William March / Company K

As Paul Fussell points out in The Great War and Modern Memory, the scope of the disaster in World War I sparked an unusual number of combatants to speak the truth about their experience -- in the words of literary scholar Benjamin Dunlap, to 'express the inexpressible.' William March, an Alabamian who won three decorations for bravery in World War I, found his voice in the novel Company K (1933). March's book succeeds both as a soldier's realistic account of war in the trenches and as a classic and largely experimental novel -- according to literary scholar Phillip Beider, standing at the level of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That.

William March/Company K is a documentary of the genesis of this forgotten classic, incorporating scenes from the feature film Company K, directed by Robert Clem and to be released in 2004 -- the fiftieth anniversary of the author's death. March, who was born William Edward Campbell in Mobile Alabama in 1893, is best known for The Bad Seed (1954), his novel about a child murderess which became a successful Broadway play and Hollywood movie. The author had a difficult childhood in rural Alabama, with little opportunity to achieve even a high school education. He longed to immerse himself in theater and the arts and when his sister Margaret offered him a place to stay at her home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, he moved North and found a job as a clerk in a Manhattan law firm. A slight, sensitive man, he seemed an unlikely candidate for the Marine Corps when he volunteered in New York City shortly after America's declaration of war in 1917.

William Campbell did not shrink from battle once he was engaged, winning three decorations for bravery at the battle of Blanc Mont. Long after he became the author William March, he declined to discuss his war experience or the acts for which he was decorated. But there is no question that the war was hugely damaging to his faith in humanity. March struggled his entire lifetime to maintain some connection with other people -- or else avoided them altogether. His first story to be published, "The Little Wife," quickly established him as a promising writer, but his characters were often damaged, traumatized by life and the cruelty of their fellow man. March's good fortune to obtain a position after the war with the fledgling Waterman Steamship Corporation, which later became a highly profitable business, enabled him eventually to write full time independent of commercial pressures, continuing his pursuit of the darker recesses of his subjects.

Company K, his first novel, employs a multiplicity of viewpoints and sense of irony that bears comparison to Faulkner's achievement in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. The book was a critical success when published in 1933. "March has succeeded" wrote Graham Greene. "His book has the force of a mob protest; an outcry from anonymous throats. It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of protest." The book was March's attempt to write out the war, to leave it behind as his character Sam Ziegler attempts to do in the final scene of the novel. But the arc of March's life indicates he could not leave it behind. He underwent extensive psychoanalysis both before and after Company K. Living in New York, writing full time, he suffered a number of nervous breakdowns culminating in a crackup in 1947 that brought him home to Alabama for good. His final novel The Bad Seed was a reflection of the deep-seated distrust of humanity he had carried from the trenches of France.

Despite its huge popular success, March himself considered The Bad Seed his worst book. And in truth his other novels of the 1930s and 40s -- and especially Company K -- exhibit a humanity that belies the isolation he experienced most of his life. As Phillip Beidler sums up in the film, March shows deep compassion for all his characters, and "in that sense the war was still part of it. He was in pain."