The Compensations of War

This remarkable chronicle of one man’s rite of passage through the crucible of WWI offers a vividly detailed account of life on the Western Front. In 1917, shortly after the United States’ declaration of war on Germany, Guy Emerson Bowerman, Jr., enlisted in the American army’s ambulance service. Like other young ambulance drivers―Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, Cowley―Bowerman longed to “see the show.” For seventeen months, until the armistice of November 1918, Bowerman kept an almost daily di