Theodore E. Boyd World War I Collection - Memoirs and ... · Theodore E. Boyd World War I Collection - Memoirs and Correspondence Sent to Family, numbered 1-31 Extracted on Apr-13-2020

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Theodore E. Boyd World War I Collection - Memoirs and Correspondence Sentto Family, numbered 1-31Extracted on Apr-13-2020 04:43:27

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1.

January 27, 1973.

Dear Alice:

Among my souvenirs is a crumbling mimeogtaph copy of a telegramdated August 11, 1917. It is from the War Department to theCommanding Officer, Officers Training Camp, Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia,announcing that I had been appointed second lieutenant of Field Artillrtyin the Officers Reserve Corps. I was not exactly being singled out forthat honor. The same telegram bears the names of 120 men in all whowere being commissioned from my training unit, Battery 8. Our campincluded 15 such units. There were 8 or 10 similar camps runningsimultaneously at army posts scattered over the United States. On thatday therefore the armed forces of our country were strengthened, if thatis the right word, by the addition of about 15,000 mew officers.Moreover all those camps were preparing to begin training a secondcrop, to supply the army of draftees that was being built up.

When we entered, three months earlier, there had been more of us,about 175 in each company. During the first month we were put througha physically strenuous course of basic infantry training. Then we all hada second medical examination, which eliminated a great many. Thesurvivors were each allowed to choose his own branch of service, and Ichose field artillery. Over the next two months more men wereeliminated because their instructors appraised them as unsuited forofficer rank.

Though Fort Oglethorpe is in Georgia, it is just across the stateboundary from Chattanooga. Its training camp had been set upprimarily for candidates from the Carolinas and Tennessee. The menfrom those states made up a fairly homogeneous group who talked andthought pretty much alike. Set apart from the rest of us, as far asspeech was concerned, were the men from Charrleston. They had noneof the southern drawl. They spoke rapidly, on high-pitched tones, andthey pronounced certain words in odd ways. To the Charlestonians aboard was a bode, a bear was a bee-ah, and a car was a cyar. Theymade two syllables out of the command "Fire!" (Fi-yer!").

Fort Oglethorpe also received an overflow of candidates from New Yorkwho could not be accommodated at Plattsburg. It was my first

Theodore E. Boyd World War I Collection - Memoirs and CorrespondenceSent to Family, numbered 1-31Transcribed and Reviewed by Digital VolunteersExtracted Apr-13-2020 04:43:27





-2-contact with New York Irishmen, my first opportunity to observe theirremarkable talent for politics. Soon after training began, a New Yorkernamed Flynn started taking up a collection to buy a present for ourcompany commander. We were serving under a regular army captain ofinfantry, Ben Nicklin. We heard that he was being promoted to major, arank that entitled him for the first time to ride horseback on duty. Flynnproposed to buy for him a saddle and its accoutrements. The saddlewas duly presented to Nicklin, with a list of the contributors. Flynnnaturally made the presentation speech.

The same thing happened again a few weeks later, when I had beentransferred to an artillery unit commanded by Captain Alfred L. P.Sands. Sands likewise was promoted to major (all the regular armyofficers skyrocketed upward in 1917). Another New Yorker namedSweeney started a collection to buy a present for Sands. Being in amounted service he was already provided with saddles. He played onregimental polo teams, and prided himself on his horsemanship. I forgetwhat he bought for Sands, but it was something handsome, andSweeney did the honors.

I am ashamed to admit that I contributed to both of those gifts. I did soreluctantly, partly because I thought it unethical for us to offer presentsto our superiors, and equally so for them to accept. We were candidatesfor commissions, and our instructors were supposed to judge usimpartially. It was as if a litigant, in a case pending court action, were tosend a case of liquor to the judge. And besides the hurt to my ownconscience, I was afraid that Nicklin or Sands might be insulted ratherthan pleased by our gifts. As it turns out, neither of the recipientsseemed to feel any scruples. Flynn and Sweeney knew army attitudesbetter than I did.

Not all the New Yorkers were like that. Some of the Irish turned out to beagreeable companions. And there was Robert Low Bacon. He waswealthy, the son of a former ambassador to France. He was probablythe oldest among us, and was plainly an outstanding officer candidate.He served as first sergeant in our battery. In later life he became acongressman from a Republican district on Long Island, and served inCongress until his death.

On August 15 Bacon called us into formation for the last time. Sandsappeared, and the telegram announcing our commissions was read tous. Bacon had become a major, the only one of us to draw that rank. Wehad four captains and a dozen or so first lieutenants. All the rest of






us, those under 25 years of age, were second lieutenants. Three or fourmen still in the battery had not been commissioned. They were offeredan option. If they chose, they could stay on at the camp for a second try.Or they could have an outright discharge and take their chances with thedraft.

Then Sands broke another bit of news. He had been directed to name15 of us to be sent overseas immediately. He asked all those whowanted that assignment to step forward one pace. All but four or five ofus stepped forward. Sands let it be known that he felt those few haddisgraced him. Then he said that the list would be posted later, and wewere dismissed.

Six of us, Tennesseeans, held a hurried conference. We decided tofollow Sands to the officers' quarters, until then off bounds to us, and putin a direct plea for the assignment. We found Sands lying on his cot. Heseemed pleased at our intrusion, glad to find us so eager. He made nopromises, but when the list was posted later that afternoon all ournames were on it.

During our two months in Battery 8 the six of us had gradually formed aclique. It now included three first and three second lieutenants. Thesenior rank included Merritt Guthrie, a Virginia Military Institute graduatewho had been a travelling salesman for his family's furniture plant inNashville: Joe Thompson, gentleman farmer and agricultural graduatefrom the University of Tennessee; and Morton Adams, a lawyer andVanderbilt graduate. The second lieutenants, besides myself, were bothVanderbilt undergraduates. Charlie Price had alternated with RabbitCurry as quarterback on the football team. Herbert Jones was a pitcheron the baseball team.

We could not then foresee it, but we were destined to spend the rest of1917 together. And the three first lieutenants were all destined to comethrough the war unscathed, while the three second lieutenants allbecame casualties (2 dead, 1 severely wounded).

Love,Dad

Note: Local peculiarities of speech, such as those of the Charlestonarea, were much more noticeable in 1917 then they are today. We nowhave radio, TV, and the tomobile.






2

February 6, 1973

Dear Wanda and Ted:

Our officers training camp was part of a national effort being made in1917 to raise, train, and equip a big army in a hurry. The British hadbeen through a much similar experience three years earlier, after thewar had broken out. But the British had a somewhat larger and betterequipped army to start with than we had. The Germans and the Frenchhad been much better prepared at the outset of the war. Both had haduniversal military service for years, with large standing armies, up-to-date equipment, and millions of trained reserves.

So we took more than a year to get ready before we could take anysignificant part in the fighting. Even then there were serious deficienciesin our training, You might think for example that to be an artilleryman,especially an officer, you would need a bit of shooting practice. We hadnone at Fort Oglethorpe. That would have required a firing range, andwe had none. Our army had until then made out with a few firing rangeselsewhere. Once during the summer our Battery 8 had been schedukedto be shipped out to a field in Texas for a day or two of intensiveshooting, but for some reason the order was cancelled. When I receivedmy commission I had actually heard cannonfire only once in my life. ARussian general had visited Fort Oglethorpe that summer. We hadparaded in his honor, and our guns had fired a salute. That could safelybe done, since salutes are fired with blank ammunition.

We did have guns, but not the kind the American army was to use inFrance. Ours were 3-inch guns, standard equipment in our army at thetime, but long obsolete by European standards. We also had horses.The importance of horses in warfare had diminished since the beginningof World War I. Trenches, barbed wire and machine guns had renderedcavalry quite useless after the first few weeks, at least on the westernfront where the main action was taking place. Yrucks gradually took overthe work of horse-drawn wagons in transport. Only the field artillerycontinued until the end of the war to depend on horses. On the move,horses pulled the guns and caissons. Enlisted artillerymen might ride onlimbers or supply wagons. The officers had to ride horseback.






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To be an artillery officer, therefore, you had to be able to ride a horse.That was one thing our American instructors could teach us, or at leastthey could weed out those of us who kept falling off. In another fieldartillery training unit, not number 8, an instructor was accidentally killedwhile leading his pupils at a gallop through woods with overhangingbranches. His funeral was an elaborate military ceremony, featuringChopin's Funeral March. He was the son of a noted Philadelphiapublisher. Our camp was renamed Camp Warden McLean in his honor.

Our Battery 8 likewise rode hell-for-leather through the woods, but wehad no fatalities. Our worst accident came one day when we rode downthe steep slope of a railroad cut. A horse fell, rolled over and landedwith a leg stuck under a steel rail. In struggling to get up he broke theleg and had to be shot.

Our riding instructor was Captain (later Major) Sands himself, poloplayer and expert horseman. We ended each session by taking a seriesof log hurdles, os varying height, that ran along one side of our drill field.I had no trouble, [[strikethrough]] for [/strikethrough]] for I had theadvantage of a sountry upbringing. But some of our cadets, from thecities, had rarely if ever ridden horseback before they met CaptainSands. I recall in particular a young Jew from Memphis, namedBlutenthal. He was a Princeton man and I liked him, but I wonderedwhy he had chosen field artillery. He had never been on a[[strikethrough]] hu [/strikethrough]] horse before going in the army. Hehad a pudgy build, and he simply could not go over a hurdle withoutgrabbing the saddle or falling off. I must have heard his body thump theground at least a dozen times, with Sands contemptuously ordering himto try again. He always did and always failed. He was washed out fromBattery 8, but I heard later that he had found a job in the Intelligencedepartment.

