Excerpt
AUTHOR'S NOTE
"The history of the Victorian Age," writes Lytton Strachey in his Preface to
Eminent Victorians, "will never be written: we know too much about it."
That paradoxical and somewhat arresting statement serves as Strachey's excuse
for selecting four lives to depict an entire age of British history, but it
applies to any subject on which mountains of material have been written.
The First World War, often referred to as the Great War, certainly falls into
that category. Too much is known about that vast conflict to permit one book to
cover the entire war in anything but a textbook fashion. The "explorer of the
past," to continue with Strachey, "will row out over that great ocean of
material, and lower down into it...a little bucket, which will bring up to the
light of day some characteristic specimen."
With that idea in mind, I have not attempted to write a comprehensive story of
the Great War. Instead I have focused on the American Expeditionary Force (AEF),
commanded by General John J. Pershing. In describing the inception of the AEF in
early 1917 and its subsequ ... read full excerpt from Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I ebook
