Three Soldiers is a war journey that follows three soldiers, although only one gets heavy focus. In brief: it has a Hemingway style with a Remarque view of The Great War. Despite some of these shortcomings, Dos Passos message is unmistakable in its pessimism.

While Dos Passos is regarded as one of the best writers in American history, this focus in World War I felt unfinished. The characters are evenly distributed across the American map, and each of them have monumental struggles toward success. Yet they are hardly represented evenly across the pages. Two of the three soldiers - Fuselli and Chrisfield - are underdeveloped. On top of that, Andrews himself (the soldier focused on for almost two-thirds of the book) really doesn't have an likable personality. Some critical essays have pointed to Andrews being Dos Passos himself since Andrews is a graduate of Harvard. Much of the book is spent wondering if there will be any closure to the three characters' struggles. And when Dos Passos unravels the theme into our lap, it risks leaving a bad taste in the reader's mouth. The message could be too bitter.

Throughout the tale, Dos Passos uses dialogue to carry the story. Like Hemingway who bragged about his ability to have masterful drunken dialogue in his stories, Dos Passos creates a thick drawl in Chrisfield's words. Lines have to be re-read to understand what he said. Furthermore, Dos Passos gives the reader a healthy dose of French dialogue that will leave one nearly fluent in French by the end of the story. Dos Passos does not provide any translations to help us out with the meaning of the French comments.

It is the view of the War, though, that becomes intriguing. Dos Passos uses Andrews' experiences as his message-bearer: that the American army, having very little to do after the Armistice, becomes unraveled from leadership on down. Andrews is like a prisoner in the American army. He sees the dark side of War. Much like Remarque's attempt to avoid the glorification of war, Dos Passos makes it very clear that enlistment is the antithesis of his purpose. Andrews is blocked time and time again with bureaucracy. He can't connect with people on a personal level or on a professional level within the army. As a matter of fact, the easier the request in the American army during World War I, the harder it is to get approved. Since the War is winding down, deserters are aplenty and Andrews wonders why he continues to try army channels to get something he feels he is owed. Andrews' goal becomes putting the greatest distance between the army and himself. "Remember how sentimental history books used to talk about prisoners who were let out after years in dungeons, not being able to stand it, and going back to their cells?" This quote by Henslowe, another soldier, leads the reader to believe that even if Andrewes was able to distance himself from the War, he risked crawling back to the only life he had now: a soldier's life.

This is a great book for anyone interested in World War I fiction. There were times where pages had to be re-read to understand what John Dos Passos was trying to say, but his message is lucid on the final pages. This 1921 book is certainly not for everybody. There are no intense battles scenes, there are no hurrah moments- it's all quite dark and pessimistic. If pessimism about World War I sounds appealing, then this might be a book worth reading a couple of times.

I liked it. A post-war take on American soldiers taking on the army and its culture in WWI. I found it a little hard to follow at its beginning, but as Dos Passos settled in for longer stretches with a character, the story was easier to comprehend, absorb, and enjoy, especially the last third or so. I was surprised by the lack of battle scenes and the long stretches of the characters on the run from the American army. A distinct counterpoint to a conquering hero mythology of American soldiers overseas. I'd recommend.

Meh

I was drawn to this book to try and get a more detailed look at the lives of the soldiers in World War I. It did give a description somewhat of how military life was back then but it mostly turned out to be a long drawn out political rant. I was very curious about John Dos Passos and then I read this and it makes me never want to read something by him again. The story was very disjointed and felt like a diary that had all the headers removed. It was hard to keep track of where the characters were and what they were doing. All in all I only finished it because I hate not finishing a book.

Well worth a read. All three soldiers are young and overwhelmed by the brutality of war. John Andrews receives the most attention through the book and his experience is bitter and bleak. Andrews cannot conform and eventually transfers to study music in Paris in an effort to escape but the army catches up with him and he cannot escape. While his time in Paris is idled away and book slows, the end is tragic and profound.

