The Meuse-Argonne Offensive plays a climactic role in One of Ours (1922), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by one of America's great, yet often overlooked, writers, Willa Cather (1873-1947). As in much of her work, the greater part of the novel is set in the Nebraska farmlands, where Claude Wheeler, a sensitive young man, finds himself ill at ease with his life as a successful farmer. Claude feels unsatisfied in his relations with others in his community, particularly with his wife, Enid, a rigid, unloving woman. Her rejection leaves him with his sense of manliness shaken.

The war brings the chance of redemption: Claude begins to experience feelings of challenge and purpose as he becomes an officer in the army. Once in France, he forms a friendship with a fellow officer, David Erhardt, a former concert violinist who has lived in France and speaks the language fluently. Through David, Claude is exposed to French art and culture. In one poignant scene, Claude listens to David playing the violin in the home of a cultured French family and becomes fully aware of what has been missing in his life.

Claude's admiration and envy of David and his camaraderie with the men under his command heighten his commitment to the justice of the war: "I never knew there was anything worth living for, till the war came on. Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition." His newly discovered vitality and confidence produce a psychological transformation, as the hesitant young farmer becomes a skilled and courageous leader of men.

In September 1918, Claude and David's battalion is transferred to the Meuse Argonne front, in preparation for the offensive. When the fighting begins, Claude, now a company commander, is ordered to occupy a critical position where the Germans are expected to counterattack. The designated spot is a former German trench, which the Germans had mined before retreating. Just prior to their counterattack, the enemy detonates the mine, wiping out the American machine guns placed there. With only rifles to defend his position, Claude exposes himself to danger by directing his men's fire, and he successfully holds the line until reinforcements arrive. In the process, however, both Claude and David are killed.

When One of Ours was first published, some critics complained that the war served as a kind of deus ex machina, a facile solution to Claude's personal malaise. Others objected to its perceived glorification of war, while still others disliked its depiction of battle. Among the latter, Ernest Hemingway suggested, in a letter to Edmund Wilson, that the battle descriptions were derived from the famous D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915). (One should not discount the possibility that such comments were the product of injured male pride over a woman daring to describe a battle scene at all.) On the other hand, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and became a best-seller.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, One of Ours appears to be less about war and more about youthful idealism. As Claude perceives it, just prior to the battle: "Ideals were not archaic things, beautiful and impotent; they were the real sources of power among men. As long as that was true, and now he knew it was true--he had come all this way to find out--he had no quarrel with Destiny." As Claude's grieving mother comes to recognize, if he had survived, Claude would probably have joined the list of war heroes who ended up committing suicide, "the ones who . . . had to hope extravagantly and to believe passionately. And they found they had hoped and believed too much." It is clear that Cather is not interested in the glorification of war, but rather in the tragedy of idealism.

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