One Man's Initiation: 1917

by John Dos Passos

As the "Great War" inspired much great poetry, including that of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, so did it inspire compelling prose. John Dos Passos volunteered to drive an ambulance in France during the First World War. The brutality of his experiences turned him against not only war, but capitalism and inspired him to write One Man's Initiation: 1917.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, War, Audiobook, Classics, Historical, Literature

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

John Dos Passos was a prominent American novelist, artist, and political thinker best known for his U.S.A. trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—a groundbreaking work of modernist fiction that employed experimental narrative techniques to depict the complexities of early 20th-century American life. Born in Chicago in 1896, he was educated at Harvard and served as an ambulance driver during World War I, experiences that deeply influenced his early literary themes. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, and the antiwar Three Soldiers drew on his wartime observations and marked him as a major voice among the Lost Generation.
Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer brought him widespread recognition and introduced stylistic innovations that would define his later work. His U.S.A. trilogy fused fiction, biography, newsreel-style reportage, and autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections to explore the impact of capitalism, war, and political disillusionment on the American psyche. Once aligned with leftist politics, Dos Passos grew increasingly disillusioned with Communism, especially after the murder of his friend José Robles during the Spanish Civil War—a turning point that led to a break with Ernest Hemingway and a sharp turn toward conservatism.
Throughout his career, Dos Passos remained politically engaged, writing essays, journalism, and historical studies while also campaigning for right-leaning figures like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s. He contributed to publications such as American Heritage, National Review, and The Freeman, and published over forty books including biographies and historical reflections. Despite political shifts, his commitment to liberty and skepticism of authoritarianism remained central themes.
Also a visual artist, Dos Passos created cover art and illustrations for many of his own books, exhibiting a style influenced by modernist European art. Though less acclaimed for his painting, he remained artistically active throughout his life. His multidisciplinary approach and innovations in narrative structure influenced numerous writers and filmmakers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer and Adam Curtis.
Later recognized with the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for literature in 1967, Dos Passos’s legacy endures through his literary innovations and sharp commentary on American identity. He died in 1970, leaving behind a vast and diverse body of work that continues to shape the landscape of American fiction.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

One Man’s Initiation: 1917 by John Dos Passos

A semi-autobiographical story of an ambulance driver in Italy, France and Spain in World War I. (Other pacifist ambulance drivers in WW I included Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, and W. Somerset Maugham.) The author was a pacifist and he wrote up the carnage in an under-stated, matter of fact style. “Through the trees from which they lay they could see the close-packed wooden crosses of the cemetery from which came the sound of spaded earth, and where, preceded by a priest in a muddy cassock, little two-wheeled carts piled with shapeless things in sacks kept being brought up and unloaded and dragged away again.”



There is constant butchery, constant gunfire and shelling and gas attacks. Those who don’t get to their masks in time choke to death after five days of agony. This is the trench warfare of WW I. He sees men in masks who have lost faces and jaws, wounded with stomachs missing. A wounded man with PTSD tries to stab those who are helping him. The wounded in the ambulance groan in unison when the vehicle hits a pothole.

The carnage alternates with bouts of idleness when the men drink, play cards and talk about women. They spend time in a bombed-out monastery where they pore over shreds and shards of beautifully illustrated books.

Some passages I liked:

“…Curious how many shells can explode around one’s very head without doing any damage…”
“…the Liberals cover their heads with their robes of integrity and wail, wail, wail – God I’m tied of waiting. I want to assassinate.”

“God, it’s so stupid. Why can’t we go over and talk to them? Nobody’s fighting about anything…God, it’s so hideously stupid.”

This book was Dos Passos’s first work. The edition I read (Cornell University Press, 1969) is the complete and corrected version approved by the author in later years. We are told in a publisher’s note that earlier editions were censored without the author’s knowledge or permission and typesetting errors were made.



It’s time for a John Dos Passos revival! Initially he was more read and more famous than his buddy, Ernest Hemingway. They hung out with other authors in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Dos Passos was most famous first for the staccato-like style of Manhattan Transfer and later for his U.S.A trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930); 1919 (1931), and The Big Money 1936.



How famous was he? Jean Paul Sartre referred to Dos Passos as "the greatest writer of our time.” Norman Mailer called the trilogy perhaps the Great American Novel. However Dos Passos fell out of favor with liberals when he changed his politics from radical left to right. He went from serving on a committee to defend Trotsky to supporting Nixon and Goldwater. This shift in politics (and Dos Passos’ fame) were largely why his friendship with Hemingway ended. Anyway I read most of the Trilogy years ago and intend to read more of Dos Passos’ work.

His father immigrated from Madeira so the author is Portuguese American. At that time about half of Provincetown was Portuguese. I recall reading in Virginia Carr’s biography of Dos Passos that he and Hemingway hired an old Portuguese man as a handyman who also procured booze for them during Prohibition. They called him their “boy.”

Top photo: ambulances in WW I from alamy.com
Dos Passos (r) and Hemingway from publicradiotulsa.org
Dos Passos' house at 571 Commercial St. in Provincetown from buildingprovincetown.files.wordpress.com

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dos Passos' Early Novel Of WW I

"One Man's Initiation:1917" was the first novel of the American writer John Dos Passos (1896 -- 1970) and offers a semi-autobiographical account of the writer's experience as an ambulance driver in France as a young man. I became interested in reading the book after reading a new biography of Woodrow Wilson by A.Scott Berg, which discusses the entry of the United States into the Great War and its aftermath.

This is a short novel of about 100 pages told in a third person narrative voice. The primary character, Martin Howe, has just volunteered for the ambulance service in August, 1917, after completing college. His friend while in the service is Tom Armstrong, a young volunteer from New Orleans. Dos Passos, in fact began "One Man's Initiation: 1917" as a joint project with a friend, each writing alternate chapters. But Dos Passos took over the work, with rewriting and adding new sections and made the book his own.

The book is told in an impressionistic, angular style. The chapters are short. Each chapter focuses on a single event which it describes in detail. Within each chapter, the mood shifts frequently, with snatches of conversation interspersed with narrative. The individual chapters are replete with descriptions of places, scenes and characters, but the overall impact is disjointed. There is no continuity in the plot with Dos Passos writing instead a series of episodes. Still, the book offers a strong portrayal of the brutality of the war, the use of gas, the senseless and endless killing and the long periods of boredom among the soldiers in the field and the medical staff. Some of the scenes are set in Paris and include a degree of sexual frankness unusual in novels of the time. In a late chapter, Dos Passos presents an extended conversation among French and American soldiers. The soldiers explore the different ways each understands the conflict and how they would hope to resolve governments to avoid another outbreak of war in the future. Thus one man argues in favor of governments based upon a universal religion, while others argue in favor of communism and economic redistribution or of anarchy. Although interesting in itself, the discussion becomes didactic and slows the pace of the book. For all its brevity, the book becomes a little tedious.