*****************
One Man's Initiation: 1917 4 stars
Manhattan Transfer 1 star
Three Soldiers maybe

This may be my new favorite war classic. The writing is electric. really glad that I assigned it for my Ap Us History students . Here are my notes

Three Soldiers (Dos Passos) KEY PASSAGES

P.23 “ He had planned so many lives for himse;lf: a general, like Caesar, he was to conquer the world and die murdered in a great marble hall; a wandering minstrel, he would go through all countries singing and have intricate endless adventures; a great musician, he would sit at the piano playing, like Chopin in the engraving, while beautiful women wept and men with long, curly hair hid their faces in their hands. It was only slavery that he had not foreseen. His race had dominated for too many centuries for that. And yet the world was made of various slaveries.

P.117 Furious, hopeless irritation consumed him. How these people enjoyed hating! At that rate it was better to be at the front. Men were more humane when they were killing each other than when they were talking about it. So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression. Oh, but there must be something more in the world than greed and hatred and cruelty. Were they all shams, too, these gigantic phrases that floated like gaudy kites high above mankind? Kites, that was it, contraptions of tissue paper held at the end of a string, ornaments not to be taken seriously. He thought of all the long procession of men who had been touched by the unutterable futility of the lives of men, who had tried by phrases to make things otherwise, who had taught unworldliness. Dim enigmatic figures they were—Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, Christ; so many of them, and so vague in the silvery mist of history that he hardly knew that they were not his own imagining; Lucretius, St. Francis, Voltaire, Rousseau, and how many others, known and unknown, through the tragic centuries; they had wept, some of them, and some of them had laughed, and their phrases had risen glittering, soap bubbles to dazzle men for a moment, and had shattered. And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, to live his life as he saw it in spite of everything, to proclaim once more the falseness of the gospels under the cover of which greed and fear filled with more and yet more pain the already unbearable agony of human life.

P.123 John Andrews sat on a bench in a square full of linden trees, with the pale winter sunshine full on his face and hands. He had been looking up through his eyelashes at the sun, that was the color of honey, and he let his dazzled glance sink slowly through the black lacework of twigs, down the green trunks of the trees to the bench opposite where sat two nursemaids and, between them, a tiny girl with a face daintily colored and lifeless like a doll's face, and a frilled dress under which showed small ivory knees and legs encased in white socks and yellow sandals. Above the yellow halo of her hair floated, with the sun shining through it, as through a glass of claret, a bright carmine balloon which the child held by a string….

Something made him go up to the little girl and take her hand. The child, looking up suddenly and seeing a lanky soldier with pale lean face and light, straw-colored hair escaping from under a cap too small for him, shrieked and let go the string of the balloon, which soared slowly into the air trembling a little in the faint cool wind that blew. The child wailed dismally, and Andrews, quailing under the furious glances of the nursemaids, stood before her, flushed crimson, stammering apologies, not knowing what to do. The white caps of the nursemaids bent over and ribbons fluttered about the child's head as they tried to console her. Andrews walked away dejectedly, now and then looking up at the balloon, which soared, a black speck against the grey and topaz-colored clouds.

“Sale Americain!” he heard one nursemaid exclaim to the other. But this was the first hour in months he had had free, the first moment of solitude; he must live; soon he would be sent back to his division. A wave of desire for furious fleshly enjoyments went through him, making him want steaming dishes of food drenched in rich, spice-flavored sauces; making him want to get drunk on strong wine; to roll on thick carpets in the arms of naked, libidinous women. He was walking down the quiet grey street of the provincial town, with its low houses with red chimney pots, and blue slate roofs and its irregular yellowish cobbles. A clock somewhere was striking four with deep booming strokes, Andrews laughed. He had to be in hospital at six. Already he was tired; his legs ached.

