This blog is about a man, a railroad, and a war. It is the history, one hundred years later, of EP Dudley’s experience in the 13th Engineers (Railway) during the First World War and covers the period 1917 to 1919. Edwin

At the beginning of August 1914 the world was suddenly and unexpectedly at war. The establishment of alliances and mutual protection agreements in Europe in the preceding decades had been intended to ward off major conflicts by making the consequences

In the late summer of 1914 war in Europe was far from the minds of Americans. To be sure, there were plenty of Americans of European descent, and many not far removed from the “old country.” The turn of the

I’m getting ahead of my story. In fact we need to go back a few years. In 1887 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway began to build a 350-mile line connecting Chicago to Kansas City and on to the

During the first two years of the war in Europe, President Wilson had carefully avoided making any commitments on behalf of the United States. He was careful, even, to avoid assessing blame, insisting that the war was a European matter

On April 24, 1917, shortly after the US declared war on Germany, former French Prime Minister René Viviani arrived in the US as head of a commission to solicit US support for the war. He was accompanied by the famous