The final chapter in the war record of E.P. Dudley (pictured above with his “pal” Cecil) was written some forty years after the end of the war, following his retirement...

Friday, March 22, 1918 Went to Bar-le-Duc. Got up 5:15 a.m., got there at 9:30 a.m. Ordered uniform and got measured. Cost 260 francs. Horrid journey on slim gauge. Ate dinner Commerce...

Thursday, January 3, 1918 Happiest day in my life. When I got up I found a letter on my bed telling me to report to the doctor for a physical...

EP Dudley’s visit to the front makes for grim reading. His matter of fact reporting of how German prisoners were treated is startlingly contrary to the Geneva Convention. The Convention...

War has been described as “interminable monotony punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” The boredom of late September and October 1917 is evident in these diary entries, where mail from...

On September 11 the 13th Engineers moved to Fleury-sur-Aire, near Verdun, which was to be their headquarters for the next twenty months. Tuesday, September 11, 1917 Up 5:00 a.m. Moving today....

The final call to all officers and men was issued on June 1, 1917, to report at the Municipal Pier in Chicago for active service, to begin basic training and...

On April 24, 1917, shortly after the US declared war on Germany, former French Prime Minister René Viviani arrived in the US as head of a commission to solicit US...

I’m getting ahead of my story. In fact we need to go back a few years. In 1887 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway began to build a 350-mile...

In the late summer of 1914 war in Europe was far from the minds of Americans. To be sure, there were plenty of Americans of European descent, and many not...