Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
YANKS
A. E. F. VERSE
FOREWORD
The A. E. F. was about the most sentimentaloutfit that ever lived. Most of it—so it seemedto anyone who served on the staff of The Starsand Stripes—wrote poetry. All of it read poetry.“The Army’s Poets” column, in which somehundred thousand lines of verse were printedduring the course of the Army newspaper’sexistence, was re-read, cut out, sent home,pinned or pasted up in dugouts, Adrian barracksand mess shacks, laughed over and, in all likelihood,wept over.
It was good verse. Occasionally the metrewas out of joint, the rhymes faulty, the wholemechanism awry, but it was good verse for allthat. For it rang true, every syllable of it,however the scansion may have halted or theexpression blundered. It was inspired by mudand cooties and gas and mess-kits and Boche77’s and home and mother, all subordinated to avidetermination to stick it through whatever thetime and pains involved.
Various anthologies of war verse have appearedin America. Nearly all have consistedalmost wholly of the work of non-combatantpoets—indeed of professionals—who wrotesmoothly, visioned the horror with facile accuracyfor what it was, and interpreted well—forpeople who didn’t get to the war. Yanks isthe work of men who got there. It is a sourcebook of A. E. F. emotion.
Yanks is composed entirely of selections fromthe verse published in The Stars and Stripesduring the nine months of its pre-armisticecareer, and seven months before the Army newspaper,according to the pledge of its editors, was“folded away, never to be taken out again.”The profits from the original edition were tohave been used to buy fruit and delicacies forAmerican sick and wounded in overseas hospitals,and would have been but for the decision of theJudge Advocate General of the A. E. F. who,after the publication and sale of the volume,refused to permit the expenditure of the proceedsbecause