Dos Passos changed his way of thinking several times in his life. In 1945, during WW II, Dos Passos wrote a Preface for his first book when it was published in a new edition under the title "First Encounter". Much of what he said remains insightful. Dos Passos described himself as a "bookish young man of twenty-two who had emerged half-baked from Harvard College and was continuing his education driving an ambulance behind the front in France." Dos Passos argues that the shock of the first World War was greater than the second in that, in 1914, young people were idealistic and hopeful of a good future while the second world war originated during a time of conflict and economic depression. Thus, there was less grounds for disillusion. Dos Passos offers his own conclusions on the lessons that might be learned from the wars.

"Perhaps the disillusionments of the last quarter of a century have taught us that there are no short cuts to a decent ordering of human affairs, that the climb back up out of the pit of savagery to a society of even approximate justice and freedom must necessarily be hard and slow. We can only manage one small step at a time. The quality of the means we use will always determine the ends we reach."

Dos Passos would write far better books, but this first novel is still worth knowing. It is readily accessible and is included in a Library of America volume consisting of three novels written between 1920 and 1925: "Three Soldiers" and "Manhattan Transfer" together with this book.

Robin Friedman

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't heard of John Dos Passos until I started reading about expatriate writers in 1920s Paris. Like Ernest Hemingway, Dos Passos served as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Whereas Hemingway’s experiences during the war helped develop his macho persona, Dos Passos’ exposure to the brutality of war politicised him. In the late 1920s he went to Russia to study socialism and in 1935 was involved with the US Communist Party-sponsored First Americans Writers Congress.

However, Dos Passos became disenchanted with communism during the Spanish Civil War after Soviet agents killed his friend and translator José Robles Pazos. At that time, Dos Passos was in Spain with Ernest Hemingway supporting the Republican cause, which Robles Pazos also supported. Dos Passos and Hemingway had been close friends, but when Hemingway condoned the killing of Robles Pazos as “necessary in time of war”, it led to a permanent rift in their relationship. The incident also commenced Dos Passos’ gradual move towards political conservatism.

This was Dos Passos’ first novel, published in 1920. Clearly based on Dos Passos’ wartime experiences, it follows two young American volunteer ambulance drivers in the battlefields of France. It lacks a linear narrative and instead consists of a number of loosely connected sketches describing different aspects of the experience of war, from the horror of the trenches to the quiet beauty of the countryside to the desperate dissipation of soldiers on leave in Paris. It includes a discussion of philosophy, politics, religion and provides insight into the thoughts and attitudes of a generation forever changed by war.

Dos Passos’ prose moved me to tears on a number of occasions and affected me more deeply than did A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's novel based on his wartime experiences on the Italian front. The audiobook edition I listened to was very well narrated by Jeff Woodman, who did an excellent job with the various accents required by the narrative. While this short novel may be a minor work in the history of 20th century literature, it’s nevertheless effective in conveying the horror of war. It’s also a must-read for anyone with an interest in the literature of the Lost Generation.

[Come Musica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Questo è il primo libro di John Dos Passos che leggo.
Sono stata subito affascinata dalla prosa poetica, dall'abilità del narratore di farti immaginare i vari luoghi.
Il romanzo è ambientato durante la Grande Guerra del 1914-1918, l'ultima guerra delle trincee, dei fronti. Da una parte i luoghi dei combattimenti e a pochi chilometri di distanza la vita normale: e nei momenti di tregua, forte era nei soldati il desiderio di tornare alla normalità della vita quotidiana, per poi scoprire che non era più come la ricordavano, che la guerra li aveva trasformati, diventando altro da ciò che erano, prima di arruolarsi.

"Howe guardava i boschi come un tavolo da gioco sul quale, tiro dopo tiro, rotolavano i dadi casuali della morte.
[.]
Come dadi gettati su un tavolo, granate irrompevano nel rifugio, ora da una parte ora dall'altra."

Un libro di denuncia in cui Dos Passos condanna il capitalismo, la religione e infine la guerra:
"Come relitti in un sogno in dissoluzione
brillano gli imperi e le religioni."

La sua analisi non è valida anche oggi? Quali progressi ha fatto l'uomo in questi cento anni dalla Grande Guerra? Ha smesso forse di generare morte?
"Tutto quello che abbiamo è la sempiterna guerra tra classi: quelli che sfruttano e quelli che sono sfruttati. I furbi, la gente senza scrupoli, controllano le persone sensibili e gentili. Questa guerra che ha distrutto il nostro piccolo mondo europeo, in cui l'ordine aveva così tanto dolorosamente preso il posto del caos, mi sembra semplicemente una gigantesca battaglia combattuta per il saccheggio del mondo da parte dei pirati che sono cresciuti e diventati grassi fino a scoppiare sfruttando la fatica del proprio popolo, il lavoro di milioni in Africa, in India, in America, i quali sono caduti direttamente o indirettamente sotto il giogo dell'avidità folle delle razze bianche."

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a semi-autobiographical novella. The American author is writing of his own experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver in France during the First World War in 1917. The writing is disjointed, a scathing commentary of war. It covers disparate events; there is little continuity to the story. Each short chapter depicts different scenes of war, the trip over the Atlantic, days in Paris and "the French girls", a didactic discussion one night among Frenchmen and Americans - an anarchist, a talkative socialist, another with deep religious conviction. There are numerous scenes of the French land and towns, somewhat colorfully depicted, with French slate tiles, mansard roofs, abbeys and colorful foulards. Clearly the author wanted to demonstrate a thorough knowledge with a palette of numerous pigments, the gas and mud eerily painted in pigments of green, gray and mustard.

I preferred The Backwash Of War by Ellen Newbold La Motte.

The audiobook's narration narration by Jeff Woodman, mixing both American and French accents, was quite well done.

