WWI AS SEEN THROUGH BINGHAM COUNTY SOLDIER'S WORDS
The Bingham County contribution to WWI
8/19/202622 min read
In early April of 1917, the US formally declared war on Germany and its allies, thus officially entering a conflict already three years old. Nineteen thousand Idahoans would serve in the ensuing conflict, 782 losing their lives—including thirteen from Bingham County overseas (five in battle: John Bagley; Guy Faulconer; John Hepworth; Edward Francis McKenna; Joseph Walters), six in US camps of the flu (presumably,) and one on the ocean between continents.
The Spanish Flu would take a larger toll than war on the Idaho population: 2300 died after that virus hit in September of 1918. Idahoans at that time, were under a two-pronged siege: first on the battlefield, later on the medical front.
It takes time to get the war machine moving, so the first draft didn't take place until early June, when all men aged 21-31 were called to register. Two more calls would come before the war ended—early June of 1918 for those too young to register the prior year, and later in September when the draft list expanded to include all those men aged eighteen to forty-five. Essential workers would be exempt from the draft, including men whose children, wives or parents were dependent on them for support. Being married itself, the Draft Board emphasized, was not sufficient reason for exemption.
The government offered a twenty-five dollar reward for to expose any man avoiding the draft. Bob Akers, a Taber farmhand, was one such resister, intending to flee the area with his seventeen year old girlfriend. He was apprehended but later escaped. Another resident, a burly sheep rancher with five thousand animals, appealed his initial call: What am I going to do with my sheep? he wrote, to which the board replied, "Set them loose, someone will pick them up." Earl Farmer wrote home to tell of a more drastic method of draft avoidance: "One soldier shot himself in the shoulder to avoid coming over on ship. He's looking at 25 years (in prison)."
380 Bingham County men registered in the first call, but many had already enlisted. A dozen men had joined the Marines in May and three were enlisted in the signal corp. Several Springfielders signed up for the ambulance corp. Hazel Nelson, from Sterling, an LDS nursing school graduate, enlisted early in the war effort but her call was delayed until September of 1918 due to her crops needing to be harvested. She would serve at Fort Riley in Kansas as a nurse where she witnessed as many as a hundred patients die each day due to the flu—one of the first cases in the world, it is now known, occurred across that state in Haskell County in March of 1918. Older county residents might recall Nelson's brother, Art, who ran the Springfield tavern on the lake in the 1950s and 1960s—later it became Luke's Island and then Homer's.
The war machine slowly ground on. 65 local men left in early August for Camp Fremont in California, a thousand well-wishers sending them off at the depot while a band played patriotic airs. Other draftees reached their points of departure later in 1917. Lewis Fackrell wrote home in late December and described his experience. We arrived in Jacksonville December 9, he wrote, came out to Camp Johnston the next morning...rode a Pullman all the way, six days and nights on the train thru twelve states. "I would not trade twenty acres of our farm for all of the south," he reflected. "They plow with one mule." The camp was in the process of being built, 100 new barracks underway to house fifty thousand soldiers, a number Fackrell wrote, "looks like a million to me." At least seven other county men accompanied him to Camp Johnston.Frank Carmody was one of the 1917 batch of soldiers whose training ended in November at Camp Lewis in Washington. He was elated to see females after so being cooped up so long with other young men. "The ladies of the YWCA have opened the...Hostess House," he wrote. "A very elaborately decorated place with large plush chairs and an air of homelike refinement. It is intended for ...relatives of the fellows of the camp...i was over there the other evening and talked to the first woman i have spoken to since coming to the camp. it was rather a pleasant sensation after being isolated so long...you know fellows are inclined to develop into savages completely, if not subjected to the feminine influence occasionally." Fremont Kutnewsky, who had worked at the local newspaper before going to the military, described a similar respite at his station. The YMCA (the forerunner of the USO that was established in 1941) had given a "big treat (of) high class vaudeville" that had comedians and movie stars.
