Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends and Ghosts to Count

by Richard Rubin

Overview

Based on Richard Rubin's wildly popular New York Times series, Back Over There is a timely journey, in turns reverent and iconoclastic but always fascinating, through a place where the past and present are never really separated.

In The Last of the Doughboys, Richard Rubin introduced readers to a forgotten generation of Americans: the men and women who fought and won the First World War. Interviewing the war’s last survivors face-to-face, he knew well the importance of being present if you want to get the real story. But he soon came to realize that to get the whole story, he had to go Over There, too. So he did, and discovered that while most Americans regard that war as dead and gone, to the French, who still live among its ruins and memories, it remains very much alive.

Years later, with the centennial of the war only magnifying this paradox, Rubin decided to go back Over There to see if he could, at last, resolve it. For months he followed the trail of the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, finding trenches, tunnels, bunkers, century-old graffiti and ubiquitous artifacts. But he also found an abiding fondness for America and Americans, and a colorful corps of local after-hours historians and archeologists who tirelessly explore these sites and preserve the memories they embody while patiently waiting for Americans to return and reclaim their own history and heritage. None of whom seemed to mind that his French needed work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250084330
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/04/2017
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	41 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Richard Rubin is the author of the Back Over There from St. Martin's Press. He is also the author of The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War and Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, as well as scores of pieces for the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian, among others. A fifth-generation New Yorker, he now lives in small-town Maine, which baffles his neighbors.
RICHARD RUBIN (M.A.) was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University and began his career as a small town journalist in Greenwood, Mississippi. Since then he has written for rather larger outlets, routinely contributing to: The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker and AARP Magazine. He is the author of the books: Confederacy of Silence, and The Last of the Doughboys. He lives in Maine.

Table of Contents

Prologue Follow Me 1

1 Like Traveling Back in Time 9

2 The Soul of the Battlefield 32

3 Chemin des Américains 55

4 From the Bowels of the Earth 85

5 What If 120

6 The Burnt Woods and the Ball-Shaped Tree 160

7 Red Giant 197

8 The Devil's Basket 233

Epilogue History and Memory 268

Appendix 280

Selected Bibliography 281

Acknowledgments 283

Index 286

Editorial Reviews

A journey back to the French rural landscape where so many American soldiers fell during World War I…a fine on-the-ground account of some of the iconic battles…An eloquent dive into World War I cemeteries, monuments, mines, and trenches.” - Kirkus

“This is a fascinating book that brings to life the Great War’s brutal trench warefare its lingering presence in rural France...This remarkable work of journalism reminds us of the hardships of that war and the bravery of those called upon to fight it.” - The Missourian

“A century after the Great War, the battlefields of France are still littered with the evidence of the barbarous fighting—trenches, the abandoned foundations of destroyed villages, and shell fragments galore. But Richard Rubin doesn’t pursue this subject merely to give new meaning to the genre of ‘deep travel.’ This thoroughly researched and entertaining narrative refreshes our understanding of a tragic war and will be welcomed by anyone who enjoys good writing and history.” - Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey,and Flight of Passage

“Richard Rubin is a highly-skilled time-traveler whose passion and diligence make the haunted sites of the First World War yield up their amazing stories. By reminding us how real and how recent that war was he has produced an engrossing, important book.” - Ian Frazier, author of Great Plains and Travels in Siberia

"Delightful may seem like a strange word for a book about war – but it’s the word that came repeatedly to mind as I turned the pages of Richard Rubin’s narrative of his adventures on the French and Belgian battlefields where Americans fought in the Great War. With vast erudition and effervescent style, Rubin brings to life what the Doughboys endured “over there” a century ago and what he experienced as he retraced their footsteps." - David Laskin, author of The Family: A Journey into the Heart of the 20th Century and The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War

"Back Over There is a thoughtful, emotional, engaging journey into the rich and sometimes forgotten history of WWI." - Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