P.130 And you live here?” asked Andrews after they had all laughed.
“Always. It is not often that I go down to town.... It's so difficult.... I have a withered leg.” He smiled brilliantly like a child telling about a new toy.
“And you?”
“How could I be anywhere else?” answered the girl. “It's a misfortune, but there it is.” She tapped with the crutch on the floor, making a sound like someone walking with it. The boy laughed and tightened his arm round her shoulder.
“I should like to live here,” said Andrews simply.
“Why don't you?”
“But don't you see he's a soldier,” whispered the girl hurriedly.
A frown wrinkled the boy's forehead.
“Well, it wasn't by choice, I suppose,” he said.
Andrews was silent. Unaccountable shame took possession of him before these people who had never been soldiers, who would never be soldiers.
“The Greeks used to say,” he said bitterly, using as phrase that had been a long time on his mind, “that when a man became a slave, on the first day he lost one-half of his virtue.”
“When a man becomes a slave,” repeated the lame boy softly, “on the first day he loses one-half of his virtue.”
“What's the use of virtue? It is love you need,” said the girl.

P.132 In one doorway the vague light from a lamp bracketed in the wall showed two figures, pressed into one by their close embrace. As Andrews walked past, his heavy army boots clattering loud on the wet pavement, they lifted their heads slowly. The boy had violet eyes and pale beardless cheeks; the girl was bareheaded and kept her brown eyes fixed on the boy's face. Andrews's heart thumped within him. At last he had found them. He made a step towards them, and then strode on losing himself fast in the cool effacing fog. Again he had been mistaken. The fog swirled about him, hiding wistful friendly faces, hands ready to meet his hands, eyes ready to take fire with his glance, lips cold with the mist, to be crushed under his lips. “From the girl at the singing under her street-lamp...”
And he walked on alone through the drifting fog.

P.138 Oh, but I think it was superb of you to join as a private; It was my dream to do that, to be one of the nameless marching throng.”
“I think it was damn foolish, not to say criminal,” said Andrews sullenly, still staring into the fire.
“You can't mean that. Or do you mean that you think you had abilities which would have been worth more to your country in another position?... I have many friends who felt that.”
“No.... I don't think it's right of a man to go back on himself.... I don't think butchering people ever does any good ...I have acted as if I did think it did good... out of carelessness or cowardice, one or the other; that I think bad.”

P.145 Andrews looked hard at Walters as he went out, but got no glance in return. When he stood in the air again, disgust surged up within him, bitterer than before. The fury of his humiliation made tears start in his eyes. He walked away from the village down the main road, splashing carelessly through the puddles, slipping in the wet clay of the ditches. Something within him, like the voice of a wounded man swearing, was whining in his head long strings of filthy names. After walking a long while he stopped suddenly with his fists clenched. It was completely dark, the sky was faintly marbled by a moon behind the clouds. On both sides of the road rose the tall grey skeletons of poplars. When the sound of his footsteps stopped, he heard a faint lisp of running water. Standing still in the middle of the road, he felt his feelings gradually relax. He said aloud in a low voice several times: “You are a damn fool, John Andrews,” and started walking slowly and thoughtfully back to the village.

P.154 But think of it, man,” said Andrews, “the butchery's over, and you and I and everybody else will soon be human beings again. Human; all too human!”

P.159 Andrews was not listening to their talk; twirling the stem of his glass of vermouth in his fingers, he was thinking of the Queen of Sheba slipping down from off the shoulders of her elephant, glistening fantastically with jewels in the light of crackling, resinous torches. Music was seeping up through his mind as the water seeps into a hole dug in the sand of the seashore. He could feel all through his body the tension of rhythms and phrases taking form, not quite to be seized as yet, still hovering on the borderland of consciousness. “From the girl at the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp to the patrician pulling roses to pieces from the height of her litter....All the imaginings of your desire....” He thought of the girl with skin like old ivory he had seen in the Place de Medicis. The Queen of Sheba's face was like that now in his imaginings, quiet and inscrutable. A sudden cymbal-clanging of joy made his heart thump hard. He was free now of the imaginings of his desire, to loll all day at cafe tables watching the tables move in changing patterns before him, to fill his mind and body with a reverberation of all the rhythms of men and women moving in the frieze of life before his eyes; no more like wooden automatons knowing only the motions of the drill manual, but supple and varied, full of force and tragedy.

P.163 “But just think of it,” said Aubrey, “that means world revolution with the United States at the head of it. What do you think of that?”

“Moki doesn't think so,” said Heineman. “And Moki knows.”

