In 1993 at the Gettysburg College, he found himself in the library, searching for information about his great-uncle who had been killed in World War I. There, he stumbled on a book that described the conflict. He noticed a marginalia inscribed by the book’s late owner, Major Harry D. Parkin.

“The veteran was a member of the U.S. 79th Division that fought to bring the war to an end in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive,” Walker writes in the introduction to his forthcoming book, “Betrayal at Little Gibraltar: A German Fortress, a Treacherous American General, and the Battle to End World War I.”

“The major had helped lead the assault to capture the butte of Montfaucon, the site of a top-secret German observatory protected by an underground fortress. In several places, Parkin’s marginalia took issue with the book’s conclusion about the attack and challenged readers to turn to the back of the book to learn the truth.”

There, Parkin, inserted an affidavit, testifying that Gen. Robert E. Lee Bullard, one of John J. Pershing’s senior generals, did not support the attack on Montfaucon, a deliberate act that caused the death of many American soldiers.

Walker, at first was skeptical of Parkin’s charges. “Surely, I reasoned,” Walker wrote. “Parkin was mistaken. No American general would refuse to assist his fellow soldiers.”

He looked into Gen. Pershing’s memoirs to see whether the attack on Montfaucon was mentioned and found a brief description of the attack. Pershing wrote that a “misinterpretation of orders” had resulted in failure to capture the Mount of Falcon on the crucial first day of the battle.

Considering that Gen. Pershing was known to be reticent to acknowledge problems or cast blame in his memoirs, for Walker it was good grounds to go on the hunt for facts and the truth.

For 20 years, since his discovery of Parkin’s affidavit, Walker pursued his aim with great vigor to shed light on the battle that caused 122,000 American casualties. After his retirement from the College of William & Mary, where he served as associate vice president for public affairs, Walker devoted full time to researching what was called “America’s bloodiest foreign battle ever and the 100-year-old shocking cover-up at its heart.”

“I grew accustomed to the dust of archives, haunted old bookstores in search of critical volumes, interviewed sons and grandsons of soldiers killed in France: stood in the trenches of the Hindenburg Line; and even climbed into dank bunkers of Montfaucon where light never shines. Seldom did I encounter a blind alley.

“Eventually these discoveries enabled me to determine the truth about the 79th Division, to solve the mystery of Montfaucon, and to demonstrate that long-forgotten marginalia can prove the proposition that, ‘The communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.'”

What Walker has discovered and retells in a masterfully constructed narrative is the story how and why the American forces in their assault on Montfaucon become bogged down, a delay that cost untold thousands of American lives.

“Years of archival research and uncovered documents demonstrate that the actual cause of the failure was the disobedience of a senior American officer, Lieutenant Gen. Robert E. Lee Bullard, who subverted orders to assist the U.S. 79th Division,” Walker said in an interview with the Lake Placid News and the Virginia Gazette.

His book is being published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on May 10. 2016. but can be pre-ordered on Amazon and other outlets.

Frank Shatz lives in Williamsburg, Va. and Lake Placid. His column was reprinted with permission from the Virginia Gazette. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” a compilation of his selected columns.