I didn't know much about World War One.

I grew up learning about World War Two.
I watched movies, television shows, played with plastic army men and knew my grandparents had served in that War.

It is a flat shame and downright failure of my own and my schooling history that I do not more about World War One than I do.

Jeff Shaara authors a story that is riveting, vivid and tactile.
To The Last Man is an excellent book.

The ease with which he moves from theatre to theatre and personality to personality is remarkable. This novel will take you into the air above France and Germany in canvas and wire bi-planes into the life of both a Lafayette Escadrille pilot and Germany's most decorated Ace.

This novel will put you into the desolate muddy quagmire that was no man's land lined with trenches of troops.It will put you in the soaked, crusted boots and chigger-ridden uniform of a United States infantryman.

This novel will put you into the offices of commanders both in the United States and Europe.
It will put you in the life of American General John J. Pershing as he leads the United States Army against the enemy and between two distinctly different allied forces.

You will experience both sides of the war - sometimes three or four different sides.

You will marvel at how any pilot survived any mission, much less an entire war.
You will hang on to hope that any foot soldier could survive any offensive much less the war.
You will be amazed at what a true leader can accomplish in the face of a dread adversary with little faithful help and barely, if any, true army at the beginning of it all.

It is amazing to me - and shameful to me that I did not understand this previously - that this war, was waged with ancient methods of combat, at grave sacrifice, with the lives of an entire generation.

It is stunning to me that this War ushered in not only a new world, but a brand new balance on the planet and indeed, this war to end all wars, set the stage in fact for World War Two.

Freedom is not free.
We should not forget these men...

Jeff Shaara's homepage.