Other local men deployed elsewhere in the US. Sam Mulville was near Key West in October the following year and visited the nearby Danish West indies (now known as the Virgin Islands, which was purchased by the US in 1917). There, he watched sponge divers: "The negro dives for them," he wrote. "Cleans them, prepares them for market in fact nearly everything yet he doesn't seem to have but little, his existence is founded on how much the white men feel like throwing him...he is more an economic slave than in our country." Mulville's trip back to Key West involved a hurricane. "I opened my mouth to shout but wind pushed words back in my mouth," he wrote. He described the 'old ship' he was aboard as camouflaged, "look(ing) like an African zebra pulling a Barnum and Bailey circus wagon." He also remarked on the 'Cuban senoritas' camouflage: "you can't tell whether the object of (your) gaze is a Castillean woman of high lineage or a dusky daughter of Ham." According to Mulville, over two thirds of his shipmates contracted the Spanish flu, but he did not.
Local man Warren Kent had departed with his company early in 1918 from Hoboken on the 'Madawaska', which was formerly a German passenger liner named Konig Wilhelm II. The ship was just one of many interned at US harbors early in the war and was said to be one of the Kaiser's favorites since he took his wedding trip aboard it. The Madawaska was accompanied by two other ships and the cruiser 'Montana' that together formed a convoy to Europe. Kent's ship faced the coastal danger zone the last two sailing days alone with five torpedo boats. "I did not see a sub," Kent wrote. "But one was reported."
Once in Europe, Kent's shipmates and he rested briefly at the coast before taking a train to their post. He remarked on how small the French train cars were—they held only eight horses or forty men, and being slatted were 'pretty cold' since it was snowing. Kent worked for military transportation services so took numerous trips to the front. He wrote of an instance when his truck was concealed in a shelter while he waited for dusk to fall before he made the last few miles of his trip. "I had moved on but a few minutes when a German aviator dropped a bomb on the exact spot where my truck had been parked."
Some young men of Bingham County who went overseas spent time in England and Scotland, but most spent their deployment primarily in France and found the country a strange sight. L.W. Defenbach wrote that "the little village I am in today does not boast of anything as modern as a street light." Several found the train size laughable. William Clough wrote that "The cars and engines over here remind me of toy trains." He did, however, appreciate his accommodations for a while, being "billeted in a chateau of a countess's...surrounded by high fence and a moat."
Harry Horton also found the French farming strange. "They plow with one horse, lead up and down the field by women folk. These people would be dumbfounded to see a plow outfit in the states." Regarding the French mode of transportation, he remarked that "their buggies just have two wheels made up high with a door in the back and steps to the ground...They don't look like much to me but these people think they are something very fine" hitching a donkey to one and driving with as much pride as if they had an auto.
Others thought the area picturesque. Dows Smith remarked that "they have pretty canals running through the country and canal boats that they pull with horses." Frank Carmody particularly appreciated the scenery: "We are in one of those villages like we used to read about last year in 'Les Miserables'...We have everything we need for the setting of 'Gray's Elegy'....just open up any of Hugo's books at the steenth page and you will find this village described better than i could possibly do." He "thought (he) saw the 'old codger Parigot' by the village fountain with his porcelain pipe in his mouth" and wrote that the "French still farm with a 'cradle' harvester (a combination hand scythe and comb like gatherer)" and "think more of convenience than sanitation." He was somewhat astounded to see the "dwelling, barn, chicken house, hayloft and manure pile all under same roof...(you) step out the dining room and find yourself in the stable." The women washed clothes in the communal washroom using the same water and he had yet to see a bathtub. "Women, children, and old men are doing the harvesting," he wrote. "We'll have to give credit to a great many 'field heroes' after the war." He also noted a distinct difference in community relations to its land. "Instead of living out on the farm like our rustics do these people live in villages and go out to the farms in the morning and come in at night."
