Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

6.2 Anti-War:Dos Passos'Three Soldiers-Goldman, Gide,Spender,Koestler,Wright

                                                                      Dos Passos' Three Soldiers

 1.    The senselessness of war for domination and self-aggrandizement takes the lives of countless civilians  throughout our world each day! Three Soldiers, an anti-war novel by John Dos Passos, recounts the desperation and hopelessness of American soldiers Fuselli, Andrews, and Chrisfield who undergo a moral transformation from their  youthful view of  war as a glorious endeavor to one of loss and betrayal.  Dos Passos creates a tone of futility and hypocrisy in his depiction of the characters' transition from innocence to experience. The novel begins with the image of the mess hall   where soldiers  "shuffled" around  "tables," "benches," and " board floors [that] . . . that had  a faint smell of garbage mingled with the smell of disinfectant" (4).  Dos Passos expresses Fuselli's naive attitude toward war that is shared by his two friends: "Oh, when we're ordered overseas, I'll show them, he thinks to himself . . . picturing to  himself   the long movie reels of heroism" (9).  He is shocked by the cursing of the veteran nearby "swearing away his helpless anger" (9). In the next image,  Andrews and Chrisfield both express their eagerness to fight the Germans (13) as they "pick up cigarette butts around the barracks" (13). Fuselli envisions himself " heroically carrying a wounded captain back to a dressing tent, pursued by fierce-whiskered men with spiked helmets" (25). Andrews later admits to himself that he had joined the military as an escape from "the horrors of the world that had fallen upon him " (15). Having a common goal with other men made him feel a part of something much bigger, and better, as Dos Passos  ironically says, "to humble himself into the mud of common slavery"(15).  The romantic notions of war and killing they had witnessed on screen did not correspond with their innocence and sensibilities.  Andrews admits to himself "that he had thought of himself as a passionate person, but never in his life had he wanted to kill a man" (16). Chrisfield agrees, saying that he had almost killed a man years before but never would  have "wanted to do that" (17). Andrews refuses to think of death and the harsh consequences of war (19), and wonders if this gathering of men is all just "futile madness" (20). While on the ship, Fuselli has second thought about dying. In the dark, dank hold of the vessel, men are cramped together (1), meningitis is spreading throughout the ship (32) , and as the Jewish soldier Eisenstein suggests, they were herded there as "meat for the guns" in a "system that turns men into beasts" (28-29). When a soldier died there from  disease, the officers threw his body to the sharks (33). Instead of courage, Fuselli is terrified by the blackness of the night, demands of army life,  the contagious disease, the indifference of the officers, and the thought that he could be the next to die (34).

2.             Dos Passos next uses the image of the convalescent camp to enhance the tone of war as madness and terror. While  Fuselli is in the camp, he witnesses the anger and frustration of  his first mentally ill victim of war. "Go ahead, you can't do nothin'. I can't never have nothing done worse than what's been done to me already," said the tragic sufferer resisting the Y man's help in  the hospital (36). The patient's resentful response filled Fuselli with "terror, which he had never believed an American soldier could feel because he had only seen propaganda films of successful U.S. soldiers "pursuing terrified Huns across potato fields" (37). The distraught patient next alludes to "the poor soldiers" who "got in the way of a  torpedo, and no one even found a button of their pants" (38).  Fuselli asks Grey: " Say, Bill, ain't it different from what we thought it was going to be?"(40).  Fuselli is overwhelmed with loneliness and despair. Dos Passos says Fuselli  was "so far from anyone who cared about him, so lost in the vast machine" (41'). Throughout the novel, Dos Passos uses metaphors of machinery and broken toys to suggests  that the soldiers were merely cogs in the military's organization, insignificant in any other context. Caught in the "treadmill" of routine  army life,  the young soldier feels lost and unimportant (41). Dos Passos uses the same metaphor when he describes Fuselli's learning he was going to the front: "But the faint sense of importance it gave him did not compensate for the feeling he had of being lost in the machine, of being as helpless as a sheep in a flock" (47). In  a ward, Andrews thinks back upon his life in the military "in which all the little routine of the army seemed unreal, and the wounded men discarded automatons, broken toys laid away in rows" (141). Anderson reminisces about "all the months he had wasted in life" (142).  At  a bar one evening, Fuselli overhears Eisenstein telling a Frenchman, "And in the tyranny of the army, a man becomes a brute, a piece of machinery" (62). Sadly, Fuselli meets a woman named Yvonne, and after what he considers a legitimate courtship, proposes; she , however, laughs in his face, and Fuselli's sergeant steals his girl( 74-75).  The young  protagonist feels betrayed by the one he loves, as well as the  military.The  seemingly endless army routine, day after day, made him so despondent that despite his resistance, he felt "his feet would go on beating in time to the steps of the treadmill" (78). One morning, Fuselli's young friend Stockton  refuses to "get out of bed," and after the officer in charge threatens court martial him, the other soldiers attempt to force him to stand. To their amazement,  Stockton, frail and sick,  dies just as they try to life him! This death of so young a man weakened by  the  the rigid military routine and the inhumanity of war leaves a indelible impression on Fuselli (85).