Summary
A celluloid palimpsest of 1917-1918, America's Answer unspools like a fevered charcoal sketch across the Atlantic: khaki waves crashing on French shores, the first half-million Yanks staggering from holds into a landscape already scarred by Verdun’s metallic breath. The camera—an unblinking iron eye—tracks columns that snake through villages whose gables sag under the weight of memory; it lingers on a soldier pinning a postcard of the Statue of Liberty inside a barn scarred by shrapnel, on mules hauling Krupp-chewed caissons past cherry trees blooming as if war were merely rumor. Between marching feet and steam-whistle hymns, the film stitches micro-epiphanies: a Black stevedore from Charleston teaching a Breton porter the Charleston kick, a nurse from Duluth humming “Over There” while blood-soaked bandages flap like failed surrender flags. Grain swarms; emulsion cracks like frozen mud, yet every frame pulses with the raw astonishment of New World innocence colliding with Old World attrition—an archival hallucination where the doughboy’s tin helmet becomes a makeshift chalice for communion wine pressed from Ugni-blanc vines, and the first armistice bells echo through a shattered cathedral whose rose window now frames only sky.
Synopsis
Documentary (part of the Following the Flag to France series) on the arrival in France of the first half-million American troops in the First World War, and their progress.
Director
Edwin F. Glenn
