In 1917, at the height of the First World War, Collier’s Weekly sent the most widely read humorist in America across a submarine-haunted Atlantic to report from France. Ring Lardner — sportswriter, satirist, and the creator of You Know Me Al — cheerfully confessed he knew nothing about war, and was told it had frequently been proved that that had nothing to do with it. My Four Weeks in France (1918) is the deadpan, wisecracking report he brought home. It is a war book almost entirely without battles. Lardner sets out across the ocean dodging German submarines and sizing up his fellow passengers; lands in France and is baffled by the language, the officials, and the strange sights of Paris at war; tries to reach the American camp and breaks down, comically, in the French countryside; looks over the American soldiers and their officers; and finally blunders his way to the British front. At every turn he is defeated not by the enemy but by the eternal red tape of his own side — the permits, the passes, the censors — and out of that endless hurry-up-and-wait he makes one of the funniest pieces of reportage of the war. Beneath the wisecracks runs a quieter, truer book about how a civilian faces a war he can never fully see. Lardner jokes to hold the thing at arm’s length, but the comedy keeps opening onto what it cannot quite make light of — the soldiers, the vast machinery that has swallowed them, the war going on just beyond the last permit he could not obtain. The gap between the joking surface and the real conflict glimpsed beneath it is the book’s deepest and most lasting effect. This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on Lardner’s art and his unlikely war, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.
