Trench Knives and Mustard Gas: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France is the memoir of a soldier on the front lines of World War I. Hugh Thompson’s memoirs of his time in France demonstrate a keen eye for detail and a penchant for philosophy. Thompson combines the fast-paced prose of the jazz age and the passionate observations of an engaged intellectual. Originally serialized in the Chattanooga Times in 1934, this newly edited version allows the author to tell his story to a whole new generation. Thomspon takes the reader on an intense journey with the 168th regiment of the 42nd Rainbow Division through the villages, towns, battlefields, and hospitals of France. He points out the sights along the way and has a knack for compressing a complex reflection on life into a single sentence. Severely wounded in his arm and back, Thompson reassesses his situation after visiting comrades who lost arms or legs. “I went back to my tent,” he recalls, “almost ashamed of my own lucky wounds.” Homesick for the States during his first months overseas, Thompson discovers that his platoon has become his second family. He becomes increasingly estranged from his old one and accustomed to the war’s distortion of time and values. Friendships form and disappear in the hour it takes a stranger to die. When he is wounded, Germans serve as his stretcher bearers. And things never happen when they take place, but later when one learns of them from a letter or from a soldier passing through. War does not destroy the physical man. It leads to strange experiences. Trench Knives and Mustard Gas brings the front lines of World War I, the Great War, to the hearts and minds of its readers. The book is an indispensable guide into the past, told by a man who was there.

Trench Knives and Mustard Gas: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France is the memoir of a soldier on the front lines of World War I. Hugh Thompson’s memoirs of his time in France demonstrate a keen eye for detail and a penchant for philosophy. Thompson combines the fast-paced prose of the jazz age and the passionate observations of an engaged intellectual. Originally serialized in the Chattanooga Times in 1934, this newly edited version allows the author to tell his story to a whole new generation. Thomspon takes the reader on an intense journey with the 168th regiment of the 42nd Rainbow Division through the villages, towns, battlefields, and hospitals of France. He points out the sights along the way and has a knack for compressing a complex reflection on life into a single sentence. Severely wounded in his arm and back, Thompson reassesses his situation after visiting comrades who lost arms or legs. “I went back to my tent,” he recalls, “almost ashamed of my own lucky wounds.” Homesick for the States during his first months overseas, Thompson discovers that his platoon has become his second family. He becomes increasingly estranged from his old one and accustomed to the war’s distortion of time and values. Friendships form and disappear in the hour it takes a stranger to die. When he is wounded, Germans serve as his stretcher bearers. And things never happen when they take place, but later when one learns of them from a letter or from a soldier passing through. War does not destroy the physical man. It leads to strange experiences. Trench Knives and Mustard Gas brings the front lines of World War I, the Great War, to the hearts and minds of its readers. The book is an indispensable guide into the past, told by a man who was there.

Decades before Americans became familiar with the term “embedded journalist,” a young cartoonist named Francis Webster embodied that role when he served as a volunteer infantryman during World War I. Using his skills as an illustrator, he documented firsthand the harsh realities of combat life and regularly submitted visual dispatches of his experiences back to an Iowa newspaper. The first published collection of Webster’s wartime chronicles, Somewhere Over There presents a unique view of World War I through a rare compilation of letters, diary entries, cartoons, sketches, and watercolors. As editor Darrek D. Orwig explains in his introduction, Webster gained valuable training as an illustrator when he worked for famed political cartoonist Jay “Ding” Darling during the early years of World War I. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, Webster volunteered with the Iowa National Guard as it prepared for deployment on the western front. His regiment would be part of the Forty-Second Rainbow Division, one of the first American units to arrive in France. Webster’s accounts, rendered in words and pictures, capture the daily life of a citizen-soldier who trained in stateside camps, traversed the submarine-infested waters of the Atlantic Ocean, fought in muddy trenches, and recovered in hospitals from poisonous gas exposure. Webster suffered a mortal wound during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918, when he placed a fellow soldier’s safety before his own. Webster’s illustrations for the Des Moines Capital helped readers of the time learn what American soldiers were experiencing “over there” by bringing news from the western front to the home front. For nearly ninety years following his death, Webster’s family treasured his collection of artwork and writings before donating it to the Iowa Gold Star Military Museum at Camp Dodge, where it resides today. This wartime assemblage is amplified by Orwig’s enlightening commentary based on extensive research that places Webster’s story within the wider narrative of American involvement in the “war to end all wars.”

Preparation -- The plan -- First days -- The 35th Division -- Ending the enfilade -- The Kriemhilde Stellung -- Reorganization -- Breakout -- Victory.

Focuses on the posters of World War I as a medium to interpret the tremendous role played by New York State and its citizens in the war effort.