Tharin Christiansen also found the French countryside beautiful. "You can talk about your pretty places but it can't compare with all the beautiful scenery here," he wrote. "The farms are all on small lots on an acre or more and you never see a fence just dikes shoveled up four or five feet high." He thought the trains toylike. "(They) are like a child's dream of playing railroad, with a spool on a string, the cars are a little larger than the freight wagons at home."
Some considered the French population backwards. Omey Dyer wrote that "everything here is different from our country. They build their fences with dirt, and all the fields being small, this makes them look like they are surrounded by hedges...The sizes of the farms will never cease being a joke to me, they are about as big as our gardens." Fremont Kutnewsky described his village setting as "truly ancient. The water is lifted in buckets from from stonelike wells...everything is made of quarried rock and cement plaster." All roofing was red tile. "They cook over open fires," he wrote. "Even in restaurants and hotels."
Kutnewsky detailed the area further, describing the prevalence of a pygmy brand of burro used for draught work. "There will be a great big bulky, two wheeled cart, a load, a driver, and almost hidden between two gigantic halves a bit of a donkey, ...looking more fit for circus clowning than actual work." They were "not much bigger than a good sized mastiff." Many boys remarked on the footwear. "Quite a number, especially children," Kutnewsky wrote, "Wear wooden shoes. A manufacturer is next door to me now, where i can see blocks of wood destined for the unfortunate wearers, ready to be scooped out and sold. There are also low sabots, slippers of wood with a strap on them, forcing wearer to shuffle along as if on roller skates."
Away from the trenches, the men spent their free hours in the rurality. Kenneth Keverin and two others "went out for a stroll ....and climbed a high ridge covered with pines and rocks. We looked around the valley and spied a cathedral spire...and heard the bell ring so we decided to walk over and visit the burg. (It) is a little mountainside village surrounded by hills...with a little creek running through the heart of town. ducks and geese...swim within a stone's throw of the city banque." He remarked that 'the French plant pine trees for lumber as we would corn" and complained that "the French think all Americans are millionaires and charge us beaucoup."
Fremont Kutnewsky wrote home from "a cafe in a village, having bicycled," remarking that "wine and a good dinner is ninety cents. French omelets are delicious wherever found and (their) dark bread hits the right spot." But not even Kutnewsky, who enjoyed the French, was fully appreciate of all aspects they exhibited. "We stopped at a cafe on the way home," he wrote. "Its floor was dirt, the stools without a back and a foot tall. The aubergiste (innkeeper) broke the eggs for our omelette in front of us and threw the shells on the ground. laid a long loaf of bread on the table but without a knife." The wine was "about like diluted vinegar and charged as soda pop." Its cost—thirty cents a quart.
Luther King, writing in June of 1919 and expecting to be sent home in two months. called his biggest struggle of the war not the trenches but the "Battle of Paris (between cognac and vin blanc) which 'hasn't gotten me down yet." He added that "a 'large army of mademoiselles' participated in that battle."
The language was a problem for most area soldiers, Kutnewsky being an exception. "I picked me a quiet cafe this morning," he wrote. "And tried reproducing a sketch i made on the boat, ...but first the patrone, then the flies, then a soldier or two...all (bothered) me so I gave up. The language is coming to me little by little...I catch parts of conversations on the street and can understand most of what is said to me directly." He had "made acquaintance with a charming french girl" a dressmaker, and gone with her to a concert. "In this part of France," he explained, "People speak a pure form," and he hoped "to go to a French part of the (front) line to be near these people and hear their pretty language spoken."
Others found the language more cumbersome. Frank Carmody found French difficult. '"I go about with my dictionary in the alert position," he wrote. "I know 'no comprende' and oui monsieur' but little more." Floyd King wrote that to talk French a man has to "use his hands, arms and shoulders too much" but "I have picked up a few French words."
