Frank E. Vandiver

Preface, Vol. I, p. xvi:
There were two ways to do a Pershing biography: a short one, focusing on the main facets of his World War I career, or a longer one, tying youth to later achievement and the part he played in his time. There were several books in print that covered the first approach well enough. So I opted for the “life and times” treatment. The decision came not entirely because of precedent works, but also from the growing certainty that Pershing could not really be understood in any halfway sense. His career spanned the old and new military systems of the United States and he helped create the new army that fought the Second World War. He was one of those American “conquistadores” who pioneered the Yankee “colonialism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and things he did in military government set patterns to the present. He was a captain and a manager, a governor and a general, one of the new breed of U.S. soldiers required by the expanding world role of his country.

Vol. II, Chapter 19, pp. 725-26
By mid 1917 war had changed. All illusions of 1914, most hopes for a ‘breakthrough’ had washed away in the blood and ooze of Flanders, Artois, Picardy, Lorraine, and Champagne. A close look at France behind the war, at the drawn and sober faces of a naturally gay people, showed pitiless human erosion. A look at the poilus, at their slumping pose and dragging gait, showed martial decay. All the dash, the audace of earlier days lay behind somewhere with comrades on the Marne, the Somme, at Verdun, on the bitter slopes of Chemin des Dames. . . . As thousands upon grisly thousands fell along the 400 miles of trenches soiling France from Switzerland to the English Channel, a kind of unstoppable consumption sucked men to butchery. Different surely from all trenches before, these ranged through high land and low, split towns and families, and were marvels of engineering waste. . . .all things said of the trenches were untrue. For no voice could tell, no eye could see the truths of soul learned in those ditches of the damned. In that alien world men burrowed, scurried, slithered, snatched existence in a mutant incarnation. . . . For three years the trenches ground lives in the mincing machine of the Western Front until, at last, there seemed no other life.