num_pages: 549
description:  The Last of the Doughboys is more than simply a war story: It is a moving meditation on character grace aging and memory.In 2003 85 years after the armistice it took Richard Rubin months to find just one living American veteran of World War I. But then he found another. And another. Eventually he managed to find dozens aged 101 to 113 and interview them. All are gone now.A decade-long odyssey to recover the story of a forgotten generation and their Great War led Rubin across the United States and France through archives private collections and battlefields literature propaganda and even music. But at the center of it all were the last of the last the men and women he met: a new immigrant drafted and sent to France whose life was saved by a horse; a Connecticut Yankee who volunteered and fought in every major American battle; a Cajun artilleryman nearly killed by a German aeroplane; an 18-year-old Bronx girl drafted to work for the War Department; a machine-gunner from Montana; a Marine wounded at Belleau Wood; the 16-year-old who became Americas last WWI veteran; and many many more.They were the final survivors of the millions who made up the American Expeditionary Forces nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first century. Self-reliant humble and stoic they kept their stories to themselves for a lifetime then shared them at the last possible moment so that they and the World War they won  the trauma that created our modern world  might at last be remembered. You will never forget them.
language: English
title: The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War
publisher: Mariner Books