The American Stephen Crane (1871-1900), a hard-hitting reporter in New York, a restless spirit and an adventurous type, caused a sensation in America when he published in 1893 The Red Badge of Courage, a war novel that is now considered a classic.

Years later, Crane, after surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Cuba, sought out and found himself in the turbulent Greece of 1897 to cover the war with Turkey as a correspondent for the then-renowned New York Journal. Based largely on his first-hand experience at the front, he wrote this novel, where readers will encounter Rufus Coleman, the editor of a Sunday newspaper in New York, a character modeled after the author himself, who will seek to go to the Greco-Turkish war because he is bored with the editorial position, but mainly to find his beloved Marjorie.

She is in Greece with her family, on a trip organized by her archaeologist father – and former professor of Coleman at the university. The Front Line is, first and foremost, a romance – a rather oblique romance. The true battle takes place in the heart of the hero and/or between him and his beloved, whom he fiercely competes for, but also with a terrifying, unyielding, rigid egoism, until "the last drop of his blood."

The novel certainly presents Greek interest. A yankee at the front in Epirus in 1897 could not be of indifference to us. A foreigner, observing with a detached eye, looks at the dusty Athens of the late 19th century, with its rudimentary comforts, the trains that take a century to reach their destination, the Greeks themselves who shout and chatter incessantly, who brag about everything and lie at the slightest provocation, who show off as soon as a foreigner pays them the slightest attention, but who are willing to help even under the most difficult circumstances.

In other words, the general image of the Greeks is not flattering in essence – and how could it be in Greece in 1897? Moreover, in the context of a humiliating national defeat? Only the natural beauty of the country is preserved, and of course, its glorious ancient past.

EXTRACT FROM THE AFTERWORD BY ILIAS MAGLINS