[Leggendolibri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Questo libro è arrivato per caso, avevo letto un articolo sul The New Yorker su Dos Passos in cui si diceva che per lungo tempo era stato un autore "più rispettato che letto" e mi sono detta che volevo leggere questo scrittore, colui che per primo era riuscito a narrare l'epopea negativa degli anni che vanno dai primi del '900 in poi americani. Sottolineava che Dos Passos aveva fatto del suo narrare del mondo visto dalla parte del popolo il suo punto di forza che unito con la sua scrittura pulita rendeva veramente in maniera lucida cosa fosse effettivamente stata la disgregazione sociale che aveva creato questa grande parabola negativa. Poi mi è arrivata una segnalazione per una proposta di lettura e fra questi c'era un libro che nulla aveva a che fare con la saga di cui sopra, la trilogia di romanzi pubblicati con il titolo U.S.A in Italia, ma il primo romanzo di esordio di Dos Passos. L'ho richiesto, aperto svogliatamente e via via, sono andata con Martin "alla guerra", ho sentito le granate esplodere, i velivoli sorvolare alla ricerca di un obiettivo, le bombe uccidere e distruggere. Sono stata in Francia con gli americani, ho attraversato paesi di gente che mi vedeva andare alla guerra mentre nascondeva il cibo per paura di possibili carestie, ho brindato con i soldati e convenuto che, l'esercizio della guerra, è una cosa idiota e sperato di far ritorno presto a casa.
E mi sono innamorata del modo di scrivere di Dos Passos, del suo modo di guardare al mondo e alle persone e non vedo l'ora di leggere altro. Peccato lasciarselo sfuggire...

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those anti-war classics that emerged from the Great War, with boys marching off singing patriotic songs about whipping the Huns, and discovering war as it was to be fought in the 20th century: trenches, machine guns, grenades, endless shelling, poison gas.

It was probably very powerful in its day. It still is a powerful and harrowing description of war, but the narrative is a sadly familiar one. If you want to read another story about how horrible war is, this is another story about how horrible war is.

One Man's Initiation has the anti-war message of All Quiet on the Western Front and the starry-eyed socialist idealism of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Ending with a bunch of soldiers slinging philosophy and revolution in an atmosphere of alcohol and mortar shells, you can see how anything that might shake up the present world order must have appealed to them under the circumstances. Unfortunately, we also know how it turned out.

As a story, it's average, half-fiction, half autobiographical soapbox. I listened to it because it was an Audible freebie. Not a complete waste of time, but I find Upton Sinclair a much more compelling writer in this space than John Dos Passos.

[Bear · Rating 2 out of 5]

When meandering through this novella, I found myself wondering if it was worth reading. And meandering is likely the best word to be using since the novella is broken down into smaller segments / scenes. The first half was slow and kind of dull, but well written to the extent that small contained scenes can be. By the halfway point, and slightly beyond, I found myself still questioning the merit of the novel. Then boom – the philosophical discussion on war (or rather anti-war) hits. And it’s both deep and heavy handed to the point where it might be overboard. And that makes this interesting from the view of John Dos Passos’s stance on war, but at the same time is a little obnoxious with how hard he hits his point when he gets there. All in all – it’s a decent novella – but quite unbalanced.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

One thing I noticed while reading John Dos Passos's "One Man's Initiation: 1917" is how much I know about World War 2. And how much I know about Vietnam. Even about the Korean War.

All I know about World War I has come from fiction wherein it's treated like a character, like a woman who is to be pursued, or from whose cruel rejection you must recover. In "The Beautiful and The Damned," F. Scott Fitzgerald's doppelganger, Anthony Patch, is disappointed when he misses out on going to the front to see action. In Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," Jake Barnes is impotent from a World War I injury.

I know there are some wonderful novels set during World War I. Out of the thousands of books I've read, I haven't picked one up. I don't know why.

Maybe because it's so far distant. My grandparents were barely born when The Armistice ended the War, or when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, thus paving the way for a little WW1 Corporal named Adolf Hitler to take-over half of Europe, and scare the scheisse out of the other half.

My grandfather served in World War 2; my father and uncles served during Vietnam; my cousin is Skype-ing with his family from Afghanistan till he can leave that hell-hole.

My grandfather never said a word about World War 2. I saw him cry at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, but he never said a word.

I think what matters is that my family connects me to that time--somebody I know and love was there.

World War I was horrible. It was muddy and cold and wet, and every time you turned around, you were being shelled or gassed. Allied troops had roughly a 50% chance of going missing, being injured, or being killed. The odds were worse for the Germans.

John Dos Passos's "One Man's Initiation: 1917" gives a window into that world, that horrible war.

Dos Passos volunteered as an ambulance driver, and served in France during the war. His protagonist (and future ambulance driver)--Martin Howe--sails from New York the happiest he's ever been. His past is behind him, and his future is yet to be written.

His future is a hell of a lot less-glamorous than he might have envisioned.

There are battle scenes, of course, as well as moments of wartime camaraderie (or gallows humor, whichever you prefer).

"One Man's Initiation: 1917" is a short book--128 or so pages--but it gives a rich sampling of what World War I was like, and how it can pop the idealism right the hell out of you. It's divided into chapters, which are divided into short segments of a page or two, sometimes more, sometimes less. This truly gives the feeling of a journal: one day, there are no injured to haul, so you lie in the sun all day. The next day, you're being gassed, having to clear roads as you go, it's black and pouring and muddy, and you wonder where that sunshine went.

Toward the end, Martin and some friends are discussing politics. Different characters espouse for Communism, Anarchy, The Church, et. al. In the end, none of them can help. War is more powerful.

The image that sticks with me is when Martin is walking through a beautiful, ancient French forest, simply trying to enjoy the morning air and pristine surroundings. But it wasn't pristine. Explosions had left ancient trees splintered and broken. Spent brass artillery shells littered the forest floor, and there were shards of metal, discarded gas-masks, and small scraps of uniform fabric mixed in with the undergrowth.

This should have been the quietest, most virginal place on earth. Instead, it's the Grim Reaper's junkyard. War can destroy anything, no matter how stalwart, and there isn't even one acre of beauty we humans can't find a way to fuck-up.

Highly Recommended

("One Man's Initiation: 1917" is available free at numerous online sites)

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not as well known today as Hemingway or Steinbeck, John Dos Passos was one of the most distinguished American writers of the early decades of the 20th century. His U.S.A. trilogy, published between 1930 and 1936, is considered a landmark of American literature.

Dos Passos was a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, serving in France and Italy. A surprising number of significant writers volunteered for this, including Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, Somerset Maugham, Henry Beston, and Robert Service. Beston wrote about his experiences in A Volunteer Poilu, which is worth reading today for the talent it shows that he would later put to use in The Outermost House, one of the great works of nature writing in English.

In One Man’s Initiation: 1917 Dos Passos, too, displays a firm command of the style that would bring him acclaim in his later works. It is a short book of only about 100 pages, and is lightly fictionalized, using pseudonyms for its characters, but the people in it feel real, as do the events he describes.

Like so many young men heading off to war for the first time, he was ecstatic at the chance to leave the humdrum world for the excitement of battle. The classic example of this sentiment is Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnet Peace, which begins with the lines:

Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary;

Brooke would die a few months later of sepsis on the way to Gallipoli.

