The Fight for the Argonne: Personal Experiences of a 'y' Man

In the autumn of 1918, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive tore through the French forest in one of the bloodiest battles American forces would ever fight. William Benjamin West was there not as a soldier, but as a 'Y' man with the YMCA, running canteens, hauling supplies, and sitting with boys broken by shell shock. This is his account of that inferno: the endless mud, the shell craters filled with rainwater, the men who stumbled in for coffee and a kind word between barrages. West preached to the neurosis ward. He watched casualties pour in. He witnessed the strange grace of soldiers sharing what little they had. This is not a military history with troop movements and strategies. It is something rarer and more fragile: the view from behind the lines, where the real war was fought in small acts of mercy. For readers who want to understand what war actually felt like to those who lived it, this memoir offers something no textbook can.