Fix bayonets! — Reading Notes

The Texture of the Marine Corps

Thomason devotes his introduction to cataloguing the men of the Marine Brigade: Northwesterners with “straw-colored hair,” Eastern university men, Pacific-coast lumberjacks, drawling Southerners, and “diverse people who ran curiously to type, with drilled shoulders and a bone-deep sunburn.” Their speech is flavored with navy words and phrases from ports around the world. This is not a generic army; it is a specific institution with its own culture, one that Thomason treats with affectionate precision. The stories that follow show that culture under extreme pressure—the way a gunnery sergeant commandeers a German 105mm gun and turns it on the enemy, or how a lieutenant coolly assesses a map reference while surrounded by dead and wounded. The book’s title, Fix Bayonets!, is both a literal order and a symbol of the Marine ethos of closing with the enemy.

Combat as Fragmentary Experience

The battle sequences resist neat narrative. Thomason writes that “the rest was no connected story. Only the hot exaltation of the fight kept the men on their feet.” The prose itself becomes fragmentary: “There was crawling and shooting low among the poppies, and presently hand-to-hand fighting.” The reader is plunged into the same confusion as the participants. Details emerge in sharp bursts: a tank “stalled, its guns not working,” swarmed by Germans prying at its plates with bayonets; a hidden strong point in the wheat; a battery of 105s firing point-blank. Thomason does not explain the larger tactical picture; he gives the sensory overload of the front line. The effect is immersive and unsettling, a deliberate refusal to impose order on chaos.

Moments of Dark Humor and Humanity

Amid the violence, Thomason includes small, telling details that undercut the horror. After the tank is rescued, a “greasy, smiling Frenchman emerged head and shoulders and inquired after a cigarette.” A lieutenant, surveying his thin line, says, “Accordin’ to the map, we’re here. Turn those Boche machine-guns around—guess we’ll stay.” The humor is laconic, understated—a survival mechanism. These moments do not diminish the brutality; they make the men more human. The book also acknowledges the psychological toll: the freckled boy who “went himself quite mad among the wounded and the corpses with his bayonet.” Thomason does not dwell on trauma, but he does not ignore it. The result is a portrait of men who are both capable of extreme violence and capable of wry observation.

Readers should approach Fix Bayonets! as a series of linked episodes rather than a continuous narrative. Thomason’s background as an illustrator is evident in his visual, almost cinematic descriptions; the book rewards attention to small physical details—the look of wheat waist-high, the sound of a tank’s one-pounder gun, the feel of a sunken road. The stories are best read slowly, allowing the cumulative effect of exhaustion and exaltation to build. They offer a specific, unromanticized view of the Marine Corps in 1918, one that avoids both jingoism and antiwar sermonizing.

There’s a moment in Thomason’s book when the noise drops away, and you’re just left with men and their tired jokes. That same intimacy surfaces in Strange True Stories of Louisiana — Story, Setting & Ideas, though it trades mud for river mist. I keep thinking how both make history feel like someone leaning close to tell you a secret.