"The Long March" is a short novel, or novella, by William Styron. It was his second work to be published, and is a rather spare, brief work.
The book is seemingly semiautobiographical, since it deals with a reserve Marine Corps officer recalled to duty for the Korean War, a situation that William Styron did find himself in. The book is set over a period of a few days, when a commanding officer, Colonel Culver, thinks that the reserve troops have lost their discipline, and need to have it reinforced through a 36 mile forced march. The narrator and his close friend, Mannix (an officer with a cynical view of the military) undertake the march. Mannix, although in opposition to the Colonel and what he stands for, internalizes the pressure to succeed, and ends up injuring himself, and facing a court martial, due to his behavior on the march.
William Styron was a great novelist, but his body of work was fairly small, with this book being one of five novels he wrote. I would say it does not qualify as one of the pillars of his greatness, although it is a good book in its own right. The book is somewhat lyrical, containing long paragraphs of the narrators subjective impressions, and containing a small amount of dialog and direct character development. The book only has three real characters, the Colonel, Mannix, and the somewhat passive narrator. William Styron's fiction and social views were often very oriented towards activism, so I assume this work must have some sort of agenda, but I can not tell what it is. That it is somehow a statement against militarism or the idea of hierarchy is an obvious background, but it does not seem to make a statement against either in any sort of articulated form. The Colonel is not portrayed as a Pattonesque bully, or as an uncaring bureaucrat, his motivations for the extreme forced march are never fully explained. Instead, the entire work seems to be just an impressionistic exploration of a slice of the emotions that the main chracters on the march go through.