Hell, Heaven, or Hoboken by Christmas

About the Book

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 diary—memoirs 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.

About the Author

Robert Lambert: B.A.; B.S.; M.A.; M.S.; A.B.D. Most of my career has been in the agricultural and environmental sciences. I have worked as a farmer, a crop scout, a soil mapper, a soil geomorphologist, a soil contamination specialist, a lakebed ecologist and an archaeologist. My master's thesis was a statistical study of the interaction between early corn growth and the microclimate which results from variations in the topography. I did not go straight through school with a long term goal in mind. I have had a series of jobs that were phased out over time. Each time that happened I went back to school for retraining. My degrees are in anthropology, agriculture, agricultural education, and physical geography. I was in the Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois studying historical geography. I completed all but dissertation, but ran into a bureaucratic snafu. My level of tolerance for bureaucracy is pretty low, so I just moved on into teaching for a few years. I started reading historical biographies when I was about nine years old, just because I enjoyed it. I was originally a history major in college, but that seemed to take the fun out of it for me, so I switched majors (several times). When I was working on one of my master's degrees at Western Illinois University, I was the only non-ROTC member of the military history club. When my children were in high school, I realized that I was not making enough money to pay for their college without going into a lot of debt, so I retrained one more time. I went to truck driving school, and that is what I have been doing for the last fifteen years. I am currently based in Laredo, Texas, the busiest trucking hub in the nation.