“She just knows what a lot of reactionary warlords tell her,” said Aubrey. “This man I was talking with at the Crillon—I wish I could tell you his name—heard it directly from...Well, you know who.” He turned to Henslowe, who smiled knowingly. “There's a mission in Russia at this minute making peace with Lenin.”

“A goddam outrage!” cried Heineman, knocking a bottle off the table. The lanky man picked up the pieces patiently, without comment.

“The new era is opening, men, I swear it is...” began Aubrey. “The old order is dissolving. It is going down under a weight of misery and crime.... This will be the first great gesture towards a newer and better world. There is no alternative. The chance will never come back. It is either for us to step courageously forward, or sink into unbelievable horrors of anarchy and civil war.... Peace or the dark ages again.”

P.167 The darkness, where the rain fell through the vague halos of light round the street lamps, glittered with streaks of pale gold. Andrews's ears were full of the sound of racing gutters and spattering waterspouts, and of the hard unceasing beat of the rain on the pavements. It was after closing time. The corrugated shutters were drawn down, in front of cafe windows. Andrews's cap was wet; water trickled down his forehead and the sides of his nose, running into his eyes. His feet were soaked and he could feel the wet patches growing on his knees where they received the water running off his overcoat. The street stretched wide and dark ahead of him, with an occasional glimmer of greenish reflection from a lamp. As he walked, splashing with long strides through the rain, he noticed that he was keeping pace with a woman under an umbrella, a slender person who was hurrying with small resolute steps up the boulevard. When he saw her, a mad hope flamed suddenly through him. He remembered a vulgar little theatre and the crude light of a spot light. Through the paint and powder a girl's golden-brown skin had shone with a firm brilliance that made him think of wide sun-scorched uplands, and dancing figures on Greek vases. Since he had seen her two nights ago, he had thought of nothing else. He had feverishly found out her name. “Naya Selikoff!” A mad hope flared through him that this girl he was walking beside was the girl whose slender limbs moved in an endless frieze through his thoughts. He peered at her with eyes blurred with rain. What an ass he was! Of course it couldn't be; it was too early. She was on the stage at this minute. Other hungry eyes were staring at her slenderness, other hands were twitching to stroke her golden-brown skin. Walking under the steady downpour that stung his face and ears and sent a tiny cold trickle down his back, he felt a sudden dizziness of desire come over him. His hands, thrust to the bottom of his coat pockets, clutched convulsively. He felt that he would die, that his pounding blood vessels would burst. The bead curtains of rain rustled and tinkled about him, awakening his nerves, making his skin flash and tingle. In the gurgle of water in gutters and water spouts he could imagine he heard orchestras droning libidinous music.

P.171 “Have you ever read La Tentation de Saint Antoine?” he asked in a low voice.

“Flaubert's?”

“Yes.”

“It's not his best work. A very interesting failure though,” she said.

Andrews got up from the piano with difficulty, controlling a sudden growing irritation.

“They seem to teach everybody to say that,” he muttered.

Suddenly he realized that other people were in the room. He went up to Mme. Rod.

“You must excuse me,” he said, “I have an engagement.... Aubrey, don't let me drag you away. I am late, I've got to run.”

“You must come to see us again.”

“Thank you,” mumbled Andrews.

Genevieve Rod went with him to the door. “We must know each other better,” she said. “I like you for going off in a huff.”

Andrews flushed.

“I was badly brought up,” he said, pressing her thin cold hand. “And you French must always remember that we are barbarians.... Some are repentant barbarians.... I am not.”

P.183 I have always been tremendously fascinated by the place in La Tentation where the Queen of Sheba visited Antoine, that's all,” said Andrews gruffly.
“Is that the first thing you've done? It made me think a little of Borodine.”
“The first that's at all pretentious. It's probably just a steal from everything I've ever heard.”
“No, it's good. I suppose you had it in your head all through those dreadful and glorious days at the front.... Is it for piano or orchestra?”
“All that's finished is for piano. I hope to orchestrate it eventually.... Oh, but it's really silly to talk this way. I don't know enough.... I need years of hard work before I can do anything.... And I have wasted so much time.... That is the most frightful thing. One has so few years of youth!”
“There's the bell, we must scuttle back to our seats. Till the next intermission.” She slipped through the glass doors and disappeared. Andrews went back to his seat very excited, full of unquiet exultation. The first strains of the orchestra were pain, he felt them so acutely.

