Publisher Description
In The Last of the Doughboys, Richard Rubin introduced readers to a forgotten generation of Americans: the men and women who fought and won the First World War. Interviewing the war’s last survivors face-to-face, he knew well the importance of being present if you want to get the real story. But he soon came to realize that to get the whole story, he had to go Over There, too. So he did, and discovered that while most Americans regard that war as dead and gone, to the French, who still live among its ruins and memories, it remains very much alive.
Years later, with the centennial of the war only magnifying this paradox, Rubin decided to go back Over There to see if he could, at last, resolve it. For months he followed the trail of the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, finding trenches, tunnels, bunkers, century-old graffiti and ubiquitous artifacts. But he also found an abiding fondness for America and Americans, and a colorful corps of local after-hours historians and archeologists who tirelessly explore these sites and preserve the memories they embody while patiently waiting for Americans to return and reclaim their own history and heritage. None of whom seemed to mind that his French needed work.
Based on his wildly popular New York Times series, Back Over There is a timely journey, in turns reverent and iconoclastic but always fascinating, through a place where the past and present are never really separated.
This program is read by the author.
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It was called the Great War, and it brought America–and millions of ordinary Americans–decisively into the wider world for the first time. We would never be the same again. But our entry into the conflict was a century ago–knowledge and memories fade. A keen student of the war, Richard Rubin set out on a journey along what were once the front lines in northern France. With an eye for compelling and sometimes chilling detail–the graffiti scrawled in tunnels, the rusted ordnance turned up by ploughs, the lonely grave of the last American killed–he has produced a personal account of historical discovery that is human and haunting, and written with literary flair. The First World War, we come to realize, is both distant enough to evoke the clashes of antiquity and recent enough to feel like yesterday.
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Cullen Murphy, author of Are We Rome?Â
