Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade
". . . This book is as much a social and cultural, as a military history. There is, for instance, far more about the French villagers among whom the Marines were billeted than you will find in other books about the Marine Brigade. There is more about the rear areas, and movements from one area to the next, with all the complex preparations such movements entailed, than can easily be found elsewhere. And there is of course a good deal of information on the care of mules and wagons, and the duties of teamsters, as well as anecdotes about teamsters and mules.
This book, in other words, is about those aspects of the Marine Brigade’s history which—because they do not bear directly on the fighting—have been largely passed over. But a soldier’s experience of war involves a great deal besides combat, and such “peripheral” experiences are consequential in their own right. They matter. They are an integral part of the full story.
It will never be possible to recover the greater part of my grandfather’s experience of the war—for the most part that experience went with him to the grave. But there are, nevertheless, many aspects of his experience—and of the wider context of that experience—which can be recovered, and this book is the result of a fifty-year quest to seek them out and organize them into an open-ended but still coherent narrative. "