The preparation for battle had its own brand of dis-ease that wouldn't reach the intensity of trench warfare but still weighed on the soldiers. Kutnewsky wrote in August of 1918 how "it was amusing to hear the cussing when we were given the rations, which it is a court martial offense to get rid of except in emergency. There is a...two pound can of bully beef, four packages of hardtack, and a tin of coffee, sugar and salt...it makes an unwieldy pack." He described the boredom of waiting: "We lie about day times on our beds ready for the 101 calls to formations, at which we get information meant for a few, or instructions about inspections. Every time the first sergeant's whistle blows there comes a volley of drowsy curses."
L.B Kimble's description of the soldier's pack worn into battle was much more detailed: "One part resembles suspenders, which hold the pack." In it were "blankets, shirts, shoes, underwear, gloves, half of a shelter tent, toilet articles, and mess kit." Around your waist you were to have a belt with canteen, first aid packet, cartridges, and 'a big forty-five'. It weighed seventy five pounds, that got "heavier as you go." He wrote that "ten thousand of us (were) ordered to pack up and get out at two in the morning in pouring rain." They hiked seven miles, all but two up an incline. A hundred of the ten thousand were unable to complete march, and Kimble noted that he was tempted to join them in the support wagons that picked them up.
Frank McKenna, who would fight alongside Kutnewsky, wrote of entering the battefield. He "felt rather queer before we started over but as soon as we did I felt just like i was on a rabbit hunt. I don't know if i killed any Huns (Germans), I know I tried awfully hard to get some." A month later, in the thick of battle, he wrote that "one month at the front will change one's mind. America will be a different country when the Yanks come home, and the men will be altogether different." Another local soldier, Maine France, had written in June of surviving "thirteen days in the trenches without a scratch. They had us go through a gas chamber today and take our masks off in it and it sure makes big tears come to your eyes." Returning from the front he saw an American girl and she spoke to him. "You don't know how good it sounded to hear her speak our language," he wrote.
Cleanliness wasn't generally an option. In August, Herb Neider had his first bath in a month. John Wiese, in October, said,"I didn't have any of my clothes off for thirty days." He had lain in a foxhole with just his slicker, ammo and gun. "I got six holes shot in my pack and belt and got thru without a single scratch," he wrote. "Talk about hard work, if you got to work twenty hours a day and got one meal a day you consider yourself lucky." Long periods of time without sanitation of any sort were common, and even longer stretches without pay still moreso.
The summer of 1918 would prove to be some of the heaviest American fighting and instrumental in ushering the Allies closer toward ending the war. Leslie Nielsen wrote home to tell how "we have had over 3000 (wounded men) in the time we have been running (our train). ...each car holds 36 wounded men. Inside is all white and clean with a big Red Cross on the outside."
The soldiers couldn't write in detail about the war itself, which was brutally fought in the trenches, as the censors removed any references that might, if intercepted, prove helpful to the enemy, but after the armistice many described the ordeal in detail. Oda Fisher, wrote, "Uncensored now I can write. I was in the 42nd division, one of the first at the front. We held for 106 days. It was a quiet sector. We marched from Lorraine to Champagne, a twenty-five mile march every night for three nights. We spent five days in foxholes filled with mud and water." As he was writing, shortly after the Armistice, his camp had contracted flu. "Many sick, i am in misery."
Tom Phelps, of the ninety-first division, fought at Argonne for nine days straight, then went back of the lines, then returned for five more days of assault. Those return bouts weren't uncommon for the battle of the trenches often moved little, the struggle for territory much like a Greco-Roman wrestling match of much effort and little result. The area between the land held by the Germans and that of the Allies, stripped with barbed wire barriers to slow any onslaught, wasn't as desolate as imagined—at least at Charles Farnesworth's post. "Many places in (No Man's Land) there is wheat between the lines but who will harvest it?"