“France is stifling,” said Andrews, all of a sudden. “It stifles you very slowly, with beautiful silk bands.... America beats your brains out with a policeman's billy.”

P.185 Andrews flushed and walked away without turning his head. He was stinging with humiliation; an angry voice inside him kept telling him that he was a coward, that he should make some futile gesture of protest. Grotesque pictures of revolt flamed through his mind, until he remembered that when he was very small, the same tumultuous pride had seethed and ached in him whenever he had been reproved by an older person. Helpless despair fluttered about within him like a bird beating against the wires of a cage. Was there no outlet, no gesture of expression, would he have to go on this way day after day, swallowing the bitter gall of indignation, that every new symbol of his slavery brought to his lips?

P.191 Their senses glutted with the beauty of the day and the intricate magnificence of the cathedral, languid with all they had seen and said, they were talking of the future with quiet voices.

“It's all in forming a habit of work,” Andrews was saying. “You have to be a slave to get anything done. It's all a question of choosing your master, don't you think so?”

“Yes. I suppose all the men who have left their imprint on people's lives have been slaves in a sense,” said Genevieve slowly. “Everyone has to give up a great deal of life to live anything deeply. But it's worth, it.” She looked Andrews full in the eyes.

“Yes, I think it's worth it,” said Andrews. “But you must help me. Now I am like a man who has come up out of a dark cellar. I'm almost too dazzled by the gorgeousness of everything. But at least I am out of the cellar.”

P.202 Andrews hesitated a moment, then let go his hold and started swimming with the current for all his might.

At first he felt strong and exultant, but very soon he began to feel the icy grip of the water bearing him down; his arms and legs seemed to stiffen. More than against the water, he was struggling against paralysis within him, so that he thought that every moment his limbs would go rigid. He came to the surface and gasped for air. He had a second's glimpse of figures, tiny like toy soldiers, gesticulating wildly on the deck of the barge. The report of a rifle snapped through the air. He dove again, without thinking, as if his body were working independently of his mind.

The next time he came up, his eyes were blurred from the cold. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. The shadow of the bridge was just above him. He turned on his back for a second. There were lights on the bridge. A current swept him past one barge and then another. Certainty possessed him that he was going to be drowned. A voice seemed to sob in his ears grotesquely: “And so John Andrews was drowned in the Seine, drowned in the Seine, in the Seine.”

Then he was kicking and fighting in a furious rage against the coils about him that wanted to drag him down and away. The black side of a barge was slipping up stream beside him with lightning speed. How fast those barges go, he thought. Then suddenly he found that he had hold of a rope, that his shoulders were banging against the bow of a small boat, while in front of him, against the dull purple sky, towered the rudder of the barge. A strong warm hand grasped his shoulder from behind, and he was being drawn up and up, over the bow of the boat that hurt his numbed body like blows, out of the clutching coils of the water.

“Hide me, I'm a deserter,”

This one just never made it for me. All of the action was in the first and last parts of the book with an endless boring section in the middle. The book focused on three soldier with the first part mostly featuring Fuselli then going with mostly Chrisfield and Andrews in the middle and eventually focusing on Andrews toward the last section. The book started off good describing young men anxious to join the army to fight in WWI hoping for glory like what they saw in the movies, but what they found was the dehumanizing treatment of military life. The book then drifted off into a, seemingly, pointless stretch of little interest until Andrews is caught to be out without a pass which led to disastrous results. Another factor that led to my disappointment in the book was the writing that I found was merely adequate.

The United States sent some 4 million people to Europe to fight in World War I as the American Expeditionary Forces. During the war, more than 400,000 of them contracted VD (venereal disease). And after reading THREE SOLDIERS by John Dos Passos, it’s easy to understand why so many soldiers got sick: the book is filled with sex.

