From "Poilu" To "Yank," [Illustrated Edition]

Book excerpt: Contains 17 illustrations that the author took whilst in France. William Yorke Stevenson was one of a hardy bunch of American volunteers who joined the French army as an ambulance driver and was, indeed, a driving force behind American aid for the many wounded soldiers. As he was initially posted to the Verdun sector he would see the effects of some of the worst fighting on the entire Western Front which he recounted in his first book “At the Front in a Flivver”. His experiences continue in this volume which carries the action into 1917 and the further bloody battles that the French undertook to retake the ground lost to the Germans in 1916. Needless to say the casualties were horrific and Stevenson and his unit would show great courage in ferrying the injured from the frontlines to the hospitals in the rear. With the entrance of the United States into the lists on the Allied side, Stevenson and his men found themselves part of the official American effort, and passed from being a “Poilu” (a traditional name for a French infantryman - literally “hairy one”) to a “Yank”. A vivid and well-written account of service in the American Ambulance Corps with the French during the First World War.