What the ''Boys'' Did Over There

They arrived as boys. The trenches made them something else entirely. Henry L. Fox gathered the testimonies of soldiers who lived through the First World War's killing fields, men who learned to sleep standing up, who grew accustomed to the smell of mustard gas and the sight of comrades torn apart by shells. These are not officer accounts from comfortable chateaus. These are the recollections of ordinary soldiers who shared trenches with rats the size of cats, who boiled their uniforms to kill the lice burrowing into their skin, who watched friends die in ways too grotesque for the letters they sent home. What emerges is not heroism in the patriotic sense, but something more honest: the black humor, the small kindnesses, the sheer animal persistence that kept them alive. Fox preserves their voices in all their profanity, confusion, and grudging respect for enemies they never understood. This is war written from the bottom of the crater, where the real history happened.