Floyd King described in depth the front that Fisher wrote about. "(There) I was under my first shell fire, first gas, first barrage, and under my first attack by the Boche (an insulting name for Germans). ...I didn't particularly mind (the first few shells) but later it got to be hell. Boche gas wasn't half bad. of course, we had to spend many unpleasant hours with our gas masks on." He found trenches and dugouts in bad shape there, "water inch to knee deep." The Germans threw a few shells every day, the Americans repaired the trenches every night. He left Lorraine as one of 'shock troops', hiking and riding 'the French Pullmans to the Champagne front,' and 'arrived for fire works on July 14.' "At 11 PM we unleashed our barrage," he wrote, and at "12 PM Boche unleashed theirs, until 9 AM next morning. it was hell." At sunrise "Fritz came over" in thirteen waves at 25 American divisions. "A wave would hit our wire, be annihilated by our machine guns" and "by 9 our wire and No Man's Land was carpeted with German dead." By noon the Germans gave up and everything was quiet. King got four slight wounds that morning, none bad enough for a trip to the hospital. He went next to Chateau Thierry. "Fast fighting there," he wrote. "At the battle of Sergy we were hit the hardest." He participated in capturing two town where fighting had gone back and forth five times. "It was a very common sight to see arms legs and other body parts lying around...I have seen shells make direct hits on a man and leave nothing but ten thousand bits...I saw a body of a lieutenant lying on the battlefield without a head." He summarized his war,'I have hiked and fought all over France, marched through Belgium andLluxembourg, and up to the Rhine river. i used to be full of fight but now i am the most peaceful boy in the world.." King was in the 84th Brigade.
Lane Shelman, who was from Springfield (his brother E.T. was one of the first auto repairmen in the county; he also started an 'electrical plant' to service the Springfield townsite with power and water in the 1910s), revealed the nature of his similar trials in a lengthy March 1919 letter. "We moved in at night and relieved another division that was in the first lines." Fighting started at daybreak and after a four hour barrage another company mistakenly swerved out, leaving Shelman's assault wave alone. They kept running into machine gun nests, he wrote, and encountered one that held his squad up after—among six men and a corporal—they had lost two to wounds. Shelman was a gunner—each group had an automatic gun which took a gunner, a loader and a scout.
They moved in on thirty Germans and two guns, successfully took three prisoners, with Shelman getting a cut in face from a machine gun bullet. Heading back with the prisoners, they "ran into a bunch of ambushing Heinies" and their corporal got hit. Shelman was shot in the neck. just above the collar bone, his back, his left side and spinal column. The bullet hit a vertebrae square and burst it, the bullet staying until later. It had cut two big tendons completely. Shelman wrote that it "felt like my neck was broken...I slid a bandage around my neck to stem the bleeding."
Two other soldiers in the group were hit in the stomach and back before other Americans caught up and started taking prisoners. Shelman helped tie the wounded up, got the prisoners to pack them to the waiting ambulances, then turned the captives over to prison detail—there were 108 of them. After an hour, Shelman walked to a field ambulance that got him to the evacuation hospital at ten that night. There were hundreds "in worse shape than me," he wrote. The doctors cut his bullet out and sewed his tendons in but minutes without anaesthetic. The doctor whispered "why no pain?" and Shelman shrugged, denied feeling any great distress.
Shelman had seen fellow soldier Frank McKenna killed a half hour before he himself was wounded. so in a letter to his family told them to phone McKenna's sister because he knew where he was buried—two miles from Bayonville. He'd been killed by machine gun bullets, and Shelman was going to recommend he receive a Distinguished Service Cross.
Shelman had written in June of one marine bringing in 73 prisoners alone. "I think they would all surrender if they could," he wrote. "The prisoners are a disheartened, starved looking bunch, mostly just kids. It looks kind of bad when they have to chain their machine gunners to their guns to make them fight." He noted how the Americans had more firepower. "Our artillery shoots about six to their one." The quality of the German weaponry also was poor. He wrote that he "counted 22 of their 30 shells that didn't explode."
