These sketches create contrasting and horrific accounts of the daily life endured by the common Marine.

It has often been described as an anti-militarist and an anti-war novel, but March maintained that the content was based on truth and should be viewed as an affirmation of life.

Writer and literary critic for the Spectator Graham Greene places it among the most important of all war novels: The journalist and writer Christopher Morley had an almost identical response to Company K after reading an advance copy: Company K has often been compared to Erich Maria Remarque's classic anti-war novel "All Quiet on the Western Front" for its despairing view of war.

University of Alabama professor and author Philip Beidler wrote in his introduction to the 1989 republication of the novel: Years after the completion of Company K, Ernest Hemingway published Men At War: The Best War Stories of All Time.

In the introduction Hemingway notes that of all the stories in the book, the two he most desired to publish were omitted, Andre Malraux's Man's Fate and William March's Nine Prisoners, one of the original serialized excerpts from Company K. Hemingway states that the anti-war aspects of the stories would not bode well, as the novel coincides with the beginnings of World War II.