Yanks - A.E.F. (American Expeditionary Forces) Verse from WWI

These are the voices America sent to France, and they are not what you expect. This is not poetry written in comfortable retrospect by men decades removed from the trenches. This is verse composed in the moment, by soldiers who knew the weight of their rifles and the taste of that particular mud, who watched friends die and somehow kept writing. Drawn from the final nine months of the war and the first seven months of peace, the collection captures something no historian's account can: the raw, unfiltered consciousness of young Americans experiencing the unprecedented. Here is gallows humor and genuine terror,爱国主义 and disillusionment, the strange purgatory of waiting for orders that might kill you. Some poems are crude; some are brilliant; all are authentic. The editor, John T. Winterich, served as an editor for Stars and Stripes and understood that these verses were not meant to be monuments but testimonies. For anyone who wants to understand what war feels like from the inside, or who believes poetry can only be written in safety, this collection offers necessary corrective.