[Illustration: He’s been on every front from Château-Thierry to the Rhine CLR, Baldwin Jr. Coblenz—1919] YANKS A. E. F. VERSE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN “THE STARS AND STRIPES” THE OFFICIAL NEWSPAPER OF THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES ❧ G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1919 COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS [Illustration] To THE CHILDREN OF FRANCE FOREWORD The A. E. F. was about the most sentimental outfit that ever lived. Most of it—so it seemed to anyone who served on the staff of _The Stars and Stripes_—wrote poetry. All of it read poetry. “The Army’s Poets” column, in which some hundred thousand lines of verse were printed during the course of the Army newspaper’s existence, was re-read, cut out, sent home, pinned or pasted up in dugouts, Adrian barracks and mess shacks, laughed over and, in all likelihood, wept over. It was good verse. Occasionally the metre was out of joint, the rhymes faulty, the whole mechanism awry, but it was good verse for all that. For it rang true, every syllable of it, however the scansion may have halted or the expression blundered. It was inspired by mud and cooties and gas and mess-kits and Boche 77’s and home and mother, all subordinated to a determination to stick it through whatever the time and pains involved. Various anthologies of war verse have appeared in America. Nearly all have consisted almost wholly of the work of non-combatant poets—indeed of professionals—who wrote smoothly, visioned the horror with facile accuracy for what it was, and interpreted well—for people who didn’t get to the war. _Yanks_ is the work of men who got there. It is a source book of A. E. F. emotion. _Yanks_ is composed entirely of selections from the verse published in _The Stars and Stripes_ during the nine months of its pre-armistice career, 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 to have been used to buy fruit and delicacies for American sick and wounded in overseas hospitals, and would have been but for the decision of the Judge Advocate General of the A. E. F. who, after the publication and sale of the volume, refused to permit the expenditure of the proceeds because of a technicality.