Ambulance Drivers in France and Italy

THE current interest in the literature and ideas of the 1920's has on the whole focused upon the disillusionist quality of the period. The writers of the post-World War I era are now pigeonholed as jaundiced and embittered by the holocaust of trench warfare, and the disillusionist label then inevitably seeps over to encompass not only, let us Hemingway and John Dos Passos, but also the entire generation of which they were, after all, only individual members. The literary critic and the intellectual historian conventionally isolate the war as the primary source of the disillusionment, and point to such novels as Three Soldiers and The Enormous Room for documentation. World War I has been represented so often in sardonic terms its memory has become an embarrassment. Wartime slogans have been endowed with irony as though no good had ever existed in them. Obligations initially entered upon by men of sustained good will have taken on a clownish, disreputable air. of the American enterprises of World War I which has been sometimes distorted in this way, and which has been consistently overlooked as a source of cultural verification of at least equal importance with the fiction of the period, is the American Ambulance Field Service, which provided an emotional apprenticeship for talents as diverse as those of E. E. Cummings, Dos Passos, Donald Moffat, Slater Brown, Harry Crosby, Hemingway, Robert Hillyer, Julian Green, William Seabrook, and Malcolm Cowley. One might almost say, Cowley himself has concluded, in the most thoughtful memoir the group has yet received, that the ambulance corps and the French military transport were college-extension courses for a generation of writers

Geography · Political science · French Historical and Cultural Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact