ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I found this work very challenging. There’s a lot of death in this book and, unlike my other work, it’s less oblique, less a subtext, and more the overwhelming inescapable reality of what human beings have been doing to each other and the world they have lived in for the last century.

Amid all this morbidity, my students have been an unending source of inspiration. Their questions and ideas have helped form my own. I’m especially grateful for the friendship and encouragement of some of our alums, including Blair Mintz, Miah Bundy, and Laura Rashley. The latter in particular has made sure I read things unrelated to the Great War and I hope Laura knows her friendship means even more than the hopefully unending recommendation of poetry and graphic novels.

I am proud to have worked with Counterpoint and their imprint Soft Skull over the years. Executive editor Dan Smetanka brings much needed humor and motivation to me. Thank you to Sarah Jean Grimm, Katie Boland, and all the publicity work of Megan Fishmann for answering my many questions. I appreciate the quick responses from Counterpoint’s managing editor Wah-Ming Chang. I also want to note that Janet Renard proved an excellent and precise copy editor who has saved me from many embarrassments. Remaining errors are my responsibility alone.

Deirdre Mullane is an extraordinary agent and a good friend. I don’t always feel I have deserved the time she’s given me, which makes me admire her all the more.

My parents, Clarence and Joan Poole, are much in my thoughts always. My mom bought me my first book about the Great War and my dad read it to me along with all the other books he introduced me to every night before bed, sometimes books I was probably too young to understand. I appreciate how much this has shaped my life.

Tammy Ingram’s own work provides me constant inspiration and I do not know what I would do without her companionship, even when she’s rather far away so we must text six times a day.

This book would not exist without Christopher Bram and his novel Gods and Monsters (that later became an Academy Award–winning film of the same name).

I dedicate this work to Beth Phillips, for her love and constant support. I am lucky to have a partner who enthusiastically joins me on World War I battlefields and, in fact, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the conflict that dwarfs my own. It’s hard for me to imagine completing this work, or indeed getting through life, without her. I love her (and our dogs Jessica and Verna) more than I have ever been able to show.