As it was both uncontroversial and common practice at the time, Sims founded gynecology through many experimental operations upon enslaved black women without anesthesia.

[14] In his sonnet Camp Upton to Hoboken: Secret Troop Movement,[15] Wyeth describes how, in the early morning of May 16, 1918, he and his fellow soldiers boarded a railroad train in Yaphank and arrived in New York City.

[16] In his sonnet Brest: The Waterway, Wyeth recalled the sight of French and Breton civilians enthusiastically waving and cheering over the arrival of his division.

[17] Because Brest's waterfront, with its "regiments of streetwalkers" and regular drunken brawls between sailors, was considered "the scourge of the provost-marshal", Wyeth's division was diverted to barracks.

[16] In his sonnet The Train from Brest, Wyeth describes listening to the bickering of his fellow Doughboys accompanied by "the clank of iron beating a rackety tune."

When the train arrived at the Gare Montparnasse, however, a British Army staff officer delivered new orders reassigning the 33rd Division to Oisemont.

"[22] That evening, Wyeth watched in the Mercerie of Oisemont as a Scottish regimental band, playing bagpipes, passed by with "kilts flapping while the drumsticks thump and fly," followed by fascinated French civilians.

As the trains finally stopped arriving in Oisemont, Wyeth strolled down a nearby hillside and tried to sleep, while eyeing "those frail trees and the town's naïve profile.

While out on a nighttime carouse with his fellow Doughboys, Wyeth and his buddies found a village café and marched inside despite the protests of the proprietress, who told them that her business was closed.

"[28] On the afternoon of September 14, 1918, while the men of the 33rd U.S. Division were stationed at Fromereville near Verdun, Wyeth was taking a shower with a group of bickering Doughboys when he heard the cry, "Air Raid!"

There, he watched as a Fokker D VII, flown by Unteroffizier Hans Heinrich Marwede from Jasta 67's aerodrome at Marville, attacked and set on fire three French observation balloons.

[32] Wyeth delayed his return to Princeton until the following year by claiming, "a percentage of disability," that required recuperating at his older brother's home in Palm Beach, Florida.

According to the obituary of Jane Marion MacLean, her tutors during the years in Rapallo included Max Beerbohm, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Gerhard Hauptmann.

[33] Both Gioia and Omanson suspect that it was in Rapallo and under the influence of Ezra Pound's poetic philosophies of Modernism and Imagism that Wyeth wrote the sonnets that comprise his only poetry collection.

According to Gioia, "One assumes - and in the absence of documentary evidence this can remain only an assumption - that the young Wyeth kept a detailed journal during the war that later served as the basis of his book.

[36] According to Gioia, the fact that Wyeth's collection was published so soon before the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression meant that This Man's Army soon slid into obscurity.

In May 1932, Wyeth had a chance encounter with Scottish painter Duncan Grant, who was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, at Cassis-sur-Mer on the French Riviera.

Grant urged Wyeth to study painting at the Académie Moderne in Paris and provided him with a letter of introduction to French artist Jean Marchand.

Although there is no concrete proof, there is a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Wyeth may have been spying on Nazi party members for American or British Intelligence.

"[42] He composed sacred music, including Missa Prima which was premiered in 1974 by a 65-voice choir for the centenary of St. Edward's Church in Providence, Rhode Island.

[8] The Princeton alumni organization consistently failed to locate Wyeth and eventually dropped him from the 1915 Class roll, "by mutual consent.

[2] In 2019, Omanson wrote, "When Dana Gioia first approached the Wyeth family in 2008 to learn more about their 'Uncle John', and to request permission to reprint his sonnets, they confessed that -- as well as they had known him -- they had no idea that he had ever published a book of poems.

"[44] During the early 1990s, independent scholar BJ Omanson found a copy of This Man's Army inside a used bookstore in Morgantown, West Virginia.

[45] While subsequently researching at his local university library, Omanson discovered a few positive reviews of This Man's Army, but nothing about its author's life or identity.

[46] Of the notable literary critics Omanson contacted, only Dana Gioia, with whom he had already been corresponding about the New Formalist Movement in American poetry, expressed any interest in Wyeth.