In One Man’s Initiation Dos Passos’s avatar reflects a similar enthusiasm as he boards a ship bound for Europe, “Like the red flame of the sunset setting fire to opal sea and sky, the old exaltation, the old flame that would consume to ashes all the lies in the world, the trumpet-blast under which the walls of Jericho would fall down, stirs and broods in the womb of his grey lassitude.” (p. 6)

The book progresses, through scenes of increasing madness and horror, until at the end there is a long conversation with three French soldiers where they conclude that only communism can end the lies and deceits that lead nations to war. It is ironic that Dos Passos himself later became disillusioned with socialism in all its forms after observing the Spanish Civil War, and by the end of his life had become politically reactionary, campaigning for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.

Other than this gradual process of illumination, the initiation of the title, the book has no plot. There are scenes in the aid stations, in the ambulances, behind the lines, and on leave in Paris, but their only connection is how they gradually change the protagonist’s perception of war and society.

One Man’s Initiation is worthwhile for anyone interested in World War I, and anyone interested in what war does to soldiers. As I read it I kept thinking of the closing lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

World War I is famous for its memoirs describing life in the trenches, many of which have become classics. Dos Passos’s writing is memorable, combining vivid imagery with sound and smell to evoke the situations his characters find themselves in. I kept re-reading certain passages that I found memorable, and include some of them below.

- “think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages that must have been necessary to make this [war] possible! Think of this new particular vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out of the press and the pulpit.” (p. 18)

- The other day he had been there, and had clambered up the oily clay where the boyau had caved in, and from the level of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at the tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil the direction of the German outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky clay were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, men with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and boredom as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the trenches and the shell-holes. (p. 25)

- He walked a long while with his hat off, breathing deep of the sharp night air [of Paris]. The streets were black and silent. Intemperate desires prowled like cats in the darkness. (p. 49)

- The road was filled suddenly with the tramp and splash of troops marching, their wet helmets and their rifles gleaming in the coppery sunset. Even through the clean rain came the smell of filth and sweat and misery of troops marching. The faces under the helmets were strained and colourless and cadaverous from the weight of the equipment on their necks and their backs and their thighs. The faces drooped under the helmets, tilted to one side or the other, distorted and wooden like the face of the figure that dangled from the cross. (p. 58)

- The road became muddier as they went deeper into the woods, and, turning into a cross-road, the [ambulance] began slithering, skidding a little at the turns, through thick soupy mud. On either side the woods became broken and jagged, stumps and split boughs littering the ground, trees snapped off halfway up. In the air there was a scent of newly-split timber and of turned up woodland earth, and among them a sweetish rough smell. (p. 60)

- Dawn in a wilderness of jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against the yellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangle of wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Long rutted roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wrecked woods in the yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled masses of telephone wires. Torn camouflage fluttering greenish-grey against the ardent yellow sky, and twining among the fantastic black leafless trees, the greenish wraiths of gas. Along the roads camions overturned, dead mules tangled in their traces beside shattered caissons, huddled bodies in long blue coasts half buried in the mud of the ditches. (p. 68)

- And all those men beyond the hill and the wood, what were they thinking? But how could they think? The lies they were drunk on would keep them eternally from thinking. They had never had any chance to think until they were hurried into the jaws of it, where was no room but for laughter and misery and the smell of blood. (p. 86)

- The woods about him were a vast rubbish-heap; the jagged, splintered boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brass shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And this was what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. For this had generations worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in fields and workshops, toiling, screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds and muscles, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of their intelligence. For this! (p. 86-87)

- “And in America – they like the war?”
“They don’t know what it is. They are like children. They believe everything they are told, you see; they have had no experience in international affairs, like you Europeans. To me our entrance into the war is a tragedy.”
“It’s sort of goin’ back on our only excuse for existing,” put in Randolph. “In exchange for all the quiet and the civilisation and the beauty of ordered lives that Europeans gave up in going to the new world we gave them the opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedom from the past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europe to-day with its infection of hate and greed and murder.”
“America has turned traitor to all that, you see; that’s the way we look at it. Now we’re a military nation, an organised pirate like France and England and Germany.” (p. 95)

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novella about an American ambulance driver in World War I was a good remembrance for Veterans Day (although I didn't get to it until later). As with most WWI stories, it is gritty and heartwrenching. I find that is even more affecting in audiobook form than in the written word, so it took me a while to make it through this despite its short length.

As for the narration, it was neither great nor terrible. A tad on the slow side but not so much as to make me use the 1.5x setting...

August 2017 reread: No change from the above...

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was planning on beginning my reading for War Through the Generation's WWI reading challenge with Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, but then came across his novel One Man's Initiation--1917 on Project Gutenberg. I started reading it and couldn't stop. As a rule, I'm not into slamming one writer or genre for the sake of another, but One Man's Initiation--1917 makes Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms look like chick lit. (I like Hemingway but he was snarky about Willa Cather's Pulitzer winning WWI novel One of Ours, so I owe him one.)

Like Hemingway, Dos Passos was a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. One Man's Initiation--1917 was first published in London in 1920. It was republished in 1945 as First Encounter.

One Man's Initiation--1917 is the story of Marin Howe, an American volunteer ambulance driver in France during the Great War. It is more a collection of short vignettes and images rather than a neatly woven narrative and has been called an impressionistic novel. It is very short, more of a novella, but powerful precisely because of it's form and style.

It begins on a dock next to a ship that's getting ready to leave for France. It's a party scene: a band plays a "tinselly Hawaiian tune," people are dancing between the baggage, there's a scattering of uniforms, young men stand around in groups laughing, "talking in voices pitched shrill with excitement," women wear gay dresses, colored hats, and carry white handkerchiefs.

The party continues during the crossing and in Paris. One group of American guys stay drunk and raise hell to the point that they're sent back to the States. There's also much talk about French women and how there are houses in France where, it's implied, a man can buy sex. One guy says, "Gee, these Frenchwomen are immoral. They say the war does it." To which another guy replies, "Can't be that. Nothing is more purifying than sacrifice." Martin Howe, on the other hand, gets his first close-up look at the price of war as he sits in an outdoor cafe:

"As he stared in front of him two figures crossed his field of vision. A woman swathed in black crepe veils was helping a soldier to a seat at the next table. He found himself staring in a face, a face that still had some of the chubbiness of boyhood. Between the pale-brown frightened eyes, where the nose should have been, was a triangular black patch that ended in some mechanical contrivance with shiny little black metal rods that took the place of the jaw. He could not take his eyes from the soldier's eyes, that were like those of a hurt animal, full of meek dismay."

