This a literal transcription of the diary kept by my father, Benjamin Edgar Cruzan, as he served with the American Expeditionary Forces during the Great War. Though coarse in appearance and betrayed by his third-grade education, this diary testifies to his powers of observation; that he was ever the student.
     Like his father before him who served with the Union Forces at Vicksburg, Jackson and Missionary Ridge, Ben Cruzan was an unabashed patriot; a nineteenth-century idealist in the early light of the twentieth-century since grown cynical.
     While some may note that the Great War has been mythologized by such classical memorists as Siegfried Sassoon, it was ordinary men like my father who, with roots deep in a growing and vital nation, memorialized the Great War as historical experience.
     Before he passed away, my father told me that he often regretted never having asked much about his father's experiences during the Civil War. What is never told, what is never heard, what is never written, is lost.
     My father's experiences shall always remain a part of the texture of my daily life.