well. What was most exciting was that they were written, not in an elevated, formal tone, but in a cool, concise, dispassionate voice, spiced with slangy soldiers' dialogue, French villagers' patois, and filled with as many small particulars of life as any of the finest soldier-diaries I had read." The collection, which is written in an experimental form truly unique in the 800-year history of the sonnet, traces Wyeth's service as a 2nd Lieutenant and military intelligence officer assigned to the 33rd U.S. Infantry Division from receiving orders at Camp Upton to embark on a troop transport bound for France, during the ocean voyage, and through his journey into the firing line. At the time of his enlistment, Wyeth fluently spoke and read several languages and was a recent graduate of Princeton University, where his circle of friends had included Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. On 8 August 1918, the first day of the Battle of Amiens, was later described by General Erich Ludendorff as "Der Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres" ("The blackest day of the German Army"). Enormous numbers of German enlisted men, whose will to continue fighting had been shattered, surrendered voluntarily or retreated en masse. German officers who tried to rally their men were showered with the kind of insults union members usually reserved for strikebreakers and were accused of trying to needlessly prolong the war. However, the otherwise rapid Allied advance ran into a very serious obstacle; "a bare seventy-five-foot-high ridge" in an oxbow bend of the Somme River near the village of Chipilly. The German soldiers on Chipilly Ridge were able to command a wide field to the south of the Somme River and poured forth devastating machine gun and artillery fire that kept the Australian Corps pinned down at Le Hamel. The job of taking Chipilly Ridge was assigned to 3 Battalions of Doughboys from Wyeth's Division. According to B.J. Omanson, "Their attack took place at 5:30 p.m.and, despite heavy machine gun and artillery fire pouring down on them from Chipilly Ridge, the Americans could not be driven back. They repeatedly pressed the assault until the northern half of the ridge and southern end of nearby Gressaire Wood were taken. Continuing the assault the following day, they took the rest of Gressaire Wood and by day's end were in possession of seven hundred German prisoners, thirty artillery pieces, one aircraft, and more than