Martin is soon at the front. He waits around for casualty calls, endures bombings, tries to avoid shrapnel, picks up the blown apart bodies of young men, and navigates roads jammed with convoys, troops, and dying horses and mules. The stupidity of the war, particularly stagnant trench warfare, is soon made evident. The trenches had long been established and the war had become somewhat routine, yet also still random. Artillery is lobbed back and forth like shuttlecocks, men endure direct gas attacks, initiate or repel attacks, and live in the mud to the point their legs and feet look unnaturally large from layers of dried-on mud. There's a persistent smell of almonds, which is actually hydrogen cyanide, the primary chemical weapon used by the French. It's a mutual suicide and men know that the men on the other side are just guys like themselves. As one man sarcastically says, five hundred meters from here they're drinking beer and saying "Hoch der Kaiser" about as much as we're saying "Vive la Rebublique." Martin explodes, saying, "God, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? Nobody's fighting about anything . . . . God, it's so hideously stupid!" To which a doctor replies, "Life is stupid."

There are many moving and/or outrageous scenes in the book, and the ones that stood out to me depict mindless hate with a sense of revulsion. One evening the Americans meet up with an Englishman on his first leave from the front in eighteen months. Without preamble he tells them a story, of when he, too, was "new at the game" and before he left for the front: "I saw a man tuck a hand-grenade under the pillow of a poor devil of a German prisoner. The prisoner said, "Thank you." The grenade blew him to hell!" Later in the evening at the theater the Englishman picks up his story:

"It was like this . . . the Hun was a nice little chap, couldn't 'a' been more than eighteen; had a shoulder broken and he thought that my pal was fixing the pillow. He said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent....Mind you, he said 'Thank you'; that's what hurt. And the man laughed. God damn him., he laughed when the poor devil said 'Thank you.' And the grenade blew him to hell."

Later in the evening the Englishman murmurs about that 'Thank you' and one of the women they're with asks what he's saying. Martin says, "He's telling about a German atrocity." She replies, "Oh, the dirty Germans! What things they've done!" the woman answered mechanically." The woman's automatic, unthinking response and the fact that after eighteen months of trench fighting what the Englishman can't get out of his head is this senseless murder of a young man in a hospital bed seem to be saying that it isn't just the actual war fighting that's the problem, per se, but people's inability to think for themselves and their hate.

At one point Martin says, "It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can't be. It even disgusts the perfectly stupid dam-fool people, like Higgins, who believes that the Bible was written in God's own hand writing and that the newspapers tell the truth."

Toward the end of the novel there's a lengthy scene of dialog that breaks the more impressionistic style. It's a night of conversation between two Americans and some Frenchmen. The conversation opens with one of the Frenchmen asking what Americans think of the war. "I doubt if we Americans do think," says Martin. To which one of the Frenchmen replies, "I hope you won't be offended if I agree with you in saying that Americans never think. I've been in Texas, you see." Later Martin explains that Americans are like children, "They believe everything they are told...they have no experience in international affairs...To me our entrance in the war is a tragedy."

The conversation touches not only on America's isolationism, but how "dark forces" (these seem to be big business, politics, the church) buy the press and how The Press enslaves our minds. Lies have been mentioned throughout the novel, the lies that have been told for generations to get men to fight in wars. The tools these "dark forces" use are patriotism, nationalism, The Press, and "conventional ties"--parental inculcation of their children to "worship success and respectabilities." This scene is a night of drinking, the kind of night when friends of relatively like minds sit around philosophizing and solving all the world's problems. They decide that "economic war" must end, and that people must learn to help each other rather than believe the lies, especially the lies of the rich who control the poor. In the end they toast to Revolution, Anarchy, and the Socialist State.

Most of the men engaged in that conversation are soon battlefield casualties. I was left with a feeling that nothing matters, nothing can change. It's all talk and those doing any talking against the status quo are simply more cannon fodder for those "dark forces."

Nothing about the above conversation or this book is remotely pro-war or pro-American or pro-any nationality, religion, or ideal. But it is much more than an anti-war novel. It seems to condemn the entire modern world--from those who created the modern war machine and the political system that drives it, to those who support it by being unthinking sheep.

But--and I'm grasping at straws here--it seems that there might be hope in 1) helping each other and 2) giving young men something to do so that they won't want to escape the dullness of life for the adventure of war.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

People here in the US might not know it to hear it- there was practically no mention in 2014- but 100 years ago an especially bloody World War was sweeping Europe and Asia. (Expect -lots- of coverage of the 100th anniversary of our entry into the war, though, in 2017. Us? Parochial?)
Anyhow, this brief and interesting novel - autobiographical? - charts the progress of Martin Howe from the time he leaves the USA by boat to fight in France, to near the end of 1917 or so- an eventful year for a new soldier.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a four-star book marred by a two-star ending. A series of jagged, abrupt vignettes with great imagery evokes the experiences of an American ambulance driver in the Great War, but it's rather spoiled by a heavy-handed discussion of a new world order by the various soldiers and noncombatants at the end. Still worthwhile for its prose style and recommended as a notable contemporary account.

[Jay Hinman · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first, uh, initiation to Dos Passos is this 1920 novella, his first book concerning a young American man’s entrée into World War I. Knowing that Dos Passos himself saw some action in The Great War, it stands to reason that much of this is drawn from the firsthand. His title character is Martin Howe, a young man who leaves the USA on a steamer for France with other scared conscripts and aggro soldiers, full of wonder and chagrin about what’s he’s about to experience. Howe concludes his stay overseas as a full-stop socialist, bemused and upset by the “lies” and betrayals on all sides, and full of undying love for the quote-unquote brotherhood of man. It may be a little too “of its time” as a socialist siren call; and as I understand it, even Dos Passos later worked tirelessly for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon before he shuffled off our mortal coil. Utopian dreams have a way of dying rather hard, don’t they?

There is one particularly wonderful and moving chapter in the book that takes place in Paris while Martin and his southern buddy Tom Randolph are on leave. They get into it with some prostitutes, have wonderfully lavish white-tablecloth meals, befriend a sad English drunk, and essentially find their humanity and even some measure of dignity in an all-too-short break from slaughter and pointlessness. The book repeatedly allows the men doing the fighting to brand themselves as “slaves” and “dupes”. There’s a good soliloquy toward the end about the United States once having being a special refuge for immigrants from Europe's wars, but no longer, as America, by involving itself in this most destructive of European wars, has become just as morally rotten as the feuding states of Europe. Tom and Martin and their new Allied pals bullshit around the campfire about anarchy, the nature of peace, the working masses and other sundry intellectual topics that may or may not have been actually discussed in real life by the grunts on the ground.

