SOURCE: “Two Novels of War: Drums and Marching On,” in James Boyd, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972, pp. 60-86.

In the following essay, Whisnant discusses Boyd's works Drums and Marching On as transitional war novels between historical romanticism and psychological realism.

I Drums (1925)

Shortly after Boyd began Drums, his first novel, he observed that “Literature in [America], while showing many hopeful symptoms … [is] divided between the old virtue-triumphant school of false sentiment and false heroic and the new writers who, while much more skillful technically and truer to the superficial aspects of life, are oriental in their basic … regard [for] man as a helpless puppet in the clutch of circumstances or of his own passions. [But] … all of English literature has been devoted to the idea of man beset with trials and temptations and sometimes overwhelmed by them but frequently victorious and if not the master of his fate at...