"Back Over There is journalistic magic, somehow travelling back in time 100 years without leaving the present, in order to bring us a graphic portrayal of our tragic participation in World War I, the Great War that cost 116,000 American lives, and the great legacy that lives on even now. Richard Rubin has traveled the battlegrounds and combat villages of France and has given us not only a graphic portrayal of the bloody battles in the trenches, in the villages and in the air where fighter planes dueled and bombs dropped for the first time, but a moving portrayal of the eternally grateful French people who keep the memory alive to this day.” - A.E. Hotchner, author of Hemingway in Love

“Richard Rubin has written a unique book—a combination of history and travelogue that restores the battlefields of WWI and the men who fought on them to remarkable, often heartbreaking life.” - Thomas Fleming, author of The Illusion of Victory, America in World War I

"It was called the Great War, and it brought America—and millions of ordinary Americans—decisively into the wider world for the first time. We would never be the same again. But our entry into the conflict was a century ago—knowledge and memories fade. A keen student of the war, Richard Rubin set out on a journey along what were once the front lines in northern France. With an eye for compelling and sometimes chilling detail—the graffiti scrawled in tunnels, the rusted ordnance turned up by ploughs, the lonely grave of the last American killed—he has produced a personal account of historical discovery that is human and haunting, and written with literary flair. The First World War, we come to realize, is both distant enough to evoke the clashes of antiquity and recent enough to feel like yesterday." - Cullen Murphy, author of Are We Rome?

From the Publisher

03/15/2017
Many of the social, political, and financial events of the 20th century can be attributed to the aftermath of World War I, according to Rubin (The Last of the Doughboys). The author has written this folksy accounting of remnants of battles, relatives of the dead, and those who lived during this time. There are descriptions of artifacts in the Alsace-Lorraine theatre (in present-day France near the German border), including the remainders of shrapnel and spent cartridges that still litter the ground in local fields. Using his high school-learned French to communicate, Rubin visited combat sites that still contain German concrete trenches, machine gun nests, blockhouses, and opposing French trenches just deep enough to protect the men inside. He visits people in the villages, where the first man was killed in the war, and the site where the last American was killed in 1918. These bloody, gas-choked battles, which took place in the French countryside, brought about a 20-year cease-fire that spawned World War II. VERDICT Rubin succeeds in reminding readers how the Great War is the genesis of today's political and social complexities. Recommended for amateur historians and high school history classes.—Harry Willems, Great Bend P.L., KS

Library Journal

2017-02-02
A journey back to the French rural landscape where so many American soldiers fell during World War I.Maine-based journalist and author Rubin (The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, 2013, etc.) offers a fine on-the-ground account of some of the iconic battles of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, during which the Americans helped turn the tide finally against the Germans in late 1918. Readers following in Rubin's scramble across the largely unmarked rural terrain will need a solid background to the actual fighting since, in many places, the author (who does not speak French) felt like he was the only "Anglophone tourist" who had been there since 1918. Artifact hunting is a serious avocation in these parts, and Rubin admits that one should be mentored in the pursuit, as he was for his previous research by Jean-Paul de Vries, the proprietor of a relics museum in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. The author examines the sites of the most terrible battles missed by the Americans during the first months of the war: Verdun, the Somme, Ypres. The young doughboys of the American Expeditionary Forces were eager to join the fighting, which occurred in Bathelémont, where the first Americans fell in November 1917. Rubin explored the eerie chalk mines on the so-called Chemins des Dames, where the Yankee Division took shelter in early 1918 and where the walls are scrawled with American graffiti, in effect "their last will and testament." From there, Rubin visited Château-Thierry on the Marne, where Gen. John Pershing's Americans engaged the German Spring Offensive of 1918, including the legendary Battle of Belleau. Indeed, it was the Americans—and only the Americans—who could drive the Germans back, retaking the occupied territory held for four years. Throughout the book, Rubin sounds his theme of the Americans being crucial to France's ultimate freedom (as amply recognized by the grateful French). An eloquent dive into World War I cemeteries, monuments, mines, and trenches.

Kirkus Reviews