That gets to one small problem I had with “One Man’s Initiation” – its believability. Dos Passos’ magnificent way with words is both a blessing and curse, because some of the things that come out of the mouths of these war-fightin’ babes in arms are more than a little florid and overboard. The sky, the sun, the grass, the quality of the light – nothing is too mundane to describe at PhD-level intellectual detail for these battle-weary gentlemen. Yes, it becomes obvious in no time at all that Mr. Dos Passos is/was no fan of the war, and that’s surely fine – it certainly does seem to have been rather pointless, to say the least. I’d like to go a little deeper into his catalog and see what he did after this one, as my interest was sufficiently piqued by this somewhat flawed first leap into writing.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a reprint of the author's first novel, about some of the experiences of a volunteer American ambulance driver in the first world war, published in 1945, at the end of the second world war. For me, the most interesting part of it was Dos Passos' introduction, comparing the man he was in 1920 to what he had become in 1945, a move from that idealistic socialism best represented by his magisterial USA trilogy and reflected somewhat in one of the closing scenes of this short novel.

Dos Passos' second novel, Three Soldiers, also concerns world war one. Ignorant of their order, I read them out of sequence.

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I prefer All Quiet on the Western Front.

[Jonathan Harbour · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent narration of a mediocre war memoir disguised as a novella. Quite slow and boring but interesting if you're a WWI historian.

[Ross Barlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looking good.
LoA is fantastic

[John Shurina · Rating 1 out of 5]

You might like this if you enjoy Hemmingway and his novels about stumbling all over Europe from one bar to the next. There's some nice imagery (though never anything amazing) and even some interesting events, but there's basically no plot. Half the events could be shuffled in order with no loss of power or relevance.

Of course, an aimless novel can be enjoyable in good company, but the real damning feature here are the characters. They're all so blank and interchangeable. There were times the dialogue format made it so I couldn't tell if the protagonist was talking or his friend, which bothered me until I realized that it doesn't matter who says what, or what happens to them for that matter. Found myself wishing the protagonist would be shelled just to make the book interesting. And then we're supposed to feel bad when people we've only known for two scenes die.

And sure, maybe the point is that the book gets as boring as soldier life, whoop-de-doo. I've heard this novel was a flop, and now I see why. I can only hope Dos Passos' talent grew with later fame.

[AB · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I dont have a bad time... But the people in Boccaccio managed to enjoy themselves while the plague was at Florence. That seems to me the only way to take the war."
"We have no villa to take refuge in, though" said Dubois" and we have forgotten all our amusing stories"

A startling beautiful little novella. Following the experiences of Martin Howe, a volunteer ambulance driver, the novella flows along in a series of short vignettes. Many of these vignettes take on a surrealist or absurdist mood. Scenes of great tragedy are bitterly juxtaposed with nonchalance or even the beauty of the French countryside. They're well written pieces. All the vignettes lead to a lengthy Socratic style dialogue in which Dos Passos attempts to answer the What comes after the war? . Although a little bit overbearing, the dialogue ends as bitterly as many other moments in the book; almost all of the participants die. My first Dos Passos and it was really enjoyable for what is was. A good little book on ww1

[Timothy Roessler · Rating 4 out of 5]

World War I produced a lot of great writing, and this belongs in the best class. It's an episodic tale about an American volunteer with a French ambulance unit (yeah, pretty much like Hemingway in Italy). We follow Martin Howe from his voyage to France, through a series of actions, a brief leave in Paris and back once more to the trenches and the non-stop abbatoir. This sequence of vivid scenes bring the horrors of war home. This structure, disjointed, fragmented, poetic, must have reflected the experience of the soldiers at the front. The prose is beautifully rhythmic, powerfully descriptive and effective in every way. It's more of a novella rather than a novel, running about 120 pages long. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in the experiences of men at war.

[Budge Burgess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dos Passos' first published novel (1920), and the proverbial curate's egg. There's that paradoxical sense of excitement, a young man barely out of adolescence, discovering new freedoms and an assertive new identity in a foreign country, a newcomer to a seemingly endless war. The young men can drink, laugh, lose their virginities ... be ripped apart by shrapnel or choke on gas. This, of course, is long before the world discovered rock 'n' roll and youth culture ... but you sense that dragooning millions of young men into two World Wars helped give youth an identity ... and something to rebel against.
There are some superb passages - much of the book describes the landscape of war, there's no frontline fighting. Dos Passos went to France as a volunteer ambulanceman in 1917, and this is a story about ambulance drivers. They're not engaged in fighting but in trying to get the wounded to safety and, as such, they are figures in a blighted landscape, living under a canopy of clouds, stars and shells, living in an atmosphere of flying shrapnel and encroaching gas clouds. They endure terror, they endure boredom ... but there's scope for fun.
When on leave or withdrawn from the front or simply blessed with quiet moments, they notice the landscape - trees, birds, insects ... they luxuriate in the absence of shellfire. And when in the city, it's a landscape of exotic food, available alcohol, and exotic and available women ... a landscape of commerce and an opportunity to luxuriate in wine, women and wrongs.
Dos Passos was a man who drifted through the full political perspective. He'd follow up "1917" with his anti-war novel "Three Soldiers", he'd be active in Left-wing politics for several years. In 1927 he campaigned in the USA on behalf of the Anarchists Sacco and Venzetti. By 1964 he was campaigning in the States on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who was, to put it mildly, very hawkish about stepping up American involvement in the Vietnam War. Dos Passos travelled quite a distance.
In "1917", he's describing the war as "a vast cancer fed by lies and self-seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting." He'll complain that it was triggered and sustained by the "vintage of lies ... pumped out of the press and pulpit", pumped out for centuries, centuries in which working men and women (and children) had laboured to produce the wealth and technology that enabled princes, politicians, generals and magnates to fight war on such an industrial scale.
His vision is exemplary and would have been appluaded by millions throughout Europe and across the world, yet, when he comes to trying to describe French soldiers complaining about the war and voicing their hopes that it will trigger universal revolution, allied to his own hope that the shared experiences of French, German, English, Australian and American troops will incite the workers of the world to seize power ... the narrative becomes boring and simplistic. He can't get a compelling political dynamic into the political narrative.
He's not satisfied with making a statement about what 'The Great War' was like for the soldiers and ordinary people of Europe, fails to recognise that his descriptive narrative does enough to horrify the reader and get her / him to question what it's all about. There's passion in his revulsion with war, but it is clumsily handled.
And it contrasts with his description of landscape. I doubt if many good writers sit down and ask themselves how they can develop the imagery they use, but I'll bet there are literature teachers who invite their students to comment on Dos Passos and his use of the imagery of churches. He describes several such buildings either damaged, ruined or even actually under fire. He can handle the assault on the sacred better than he can handle the assault on humanity and the politics of war.
He comes closest simply describing the trivia - if you'll forgive my use of the word. Both Dos Passos and Remarque (in "All Quiet on the Western Front") describe going through the pockets of a dead 'enemy' soldier to find his identity ... a paybook with a name, a picture of wife and children, the discovery that the man had a life before being coerced into uniform, that he had a home which wasn't underground and repeatedly shelled ... that the dead enemy was once an ordinary living man, no different from the soldier who killed him.
A curate's egg - some superb passages, but clumsy and episodic. A book to be read critically.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But after the war we'll be free to do as we please,"

"We'll never forget [it]."

