Considered by many to be the finest American combat memoir of the First World War, Hervey Allen's Toward the Flame vividly chronicles the experiences of the Twenty-eighth Division in the summer of 1918. Made up primarily of Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, the Twenty-eighth Division saw extensive action on the Western Front. The story begins with Lieutenant Allen and his men marching inland from the French coast and ends with their participation in the disastrous battle for the village of Fismette. Allen was a talented observer, and the men with whom he served emerge as well-rounded...

Cather Studies 6 is part of a growing body of scholarship that seeks to undo Willa Cather's longstanding reputation as a writer who remained aloof from the cultural issues of her day. This chronologically arranged collection demonstrates that Cather found the subject of war both unavoidable, because of her position in history, and artistically irresistible. The volume begins with an essay addressing the American Civil War as part of Cather's southern cultural inheritance and concludes with an account of the aging writer's participation in the Armed Services Editions Program of World War II....

The train was packed with men. Men lying as still as if they were already dead. Men shaking with pain. One man raving, jabbering, yelling, in delirium. Everywhere bandages . . . bandages . . . bandages . . . and blood.

Those words describe the moment when Private John Lewis Barkley first grasped the grim reality of the war he had entered. The rest of Barkley's memoir, first published in 1930 as No Hard Feelings and long out of print, provides a vivid ground-level look at World War I through the eyes of a soldier whose exploits rivaled those of Sergeant York.

A reconnaissance...