Like many young men at the time of the outbreak of the First World War, John Dos Passos was driven by idealism to serve and joined the Ambulance Corps.  His experience there led to a rapid and profound disillusionment that eventually found expression in his second novel, Three Soldiers, which brought him some recognition when published in 1921.  In this tale of three soldiers, each from different geographic regions and social milieus, Dos Passos found his satirical voice and crafted a searing denunciation of the military and its shameless exploitation of naïve young men.   His soldiers endure the anxiety of long waits in sodden trenches that suddenly give way to battles that combine the timeless practice of frontal assault with the mechanized efficiency of modern weapons, airplanes, and mustard gas.

"Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it—and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality.” - H. L. Mencken, Smart Set, 69, October 1922