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EDITORIAL METHOD Johnson Hagood was a prolific author and military commentator as well as an experienced publisher of books and articles. He intended to publish Caissons Go Rolling Along as a sequel to The Services of Supply (Doubleday, 1927) using material from the same wartime journal. Although Caissons was unpublished when he died in 1948, a letter from his literary agency, George T. Bye and Company, on July 15, 1940, shows that the manuscript had been seen by at least three major publishing houses, and a typewritten note on the manuscript from 1944 indicates that Hagood was still making small modifications several years later. An experienced author, Hagood left a neatly typed, double-spaced Caissons manuscript, with illustrations and pasted photos and captions at their intended locations within the text. The copy text for this edition is the manuscript that is part of the Johnson Hagood Collection of the South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston. To prepare a working copy, each page of the manuscript was photocopied and then scanned using an OCR reader and text conversion software to create a preliminary electronic text document. Each page of that preliminary document was compared to a photocopy of the original text to create an electronic file that reproduced the copy text. The illustrations and captions are those Hagood had pasted into the text, with the locations as close as possible to those in his original manuscript. Hagood’s contemporaries—with respect to age and sophistication—were his intended audience in writing Caissons. In a sense, Caissons can be considered a record of travel and the author’s experiences with people and places, occasionally interrupted by his commentaries on events that occurred as he worked on the manuscript. The author’s contemporaries were numerous when he wrote the text, but they are few today. With that fact in mind, the editor has supplied annotations in the form of endnotes that provide historical context, identify people and places, and record emendations to the text. With respect to the level of annotation and textual emendation, the editor has taken some guidance from a comment Hagood made in his preface: “I have checked up on obvious errors of fact, made some changes in rhetoric, xxii Editorial Method and supplemented the text by matter of a historical character not then in my possession. But in all matters of opinion, I have left the text as it was.” An avowed Francophile, Hagood usually preferred to record the French versions of city names, using Trèves instead of Trier, for instance. He sometimes added diacritical marks to French or German words by hand—though not always correctly or consistently. For example, he nearly always spelled fräulein as fraülein and frequently wrote Hohr-Grenzhausen instead of HöhrGrenzhausen . When such omissions were obvious, the editor has silently provided requisite umlauts, circumflexes, and accent marks. When place-names were ambiguously recorded or were, rarely, in error, the text was not emended and a note was inserted with the modern, accepted place-names to assist the reader. An example of this situation is seen in a quote taken from a commendation written by General Pershing to the Thirtieth Division. The document reproduced by Hagood mentioned three French towns in the text, La Hie, Mineresse, and Vaux Digny. In reality the names are of two towns, La Haie Méneresse and Vaux-Andigny. Hagood’s quotation was left unchanged and a note added to correct the error. Hagood’s punctuation was largely left unchanged , although simple hyphens were replaced by en and em dashes where appropriate and some punctuation has been added for the sake of clarity. The most frequent change of the latter sort was the addition of closing commas in Hagood’s parenthetical phrases. Hagood occasionally placed opening but left out closing commas. In addition, commas have been inserted to separate independent clauses joined by a conjunction. When these minor additions are insufficient to make clear the proper reading, a note has been added. Hagood often referred to individuals by their rank or title and surname alone. The name is reproduced in the text as Hagood wrote it, and an editorial endnote is added to indicate, at a minimum, the full name of the individual . Uncommon abbreviations, for example, K. of C., the abbreviation for Knights of Columbus, the Roman Catholic fraternal organization, also have been identified in notes. However, unconventional or anachronistic capitalizations have been modernized. For example, “Allies” has been substituted for...

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