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Mud and Guts (A Look At The Common Soldier of the American Revolution) |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > American Revolution > Item 222
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Mud and Guts (A Look At The Common Soldier of the American Revolution)
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by Bill Mauldin
Sales Rank: 782816
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$9.50
At Amazon
on 8-1-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 57 pages
Published by: U.S. Department of the Interior 1978
ASIN: B000P8ZP3O
Product Description
Interesting view into the American Revolution soldier with drawings by the author.
Reader Reviews
Legendary WWII cartoonist Bill Mauldin was approached by the National Park Service to put a book together for the 1976 Bicentennial celebration. The book would depict the life of the Continental soldier during the American Revolution and include cartoons in the style Mauldin made popular in his "Willie and Joe" work from the war years. Bill missed his due date by 2 years, but the results are interesting, if not spectacular. Based on Mauldin's research, "Mud and Glory" attempts to provide a soldier's-eye view of the Revolution. He does this by using his own WWII experiences and projecting them back 200 years. Often, this works well. Mauldin describes the soldier's fatigue and his need to obtain supplies (what the WWII GI called "moonlight requisitioning") from sometimes-unwilling locals. He describes the horror of trenchfoot, evidently so run-of-the-mill in the 18th century that it hardly merited a mention,. He describes tick races in which soldiers matched their best pests against one another. He knows that a soldier sleeps best in the snow with his coat underneath him to slow the snow's melting. He describes the primitive and temperamental nature of the flintlock and the extremes to which a soldier went to keep it dry. Mauldin's cartoons, ironically, are the least interesting part of the book. While he claimed to want to avoid sending Willie and Joe back to the 18th century, that's pretty much what he did -- even to the point of cribbing from his WWII work: the soldier warming his with his feet in a cooking pot mirrors the GI doing the same in his "pot," or helmet. Mauldin's humor is pedestrian at best, and some of his ideas need work. Did Tories really line the back of Old Glory with the Union Jack -- or is this a allegory? And his punch lines are weak. In one, a snowed-over sleeper who wakes to the start of bugle and drummer remarks lamely, "Rabble rousers!" And when "Baron" von Steuben, when drilling a recruit, tells his charge that he "want(s) to hear those rags click!" it's hard to know whether Mauldin is making jokes about the 18th-century Prussian or his 20th-century German counterpart. But Mauldin's writing is humane, witty and interesting. In a few short pages he brought to life the obstinacy of the soldiery, the effeteness of aristocrats like George Washington, and the rugged conditions that combatants faced routinely. And while it's sometimes hard to know where Mauldin's conjectures end and where history begins, it sure helps to hear the perspective of a man who personally endured the life he sets out to depict.
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Mud and Guts (A Look At The Common Soldier of the American Revolution)
Available from Amazon
Price: $9.50
Updated on 8-1-2008.
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