Huts in Hell

In the autumn of 1917, Daniel A. Poling crossed the Atlantic aboard a ship prowled by German submarines, a journey through fog and fear toward a war that would define a generation. Once in France, he didn't stay behind the lines. He went forward, into the huts that soldiers ironically named their shelters, directly adjacent to the hell of the Western Front. This is his account of the American troops who fought there: boys from Ohio and Texas and California, their hands still steady despite the shelling, their jokes dark and quick, their loyalty to each other absolute. Poling documents what he sees with the urgent clarity of a man who knows history is being written in blood and mud. The spirit he encounters among the doughboys is neither naïve nor romanticized; it is something harder and more honest, a determination to hold the line against annihilation. Huts in Hell endures because it captures the war as the men who fought it actually experienced it: terrifying, monotonous, punctuated by extraordinary acts of courage, and bound together by a brotherhood that Crossroads Magazine called 'the finest document of the American soldier in the World War.'