A.E.F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

Heywood Broun arrived in France in 1917 with the first American forces to fight in the Great War, and what he produced was not history written afterward but journalism fired hot from the front lines. These dispatches capture young American soldiers confronting modern warfare for the first time: their fear, their gallows humor, their bewilderment at European battlefields that had already devoured millions. Broun writes with the immediacy of a man who slept in mud beside doughboys and watched artillery tear the night open. He chronicles the uneasy alliance with British and French commanders, the logistical chaos of deploying an army across an ocean, and the strange heroism of ordinary men thrust into extraordinary violence. Published in 1918 while the war still raged, this book is a time capsule of American innocence meeting industrial slaughter. It endures because it offers something no history book can: the raw, unfiltered voice of a nation discovering what it had joined. For readers who want primary source material from the war that reshaped the twentieth century, Broun's sketches remain indispensable.