The worst fault of our 3-inch gun was that when fired the recoil tended tojolt it out of its setting, so that it had to be re-aimed before the next shot.It was also slow on recoil and return. The French 75 millimeter gun,very near the same caliber, was much more stable and [[strikethrough]]could [/strikethrough]] much quicker on recoil and return. It couldtherefore be fired at more rapid rates than the 3-incher. It could indeedbe fired so rapidly that it became red-hot. That could cause






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the gun barrel to warp, so that the shells fired from that gun went offtarget. Our artillery regiments, when sent overseas, left behind the 3-inch guns with which they had been trained, and were equipped withFrench 75's. Evidently at least some of them were not adequatelyinformed om how to take sare of the 75's. In 1918 a rumor circulated inthe AEF that our men were better gunners than the French, becausethey could shoot the 75 faster. I heard that several times, though neverfrom French sources. The legend continued to crop up in this countrylong after the war had ended. I recall finding it twice in [[crossed out]]Chica [[/crossed out]] Chicago newspapers in the 1930's. Omce an ex-artilleryman, making a reminiscent speech, was quoted as boasting thathis battery had fired 12 rounds per minute from a 75; and that Frenchgunners, on hearing of that feat, were astonished.

I do not doubt that the speaker told the truth, but he surelymisunderstood the reaction of the French. Any French gun crew, unlesshandcuffed, could have fired 12 rounds per minute from a 75. They wereforbidden to do so, except in dire emergency. Their limit, to avoidoverheating, was of 4 or 5 rounds. They may have been astonished butnot at the skill of the Americans. "Horrified" would be a better word.

We six Tennesseeans who had been ordered overseas directly fromBattery 8 were not informed of our destination. It was Saumur, wherethe most famous school for cavalry officers in the world had long beenoperated. The French were closing the cavalry school and turning it intoa school where Americans would be trained in the use of French-madeguns. That meant for us another three months of schooling.

Love,

[[signature]] Dad [[/signature]]






February 26, 1973.4

Dear Alice: 4

My association with the British in World War I was brief but pleasant. Itbegan when we boarded the [[underlined]] Adriatic [[/underlined]] themorning of [[strikethrough]] Sept [/strikethrough]] September 8, 1917.The Adriatic was one of the big passenger ships of the White Star line(later merged with Cunard). It had not yet been remodelled for troopcarrying, so we enjoyed the usual amenities of an ocean voyage inpeacetime. As an officer I was entitled to first class passage but my lowrank relegated me to the cheapest of first class accommodations.Naturally I had an inside stateroom. It was small, I estimated about 6 by7 feet. But it was mine own, and each morning the bath stewardknocked on my door to announce "Bahth ready, sir". I had never beenso pampered before. (On my return voyage, 14 months later, I was onon an American ship, the Finland. I shared with three other woundedofficers a room only slightly larger, and stuffier, with two-decker bunks.No one except my roommates cared whether I took a bath or not).

Nevertheless the Adriatic on this voyage was functioning as a troopcarrier. When we arrived at the pier the men and gear of the 101st FieldArtillery were already being taken aboard. That continued for 36 hours,during which time we did not move. We were not allowed to showourselves [[strikethrough]] at[[/strikethrough]] on any of the outsidedecks. It seemed to me a rather futile attempt to hidde what was goingon from the German intelligence. Nearly all the first-class passengerswere American officers, most of them belonging to the 101st but somegoing over unattached, as we were. I don't think there were more thanhalf a dozen civilian passengers. I met a Professor Trowbridge, aphysicist from Princeton, going to work with the British on sometechnical problem. There was Sir Gilbert Parker, a Canadian novelistwhose books were popular then but are now forgotten. I can't evenrecall any of their titles. One evening at dinner Sir Gilbert gave a briefbut moving speech about the war. Finally there was Lady Drummond, ahandsome, amiable old dowager who spent an hour each morninggiving lessons in French to anyone who cared to sit in. I attended herclass regularly.

The 101st Field Artillery was a National Guard unit from the Bostonarea, called into active service. It was part of the 26th division, made upentirely of New England National Guard. I did not know it then, but the26th was the fourth American division to be [[strikethrough]] set[[strikethrough]] sent






February 26, 1973.4Dear Alice:My association with the British in World War I was brief but pleasant. Itbegan when we boarded the [[underline]] Adriatic [[/underline]] themorning of September 8, 1917. The Adriatic was one of the bigpassenger ships of the White Star Line (later merged with Cunard). Ithad not yet been remodelled for troop carrying, so we enjoyed the usualamenities of an ocean voyage in peacetime. As an officer I was entitledto first class passage but my low rank relegated me to the cheapest offirst class accommodations. Naturally I had an inside stateroom. It wassmall, I estimated about 6 by 7 feet. But it was mine own, and eachmorning the steward knocked on my door to announce "Bahth ready,sir". I had never been so pampered before. (On my return voyage, 14months later, I was on on an American ship, the Finland. I shared withthree other wounded officers a room only slightly larger, and stuffier,with two-decker bunks. No one except my roommates cared whether Itook a bath or not).Nevertheless the Adriatic on this voyage was functioning as a troopcarrier. When we arrived at the pier the men and gear of the 101st FieldArtillery were already being taken aboard. That continued for 36 hours,during which time we did not move. We were not allowed to showourselves [[strikethrough]] at [[/strikethrough]] on any of the outsidedecks. It seemed to me a rather futile attempt to hide what was going onfrom the German Intelligence. Nearly all the first-class passengers wereAmerican officers, most of them belonging to the 101st but some goingover unattached, as we were. I don't think there were more than half adozen civilian passengers. I met a Professor Trowbridge, a physicistfrom Princeton, going to work with the British on some technicalproblem. There was Sir Gilbert Parker, a Canadian novelist whosebooks were popular then but are now forgotten. I can't even recall any oftheir titles. One evening at dinner Sir Gilbert gave a brief but movingspeech about the war. Finally there was Lady Drummond, a handsome,amiable old dowager who spent an hour each morning giving lessons inFrench to anyone who cared to sit in. I attended her class regularly.

The 101st Field Artillery was a National Guarxd unit from the Bostonarea, called into active service. It was part of the 26th division, made upentirely of New England National Guard. I did not know it then, but the26th was the fourth American division to be [[strikethrough]]seht[[/strikethrough]]sent






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to France. More than six months more would pass before any of themdid any fighting, but they got better training in France than did the draftdivisions that were trained entirely in this country.

A medical unit of the 101st was on board, and gave us the finalvaccination of the series we had started in New York. The regimentalband of the 101st also was aboard. After we got to see the band wouldassemble and play each afternoon on the windy foredeck. I don't knowwhether they played for our entertainment or just for practice, but weenjoyed it. One piece they played over several times was "There's aLong, Long Trail A-Winding". I had never heard it before.

Each afternoon tea was served on deck with it came sandwiches andtwo items that were new to me; English muffins and orange marmalade.The marmalade was the genuine bittersweet English kind, made fromValencia oranges. The insipid stuff that Crosse and Blackwell sendsnowadays for the American trade is not worthy of being called by thesame name. Breakfast also was a pleasure, for the British likesubstantial breakfasts and to my mind they make it better than they dothe later meals. There I first encountered herring. Another new item thatcame on at later meals and about which I was less enthusiastic, wasBrussels sprouts. They seem to have been created specially for theBritish dinner table.

Luncheon and dinner were announced by a bugle. With one finger onthe piano I can still play over that bugle call, which I have never heardanywhere else. The bugler was a boy in sailor's uniform, with "SeaScout" on the collar of his middy blouse. Until quite recently I neverknew what a sea scout was. Now Mary, that well-informed woman, tellsme that it was a sort of optional higher degree that British Boy Scoutscould attain, somewhat as Mason can become a Shriner. On the printedmenus at mealtime the geographic origin of the various items was oftennoted. Thus we got "Manx kippers," "Yorkshire bacon" et cetera. Onemorning the menu offered "Yarmouth bloaters". The name did notexactly make my mouth water, but they turned out to be herring, justcured a different way. Very good they were.






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My education was further advanced in the bar lounge. The bar had nobourbon, so I got my first taste of Scotch. I [[crossed out]] do [[/crossedout]] didn't like it at first, but found that it seemed to improve as I becameused to it. There also I drank stout for the first time. It was Bass's ale,pronounced Bahss. In the bar lounge, finally, I learned poker, draw andstud. Out of consideration for my inexperience my friends made it pennyante. So my initiation was not expensive. I learned so well that later,playing with others for higher stakes, I made a net profit out of my armystint.

I had the good luck also to meet a chess player. He was a LieutenantChandler of the 101st, a Bostonian. We played a fairly even game andspent many hours at it. Chandler reminded me, in one way, of my great-uncle Gus Winters. Each of them had a sort of incantation he wouldrepeat aloud, over and over, as he pondered his next move. Uncle Gusused to tax my father's patience when g they played checkers together.When Uncle Gus had to decide on a move he would begin to repeat,slowly and thoughtfully, "Con-sti-tu-tion-al-i-ty and in-div-is-i-bil-i-ty".That went on until he made his move, after which he lapsed into silenceduring my father's turn. The words of Uncle Gus's incantation neverchanged while I knew him. I don't know where he got them. I thoughtperhaps they might have been a political slogan he had picked up in hisboyhood during the Civil War, when the Winterses were Unionsympathizers.

