Hell, Heaven, or Hoboken by Christmas

An American Soldier in the First Gas Regiment

This book chronicles the experiences of a young farm boy from Schuyler County, Illinois, as he participated in the three main American campaigns of World War I, or as it was known then, the Great War. The main body of the book contains the daily entries into his diarymemoirs that he wrote later during the 1970s and my own commentaries. The diary entries are apparent because they are generally dated and presented in a distinctive typeface. Diary entries for February, March, and the first two weeks of April are written in the past tense because they were not written until the second week of April 1918. The end of the diary contains a section where amusing incidents and remarks were recorded. Most of those have been presented in the text in places that seemed to fit the situation the best (for some, it was obvious, and for some, it was just speculation). There is also a section from the diary, which is presented near the end of the book, that was undated, but it seems to have been written during December 1918.