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From a story on the
Argonne offensive in
The Stars and Stripes, France, October 4, 1918
The written First World War began in its first shots' echoes. Battlefield poetry, journalists' reports, letters, and works of fiction: all sprang forth as the soldiers fought-and died. Words integral to the fighting itself, words from within the military, had impact, too, often even propelling the war. This war often traveled on logistics and bureaucracy writing from afar-did so to a degree never before imagined, a degree made possible by new technological advances such as the typewriter and the linotype machine, a degree made necessary by the immense numbers and distances now associated with wars and armies.
Over the course of time, through the more-than three-quarters of a century since that war, the words of that time-except in literature-have been mostly forgotten. Yet words documented this war in ways never before possible or even imagined, words put on paper by clerks and aides de camp, by brevet majors and even major generals. Almost all of them now lie forgotten and unread, on crumbling paper in dusty folders in government archives.
Today, perceptions of the First World War usually come through words written long after the conflict ended. We see the war through analyses made by those to whom time has presented broader pictures. Rarely do we see the war as it was presented, through writings of the time, to those involved. Though the newer, broad pictures help place the war within historical perspectives, they do little to aid the seeker of an approximation of the direct experience of that war. Fiction can provide that aid, but only subjectively and at its own deliberate removes. Sometimes neither histories nor these fictions provide satisfactory understanding to those seeking to comprehend even a small part of such monumental disasters as the First World War.
My intent here is to bring back a bit of contemporary understanding of the First World War to readers now so far removed from it that they may not have even met participants in it. The military documents I have selected pertain to the actions of one particular American division-not to build any broader picture or vision of the war, but to help us see something of the unit's day-to-day activities. To give these life, they are spliced with stories from the France edition of Stars and Stripes, the letters sent home by one of the officers of that battalion (my grandfather and the spark that ignited this project), and articles from his hometown newspaper.
Little in this volume provides explanation for the great events of the war, or even details them. Instead, primarily in words that Lieutenant Alfred Barlow wrote or read, or could have read at the time or soon after, I have tried to gather an impression of what his life as an infantry officer must have been.
Except for the news stories from The Stars and Stripes, this volume lacks description of the details of life on the front, either in its colossal dreariness or excitement. Barlow's letters deal with the mundane side of army life, not with the stuff of good fiction or drama. And the Special Orders and army messages included show little of the events that generated them-or that they, themselves, generated. But not much of army life was anything more than worrying that the local paper and letters from home were not arriving, than making sure that the details of a specific Field Order were followed. These and similar small matters, not battles, made the bulk of the American Expeditionary Force experience; their accompanying words make the bulk of this book.
--Aaron Barlow, editor of For My Foot Being Off
Click here to read the introduction
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