Our Part in the Great War

This is war history written while shells were still falling. Arthur Gleason, an American journalist embedded with volunteer ambulance units in France, captures the raw idealism and terrible beauty of America's first entry into a European conflict. He follows young volunteers who left comfortable American lives to drive battered ambulances through shell-torn countryside, pulling wounded soldiers from rubble and witnessing what war actually meant beyond the newspaper headlines. The book pulses with personal anecdotes from the front lines, moments of black humor between runs, and the grim reality of roads destroyed and villages burning. But it also captures something harder to convey: the solidarity between American volunteers and the suffering French people they came to aid. Gleason writes with the urgency of a man who knows the story he's telling is still unfolding, and the outcome uncertain. The work stands as both a historical document and a testament to ordinary people who crossed an ocean to do extraordinary things in humanity's darkest hours.