The Desert of Wheat: Classic American Western Novel

Hero Kurt Dorn is the son of a German immigrant, which puts father and son at odds during the war. Most of the book is taken up with Dorn's fight against the I.W.W., a socialist labor force that's backed by German money. (A double whammy as the two things America hated most at this time was Germany AND socialists!) It's not until the last third or so of the book that Kurt goes off to war. Author Zane Grey, through his fictional character, is able to go off on a tangent about American women going ga-ga over a uniform and throwing themselves at men. (Like that's never happened before.) Once in the trenches of France, Dorn - who had been so anxious to go kill Germans - suddenly realizes the evils of war and the wrongness of wholesale slaughter. Not that that stops him from killing a few Germans anyway.