Chandler's incantation was longer, and he sang it. But like Uncle Gus,he sang it only when it was his turn to move. Then he would sing softly,so as not to disturb the people around us, the refrain of a silly waltz songthen current:

"One, two, three four, sometimes I wish there were more.Ein, zwei, drei, vier, I love the one that's near.-.-.-.-., so says the heathen Chinee.So boys take care, and girls beware of one, two and three."

You will have guessed from the blanks above, that I have forgotten howto count in Chinese. That is strange, considering how many times ineach game I heard Chandler do it. He never sang anything else, havingfound, I suppose, that only that song helped his brain to work.






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Chandler did vary his routine occasionally by just humming the tunethrough without the words. Uncle Gus could hardly have done that,since "Constitutionality and indivisibility" had not been set to music.

We left New York [[crossed out]] lat [[/crossed out]] [[handwritten]] late[[/handwritten]] Sunday afternoon, September 9th. Next day I wasdisturbed to find that we were quite alone on the sea. With submarinesprowling around I should have been glad to see an armed escort. But Iwas somewhat reassured when, going out on deck the morning of the11th, I saw there that we were ascending a narrow channel with land onboth sides. We were going through the Narrows at Halifax. The channelends in a round basin a couple of miles wide. In that basin the Adriaticdropped anchor. We were to be part of a convoy assembling there.

Last July 29th I wrote you about the final three days of that voyage.






4A

July 20, 1972

Dear Wanda & Co:

It is many years now since I last saw the word "semaphore" in print,except in dictionaries. Once it was in more common use. In the early1900's every Boy Scout learned to send and receive messages bysemaphore. I was never a Boy Scout, but I acquired a modestproficiency at semaphoring in my one year at the University ofTennessee. It was part of the military training then required of everyable-bodied male student at UT.

The semaphore was a means of exchanging messages between peoplewho were beyond shouting distance, but still within sight of each other(the range could be extended by using field glasses). It was animportant item in the repertoire of the Army Signal Corps, for the fieldtelephone was the only other means of quick communication over sucha distance. The semaphore saved rolling and unrolling a lot oftelephone wire. Nowadays the walkie-talkie has put both thesemaphore and the field telephone out of business, but in World War 1the walkie-talkie had not yet been invented.

In practice, the sender of a semaphore message stood upright, in view ifthe recipient. In each hand he held a small flag. He spelled out themessage, one letter at a time, by assuming a succession of postureswith the flags. Each letter of the alphabet was represented by holdingthe flags in a special pattern. Ina somewhat similar way Sally Rand, thenude dancer of the 1930's, used to manipulate two big fans, one held ineach hand. In her act she always kept the fans modestly below the levelof her shoulders. She could easily have sent semaphore messages withthem, if she had only extended their range of movement to includeoverhead angles.

Late in the afternoon of Thursday, September 20, 1917, I stood at therail on the main deck of the White Star liner[[underline]]Adriatic.[[/underline We were in a convoy of eight ships.There was one other passenger liner, the[[underline]]Orduna,[[/underline]] and six freighters. That explains whywe had been eight days at sea and were not yet in sight of land. Wehad left Halifax on the 12th, and Halifax is not as far from England asNew York is. Our voyage had been further slowed because we had notfollowed a straight course. We had done a lot of zigzagging, which wassupposed to help toward evading submarines. The only armed escort






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escort we had had so far was somebody's yacht, fitted with a couple of3-inch guns and renamed the [[underlined]] Gloucester [[/underlined]].

As I stood there I saw six ships appear on the horizon ahead of us, threein the port and three on the starboard bow. (How's that for nauticallanguage?). They were destroyers sent to escort us the rest of the wayin. The waters around the British Isles were the favorite hunting groundof the submaribes. One of the destroyers circled through the convoy andcame up alongside the [[underlined]] Adriatic, [[/underlined]] perhaps ahundred wards from where I stood. It had instructions to give ourcaptain. Both ships had radio waves emanating from a ship couldenable a submarine to follow a beeline to it. Ships at sea in those daysused radio only in dire emergency. The radio telephone did not comeinto use until some time after World War I.

We got our orders by semaphore. A sailor came out on the deck of thedestroyer with two flags. I eavesdropped while he spelled out themessage. All I remember now is "keep inshore from the skerries". I hadnot the faintest idea what skerries were, but such later I learned that"skerry2 is a Gaelic word for a rocky reef. "The Skerries" with a capital Smeans a cluster of rocky islets off the northern coast of Ireland. Isuppose the message referred to them, for I do mot recall any way ofdistinguishing a capital from a lower-case letter in semaphore language.

The destroyer then scurried ahead. From then on, through the next dayday, all six of them krpt moving hither and thither in front of us, beatingthe bushes as it were. Land still was not in sight when I went to to bedon Friday night. But on Saturday morning, the 22nd, I went out on deckearly and saw the Irish coast on our right. A mountain of rock rose out ofthe sea on our left. Our convoy was strung out in single file, the[[underlined]] Adriatic [[/underlined]] in the lead. The destroyers werenowhere in sight.

About the middle of the morning I heard gunfire somewhere behind us.Three of the destroyers then reappared from in front, racing back in thedirection of the shooting. We never saw them again, nor did we everlearn what the commotion was about. We had rounded the northerncoast of Ireland. In the afternoon we left it and head across the IrishSea, passing within sight of the Isle of Man. Late that night we enteredthe mouth of the Mersey, and disembarked the next morning atLiverpool.






^[[6]]^[[6]]

March 13, 1973.

Dear Alice:

The main building of the cavalry school at Saumur has walls of stoneand big stone pillars on the porch at the entrance. On those pillars arecarved the names of distinguished alumni, one of the earliest being thatof Marshal Ney. The first rooms past the entrance were offices. Therewas an amphitheatre upstairs. In1[[strikethrough]]8[[/strikethrough]]^[[9]]17 all the rest of the building^[[was]] dormitory space. Each room housed two men comfortably, andthere were enough rooms to accommodate the 400 new Americanartillery officers who moved in at the end of September.

Soon after arriving we were assembled and counted off into sections of20 men each. Our group of Tennesseans happened to be standingwhere the counting began, so we found ourselves in Section 1. JohnRansom had sort of attached himself to our group from Southamptonon, so there were now seven of us. Each section had a cluster ofcontiguous rooms in the dormitory. Our original six paired off into threeadjoin^[[in]]g rooms just as we had in the hotel in New York. I am notsure who Ransom's roommate was, but I think it was Bob Hussey, acongenial soul who came from one of the north shore suburbs ofChicago. Over the next three months I became acquainted only with themen of our own section and the one next to us. We often went on fieldexercises with Section 2, but had little contact with any of the others. Inever saw a roster of the 400 men in that class at Saumur,[[strikethrough]]so[[/strikethrough]] so I don't know how as a group theymade out in later life. But they impressed me as being something of anelite collection. Some time in the 1930's Howard Vincent O'Brien wrotesomething in his column in the Chicago Daily News that identified himas one of us. I wrote to him and got a cordial note in reply. While there Iknew by sight R. Norris Williams, once international tennis champion,and Charles P. Taft, whose only claim to prominence at the time wasthat he was the son of an ex-president. Then there was John CroweRansom, but he had then published only his first thin volume entitled"Chills and Fever".

A French lieutenant took charge of each section. Ours was a round-faced, swarthy little Provencal named De Salinelles. Over him, ingeneral charge of five sections, was Captain Risler, an Alsatian. He wasone of three Alsatians on our teaching staff. All






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of them had been born German subjects because Germany hadannexed Alsace after the war of 1870. All had served in the Germanarmy in peacetime, but had deserted to join the French in 1914.

When the French closed Saumur as a cavalry school they left there forour benefit a number of marvellously trained horses, the stable crews,and several riding instructors. We had about half a day of riding eachweek. Our riding instructor was a cavalry lieutenant, Jacques Boutet, ashandsome a man and as graceful a rider as I have ever seen.

When I revisited Saumur with Helen in 1938 the street that runs past theschool had been renamed the Avenue Foch. I forget what it was calledin 1917. But across that street from the main building were the stables,four or five huge riding halls and an open space called Chardonnet. Inthe old days the Chardonnet had been the^[[strikethrough]]s[[/strikethrough]] scene of riding exhibitions atgraduation time. One day in my first week, walking across it, I saw oneof our Americans being dragged by a runaway horse. It turned out thathe had undertaken to ride while wearing wrapped cloth puttees, a mostimprudent thing to do. Somehow he had fallen off and the putteebecame entangled in the stirrup. It had unwound as far as his shoe, buthad stuck there. He was not seriously injured, but one side of his facewas badly skinned and bleeding from being rubbed in the gravel. Hewas from New York city and his name was Jeff Feigel. The namebecame fixed in my memory because it made the newspapers a fewmonths later. Feigel was the first American officer to be killed in combatin World War 1.