Raymond Wolfe, homesick in February after the war had ended, described being "desperately homesick for the land where the people don't wear wooden shoes, live in barns, and rob you of every cent you draw on payday (if you are so fortunate as to receive a payday)." He had received only one month's pay since May. "I am billeted in a stall previously used for cows," he wrote. "But it's better than my time as a German POW... For three months i thought i would starve to death before the week was over and was rather anxious for that momentous event for the 'cooties' and and lack of food and clothing took all the pleasure out of life." The prison camp was bombarded every day and he hoped a bomb would hit them. Wolfe wrote of the surprise in the local village once Germany was defeated. "The villagers didn't know they'd been defeated, at town entrances they had signs saying Welcome Home Victorious Warriors."
The mid-November Armistice changed the face of the war but most of the men were months from coming home. Faust Talbot was with the expeditionary forces in Germany, which acted as occupiers. "Nothing to do but drink schnapps and beer, play cards. I don't enjoy it much," he wrote. Robert Chandler was with the demolition team exploding gas canisters and mines. "One can hardly step out without fear of running into a mine or some stray gas." He expected to be in Germany for months before returning.
Alfred Jones took leave in La Havre, France, and related his trip to Paris to his mother: I got a pass, found a room, went to bed at 8:30. "Can you imagine that in Paris?" he wrote. He went to a military museum, joined a sight seeing tour to Versailles where he saw Louis XIV's palace, which was said to cost 100 million dollars to build. At that Palace, he wrote, in 1871, Wilhelm became King of Prussia, an event which started the German Empire. Jones went to the theatre, (YMCA sponsored) joined 175 sailors and Red Cross girls on a river trip down the Seine and Marne where he saw hundreds of cathedrals and churches, the Eiffel tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, and was particularly impressed by the Guerre de la Phanteon, a 360' x 60' mural by nineteen artists that depicted an allegorical panorama of WWI.
Arden Hale described the events in mid-December of President Wilson arriving in Brest, France. The 8th division had been ordered there for guard duty, while the president and his party were on parade. There are "rows of trees on both sides of the street and decorated, I have never seen anything like it," he wrote. The 'movies were on the scene doing their duty'. "If they ever come to Blackfoot take a look at them and on the right side halfway down stands Private Arden Hale," he wrote. "At 2:15 Wilson passed and looked right at me...General Pershing followed in a sedan." After the American procession passed, the French President went by. "Our orders were 'do not salute, but stand at attention as you never stood before' and we did." His group, Company G, was called to get its picture taken so they marched down to downtown Brest expecting a camera but instead found a painter. The commander said 'stand with one foot in place. it will take about fifty minutes as he is going to paint it.' The artist was looking out the window of a third story building and painted us.
The Armistice coincided with some of the worst flu outbreaks of the affliction's 'second wave' from September to November. Fifty to a hundred million people died worldwide from that epidemic. O.O. Kasel wrote to his Taber parents from Camp Dodge in Iowa, where a month prior the influenza had swept over the camp. For a week he worked eighteen hours a day, was in charge of one of sick and drug rooms when three of the best clerks fell victim to the epidemic and died within a week. Nearly ten thousand had been sent to the base hospital with the flu—702 died. More died of flu than in battle during this time. "We have ordered a carload of barb wire," he wrote. "To knit some sweaters for the Kaiser and his bunch so they may keep warm this winter."
Herbert Neider was in Gonnersdorf, Germany in December. "I'm in the dining room sitting at an old dutchman's desk," he wrote. "The people I'm staying with had a son killed in 1916 at Verdun." The boy received the Iron Cross for Bravery in Action." Neider went on to say that "Three-quarters of our company was killed or wounded at Chateau Thierry." He said he shot 3690 rounds from his machine gun in two hours at a prior battle in Verdun. He was in the 42nd Rainbow Division.
