My Year of the Great War

In the summer of 1914, a young American journalist crossed the Atlantic into a war that would consume a generation. Frederick Palmer arrived at the Belgian border with the British Expeditionary Force, not as a soldier but as an observer of history in the making, and what he saw would haunt him for the rest of his life. This is his account of the first months of the Great War, written as the shells were still falling and the full horror of industrialized conflict had not yet revealed itself. Palmer writes with the desperate clarity of a man who knows he is watching the old world die. He follows the British and French through the first catastrophic months, from the rush to mobilize through the deadlock of the trenches that would define the war's terrible geometry. He interviews soldiers in the field, watches the Belgian defense crumble, and reflects on the strange efficiency of death delivered by machine gun and artillery. Yet there is also valor here, the stubborn courage of men who did not yet understand what they had been summoned to endure. This is primary source history at its most immediat e and affecting. Written in 1915, before the slaughter at Verdun and the Somme had burned the hope from everyone's eyes, Palmer's account captures a pivotal moment when the war was still new, still somewhat comprehensible, and the full catastrophe had not yet arrived. For readers seeking to understand how the twentieth century began, there is no substitute for standing in the mud of Flanders with an American who was there when it started.