A bridle path led from the Chardonnet along a small stream to a big fieldwhich belonged to the school. There we had space to let the horses run.On rainy days we rode in one of the big halls. There ^[[we]]worked at thehurdles, raising the hurdle one notch after each^[[strikethrough]]succe[[/strikethrough]] successful jump. We were alsoput through trick riding, such as keeping both hands hight in the air, withthe reins loose on the horse's neck, and jumping the hurdles that way. Inthat same posture we were made to gallop around in ever-tighteningcircles. You had to lean inward to keep from falling off. The faster thepace, and the smaller the circle, the more you had to lean, but you couldalso fall off by leaning too far. A French cavalry major, with a stern faceand a resonant bass voice, often directed those indoor exercises.Watching






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me gallop around in a circle with a 10-foot radius, both hands high overmy head, he would bellow "Plus vitel Plus vitel".

The French style of riding was quite different from ours. I found itawkward and uncomfortable at first, and event with long practice I think Ishould have preferred ours. At Port Oglethorpe Sands had taught us toride as cowboys do, using the deep McClellan saddle and with stirrupslet out almost to full leg-length. The French rode more like jockeys in arace, using the same shallow English-type saddle. They shortened theirstirrups, though not quite so far as jockeys do. The Frenchman postedto his horse's trot, letting the shocks be absorbed by his leg musclesinstead of his liver. In our style the rider's body took whatever shakingthe horse chose to give it. At Fort Oglethorpe I had felt that I was abetter than average rider. At Saumur I did not shine, though I didmanage never to fall off.

One class hour each week was given to a subject called "Hippology". Ithad to do with the care and feeding of horses. An artillery officer did nothave to feed, groom or show horses, but his men did. So the officer hadto know enough to judge whether the horses were being cared forproperly or not. An officer had to inspect his battery's horses from timeto time, and it would have been silly to attempt that if you did not knowwhat to look for.

I was humilliated on two occasions at Saumur. I have written of one,when my section was scheduled to ride bicycles out into the country forfield exercises and I found myself the only man in the section who hadnever before been on a bike. The second occasion was in the class inHippology. Each of us was required to run at a horse from behind, putour hands on his rump and leapfrog into riding position astride his back.I was the only man in our section, perhaps the only one in the wholeschool, who could not do it. The instructor did not let me give up easilybut I never made it. Back in high school we had played a variety ofleapfrog called "one-and-over". The idea was to take a running jumpfrom a mark on the ground and clear the back of another boy standinghumped over eight or ten feet away. If everyone made it the jumpdistance was increased by a foot or so, and that went on until somebodymissed. Then he became "It" and had to take the humped-over stance.At that game my standing had always been the lowest in the league.






-4-It will have occurred to you that anyone mounting a horse in thatleapfrog fashion was trusting a great deal to the good nature of thehorse. Just in case you should ever want to try it, I will tell you how toinsure against getting kicked. You must get someone else to lift one ofthe horse's forefeet into the air and hold it there, as a blacksmith wouldin fitting a shoe. As long as that forefoot is off the ground the horse willnot kick with his hind ones. The horses I tried to jump on must have hadtheir patience worn pretty thin, but they did not kick.






^[[1]] March28, 1973.

Dear Alice:

Saumur is on the south (left) bank of the Loire, about 40 milesdownstream from Tours. I loved the town and its surroundings. In mylifetime the area has changed in ways that doubtless have made lifemore comfortable for the inhabitants. But when I revisited it in 1938 ithad become less picturesque than it had been in 1917. Then thecountryside had been dotted with windmills, and many of the peoplelived in cave dwellings with neatly built-in fronts. By 1938 the caveswere abandoned and the windmills were nearly all gone.

Once each week we were taken in Peugeot trucks with bench seats tothe champ de tir, the firing range (I never heard of Peugeot passengercar until long after WWI). From the beginning I was impressed by theexcellence of the French roads, as compared to ours. On that particularstretch of road I was surprised at the abundance of Mistletoe growing inthe trees. Later I found that mistletoe is very common all through theregion southwest of Paris. Our route first followed the river for about sixmiles, then turned away from it to the right for another four or five miles.A little while after leaving the river road we passed the entrance of theabbey of Fontevrault. It was closed to the public for the duration of thewar, so I never got inside the grounds. The high stone wall surroundingthem made the abbey an excellent prison camp. German war prisonerswere lodged there. During the day they worked in gangs, under guard,on the firing range or on the local roads. They wore green denimclothes with "PG" in big letters on the back. I suppose they were lockedout of the abbey church, which holds the tombs of Henry II of England,his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their son Richard Coeur de Lion. Thiswas Anjou, Henry's homeland.

Coming from Saumur you had the river on your left. Beside it werefields of low land that were flooded in rainy seasons. Those fields wereused for a kind of agriculture that was quite new to me. Each field hadrows of willow stumps, from which each spring new sprouts grew out.They were called osiers and were harvested for the making of basketsand other wickerwork. I understand that there are similar






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willow plantations in Ireland, and that they are there called "sallygardens". No doubt you remember Yeats's line about them.

On the right of the river road the ground rose quite steeply. Rows ofcaves had been dug from solid stone in those hillsides. They werearranged in successive tiers, one row opening at road level and two orthree more higher up. A street ran horizontally in front of each tier. Thecaves had masonry fronts with windows and doors. Some of themextended far enough out from the hillside to have side windows and astretch or roof above. Along that 6-mile route we passed four or fivevillages of such cave dwellings.

I never entered one of those dwellings. They must have been warm inwinter, but rather dark and stuffy. I don't know what plumbingarrangements they had, if any. The village nearest to Saumur was thelargest and was called Dampierre. As I recall the only building it hadabove ground was the town hall. Our section was taken there once byde Salinelles, our instructor, for an interview with the mayor. We wereengaged in an exercise involving the quartering of troops in the village.That was a contingency for which every town and village in France hadto be ready at all times. The military authorities had set, for each locality,the maximum number of officers and enlisted men it might be calledupon to house. It was then up to the mayor and his constituents todecide how those uninvited guests should be distributed among thehouseholds ^[[of]] the community. The mayor had to keep at his officean up-to-date listing. In this instance we were playing at moving abattery of 75's into Dampierre. The mayor had his list ready, bedroomsfor the officers, barns and such like for the enlisted men.

The mayor was a big, muscular middle-aged peasant. He was quitegenial about it, knowing that it was just make-believe. When our^[[strikethrough]]busines[/strikethrough]] business was over he servedwine to all 20 of us and invited us to take a look at his barn. His homewas a cave on the highest street. His barn was a much bigger cave stillhigher up. Its front was a kind of lattice of heavy timbers, admitting somelight to the interior. More light came through a hole in the roof, six oreight feet in diameter and opening into a field at the top of the hill. Thehole let in rain as well, but around the walls the overhang was enough tokeep the rain away from anything stored there. Separate compartmentscontained hay,






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grain, potatoes, casks of wine and other provisions. Two of thecompartments were pens, holding chickens and Belgian hares.

About 20 years ago I read in the Atlantic a rhapsodic piece about theSaumur area entitled "Where the Wild Boars Drank". It suggested thatthe name Saumur had originally meant something like that. The authorwas Anne Green, sister of Julian Green who was then (and maybe stillis) professor of French literature at the University of Virginia. He is abilingual author. His first novel was published in French and Frenchcritics were kind to it. The Greens, though American, grew up somehowin France. They had French friends living near Saumur whom theyvisited frequently. Anne seemed to like the place as much as I did.According to her, those cave dwellings along the Loire were originallyquarries, frok which building stone was taken and shipped by water toLondon. Later it occurred to the thrifty French that each quarry could bemade into a dwelling at half the expense of building a regular house.

When Helen and I were there in 1938 the caves were empty but therewere very few new houses in the area. The villages had simply beendeserted. During that same 20-year interval our log houses inCheatham county had mostly been abandoned, and for a similar reason.Country people were moving to the big cities. In France there was[[strikethrough]] anoth [/strikethrough]] another contributing factor. Thepopulation of the country as a whole was falling. We did a lot of drivingthrough France that summer. In the rural areas we saw several villagesin which all the houses were empty.

The biggest caves around Saumur belonged to two local wineries. Theywere located in two villages, St. Hilaire and St. Florent, at the southernedge of the town. Our charwoman had a brother who worked in one ofthem. He gave Herbert Jones and me a guided tour one Sundayafternoon. There were tunnels cut for long distances into the solid rock.Down the middle of each tunnel ran a miniature railroad track, overwhich small cars were pushed by hand. Along the sides of the tunnelswere racks in which literally millions of bottles of wine were stored. Itwas a sparkling white wine which my barbarian taste has






-4-never learned to distinguish from champagne. It is made from the samevariety of grapes and processed in the same way as champagne. But itcannot under French law be labelled as champagne and therefore sellsfor about half the price of the cheaper champagnes. The Saumurvintners should move to California or New York.






[[handwritten]] 8 [[/handwritten]]

April 5, 1973.

