An autobiographical novel of World War I experiences in the German ranks, Georg Grabenhorst's Zero Hour equates duty with camaraderie and thereby finds a greater balance between bitterness and hawkishness than much of war fiction. The war is experienced here through the keen eyes of Hans Volkenborn, a well-bred officer-candidate whose youthful enthusiasm turns to angst and disillusion. The sole comfort of his experience is the fellowship he enjoys with comrades, but even that abates over time. Grabenhorst recalls specifics of battlefield actions on the western front with a visceral language...

First published in German in 1928 as Jahrgang 1902, Ernst Glaeser's autobiographical novel centers on the experiences of the narrator, E., and his friends. Born in 1902, E. and his generation come of age during the Great War, but they never know combat because the war ends before they can be drafted. Through their perspectives Glaeser provides glimpses into traumatic times on the German home front.

Retreat, a Story of 1918 by Charles R. Benstead was first published in England in 1930, as the genre of Great War fiction was shifting from positive accounts of combat heroism toward narratives of disillusionment and loss. Benstead's novel spans both phases through its tragic portrayal of an army chaplain driven to madness when his orthodox values hold no sway against the bloody realities of war and through its heartening vision of how devotion to duty can fortify soldiers' sense of purpose and self-worth in the absence of spiritual faith. In this theater of battle, Benstead captures the...

Leonard Mann privately published his first novel, Flesh in Armour, in Melbourne in 1932, after he was unable to place it with a publisher in Australia or England. The novel was an immediate success, and Mann was subsequently awarded the Australian Literature Society's gold medal for outstanding book of the year. The book's merits then established, it was republished in England and Australia in 1944. Nearly 420,000 Australians enlisted during World War I, and more than half were killed, wounded, or captured. The conflict was the most costly in Australia's history. In the fates of his...

First published in 1928, This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets is a gripping collection of narrative verse that represents the beginning and end of the promising literary career of John Allan Wyeth, a Princeton-educated French interpreter in the American Expeditionary Force's Thirty-third Division. Though it received strong reviews and enough sales to warrant a trade edition in 1929, the volume faced the insurmountable adversary of the Great Depression, and its author soon vanished from the literary scene. This new edition of This Man's Army restores to print a lost vantage point on the...