To begin with, THREE SOLDIERS, published by John Dos Passos in 1921, is a novel about the experiences of three Americans as they fight in France the final battles of World War I and then confront a world in which peace offers little respite from the dehumanizing servility and regimentation of militarized life. We follow these three soldiers – Dan Fuselli, Chrisfield (called “Chris”), and John Andrews – from basic training through the end of the war and somewhat after.

The novel is divided into six parts. Part One, “Making the Mould” (British spelling), shows all three men going through basic training together. Part Two, “The Metal Cools,” follows just Dan Fuselli as he sails from New York to France to serve packing medical supplies. Part Three, “Machines,” follows Chrisfield and John Andrews as they march through France to the frontlines, get separated in battle and go their own ways. And the final three parts – “Rust,” “The World Outside,” and “Under the Wheels” – follow just John as he gets wounded by shrapnel, recovers in the hospital as the war ends (armistice!), then wanders around France in increasingly desperate efforts to leave the Army.

Even though the book is called THREE SOLDIERS and does describe the war experiences of all three men, yet the primary focus is on John Andrews. More than half the book is about him: the Harvard-educated musician who just wants to be free to write his music and doesn’t want to be a slave to Army discipline. He’s a genuinely interesting character, though – so it’s no fault that a novel titled THREE SOLDIERS focuses mostly on just him.

That’s the overview. So, back to the sex!

And even from the very beginning, there’s sex. What little leisure time these three men have from basic training, they go to the small town near base, to the movies and whatnot, and are warned against getting too friendly with the local ladies (who love the brave soldiers). But that’s okay with Fuselli, though, because he has a girl back home (named Mabe).

However, in Part Two, which follows Fuselli, he gets stationed in a medical supply station in the middle of France (far from the front), and quickly forgets about his babe Mabe. In an early scene, Fuselli is drinking cognac at a bar near base when he keeps seeing men walk into a back room behind the bar. He goes in too to see what’s up, and finds a dozen men waiting in a small room with a bed while a woman sits putting on make-up. “ ‘Come along,’ said the woman, suddenly, tossing her head back. ‘Come along one at a time; who go with me first?’ Nobody spoke. The men stared at her silently. There was no sound except that of feet scraping occasionally on the floor. ” The men are all taking their turns with her.

Also in Part Two, Fuselli falls in love with a local waitress, Yvonne, and quickly shacks up with her. He loves her madly (sorry Mabe), and introduces Yvonne to his commanding officer – only to later find Yvonne kissing and carrying to bed this same commanding officer. She’s been sharing herself with the entire medical supply squad, it turns out. In despair, Fuselli transfers to a new unit, far away from lovely Yvonne.

Unlike so many other soldiers and so many young French women, too, Chrisfield doesn’t float from bed to bed like a bee going from flower to flower; but that’s only because he’s morally worse than all of them. He’s so determined to prove himself in combat and advance up through the ranks that he abstains from sex but begins in his mind mingling violence with sex: “ Chrisfield marched with his fists clenched; he wanted to fight somebody, to run his bayonet into a man as he ran it into the dummy in that everlasting bayonet drill, he wanted to strip himself naked, to squeeze the wrists of a girl until she screamed.” Yeah, that sentence caught me off guard when I first read it.

When Chrisfield finally does buy his way into the bed of a local woman, he sees her with “violet circles under her eyes, as if they’d been made with blows.” Even his descriptions of her contain violent imagery. And when he approaches her: “ He stood in front of the woman, staring in her face. She looked at him in a stupid frightened way. He felt in his pockets for some money. As he had just been paid he had a fifty-franc note. He spread it out carefully before her. Her eyes glistened. The pupils seemed to grow smaller as they fastened on the bit of daintily colored paper. He crumpled it up suddenly in his fist and shoved it down between her breasts. ” Everything he does is violent.

Chrisfield soon after murders one of his own superior officers during a battle and blames it on the Germans; but then, like in the Tell-Tale Heart, the guilt of what he’s done overwhelms him until he’s convinced other people know what he’s done (when no, they had no idea), and Chris deserts from the Army, going AWOL. So, no, he’s not great.