Dear Wanda, Jessica and Ted:

The cave dwellers of whom I wrote in my last letter inhabited a longridge that ends at Saumur. There its tip juts out into the city. Fromdowntown a steep, winding road, or rather street, runs to the summit ofthe ridge. About halfway up it passes along the base of the outer wall ofthe castle of Saumur. The first castle on that site was built in theeleventh century by Foulques Nerra, grandfather of Henry Plantagenetwho became king of England. Three centuries later Foulques' castle wasreplaced by the one that stands there now. Perhaps the older one hadbeen badly damaged, or maybe it was just regarded as obsolete.Anyhow xuring the Hundred Years' War a new facility (to use a modernexpression) was erected on the site. It is better preserved than mostmedieval castles, and it has everything that they were supposed tohave. For example there is a dungeon ([[underlined]] oubliette[[/underlined]]) which prisoners entered by being lowered with ropesthrough a hole in the stone floor of the room above. There was no otheropening. The castle also houses a museum of cavalry uniforms andequipment. Yet few American tourists go there. For them the beatenpath is the "chateau country" in the immediate neighbourhood of Tours. Isuppose thr average tourist is more interested in Renaissance palaces,such as Chenonceaux or Azay-le-Rideau, then in plain fortresses.

If you continue uphill past the castle to the summit, you will come to theRue des Moulins, the Street of the Windmills. Before you get there themain highway turns off to the right, so the Rue des Moulins is a quietbyway. On the map of Saumur in my Michelin guidebook of 1957 thestreet still bears taht name. But even when I went there in 1938, withHelen, the windmills were gone. In 1917 there had been five of them,standing along a two-block stretch of narrow street. There was a cozywineshop, where you could sit and look out the window at some of thewindmills. I have never known a more pleasant place for relaxing.

Our bicycle trips for field exercises in the country were alwaysenjoyable. De Salinelles, our instructor, had an eye for scenery and likedto take us to places with a good view. We used surveying






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instruments, pretending that we were moving a battery into a newposition and had to determine its precise location on the map. We didthat by sighting on objects of which the coordinates were already knownand marked on our battle-maps. The most common landmark was awindmill. One or more of them was always in sight, and naturally theystood on high ground where they were visible from long distances. Oneof our most memorable views was from a hilltop at Candes, where theVienne river joins the Loire. The Vienne, there and elsewhere, runsthrough some of the lovliest country in France. A few miles upstreamfrom Candes you come to Chinon, where Rabelais lived and where Joanof Arc was brought for her first meeting with Charles VII.

The castle is by no means the oldest building around Saumur. Thechurch of St. Pierre, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, is worthseeing. But the most antique structures are two dolmens, stone relics ofprehistoric times. They are located about two miles ^[[strikethrough]] so[/strikethrough]] southeast, at a village called Bagneux. I have seendolmens elsewhere in France, but the Grand Dolmen of Bagneux is saidto be the largest of them all. It is made of three flat stones. Two smallerones, matched in shape and size,st[[strikethrough]]to[[/strikethrough]]^[[an]]d edgewise on the ground,parallel and nearly sixty feet apart. The third slab, much larger,[[strikethrough]] was resting [[/strikethrough]]^[[rests]] horizontally acrossthe first two. The whole looked somewhat like a giant's coffee table. Theupper slab is 20 meters (about 6[[strikethrough]]8[[/strikethrough]]^[[6]]feet) in length and half as wide. It is six or eight feet thick. Engineershave speculated considerably on how it was lifted into position withoutthe aid of modern machinery. It rests high enough off the ground for atall man to walk under it. It is commonly supposed that those dolmenshad some connection with the religion of the Druidism but that seems tobe conjecture.

Herbert Jones and I visited the dolmens on one of our Sunday walksinto the country. We took such a walk nearly ^[[every]] week if it was notraining. The others of our party preferred to sleep late on Sundays andto walk in the city if anywhere. Jones and I went not only for sightseeing,but also because we frequently met people on the country roads andtried out our French on them. We had lunch at village ^[[strikethrough]]inns [/strikethrough]] taverns. There were no real restaurants out in thevillages, and often we got only cheese or sausage with bread and wine(Jones wouldn't drink even wine). More often we could get an omelet.






-3-

Usually on Sundays there were people sitting around the tables. Wewould listen to their conversation and understood occasional snatchesof it. In that fall of 1917 much was happening and the French wereworried. By that time the Germans were about ready to make peace ifthe allies would agree to a stalemate. Most of the French wanted to fighton until the Germans could be disarmed. They felt, and I think rightly,that an indecisive peace would leave both sides preparing for anotherwar, and that the Germans would start one whenever they saw anopportune time. A minority of the French, however, wanted to makepeace right away. Their leader, Joseph Caillaux, was jailed forclandestine correspondence with the Germans, and there was ashakeup in the French government. One day a Frenchman showed us aheadline in a newspaper and said "Well, we have a new premier, M.Clemenceau. Now the war will never end."

In that October the Bolsheviks took over Russia. They stopped theRussian armies from fighting the Germans, and soon made a separatepeace. That left the Germans and Austrians free to concentrate all theirforces in the west. Everyone knew they would try for a knockout in thespring of 1918. The French were too polite to ask Jones and me if theAmericans would be ready by then to do any fighting. But we knew thequestion was in their minds. It was on our minds too.






^ [[9]]

November 11, 1973.

Dear Alice:

I confess to being a Francophile. Three years ago, when Mary and Imade a brief visit to France, I was distressed to note that the Frenchseem to be acting more and more ^[[like]] Americans. In the past,wherever our customs differed from theirs, I usually found on criticalstudy [[strikethrough]] the [[/strikethrough]] that the French behavedmore sensibly than we.

For example, compare our respective public school systems. Frenchyoungsters on finishing grade school take scholastic tests. Those whorank highest get government scholarships that carry them on throughhigher education. The others can attend public vocational schools, but ifthey go to college it will be at theor own expense. That policy to be sureis "elitist", and to American educators "elitist" is a dirty word. So we try toeducate everybody, even dull-witted or rebellious pupils, to the samelevel. We force them to attend classes together until they are 18 yearsold. If a pupil at the end of that time is still unable to read, henevertheless ^[[g]]ets a diplom^[[a]]. He can even gain admittance tosome colleges, and our goverbnebt will help him there financially.

The French know how to run a railroad. At least they did in 1917-18, andI hear that passenger trains still run in France today. I have onlypleasant memories of French dining cars. Their food and wines weregood, their prices reasonable, and I never had to stand in line to get in.Before the diner opened, a waiter went through the entire train,distributing tickets for servings at specified times. For each serving hegave out only enough tickets to fill the diner. If for example you hadchosen to have lunch at 11:30 A. M., the first serving, you had only topresent your ticket at the diner at that time. You could count on beingseated and served immediately. The only hitch was that you had onehour in which to finish your meal and vacate your place. Another servingwas to start at 12:30 P.M. That never bothered me.

On American trains there was no fixed time schedule, excapt forhooking on diners and dropping them off. I still begrudge the ^[[weary]]hours I spent standing in line, waiting to get into those diners.

When I worked in New York I often rode trains to Baltimore or toWashington. The dining car usually was filled when I got aboard. Theoccupants could stay there as long as they pleased. There would be fewvacabcies for the next two hours or so. Unlike the French, who






-2-

drank their wine while eating, my fellow-Americans preferred to drinkfirst and eat later. So, once seated, they would have two or threeleisurely Martinis before ordering their food. Once, sick of standing inline, I just stayed in my seat until the train reached Philadelphia. Theresult was that my destination, Baltimore, was reached just as I finishedmy soup. I used to wonder why our dining cars did not adopt the Frenchsystem, but the management probably knew that its customers, beingAmerican, would not have submitted to such discipline.

Another minor comfort of Ftrnch trains was that the crews managed totake on or uncouple cars so quietly that the customers were notdisturbed. On American trains that operation always involved hideousscreeching noises and shook up the passengers.

Qhen we came home after Woe;d War 1 I asked a neighbor, Jim Perrywhat he had seen in France that most impressed him. He said "I saw fafarm land there that had been in cultivation, they tell me, ever since thetime of Christ. It still grows crops as well as our bext land in CheathamCounty." The same thing had impressed me. In our country farm landhad a shorter life. In our native county, Cheatham, there were manyfields that the owners no longer considered worth cultivating. Theysupported only a scanty wild growth, mostly broomsage and sassafrasbushes. Whereever the ground sloped deep gullies had been cut intothe red clay subsoil. Most of our farmers still practised the systemhanded down from their pioneer ancestors. In the southern statesparticularly, ground cleared from the forest would be planted year afteryear in corn, cotton or tobacco until the soild was exhausted. It wouldthen be left to nature. New ground would be cleared and the processrepeated. That was cheaper than trying to preserve or renovate the soil,for we still had land to spare. Late in 1918, travelling on a hospital trainftom Newport News to Atlanta, I saw rural sections of South Carolinaand Geo4gia. The desolation was worse than in Tennessee.

People of your generation never saw those ruined fields. When I went toFrance our southern states were just beginning to employ countyagricultural agents, to teach our farmers how to reclaim the land theyhad so abused. Their influence a had not yet visibly affecte thelandscape, and we did not have an agent in Cheatham county until






-3-

after the war. So the contrast between my home landscape and thataround Saumur increased my respect for the French. They had nobroomsage fields.

In 1917 we Americans still had both land and wood to spare. TheFrench, having occupied their country for a longer period, had noremaining surplus of either. When Herbert Jones and I began to takethose Sunday walks we made some interesting discoveries abou Frenchforests. The trees grew in a row, evenly spaced like stalks of corn in afield. The trees in a given row were of uniform size, presumably of thesame age. The larger the trees the farther apart they were spaced. Theforest grew in sections, separated by fire lanes where only grass grew.Obviously those trees had been planted by hand, and had been thinnedout as they grew larger. It was all part of the French pattern ofconservation, of bearing in mind the welfare of generations to come.

