Amos N. WILDER. 1895-1993. Brother of Thornton Wilder. Served in American Field Service in the Argonne and west of Verdun in 1917, and on the Serbian Front and Salonika later that year. Served with A Battery, 17th Field Artillery, Second Division, AEF from January until the Armistice, participating in the following engagements: Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont, and the Argonne. Winner of the 1923 Yale Series of Younger Poets contest for his war poems. Later wrote extensively of the relation of religion to modern poetry, religion and the arts.

As a young man, Amos Wilder, the distinguished New Testament scholar and poet, served as an ambulance driver and corporal in the Army`s 17th Field Artillery of the 2nd Division during World War I. His journals and letters home (including correspondence with his brother, Thornton Wilder) form the basis of this book of reminiscences about his experiences, one of the few wartime memoirs that eloquently articulates and interprets the common soldier`s point of view.


Battle-Retrospect and Other Poems , (Yale University Press, 1923).

Arachne: Poems , (Yale University Press, 1928).

Armageddon Revisited: A World War I Journal , (Yale University Press, 1994).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
from “Armageddon: Foret de Villers-Cotterets, July 18, 1918"

[author’s note: “The crux and turning-point of the World War is usually assigned to the dawn of July 18, 1918. At that time, after a feverish mobilization in the great woods near Soissons of Highlander, Moroccan, and other units, including the first and second American divisions, General Mangin, under Marshall Foch’s orders, attacked eastward, threatening the German Marne salient. The desperate rush to the front in the great beech forests during that rainy night and the attack at 4:35 remain one of the outstanding epic actions of the war. The overtones of the event and its portentous significance obscurely felt by those who took part in it.”