In 1917, shortly after the United Statesโ declaration of war on Germany, Guy Emerson Bowerman, Jr., enlisted in the American armyโs ambulance service. Like other young ambulance driversโHemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, CowleyโBowerman longed to โsee the show.โ He was glad to learn that the ambulance units were leaving for France right away. For seventeen months, until the armistice of November 1918, Bowerman kept an almost daily diary of the war. To read his words today is to live the war with an immediacy and vividness of detail that is astonishing. Only twenty when he enlisted, Bowerman was an idealistic, if snobbish, young man who exulted that his section was made up mostly of young โYaliesโ like himself. But he expected the war to change him, and it did. In the end he writes that he and his compatriots scarcely remember a world at peace. "The old life was gone forever. . ." Guy Bowermanโs unit was attached to a French infantry division stationed near Verdun. Sent to halt the German drive to Paris in 1918, the division participated in the decisive counterattack of July and tracked the routed Germans through Belgium. Then, โunwarned,โ Bowerman and his comrades were โplunged into โฆ a life of peace.โ Into this life, he writes, they walked โbewildered,โ like โmen fearing ambush.โ This remarkable chronicle of one young manโs rite of passage is destined to become a classic in the literature of the Great War.