The very beginning of the novel, on the transport ship out of NYC, Dos Passos introduces a symmetrical repetition on images and words. At first it seems as if he is doing it to capture the rolling, lolling motion of the ship over the waves, but later, when the story is much broader in scope than just a mere ocean, this continual repetition and reworking of the same images captures that sameness of civilization and all its problems and terrors that repeat generation after generation.

At one point Martin looks out over the men and thinks about how all the previous generations of mankind had been struggling for this terrible moment, as if we knew it was going to happen all along. Fate and time play an important role in the story and Dos Passos writes beautifully to connect the themes of timelessness and the passage of time. In one passage as Martin recites Blake's poem, Ah Sunflower, to see how far he can get before another shell flies overhead, we get the double image of the endless procession of sunflowers tilting with the sun through the day with the image of the men in darkness listening to the shells fly overhead, their full attention, like sunflowers, on the possibility of death coming from above.

He also looks at Europe as now a corrupted, filthy version of its former self - streets filled with whores, stage lights too bright, and unimpressive orchestras - a far cry from that beautiful culture of 1000 years. Dos Passos describes these intemperate desires that prowl around like cats in the night and only the foggy shadow of Notre Dame cathedral looming into view and then disappearing again as if it's an image of fading morality and fading power, too.

The images of the inhumane are on every page, first with the description of the young man with no nose and mechanical pieces for a jaw. Martin lingers on the sight of the the man with no nose and Dos Passos links this to the rest of the novel by continually describing what things smelled like which marks the worst of the dangers, the poison gas. He also uses the imagery of ripe and overripe fruit and vineyards to subtly remind you of the terrible devastation to a human body hit by a shell.

All this makes for compelling and unforgettable imagery and Dos Passos comes very close to creating a real masterpiece. However, he falls short. He falls short in his main character, Martin who though not surprisingly is idealistic (as many young people) I never could actually believe as a character. Martin never seemed to be truly effected by the war, he doesn't really seemed changed by anything. The title would suggest that he is 'Initiated' at some point, but other than being introduced to the terrible sight of war, I never could really believe a lot of what he had to say or even his own thoughts - they seemed to be too much of a writer trying to "SAY SOMETHING IMPORTANT" but not stay true to a real character.

Hemingway, who, like Martin, drove an ambulance during the war, in his novel 'The Sun Also Rises' gives us all we need to know about how the war changed his main character, Jake, with an injury that is only ever implied. Dos Passos never does anything with Martin except move him around and have him look at the war. I felt very disconnected at times to the tragedy going on on every page and really wanted Martin to act.

However, in the end, all we get is a very long sequence where the young men sit around and argue about a socialist revolution after the war. We get a lot of moralizing from Dos Passos (though his characters) about the evils of the rich and the glory of the working class. And while I don't necessarily disagree with him, it was boring and felt out of place. This was the section of the book where he should actually have given something for Martin to do, not just sit there and listen some more.

Yet as a first novel (novella) there are clear signs of the genius of the writer Dos Passos would soon become. This is a very strong work stylistically and he really put you into the theater of the war, if, unfortunately, not so much emotionally.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

One Man’s Initiation 1917 by John Dos Passos is not a long book, but it tells a story of consequence. Martin and Tom, and indeed others are fresh-faced, perhaps naïve young men from the United States. Initially, they are eager to participate, chomping at the bit, no less, to travel to Europe to fight the good fight. The conflict in question is the First World War. By 1917, the Europeans involved had already had three years of fighting. The stalemate was already stale. They needed some new blood.

Attached to the medical services, the young Americans get their taste of France. The conflict is a dirty affair. Early on, they discover their medical facility has been deliberately constructed over an ammunition store. Perhaps it was the other way around.

They experience the highlife of Paris and some of its low life as well. They learn to drink champagne out of mess tins. They see a lot of blood and pain, many spilled guts and emptied bowels. They seem continually to be dodging red hot shrapnel.

They hardly ever reflect. They seem to have neither a past (which seems a long way behind these newly educated selves) nor a future (which seems impossible to behold). The present is eternal. Its pressures are vast, and its demands are seemingly endless.

Stylistically, the concentration on the present works perfectly. John Dos Passos clearly wanted an immediate, film-like impression of the experience of conflict and One Man’s Initiation - 1917 provides exactly that.

Apparently, the book was based on the author’s personal experience as a medical assistant in the war. It was written in 1920, when the author had already had time to reflect. The immediacy of the text is therefore a product of his skill. It is surprisingly light look at the conflict, light in the sense that it does not delve into the sequence of events or the politics. What it does do, however, is record the strength of feeling that it would bring about change to ensure it would never happen again. We hear these empty words so frequently.

[Ryan Macoubrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A year after graduating from Harvard, John Dos Passos volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver along the front lines of World War I in France. During the war, he and a friend began co-writing a novel which Dos Passos would continue writing after the friend left the war -- and Dos Passos later rewrote, revised, and expanded a later section of that novel into the book which would eventually be published as ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917.

In ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917, Martin Howe is a recent college graduate who now serves as an ambulance driver along the front lines of World War I in France. The book starts with Martin boarding a ship in New York and sailing towards Europe, then landing in France and beginning his initiation into World War I. The book is mostly scenes of Martin Howe and his ambulance partner surviving through the brutal horrors of World War I: shelling and shrapnel and gas attacks.

The book is short -- being less than 100 pages long in the edition I read. I read the whole book in less than one day.

And it's written in a peculiar style, where scenes are short, flashing quickly from one to the next, sometimes feeling disjointed, but always in sequence through the war. I wondered if that was just a peculiarity of the author, being how he writes, or maybe just an artistic choice about how to tell this war story in particular -- and I never could decide on which was the right answer. I'll have to read more stuff from Dos Passos to get a better sense of his style of writing. (And, fortunately for me, I have another book of his, THREE SOLDIERS, coming up quickly on my Roaring Twenties reading list.)

But the writing itself is fine, alternating between colorful passages about the natural beauty of French landscapes and flowers and clouds (because Martin is an artistic, idealistic young man who spends a lot of time looking up and around at the world), and then describing the blood and the mud and the gas and the bombs and the trash and the dirty ugliness of the war:

" The woods all about him were a vast rubbish-heap; the jagged, splintered boles of leafless trees rose in every direction from heaps of brass shell-cases, of tin cans, of bits of uniform and equipment. The wind came in puffs laden with an odour as of dead rats in an attic. And this was what all the centuries of civilisation had struggled for. "

The book has no plot to speak of, being merely scenes of the life.

