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Zusatztext “A work of genius.” — Saturday Review “Extraordinary and utterly irresistible . . . a compelling and compassionate story.” — Los Angeles Times “A blockbuster of a book . . . raw and brutal and angry.” — The New York Times “Ferocious . . . the most realistic and forceful novel I’ve read about life in the army.” — The New Yorker Informationen zum Autor James Jones Klappentext Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time THE COMPLETE UNCENSORED EDITION • THE WORLD WAR II MASTERPIECE AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE READ • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with his commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: The Army is their heart and blood-and, possibly, their death. This new edition features an Afterword by George Hendrick, a James Jones scholar, who discusses the novel's origin and eventual censorship at the hands of its first publisher. Now the original language has at last been restored to the most important American novel to come out of World War II. From Here to Eternity re-creates the authentic soldier experience and captures, like nothing else, the honor and savagery of man. Foreword by William Styron "A work of genius."-Saturday Review "Extraordinary and utterly irresistible . . . a compelling and compassionate story."-Los Angeles Times "A blockbuster of a book . . . raw and brutal and angry."-The New York Times "Ferocious . . . the most realistic and forceful novel I've read about life in the army."-The New YorkerBook One The Transfer Chapter 1 When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh. He leaned his elbows on the porch ledge and stood looking down through the screens at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below with the tiers of porches dark in the faces of the three-story concrete barracks fronting on the square. He was feeling a half-sheepish affection for his vantage point that he was leaving. Below him under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun the quadrangle gasped defenselessly, like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather slingstraps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoesoles, the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms. Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you. In the earthen square in the center of the quad a machine gun company went listlessly through the motions of its Loading Drill. Behind him in the high-ceiling squadroom was the muffled curtain of sound that comes from men just waking and beginning to move around, testing cautiously the flooring of this world they had last night forsaken. He listened to it, hearing also the footsteps coming up behind him, but thinking of how good a thing it had been to sleep late every morning as a member of this Bugle Corps and wake up to the sounds of the line companies already outs...
