Our Army at the Front — Inside the Classic

Ceremony and the First Casualties

Broun devotes considerable space to formal events and speeches. The most striking passage in the excerpts is General Bordeaux's eulogy for Privates Enright, Gresham, and Hay, the first American soldiers killed in action. The French general's address, quoted at length, uses elevated rhetoric—'These graves, the first to be dug in our national soil'—to claim the fallen for France. Broun does not editorialize; he lets the speech stand as a set piece. Earlier, the landing of General Pershing is described with similar attention to ritual: the lord mayor's chains, the 'scarlet and gold of staff-officers,' and the goat mascot that 'intended to behave himself.' These scenes suggest that Broun saw the war partly through its public performances, where national pride and alliance were enacted before his eyes.

The Doughboy's First Contact

When Broun does describe combat, it is filtered through the inexperience of green troops. The German raid of November 2-3, 1918, is recounted with blunt specifics: 'Three Americans were killed, five were wounded, and twelve were captured.' The Americans 'fought bravely but greenly,' a phrase that captures Broun's tone—sympathetic but unsentimental. He notes that the raid 'made the doughboys mad, and, better than that, made them careful.' The subsequent German attempt to repeat the raid was repulsed. Broun also includes a vignette of a German soldier who wandered into American lines by mistake and was shot while trying to escape. These episodes are presented as learning experiences, not heroic set pieces. The catalog subject 'World War, 1914-1918 -- United States' is borne out, but the excerpts show a war of small, confused encounters rather than grand offensives.

A Reporter's Eye for Detail

Broun's prose is most distinctive in its concrete observations. The opening paragraph of Chapter I is a single, carefully constructed sentence: 'A SHIP warped into an English port.' He then builds a visual composition of khaki lines, fan-sticks, and uniform colors. The goat mascot, held by a 'rigid private,' adds a touch of absurdity to the military precision. Later, he describes the burial of the first three American dead with 'minute-guns firing shells over the graveyard toward the Germans.' These details—the goat, the gilt chains, the minute-guns—are what set Broun's reporting apart from official histories. He does not explain the strategic significance of events; he shows what a witness would see. The excerpts suggest that Our Army at the Front is less a comprehensive account of the AEF than a series of vivid, episodic dispatches from a correspondent who trusted his eyes more than his sources.

Readers should approach Our Army at the Front as a journalist's notebook rather than a definitive history. Broun's strength lies in the specific—the goat, the eulogy, the greenness of the troops—not in overarching analysis. The book's structure, moving from Pershing's landing through training and into combat, follows the chronology of the AEF's deployment, but the excerpts suggest that Broun lingered on scenes that revealed character and ceremony. For a fuller picture of the war's strategy and logistics, one would need to supplement this account with official reports or later histories. But for the texture of the American experience in France—the confusion, the pride, the small moments—Broun's dispatches remain a valuable primary source.

Reading about Pershing’s landing and those first quiet eulogies, I remembered how my grandfather spoke of marches more than battles—the mud, the waiting. Something in Broun’s ceremonial awe brings back the same feeling My Reminiscences of East Africa gave me, where My Reminiscences of East Africa — Context and Discussion lingered on the landscape and the men’s faces rather than the gunfire. Both books feel like someone remembering a war from the edge of it, holding onto what was human.