"According to Trout (English, Fort Hays State Univ.), WW I, 'the forgotten war,' occupied a disordered position in US national memory in the decades after the war ended. Public remembrance ranged broadly: one interpretation was that the US had intervened nobly and heroically in a foreign war, performing splendidly and proving itself as a world power; another was that the experience was sordid, hellish, demoralizing, and tragic. The author argues that variations on these themes were as numerous as the 'constituencies'--an assessment he bases on meticulous analysis of art, literature, periodicals, and war memorials. For example, individual works of commemoration--such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and E. M. Viquesney's sculpture Spirit of the American Doughboy --often portray more than one point of view, placing heroism in close juxtaposition with brutality. The deaths and burial sagas of Private First Class William L.

Davis of Kansas and Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt, demonstrate the perplexing responsibilities of the nation to the thousands who had fallen in combat. Trout concludes that the 'forgotten' war is part of the mythology of a narrative that was never able to achieve consistency. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers." -- CHOICE " The strength of [On the Battlefield of Memory] is in its archaeological instincts, its notion that there are layers of memory below the ones we thought we knew about it. It is the business of scholarship to unearth them all if possible. Trout joins Fussell and Hynes in showing historians how that can be done. Not bad company.

[Trout] shows movingly and with great care how the history of emotion is embedded in the history of war and points the way to future scholarship with authority and conviction."-- American Historical Review.