An American soldier named Wayne, serving in France during World War I, sent this letter to his “folks.” It exposes a great deal about his personal experience and the larger conflict in which he was a participant—from machine guns to rations; from the Red Cross to the Marines; from the front lines to the trenches; from illness to death. He offered a detailed eyewitness description of war and its atrocities, using language reflective of the time and conflict, including referring to German soldiers as “Huns” and a single German soldier as “Fritz.”
Text adapted from “Teaching Difficult Topics with Primary Sources” in the November/December 2011 National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication Social Education.