John Andrews, being the main character of the book, is a little bit better, though. He does at least wait until after the war is over before falling into bed with a Paris girl. But then after sleeping with her he immediately forgets about her and pursues another woman, a more wealthy woman with a country house and a love of music. (John Andrews is a musician, remember.) So, not very romantic.

Throughout the book, several characters complain about the low quality and character of the French women: “ ‘Gee, these French are immoral. Look at this woman here. She’ll sleep with a feller as soon as not. Got a baby, too!’ ” Other characters joke that the only French they know is “Voulay vous couchay aveck moy.” And one man brags about how successful he’s been at “pursuing Janes.” These soldiers all sleep around, often, it seems.

If THREE SOLDIERS in any way accurately reflects the sexual adventures and attitudes of American soldiers serving in France during World War I (and I have no reason to believe these depictions are wildly wrong), then yeah, it’s easy to see how more than 400,000 service members actually did contract VD (syphilis or gonorrhea) during the just two years our troops were overseas.

But I don’t want you to get the impression from these remarks that THREE SOLDIERS is nothing but sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Because it’s not that, at all. The sex is just a minor background element, mentioned at times, but not on every page. And THREE SOLDIERS was published in 1921, when explicit sex and nudity were still kept off the page (for the most part). So even what sex is mentioned is hinted at, alluded to, not shown in vivid detail.

THREE SOLDIERS is mostly about the war, about the American experience in France during World War I. And the book is bleak, with very depressing endings for all of the characters, even the minor ones. THREE SOLDIERS is almost anti-war propaganda, in that regard: “Don’t go to war because it always ends badly for everyone,” the book seems to be saying.

The book itself is finely written, full of vivid descriptions and snappy dialogue.

After reading ONE MAN’S INITIATION – 1917, published by John Dos Passos in 1920, I wondered if the distinctive writing style in that book – where sudden shifts in scenery or perspective happen between paragraphs, with no notice – was an artistic element of just that one book or was a style of the author himself. I said I’d have to read more books written by this author to find out.

Well, now I’ve read another book by this author, so I can say: THREE SOLDIERS starts with some of those same dramatic shifts in the writing, but loses those as the book progresses. I think it was an early writing quirk of the author, these sudden bounces between locations and moments within a scene; but as he kept writing, he lost that habit. The First Part of THREE SOLDIERS does have some of these sudden shifts in it, but almost none of the other Parts have any of these shifts in them. As the author kept writing, I think he outgrew those sudden shifts and got better about moving each scene along naturally, from moment to moment progressively instead of randomly. And that’s good: it’s a sign of growth!

In the final analysis: THREE SOLDIERS is a great book!

5 out of 5 stars!

The beginning of Three Soldiers is fantastic. The first part moves very quickly and is full of analysis. Once you move forward however, the book begins to drag very much.

"But can't you understand that other people haven't your notions of individual liberty?"

I have been listening to several John Dos Passos books recently. I am still waiting for one to really grab me like I had expected them to. They all seem somewhat dated and I wondered how they were when people read them at the time they were written. This book was published in 1921. Events in this book are during and just after World War One.

It is about American soldiers in France. None of the story actually happens in the trenches that are the famous WWI setting. In fact the armistice is about halfway through the book and the rest of the book is mostly about soldiers who remain in France as part of the occupation forces. It actually focuses on those who desert. It is a kind of war story that is completely new and unfamiliar to me.

The theme of the story seems to be about how army life and mentality destroy the lives of the men who find themselves in that circumstance. But it does not really tell that story in a particularly head-on way. At least that is my feeling having listen to it. It talks a lot about highway variety of men struggle with what to do with their lives interrupted by war and its aftermath. There are allusions to the possibility of revolution and a change in circumstances that will make life better.

One of the main characters in the book has a musical talent as a composer which seems so odd for someone who finds himself in listed as a doughboy in WW1.

The writing is skillful and yet I do not find it particularly motivating. It has been identified as a significant anti-war book but it seems to be more of a anti-social molding book. The struggle of men against the social system of the early 20th century that sent them off into the routinized world of the military. The image of the mindless marching legs appears several times. The life of being ordered about as a cog in the military machine.