The reasons behind the Great War and its profound effect on the attitudes and ideals of Australia are intertwined with intimate personal details in this beautifully constructed narrative.

    The irony was made more bitter as black troops struggled with the racist policies of the American military itself. The overwhelming majority were assigned to labor companies; those selected for combat were under-trained, poorly equipped, ad commanded by white officers who insisted on black inferiority. Still, African Americans performed admirably under fire: the 369th Infantry regiment was in continuous combat loner than any other American unit, and was the first Allied regiment to cross the Rhine in the offensive against Germany.The Unknown Soldiers, the only full-scale examination of the subject, chronicles the rigid segregation; the limited opportunities for advancement; the inadequate training, food, medical attention, housing, and clothing; the verbal harassment and physical abuse, including lynchings; the ingratitude, unemployment, and unprecedented racial violence that greeted their return. The Unknown Soldiers is an unforgettable, searing study of those wartime experiences that forced African Americans to realize that equality and justice could never be earned in Jim Crow America, but only wrested from its strangling grip.

    Florence Farmborough was a 27-year-old Englishwoman employed as a governess to a family in Moscow when war broke out. She volunteered with the Red Cross and found herself at the forefront of military events in Poland, Austria, and Rumania. She witnessed the effects of Lenin and Trotsky's bloody revolution, and of Russia's collapse into chaos and civil war. Illustrated with nearly 48 of Farmborough's photographs.