In that war France suffered a fuel shortage; in modern language anenergy crisis. Today our main source of energy is oil, but that was notthe case in 1917. Oil was needed only for running ships' en engines andto make gasoline to run the small amount of automotive traffic that itthen had. Having no oil wells, France had to import all its oul. The mainsource of energy for running railroads and industries, was coal. TheFrench coal mines were either in German hands or in territory beingfought over. So France had to import all its coal from its ally, England.The only native fuel the French had was wood. The French used itsparingly. Probably no civilized nation in modern times has managedwith so little winter heat as the French did in 1917-18.

Our dormitory building at Saumur had no central heating. Each bedroomhad a fireplace, but no fuel was provided. The fuel shortage wassomething entirely outside American experience. I did not understand it,and I think my classmates were equally ignorant. So, as cold weathercame on, we thought the French were just being stingy about giving usheat. We asked Théry, our orderly if he could buy some fuel for us. Coaland regular firewood were rigidly controlled and not for sale on the openmarket. The only kind of fuel on open sale consisted of fagots, bundlesof small sticks gleaned from fallen






-4-

branches in the woods or from pruning hedges. They were brought intotown and offered for sale by peasants. Fagots burned so quickly in anopen fireplace that even today they would find no market in the UnitedStates except perhaps as kindling. They were expensive by Frenchstandards, but we Americans were highly paid. We had Thery buyfagots for us to keep a fire going in one bedroom in the evenings. Ourparty of 6 assembled there, leaving the other two bedrooms cold. Butthere were 400 Americans in our building, and others besides us wereburning fagots.

The first intimation I had that we were causing trouble to others cameone day when our housekeeper, a gentle, middle-aged widow, told methat she could no longer get wood for cooking. I learned that housewivesin Saumur, when they could afford it, burned fagots in their kitchenstoves to supplement the meager ration of firewood allowed them. Instoves fagots could be made to burn more slowly than they did in openfireplaces. Stoves had dampers.

We had noticed that the price of fagots kept going up. We had notrealized the hardship we were inflicting on the civilians of Saumur.Eventually an order was issued by our American commandant,forbidding us to buy fuel in the local market. For our last month or so atSaumur we lived and slept in totally unheated quarters. It made usfinally realize that there was a war going on. After all, Frenchmen (butnot yet Americans) at the front were living and sleeping in unheatedtrenches and dugouts. And in the evenings we could still keep warm in aa cafe on the school grounds.






^[[10]]April 24, 1973.^[[10]]

Dear Alice:

Before I leave Saumur let me record a few more scattered memories ofit.

1. Le Havre and Saumur were the first places I had ever seen where thebicycle was anything more than a toy. In this country I had sometimesseen boys delivering newspapers on bikes, but I had not seen themused for any other practical purpose. At Saumur it was the major meansof local transportation. Later I found that to be true elsewhere in Franceand in other European countries. As late as 1955 I remember seeinghundreds of bicycles parked densely on a quiet side street adjoining thebusiness district of Stockholm. They belonged to people who rode themto and from work. It was much the same at that time in Denmark,Finland, Switzerland and Italy. Nowadays the automobile has more andmore displaced the bike.

It amused me at Samur to see well-dressed old ladies and often priestsriding sedately along on a bike. I failed then to notice, and I still wonder,whether the priests in those black robes managed to straddle a man's-style bicycle or had to use the girls' model.

2. Milk was delivered house-to-house in two-wheeled, horse-drawncarts. The drivers were women, their men being in the army. Each cartcarried several metal milk cans, much like those you see around dairyfarms in this country. The cart also carried a graduated pitcher, formeasuring out the milk in liters. Each customer had to meet the cart,bringing his own container. I never saw a milk bottle, and no one oneither side of the Atlantic had yet heard of milk in cartons. That mayseem to you awkward, but think of the saving to the customer. I don'tknow whether those delivery women came directly from the dairy farmsor not. If they were middlemen they were the only ones involved in themilk trade. Along one street near the school I used to see milk deliveredin a smaller cart. It was drawn not by a horse, but by a big dog. He washarnessed much like a buggy horse.

3. Saumur had two big cafes and any number of smaller ones. The Cafede la Paix in Paris is by no means the only one of that name. Nearlyevery French town of any size, including Saumur, had one. The othercafe was named, predictably, the Cafe du Commerce. Then there






-2-

was a cafe belonging to the school, in the building that housed thedining rooms. It was run f^[[or]] our benefit, and its prices were lowerthan those of the downtown cafes. Our cafe was open in the eveningsand it was warm, There I made my first acquaintance with liqueurs,-chartreuse, benedictine, curacao,- and r^[u] um.. When we came in fromcold days on the firing range I enjoyed rum in hot lemonade. Thatmixture in France is called "grog chaud".

The two big downtown cafes had billiard tables, and there I handled acue for the first time. For some years, whenever I had found myself inNashville with time to kill, it had been my habit to go to the billiard roomat the Maxwell House. I never played there, for in those days I could notafford it. But Nashville then had some expert billiard players and I likedto watch them. In one corner of the big room were elevated seats,enough to accommodate 30 or 40 spectators. The room had six tablesfor billiards and six for pool. The billiar^[[symbol for close-up letters]] dtables were placed nearest the spectators seats, as if the managementregarded billiards as the more interesting to watch. I never saw a pooltable in France, and to me that was no hardship.

After leaving Saumur, the next time I played billiards was at theUniversity of Chicago. In 1919 the university had a pleasant recretioncenter for men, called the Reynolds Club. It had a good billiard roomand I spent much time there. Then in the 1920's the world began goingto the dogs. The Maxwell House closed its billiard room and made it intoa lunchroom. The Reynolds Club at the University was turned over tothe YMCA and I never darkened its doors again. The billiard room wasclosed there too, but by that time I didn't care. I was married and^[[strikethrough]]p[[/strikethrough]]r preferred to spend the evenings athome. But if I had been born into wealth, I should probably have spentall my time playing billiards and chess. I was never much good at either,but I enjoyed them.

The school cafe at Saumur had no billiard tables, but it did have chessboards. In our section I found a chess player, a man named Aragon whohad been an instructor in mathematics at the University of Illinois. Heand I were evenly matched. When we were coming hom in a truck fromthe firing range he and I used to start a game "blindfold". We were notas good at that as master players are. We would get through 15 or 20moves and then get stuck. When we got home we would go to the cafe,get a board, and set up the game as we had left it. Then we would






-3-

finish the game with the board before us.

4. At least half of our working time at Saumur was taken up with appliedmathematics in one form or another. That was quite a change changefrom Fort Oglethorpe, where Captain Sands had not bothered us withmathematics at all. There we had to worry only about memorizing thedrill ritual and sticking on a horse. When we were commissioned, I hadranked 21st out of about a hundred second lieutenants, and CharliePrice had been 20th. But at Saumur I had an advantage over my fellow-Tennesseeans. I knew more about mathematics than they did. Justbefore we ended our work at Saumur de Salinelles ^[[insertion]] gave us[[/insertion]] the ratings of our section as our French instructors hadfigured them. Ransom and I were in the top five, but he was number 5and he did not like it. His was perhaps the best brain among us, but itwas the brain of a poet, not a mathematician. Number 1 of the sectionwas Barrett Rogers, a graduate engineer. I was either second or third, Iforget which. The other two among the top five were Aragon andanother engineer named Stribling.

The lowest rating of all was given to Charles Duryea, the only son of awealthy widow in New York. He was an odd case. He had beeneducated largely in private schools in Switzerland. He spoke Frenchfluently, as none of the rest of could. He was handsome and he hadbeautifully tailored uniforms. He was friendly and I liked him, but he wasone of the most stupid men I have ever seen at large. He had beencommissioned second lieutenant from one our training camps in thesummer, but his commission was revoked when he finished at Saumur. Iheard later that he had been seen at Tours in the uniform of a sergeantand wearing the insignia of an interpreter.

On leaving I got a typed certificate of my standing. Eventually it went topieces in my pocket. The only effect my rating a Saumur had on mysubsequent career was that in the following April I was ordered to returnto Saumur as an instructor. The order took six weeks to reach me. I wason duty with a French squadron. It was just a typical army foulup, andthe order was eventually revoked, as I hope to explain in a later letter.






^[[11]]May 1, 1^[[9]]73.^[[11]]

Dear Alice:

We left Saumur on New Year's Day, 1918. About 30 of us, including allour Section 1 and part of Section 2, had orders to report for duty with theFirst Field Artillery Brigade at Gondrecourt, in Lorraine. We had neverheard of Gondrecourt before. On the map it looked like a village ratherthan a city, and it was about 50 miles from the battlefront. To reach it wehad to go through Paris, for all the main railroad lines of Franceconverged there. Saumur is on a road that runs from Parissouthwestward to Bordeaux. Gondrecourt is on the Cemin de Fer del'Est, which runs eastward through Nancy to th^[[e]] German border.

We arrived in Paris late that night, and at once the war became morereal to us. Saumur, though not a city of neon lights, had not beendarkened at night. The German Zeppelins, which had scared everyonein France and England earlier in the war, had gone out of business afterseveral were lost on a final raid. Paris was thoroughly darkened, exceptfor the dimmed, depressed headlights of the taxicabs. Our party of 6Tennesseans went to the Richmond, a modest hotel which I still ^[[find]]listed in the Michelin guide of 1969. It was too late for us to seekadventure that night, and it was our duty to take the first train out thefollowing morning. A soldier in transit to a new post is not supposed toloiter along the way. But Paris is hardly the sort of place that a youngman wants to hurry through, especially if he has never been therebefore. We all wanted to stay over for a day. We realized that thecommand at Gondrecourt might not approve, but we [[strikethrough]]deci [[/strikethrough]] decided to take the chance.

