The Iron Division, National Guard of Pennsylvania, in the World War The authentic and comprehensive narrative of the gallant deeds and glorious achievements of the 28th — Reading Notes

The Rhetoric of Will-Power

Proctor repeatedly frames combat endurance as a triumph of will over physical limits. In the Sergy action, he writes that 'it was will-power, more than actual physical endurance, that carried them on.' This phrase recurs as a thematic anchor, but the excerpts show it is not merely a cliché. The author grounds the abstraction in specific stressors: the 109th's night in a wood adjacent to an enemy ammunition dump, where each shell that landed among the trees brought 'relief' because it did not detonate the cache. Proctor's voice here is taut, almost clinical, as he tracks the men's calculation of risk. The will-power motif thus emerges not from empty valorizing but from a narrative that insists on the psychological cost of sustained alertness.

Pace and the Interruption of Rest

The book's structure alternates between set-piece battles and interludes of 'rest' that are anything but restful. After the 110th is relieved, Proctor notes that the men were 'nervous and fidgety' for the first time since their 'bath of steel.' The promised two-day break is consumed by shelling, aerial bombing, and the 'camions sanitaire'—delousing machines that provide hot baths but no real sleep. Proctor's pacing mirrors this: the narrative rushes through the bath sequence with a wry aside about 'careful of his English,' then pivots abruptly to the regiment marching north 'whistling and singing.' These tonal shifts—from grim irony to buoyant resolve—create a rhythm that feels less like official history and more like a diary of cumulative exhaustion.

Command Instability as Narrative Device

Proctor inserts a striking administrative detail into the battle narrative: the 109th had eight regimental commanders in two months. He lists them by name and origin—Colonel Brown, then Coulter, then Ham, noting that 'all except Colonel Brown and Colonel Coulter were regular army men.' This catalog of turnover is presented without editorializing, yet its placement—immediately after the ammunition-dump ordeal—serves as a quiet counterpoint to the 'men of iron' motif. The reader is reminded that the division's identity was shaped not only by the soldiers' will but by a churning command structure. Proctor's voice here is matter-of-fact, but the cumulative effect is to suggest that institutional instability was as constant a companion as enemy fire.

Readers attentive to narrative voice will find Proctor's shifts between official praise and ground-level detail revealing. The book is most compelling when it lets the tension between those registers stand unresolved—when a 'glorious achievement' is immediately undercut by a note about sleeplessness or delousing. The excerpts suggest a chronicler who respects his subjects enough to record both the rhetoric and the reality, even when they pull in opposite directions.

That rainy afternoon, the 28th Division’s willpower weighed heavy as the gray sky, until a footnote about soldiers’ quiet hours sent me wandering. I closed Proctor’s meticulous prose and opened The Red Flower: Poems Written in War Time — A Reader’s Guide, finding the same grit softened into something almost like breath. One book’s echo became another’s hush. Nothing more.