Craig Hamilton
Published: 2015-07-11
Total Pages: 260
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Excerpt from Echoes From Over There: By the Men of the Army and Marine Corps Who Fought in France Ask a doughboy or an officer about "over there" these days, and nine times out of ten his answer will be, "Oh, what's the use of talking about it? Folks are tired of hearing about the war." The boys, lately returned, are eager to tell us of what they have seen and endured. Is it possible there is no audience for the moving stories of our young heroes? We believe that people, through the return, or non-return, of some loved one, are now so familiar with the reality of the Great War that they have little interest in war fiction. The day of the war play with its battle raging offstage, and the novel with its villain regenerated on the field, is past. Instead, we long to look into the eyes of our young fighters and hear from their own lips, authentic details of what happened overseas. Will you yawn and think of other matters when your boy stretches his legs before your fireplace once more and begins, "Well, Dad, it was this way. We went over the top at - " Or, if your boy paid the supreme price and lies with lips forever sealed, would you not listen hungrily to the story told by a member of his own company, by his Buddy, perhaps? Possibly, you had no one dear to you to send across. You must still be eager to learn all you can of that strange world of death, and struggle, and unimaginable bravery into which our untried youth advanced, and from which they have emerged, laurel crowned, our great, national pride. We offer you in this volume, not the skillful work of fiction writers, but veritable human documents. The boys themselves wrote these stories, or dictated them from their hospital beds. You will find adjectives and elaborate descriptive writing conspicuously lacking. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.