Love and Death in the Great War by Andrew J. Huebner (review)

War is, first and foremost, a family affair in Andrew J. Huebner's engrossing and poignant Love and Death in the Great War. Through detailed case studies of five young adults—three men (two of whom died overseas) and two women—Huebner captures the emotional texture of American war experience one-hundred years ago. Mobilization, he notes, was supposed to strengthen the American family by rescuing the nation's sons from the decadent comforts of industrial civilization, re-instilling their sense of filial obligation, and exposing them to the manly model of the strenuous life upheld by former president (and Rough Rider) Theodore Roosevelt. Or so propagandists promised. In practice, this redemptive narrative came under strain as lengthy separations provoked jealousy and fear, and as African Americans (approximately 370,000 of whom served in a segregated military) learned that the war's salutary effects were never meant for them. Family ties both encouraged national service and at times worked against the motivational rhetoric offered by the state.

With exceptional nuance and writerly grace, Huebner probes the war's affective history, and his five main characters form a compelling sample. One of them—sadly, the least dimensional—is none other than the author's great-uncle, Arthur W. Huebner, a second-generation German American who served in the 33^rd Division of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) and who succumbed to wounds received on November 10, 1918, less than 24 hours before the Armistice. The many ironies that attend Huebner's life and death include the inscription on the tombstone in Watertown, Wisconsin, placed above his repatriated remains: written in the language of his parents' Fatherland, it reads simply, "Gest. in Frankreich." Because their correspondence survived, the other four subjects come across as far more vivid personalities. Huebner follows the wartime experiences of New Orleans native and Red-Cross worker Natalie Vivian Scott, the only American woman to receive the Croix de Guerre with Bronze Star for courage under fire; a pair of chronically insecure sweethearts (and then newlyweds) from Missouri, Eliga and Mae Dees; and Waring Huston, a delicate-looking (and sounding) young man from Selma, Alabama, whose commitment to the code of the Southern Warrior set him on journey that, like Arthur W. Huebner's, ended tragically at the Meuse-Argonne, the bloodiest battle in American history.

Huston's story conveys, in particular, the irresistible power of culturally pervasive models of masculinity and the home. Although patently ill-suited for military life, Huston relentlessly pursued the twin goals of earning a commission and seeing action on the Western Front (after a series of frustrating set-backs, he landed in the 82^nd "All American" Division, the unit that famously included Sergeant Alvin York). The young Alabamian's desire to make his parents and fiancée proud, a desire reinforced by wartime culture at every turn, drove him to excel but also made him miserable. His wartime letters to his parents—his mother, especially—express almost unendurable homesickness and feelings of isolation. More than anything, he feared being forgotten by those he loved. In other words, for Huston, going to war for the sake of the family paradoxically undermined his confidence in those closest to him.

Likewise, the letters back and forth between Eliga, a Regular in the AEF's 6^th Division, and Mae Dees give voice to anxieties and tensions that broader accounts of Americans in World War I rarely make us feel with such intensity. The couple's correspondence forms a torturous record of long-distance quarrels and fleeting reconciliations. In Eliga's case, suspicion that Mae might take up with a "slacker" in his absence prompted one paranoid accusation after another, interwoven with his chauvinistic admonitions that she not accept a full-time job as a school teacher. Mae feared, in turn, that her long-absent partner would be unfaithful. When Eliga came clean and sent her a bundle of letters and photographs that had he...