Quotes from book
Company K

Name: Company K
Author: William March

Company K is a 1933 novel by William March, first serialised in parts in the New York magazine The Forum from 1930 to 1932, and published in its entirety by Smith and Haas on 19 January 1933, in New York. The book's title was taken from the Marine company that March served in during World War I. It has been regarded as one of the most significant works of literature to come out of the American World War I experience and the most reprinted of all March's work.

“If the common soldiers of each army could just get together by a river bank and talk things over calmly, no war could possibly last as long as a week.”

William March book Company K

Company K (1933)

“You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there.”

William March book Company K

Company K (1933)

“…To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible.”

William March book Company K

Company K (1933)

“I have never ceased to wonder at the thing we call human nature, with its times of beauty and its times of filthiness, or at the level of calm stupidity that lies in between the two.”

William March book Company K

Company K (1933)