Duane Bedell

Fragments Missouri to Allerey Duane Bedell

This is the story of one man, a drafted Missouri farmer, and his experience in the Great War told in his own words. It is estimated that over 20 million people died in the four years of WWI. It was the first war in which Napoleonic tactics met the slaughter made possible by industrial age weapons capable of the "mass destruction" that was to become the watch phrase of the twentieth century. It is inconceivable to many modern day readers that a single battle, the Battle of the Somme, could produce twenty thousand casualties in one day for the British Army alone. This was the scale of WWI. There are 51 pieces of correspondence, some incomplete and others undated. The letters and postcards represent small fragments of a man's life over a year's period. The letters are presented as written, including misspellings with grammar and punctuation lapses uncorrected.