I will not undertake a full account of all our activities during those 24hours we stole in Paris. Next morning I walked for the first time up theAvenue de l'Opéra. I found Bretano's book store, where you could getbooks in English and many of the American magazines. I found also theAmerican University Union, a useful institution for Americans in WorldWar 1. It would take care of your mail and handle messages. It had acomfortable reading room and a good, inexpensive restaurant. At aBritish clothing store I bought a Burberry trench coat. It was a soundinvestment. The British had designed the ideal outer garment for thewinter climate of northern France. It could be






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worn as an ordinary raincoat, but [[strikethrough]] o [[/strikethrough]]^[[i]]f you buttoned in in its detachable woolen [[strikethrough]] ling[[/strikethrough]] ^[[lining]] it gave as much protection against the cold asour regulation army overcoats did. Those American overcoats were notonly ungainly but weighty. When soaked with rain they must haveweighed [[strikethrough]] 20 [[/strikethrough]] ^[[15]] pounds.

Paris seemed full of friendly and unattached women. Many were ofcourse looking for cash customers, but some at least just wanted to besociable. At dinner that evening our party was served artichokes, avegetable none of us had encountered before. While we were fumblingwith them two young women got up from a nearby table and came overto instruct us. That brought on a pleasant conversation in [[/erased]] witha very limited vocabulary on both sides. When the womwn left weoffered them a choice of escorts from among us, but they declined.

The next morning we went to the Gare d l'Est to board our train. Therewere found nearly all of the contingent headed for Gondrecourt fromSaumur. Only two or three men, more conscientious or perhaps moretimid than we, had gone on ahead the day before. Our journey that daywas through territory that was to become familiar to me later on. TheMarne river joins the Seine a little upstream from Paris. The railroadruns for more than a hundred miles along the Marne. About 50 miles outwe passed through Chateau-Thie'rry, a town then 30 miles from thebattlefront. But late in May the Germans drove a wedge into the Frenchlines. They reached the Marne at Chateau-Thie'rry and cut that railroadline on which we were travelling in January. Fifty miles further on wepassed Chalons-sur-Marne, the railhead nearest the airfield where I wasto serve with the French for a few weeks in April and May. BeyondChalons the railroad and the Marne part company, because the rivertakes a bend toward the south. The railroad goes on through Bar-le-Duc, the railhead for Verdun. Toward the middle of the afternoon wereached Gondr[[strikethrough]] 4 [[/strikethrough]] ecourt.

It was a village of perhaps 1000 people. A dozen or so wooden huts hadbeen built near the station for the Americans. We learned thatGondrecourt was the railhead for the First Division, which included ourbrigade of artillery and two brigades of infantry. Those units werebilleted in villages scattered over a radius of 15 or 20 miles. We found alocal office of the artillery brigade and report






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in. The officer in charge explained that the regiments to which we wereassigned were located some miles away; that we had been expected onthe previous day and that wagons had then been sent to meet us. Hedid some telephoning. Then he told us that it was an 8-hour round tripfor the wagons; that it was too late for them to come for us that day, butthat they would be sent for us the following [[strikethrough]] ,[[/strikethrough]] day, January [[strikethrough]] 3 [[/strikethrough]] ^[[4]].

We asked him where we could spent the night. There was no hotel inGondrecourt, he said, and all billets were occupied. He suggested thatwe go to the YMCA. We did. It occupied one of the smaller huts. It hadone large room and a sort of kitchen, but no beds. Even the man whoran the place slept somewhere else. Soon after dark he went home andleft us in possession. The only alternative was to turn us out to spendthe night in the street. The place was heated in teh daytime by a coalstove, but the fire went out and we found no coal to keep it going.January in Gondrecourt was not as cold as it sometimes is in Wheaton,but the snow outside was not thawing.

So we spent 24 hours at that YMCA. When morning came our hostreturned and made coffee for us. He also had doughnuts and candybars. Early next afternoon the wagons arrived and we piled in. We werenot formally punished for being tardy. We were not even reprimanded.But we had paid the penalty that I think we had deserved. It may haveoccurred to you that a truck could easily have made that round trip, of 15miles or so each way, in an hour, and could have been sent for us onthe day of our arrival. But if our brigade had any trucks at that time Inever saw them. In fact, during my brief stay with the First Division, Inever saw any [[strikethrough]] M [[/strikethrough]] ^[[m]]otor vehiclaebeing used by it. Later on, when American division^[[s]] began going intoaction, each one had lots of trucks. They just weren't there in January.

After that ride our group of 6 Tennesseeans was disperse, for no two ofus were assigned to the same battery. I was conveyed to ghe [[the]]headquarters of the First Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, at a village calledCouvert-Puits ^[[Couvertpuits.]]. The commander of that battalion wasLieutenant-Colonel Alfred L. P. Sands, who as Captain Sands had beenmy commander at the officers' training camp at Fort Oglethorpe. He hadbeen promoted through two grades since I first met him. All regulararmy officers in the lower grades were being promoted at the samepac^[[e]]. [[strikethrough]] d [[/strikethrough]] Sands greeted me with asmuch cordiality as a shavetail could expect from one of his rank.






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The battalion included three batteries, and I was assigned to Battery C.So from [[strikethrough]] K [[/strikethrough]] ^[[C]]ouverpuits (battalionheadquarters and Battery A) I went on through Ribaucourt (Battery B) toMorley (Batt [[strikethrough]] ey [[/strikethrough]] ^[[ery]] C). Two newnewcomers from Samur were assigned to C. One was another secondlieutenant named Post. The other was First Lieutenant Murphy, the onlyman in the army with whom I had ever [[strikethrough]] exch[[/strikethrough]] exchanged angry words. We detested each other.There wee were in the same battery, and he outranked me.

Love,






^[[12 12]]

May 6, 1973.

Dear Alice:In writing about my quarrel with Lieutenant Murphy I am not trying tocast him as the villain in this narrative. I was more to blame than he. Ihad become rather ashamed of the affair, but I still didn't like Murphyand saw no reason to apologize to him. Then by pure bad luck I foundmyself assigned to the same battery as he.The trouble had started back in October of 1917, soon after our arrival atSaumur. It was on the first field excursion we made. The first andsecond sections, mine and Murphy's, went out together. Forty bicycleswere set out neatly on racks for our use. I was the only man of the fortywho had never been on one before. I rode mine that day, but at first Iwobbled quite badly. One of the wobbles caused me to sideswipeMurphy. [[strikethrough]] [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] No physical harm wasdone. He asked where the hell I thought I was going. I apologizedabjectly, but it did not seem to mollify him. A little later, still strugglingwith that bike, I saw Murphy talking to the French lieutenant of hissection. He was pointing at me and laughing. That evening after we gothome Guthrie told me he had overheard Murphy make a sneeringcomment about me to the Frenchman.At the time it did not occur to me to doubt what Guthrie said, though^[[later]] I began to suspect that he had invented it. He was my friend,but he was given to practical jokes. Still, discounting Guthrie's story, Iwas mad at Murphy. Next day we happened to meet in a corridor withno one else around. I expressed my feelings about him in rudelanguage.It was a rash thing to do. Not only was Murphy a bigger man than I, healso outranked me. In the army it is regarded as bad form to swear at asuperior officer. But Murphy's response was restrained. He merely saidthat he did not want to brawl with me, and suggested that we drop thematter. I did, but we never spoke to each other thereafter. It issometimes hard for us to analyze our own motives. Whatever I do, Imanage to persuade myself that my motives are praiseworthy. Butsometimes I begin to have doubts after the event. In this instance I feltthat all the names I called Murphy were simply expressions of justindignation. Looking back, I am sure that I was also using Murphy as anobject on which to work off my humiliation of the day before.






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Early in January, when we reported for duty with the 7th Field Artillery,the entire First Division was engaged in field maneuvers. When we gotto ^[[Orley]] Marly, the regular station of Battery C, we found there onlyso-called "rear echelon", a home base unit of 30 or 40 men. The onlyofficer there was second lieutenant Julian Hume. of Norfolk, Virginia.Hume had dinner for the four of us brought from the men's mess. Suchare the vagaries of memory that I do not remember any further contactwith Murphy or with the other Saumur man after that evening. I thinkthey rode away early next morning, on telephoned orders, to join themain body of the battery on its maneuvers. At any rate Hume had a lotto tell me over the next two or three days, and I do not remember thatanyone else was present at our talks. I liked him very much, and alwaysregretted that our acquaintance lasted less than three weeks.Hume told me that the First Division had suffered repeated shortages ofsupplies. The worst was that once for some weeks there had beennothing to feed the horses but scanty supply of hay, Several horses hadbeen lost, When a horse lay down and could not get up, the veterinarianwould be called in to condemn the animal and it was shot. For a week orso no bread had come through armay channels. The Americans couldnot buy bread from local bakeries without making the villagers gohungry. Hume took me to see three or four men billeted in a barn loft,who had been excused from any outdoor duty. Their shoes werecompletely gone and there were none to replace them.That was not encouraging news. Actually, at the higher levels of theAEF, a service of supply was then being organized. By the summer of1918 it was working admirably. But I did not enjoy the perspective thatGeneral Pershing had. All I could think of was the big German driveexpected in the spring and the strain it would put upon the Frenchrailroads. In short, I didn't see how the supply situation for theAmericans could improve. I had heard by the grapevine that we thenhad just [[strikethrough]] six [[/strikethrough]] ^[[four]] divisions in France,The question in my mind was, how we could hope to support a full-sizedarmy.The commander of C battery at that time was a West Point man,






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Captain Woodward. He was expecting momentarily to be promoted andto move up to a higher commands. That would leave Murphy the seniorofficer in Battery C and Woodward's prospective successor in command.Everything considered, my prospects for happiness with Battery C did[[strikethrough]] n [[/strikethrough]] not seem bright.

