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"Bowerman makes the war live again for me. He's a natural storyteller." (Malcolm Cowley)
In 1917, shortly after the United States' declaration of war on Germany, Guy Emerson Bowerman, Jr., enlisted in the American army's ambulance service. Like other young ambulance drivers---Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, Cowley---Bowerman longed to "see the show." He was glad to learn that the ambulance units were leaving for France right away.
For seventeen months, until the armistice of November 1918, Bowerman kept an almost daily diary of the war. To read his words today is to live the war with an immediacy and vividness of detail that is astonishing.
Only twenty when he enlisted, Bowerman was an idealistic, if snobbish, young man who exulted that his section was made up mostly of young "Yalies" like himself. But he expected the war to change him, and it did. In the end he writes that he and his compatriots scarcely remember a world peace. "The old life was gone forever'. .
Guy Bowerman's unit was attached to a French infantry division stationed near Verdun. Sent to halt the German drive to Paris in 1918, the division participated in the decisive counterattack of July and tracked the routed Germans through Belgium Then, "unwarned," Bowerman and his comrades were "plunged into... a life of peace." Into this life, he writes, they walked "bewildered," like "men fearing ambush."
Published now for the first time, this remarkable chronicle of one young man's rite of passage is destined to become a classic in the literature of the Great War.
Mark C. Carnes is visiting assistant professor of history at Barnard. College. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he was Whiting Fellow in American History.
Contents
Introduction
Diary
June 28 to October 7, 1917
October 8, 1917 to January 15, 1918
January 16 to May 27, 1918
May 28 to July 16, 1918
July 17 to September 29, 1918
September 30 to November 10, 1918Maps
France
The Western FrontAppendix 1: Complete Roster of S.S.U. 585 from August 7, 1917, to April 23, 1919
Appendix 2: Station List, Section 585
Glossary
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