In the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front, Elton E. Mackin's memoirs are a haunting portrayal of war as seen through the eyes of a highly decorated Marine Corps private who fought in every major World War I campaign in which the Marine Brigade participated - from Belleau Wood to the crossing of the Meuse on the eve of the Armistice. At age nineteen, Private Mackin joined the Marine Brigade's 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment on beleaguered Hill 142, where the Marines were fighting as part of the U.S. Army's 2d Infantry Division. The call soon went out for volunteers to serve as runners, carrying messages from headquarters to the front lines or guiding attacking units to the jumpoff point. Mackin accepted the challenge and became a member of what frontline marines called the "suicide squad". He miraculously survived some of the most vicious fighting of the war without serious injury - other than to his psyche. His narrative, written in a style evocative of the heyday of American literature, the 1920s and 1930s, is certain to become a classic in its own right. Mackin shares with the reader not just the horrors of war, but the subtle little everyday experiences that make the life of the combat soldier both tolerable and soul-shattering. Suddenly We Didn't Want to Die is a book that will leave you wondering how anyone can emerge from battle with sanity intact.

Not Even My Name is a rare eyewitness account of the horrors of a little-known, often denied genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian and Pontic Greek minorities in Turkey were killed during and after World War I. As told by Sano Halo to her daughter, Thea, this is the story of her survival of the death march at age ten that annihilated her family, and the mother-daughter pilgrimage to Turkey in search of Sano's home seventy years after her exile. Sano, a Pontic Greek from a small village near the Black Sea, also recounts the end of her ancient, pastoral way of life in the Pontic Mountains.

In the spring of 1920, Turkish soldiers arrived in the village and shouted the proclamation issued by General Kemal Attatürk: "You are to leave this place. You are to take with you only what you can carry . . . " After surviving the march, Sano was sold into marriage at age fifteen to a man three times her age who brought her to America. Not Even My Name follows Sano's marriage, the raising of her ten children, and her transformation from an innocent girl who lived an ancient way of life in a remote place to a woman in twentieth-century New York City.

Although Turkey actively suppresses the truth about the murder of almost three million of its Christian minorities--Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian--during and after World War I, and the exile of millions of others, here is a first-hand account of the horrors of that genocide.

The British attack at Amiens was the most decisive day of the Great War. In earlier offensives, a gain of a few hundred yards counted as a 'victory', but this time our troops advanced seven miles in a day and broke clean through the German defences. The long agony on the Western Front was nearly over. Spearheaded by tanks and armoured cars and supported by the RAF, the attack was led by the Australian and Canadian Corps, with British and French troops on the flanks. Elaborate deception measures were employed to ensure surprise. Drawing on both primary and secondary sources, as well as eyewitness accounts, this book describes how the attack was conceived, the preparations, and the actual assault itself, as well as what happened on the subsequent days and how Amiens paved the way for the final victorious Allied advance.

How did Russia develop a modern national identity, and what role did the military play? Joshua Sanborn examines tsarist and Soviet armies of the early twentieth century to show how military conscription helped to bind citizens and soldiers into a modern political community. The experience of total war, he shows, provided the means by which this multiethnic and multiclass community was constructed and tested. Drafting the Russian Nation is the first archivally based study of the relationship between military conscription and nation-building in a European country. Stressing the importance of violence to national political consciousness, it shows how national identity was formed and maintained through the organized practice of violence. The cultural dimensions of the "military body" are explored as well, especially in relation to the nationalization of masculinity. The process of nation-building set in motion by military reformers culminated in World War I, when ethnically diverse conscripts fought together in total war to preserve their national territory. In the ensuing Civil War, the army's effort was directed mainly toward killing the political opposition within the "nation." While these complex conflicts enabled the Bolsheviks to rise to power, the massive violence of war even more fundamentally constituted national political life. Not all minorities were easily assimilated. The attempt to conscript natives of Central Asia for military service in 1916 proved disastrous, for example. Jews; also identified as non-nationals, were conscripted but suffered intense discrimination within the armed forces because they were deemed to be inherently unreliable and potentially disloyal. Drafting the Russian Nation is rich with insights into the relation of war to national life. Students of war and society in the twentieth century will find much of interest in this provocative study.