Ralph Taylor seemed calm and settled in Germany in January. "The place I am writing at is quite a scene. The little girl is studying and writing on a slate, while an old lady is spinning wool with an old fashioned spinning wheel. The people here are indeed behind the times." He expected to be about the last of the soldiers to be sent home.
Many others, like George Jorgensen, expected to have to stay for up to eighteen months of reconstruction, but Fremont Kutnewsky returned in February 1919. "Back in the land of milk and honey," he wrote, describing the voyage as 'long and tedious beyond all worst expectations.' It lasted 14 days with the decks and bunks both cold. But "we were knocked off our pins by zeal of kindness ...of associated charities. Salvation army girls, Red Cross girls, YMCA men, Jewish welfare men all handing out good things to eat: chocolate, cookies, buns, REAL coffee!" He described sitting in a "gigantic clean restaurant by an open fire...what a difference from 'over there' where others are sitting around a barracks stove in the damp wondering when they'll come home."
Alfred Lundhigh, a Danish sheepherder convicted of killing a fellow herder in 1914 forty miles outside Blackfoot (he later appealed with the help of Presto area bondsmen), had joined the WWI effort and wrote of the postwar experience. "I was busy fixing out Fritzies' day rations' waiting to be discharged at Camp Funston (near Fort Riley in Kansas) at 50% disability. I got hit and blinded in the right eye by shrapnel." He described the post as 'real nice' with steam heated barracks and white sheets to sleep in.
C.E. Gaskins was relaxing in neutral Luxembourg in March, a country unscarred by war. He had been in tough fighting at Argonne, and on the "morning (the) armistice was signed every bit of artillery on both sides was let loose and ensued until 11 AM."
Six months after the Armistice, Floyd Peterson remained as one of the later soldiers in Europe. He was stationed in the south of France on the Mediterranean coast. Peterson had visited Italy, seen Nice and Marseilles, and at Menton, where US soldiers embarked for home, he was staying in a hotel that was "a 'regular palace' bigger than our own Hotel Utah." He described the fruit-growing countryside: "I have picked and eaten oranges several times since i have been here," the orange trees growing by the wayside. "We drive under them and pick the fruit."
Peterson revealed to his parents that he had "made several trips to the front trenches, taken in auto trucks, during the big battles...but didn't tell them because they would be worried." He had been offered $100 a month to sign up for eighteen more months once peace was signed but he had "had enough." He related how "when (the) armistice was signed it was hardly safe to go in the cities. the ladies old and young would wave the American flag and shout vive la America. They would surround we boys and nearly hug and kiss us to death. i didn't mind the young ladies so much but when a half dozen old ladies got a hold of one of us boys and all tried to hug and kiss him, well it was some bombardment, while we never ran away from a German we sure beat a hasty retreat when the old ladies started after us."
Not all the men wasted their time awaiting return. Earle Officer was organizing a Sunday School Bible Study in February. And A.P. Grimaud, who had been serving as an interpreter (his parents, Pingreeites, were French) and bossing a nineteen man sawmill, had moved in March from Fort St. Minges to Beaune, a town of 30,000—a trip that took three days on wagon train and horseback—and was working on a steam excavator.
Predictably, intense feelings ran through the local soldiers after the war. Gaskins harbored considerable ill will toward the Germans. "They are not to be trusted... the only good German is a dead one." He thought taxes should be levied on them so they could never wage another war (he got his first wish, harsh reparations, which set up the scenario to squelch his second with the second world war). Much earlier, while the war was in its worst months, Floyd King expressed similar sentiments to his family in Taber. "I am certainly tickled to learn that people there made the Germans stop holding their meetings in their own language. Over here a man that speaks German is as good as dead."
But at least one area soldier reconciled himself to the outcome and came to a bit of wisdom. Charles Farnesworth wrote the following in April: "One thing I have learned: I am very small and this world is very large. and i am playing a very small part in the great world drama."
