and I walked through an old field, pitted with shell holes and grown over with weeds, until I reached the Somme-Py road. Later on I cut off from the road, and through the woods. It was lonely and quiet in the wood and I felt cut off from everything and entirely alone. Pretty soon I found a path which ran in the direction I was going, and was following it, thinking about a good many things, when I turned a bend, and there, to one side of the path, was a young German soldier.

He was sitting with his back to a tree, eating a piece of brown bread. I stood for a few minutes watching him. The bread kept crumbling in his hands, and he would lean forward and pick up the pieces which had fallen on to the ground. I noticed that he didn’t have a rifle with him, but he carried side arms. I stood there, not knowing what to do. At first I thought I’d tiptoe back around the bend, and cut through the woods to the right, but that looked as if I were yellow.

While I stood there fingering my rifle, the German turned and saw me. He sat staring at me, as if paralysed, his hand, with a crumb of bread in it, half raised to his lips. He had brown eyes, I noticed, and golden brown skin, almost the colour of an orange. His lips were full, and very red, and he was trying to grow a moustache. It was dark brown, as fine as corn-silk, but it hadn’t come out evenly on his lip. Presently he got up and we stood looking at each other for what seemed a long time, as if neither of us could make up our minds what to do.

Then I remembered what they