American Expeditionary Forces

The American Expeditionary Forces appears in the novel as a military institution shaped by rank, assignment, and loyalty to wartime policy. Its authority is most sharply felt in Richard Ellsworth Savage’s exclusion: although he wants to return to work near the front, his pacifism makes him unacceptable to the force. A service record for Paxton Hibben shows another route through the institution, listing successive commissions and assignments in France and at its headquarters.

Institutional Access and Political Loyalty

Richard Ellsworth Savage tries to continue his wartime work with the American Red Cross and return to the front. Instead, after he is sent to army intelligence, a captain condemns his pacifism and declares that the American Expeditionary Forces is no place for a slacker. The novel presents this exchange as a conflict between Savage’s stated wish to resume service and the military’s demand for political conformity. The force is not described through a full account of its organization; its power emerges in the captain’s authority to deny Savage a place in it and arrange his return to the United States.

Service and Assignment

A documentary-style record of Paxton Hibben’s military career gives the organization a more administrative presence. The entry lists his commission as a first lieutenant in the Field Artillery in November 1917, promotion to captain in May 1919, service at Camp Grant, and service in France with the 332nd Engineers. It then places him in the Finance Bureau of the Service of Supply and at General Headquarters in the Inspector General’s office of the American Expeditionary Forces. The record also gives his discharge date as August 1919 and notes a later Reserve Officers’ Corps captaincy. In contrast to Savage’s rejected request, Hibben’s sequence of ranks and posts registers a career carried through the institution’s assignments and offices.

War Ideals and Institutional Tension

The surrounding narrative distinguishes the experience of war in Europe from the political atmosphere in New York. It says that boys in army training camps believed they were fighting to make the world safe for democracy, and that Hibben believed in the Fourteen Points and the war to end war. Set beside Savage’s treatment, that idealistic account makes the force’s political boundary visible: commitment to the war’s declared purpose could coexist with the exclusion of a pacifist who sought to keep serving. The American Expeditionary Forces therefore functions not only as a destination for military service but also as an institution whose access, in Savage’s case, is conditioned by wartime orthodoxy.