In this way, and in many others, ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917 seemed to me to be strikingly similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, also published in 1920. The parallels between the two books are noteworthy:

Both books were written by college educated (ivy league) young men, during their war service, about college educated (ivy league) young men who wander without purpose in their life. In reviewing Fitzgerald's book THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, I described the main character Amory Blaine as "a lazy, drifting character, without focus or energy. He doesn't know what he wants to do with his life, and he makes no effort to find out." That exact same thing could easily said about Martin Howe, and basically was said about him in ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917: " The future is nothing to him, the past is nothing to him. ... As through infinite mists of greyness he looks back on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leaf seems to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and unwritten on. At last things have come to pass. "

Both books have no real plot to speak of, merely showing scenes from the life.

And both books end with long, unexpected political discourses: in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, Amory Blaine hitches a ride in a car with a man who wants to talk about politics and Amory goes into a long, multi-page monologue (more than he's ever spoken in the rest of the book) in support of Socialism; and in ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917, Martin and his partner wander into a bombed out house where three other men are arguing about what to do with humanity after the war ends: one man argues for establishing a one-world government led by the Church, another man argues for the many benefits to humanity of Communism, and the other man argues for a more peaceful tribalism, among peoples and nations. In both books, this heavy-handed political commentary comes out of nowhere, right at the end of the book. It's peculiar.

While ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917 was much more nicely written than THIS SIDE OF PARADISE was written (THIS SIDE OF PARADISE being dramatically overwritten, with excessive references and excessive everything, while ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917 was much more sparse and direct, except during the purple prose passages of Martin staring at clouds and flowers), yet both books use a specific word which I had only ever seen before in one poem from Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells": the word "clangor," which means loud noise.

In the poem, Poe refers to "The clamor and the clangor of the bells." In THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, Book II, Chapter 3, "Young Irony," Fitzgerald mentions Poe by name then later writes of Amory chasing after a girl, "He wheeled and started after her, his body like ice, his nerves in a vast clangor." And in ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917, Chapter VI, Dos Passos writes about how "The brisk trot of the officer's horse is lost in the clangour." [British spelling of the word is used in the Dos Passos book.]

I've never seen anyone but Poe use that word "clangor," yet here two different authors use the same word in their books which are both strikingly similar to each other.

In my review of Fitzgerald's book THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, I noted how "Just as [Amory's] getting ready to finish at Princeton and struggle with what to do with his life, the war comes and he's drafted into service. But the war takes no real part in the book, just a few pages. Amory comes home, and the war seems to have made no real impact on his life at all."

Then, as I was reading ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917, by Dos Passos, I kept thinking about how this book focuses on just the war experience of a young man like Amory Blaine (this man called Martin Howe), showing us nothing before or after the war. I'd like to think that these are the missing pages from THIS SIDE OF PARADISE. Dos Passos wrote that part of the book which Fitzgerald forgot to write.

[That's not possible, of course, because the two books were written independently of each other by different authors at different times, and published too closely together in time for one to have been written in response to the other. But even so, I like to imagine it anyways. Deal with it.]

So, all in all, ONE MAN'S INITIATION -- 1917 was a pretty good book. But, for its lack of plot and tacked-on sad ending (which I won't spoil by discussing), I can't give it more than 3 out of 5 stars.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways this is just another WW1 novella about the horror of war. But it's unusual in that Dos Passos goes to great lengths to capture the surrounding beauty that is juxtaposed against the filth, destruction and horror of war. He captures the colors and smells of Paris and the French countryside that exist side by side with the terrible sights and smells of war. He describes the ennui and irony of war with great sensitivity. He also does a good job of revealing the intense personal relationships that are formed during wartime. The minutia of everyday life in wartime France was very interesting as well. I could tell that he had been there. His sense of irony is evidenced by the rhubarb patch the soldiers encounter in the midst of battle, the curious smell of almonds upon approaching death, and a medical aid station that is built above an ammunition dump. The final irony is that there is great concern over burying boots that are perfectly good, so they remove them from the corpses and cut them into shoelaces for those who are still alive.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortly after starting this I realized I had already listened to it previously. It is a very short book, which is why I chose it at this time. It's ok. The first half or so is decent little snippets of scenes out of World War I (which I find unfortunately should be called the Forgotten War, since it was so eclipsed in every way by WWII). These scenes are rather terrifying, particularly due to the gas weapons.
The second half or so becomes a little preachy and pushing toward an ultimate socialist utopia (which was very popular at the time) and calls for a revolution against the rich aristocracy. I think this was kind of a sky-dream at the time, especially considering now we can look back and see this has never been a successful form of government.
In the end, nearly all characters died, which is sad, but the way of war. I am already quite against war, so this book didn't move me in any particular way. I think overall, the narration was sub-par and if it was much longer I wouldn't have cared for the book.

[Ivan Ruiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hay un tipo de libros que soy incapaz de disfrutar al 100%: los episódicos, los que no siguen una trama definida, sino que se basan en fragmentos más o menos inconexos de las experiencias de un personaje determinado. Tampoco hay apenas secundarios, porque entre un capítulo y otro suelen desaparecer (en este caso sí hay un amigo más o menos recurrente) y suelen estar ahí para que el protagonista mantenga una conversación; no suelen ocurrir muchas cosas, se centran en una idea y hay muchas descripciones, demasiadas, para las pocas páginas que tienen.

Y "Iniciación de un hombre: 1917" es ese tipo de libro. Las reflexiones sobre la guerra, sobre las ganas que tenían los jóvenes de participar de algo que alterase su aburrida rutina, la crítica de los poderes fácticos que engañaban a la gente para enrolarse, lo frívolo e innecesario que es que miles de personas pierdan la vida en un conflicto que no iba con ellos, todo esto, en definitiva, es lo que hace de este libro un libro que merece la pena ser leído, pese a todos sus inconvenientes.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Narrator: Jeff Woodman, does an excellent narration.

One Man's Initiation is not a novel with a plot that builds to a conclusion. It follows the daily life of Martin Howe, a WWI ambulance driver stationed in France, almost as if it were a diary. In fact, Dos Passos did volunteer for the Ambulance Corps in WWI, so I'm guessing the book is pretty much biographical, from his own journals.

Dos Passos gives us the soldier's daily life in vignettes. And it's not all bad. There's camaradie with people he meets along the way, American and French, soldiers and villagers. Good meals in cafes and shared bottles of wine. And some live and some die.

The thread that pulls it all together is futility of war. One Man's Initiation is ultimately a powerful antiwar story. Powerful because we follow Martin Howe, from fresh-faced volunteer to muddy, disillusioned soldier, as he comes to his own conclusions about war.