The billet assigned to me at [[strikethrough]] Marley [[/strikethrough]]^[[Morley]] was the guest room of an elderly peasant couple. It wasnever heated, but the old people kept a small fire going in their living-room fireplace until bedtime. They invited me to sit with them whenever Iwished. There was always an appetizing smell from their pot-au-feu. Myroom had a featherbed which I was allowed to use. Having had no sleepthe night before my arrival, and having been chilled for most of thepreceding 24 hours, I was especially grateful for that featherbed the firstnight. It reminded me of one I had slept on as a child when visiting myElliott grandparents. That January was rather cold in Lorraine. My bedwas the one place where I could count on a few hours of warmth.

Two or three days went by at [[strikethrough]] Marley [[/strikethrough]]^[[Morley]]. Then I got a telephoned order to bring two supply wagons tojoin the battery on maneuvers. The journey was to a village calledHoudelaincourt, 15 or 20 miles away. I rode horseback, and half adozen men went in the wagons. It was, you might say, my firstcommand of troops in the field. We were passing through friendlyterritory on a cold but sunny day, and I enjoyed it. At Houdelaincourt Imet Captain Woodward, and saw Sands again. Sands gave an order toall the new officers from Saumur, in his battalion, to join him[[strikethrough]] fro [[/strikethrough]] ^[[for]] a ride next morning over thearea where war games were going on.

I was the only one of the new officers who had known Sands before. Icould guess why he had planned the next day's excursion. He wanted tosee how well his new officers could ride. He also wanted to give them apersonal exhibition of horsemanship. I did not tell any of the others whatwas in store. I looked up our stable sergeant and told him that I wouldneed a horse next morning. And I asked him to give me the best jumperhe had.

That evening I made a contribution tofriendl[[strikethrough]]a[[/strikethrough]]^[[y]] relations with the French. Iwas billeted with a family which included a grandpa, and I was invited tosit with them by the fire. The old man turned out to be a veteran of theChasseurs d'Afrique. He had been sent to Mexico when the Frenchwere trying to help Maximilian take over that






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country. That made him a contemporary of our Civil War veterans. Igave the old man a pipeful of Carthage Red Leaf smoking tobacco. Itwas too strong for my taste, but a former pupil at Carthage had sent mea bag containing two pounds of the stuff. That had happened because,when I was teaching at Carthage, I had bought Carthage Red Leaf andhypocritically pretended to like it. The old Frenchman seemed really tolike it, and accepted another pipeful when the first was gone. So I havehim the whole bag as a presnet. Madame his daughter hugged me inthe presence of her husband. They had had trouble, she said, gettingtabac for him. It was rationed and the [[strikethrough]] [[?]][[/strikethrough]] rations were skimpy.

Next day our ride turned out exactly as I had expected. Sands did notbother us with the details of the war games in progress. He sought outrough ground to ride over. He made his horse jump gullies and smallstreams. He would go first, then turn around and watch us. The stablesergeant had given me a big sorrel that loved to jump and wenteverywhere that Sands did. Two or three men fell off. Some of thehorses refused to jump and had to be ridden or led around obstacles.We did not get back to battalion headquarters until 3 P. M. or so. Sandsgave us a late lunch there. We got through it only an hour or so beforedinner time at our battery mess. I was not hungry then , so I just went tomy billet.

We had been told that the maneuvers were finished, and that the entiredivision could rest next day. Reveille was not to be until 8 o'clock, andafter breakfast we were to march leisurely back to Marly. It was not so tobe. Next day brought my first and only meeting with General Pershing.It was also to be the most uncomfortable day of my military career.

[[strikethrough]] ^[[Note: The village I call Marly here appears as Marleyon the later Michelin road maps. I still think its name in 1918 was Marly.]][[/strikethrough]]






^[[13 13]]May 11, 1973

Dear Alice:

I think it was on January 9, 1918, that I stood all day in the rain on ahillside near Gondrecourt. A week earlier, when I joined Battery C of the[[strikethrough]] 8 [[/strikethrough]] ^[[7]]th Field Artillery, there had beensnow on the [[strikethrough]] gr [[/strikethrough]] ground. It had stayed,but on that day it was turning to slush. Most of the day it drizled, butnow and then the rain came down hard for a while. My only comfort wasto congratulate myself on having bought that British trench coat as Icame through Paris.

I was there playing a small part in a war game. If the ground had beendrier and firmer, my stage props would have included two 75 mm. gunswith their caissons. But that morning the generals who were running theshow had wisely decided not to risk getting the guns mired down in themuddy fields. So our 75's [[strikethrough]] [[?]] [[/strikethrough]]remained parked at Houdelaincourt, the village where we had spent thenight. On the hill I had only imaginary guns.I did have real live guncrews. They loaded with imaginary shells and aimed the guns. When Icommanded "Fire!" they pulled imaginary lanyards. No doubt we gavethe imaginary enemy a bad time.

War games will always be necessary as long as we have wars. I wouldnot think of ridiculing them, but my part in that one had comic aspects.For the 26,000 men of the First Division, the occasion was just anothertypical army foul-up. This was to have been form them a day ofrelaxation and rest. They had been driven through a week of fieldmaneuvers in freezing weather, finishing their original schedule on the8th. They had gone to bed that night with the promise of an extra hour ofsleep next morning, to ^[[be]] followed by a leisurely breakfast and amarch back home, to the villages where they had their respective winterquarters. Instead, they had heard reveille at daybreak on the 9th andwere now being marched out again, this time into the rain.

All this came about because General Pershing had missed the fieldexercises of the final day. He had meant to witness them, but hadsomehow been detained and had not reached Gondrecourt until late onthe night of the 8th. Now the final day had to be replayed for thegeneral's benefit. Orders had gone out around midnight. I supposedevery company and battery commander had been awakened ^[[and]]told to pass the order down the ranks.






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On that night of the 8th every other officer of Battery C was notified ofthe change in our schedule for the next day, but somehow I was not. Iwas billeted at a house on the outskirts of the village, the only Americanthere. I did not hear the reveille bugle call. I was finally awakened by anenlisted man who came into my room to tell me that he had brought myhorse, all saddled and ready to go. He said that the battery was movingout. The commander, Captain Woodward, had already ridden forth, but Imight be able to overtake him on the road if I hurried.

I had missed breakfast. I could not even take time to shave. While Idressed the enlisted man gathered up my belongings, and I left them inhis charge. Then I rode after the battery, and did manage to overtakethe captain on the road. I expected a reprimand for being tardy, but hesaid it was someone else's fault I had not been called earlier.

The captain had a sheet of typed orders for me. He had detailed me tocommand the two gun crews. He rode with us off the road and postedus on that hillside. Our horses were led away. At our back were woods,in front a field sloping downward. About two miles ahead, hidden fromour sight by hills, was our infantry. It was scheduled to [[strikethrough]]mo [[/strikethrough]] move out and attack some time during the day.When they moved forward we were supposed to begin firing,contributing to a rolling barrage that kept shells bursting just ahead ofthe infantry. We were not told when the attack was to start. We were towatch for signal roskets which the infantry would send up at the momentof starting. That required us to keep an unremitting watch for the signal.To insure against our cheating, I was required to note and record theexact time at which the signal appeared. I was further required tomemorize the typed orders that Woodward had given me.

The morning passed, and nothing happened. I had set two men towatch, and told the rest to stand under the trees, for such shelter as theycould find there. They tried to start a fire, but [[strikethrough]] 5+343mwas [[/strikethrough]] ^[[found]] no wood dry enough. We got nothing toeat all day, and I was hungry. The men had had breakfast, but I had noteaten since mid-afternoon of the previous day (see my letter of May 6).






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In the middle of the afternoon one of the men on watch called out "Twoofficers coming, Lieutenant". Two horsemen came into view fromdownhill, headed toward us. They reached our post and halted a fewyards away so that I would have to come to them. One I recognized asGeneral Parshing. The other was Brigadier Generall Sunn^[[mm]]erall,commander of the First Field Artillery Brigade. I stepped forward,saluted, and identified myself and my unit. General Pershing neverlooked at me at all. He just sat there gazing off into the distance. Hemade a fine figure on [[corrected]] in [[/end corrected]] horseback.

General Summerall said "Let me see your orders". I unbuttoned the topof my trench coat and took the orders from the inside pocket, where Ihad been keeping them dry. He took them, looked, and asked "Nowwhat are your orders?" I recited them from memory. He returned them,saying "Very good. Button up your overcoat".

My trench coat had been properly buttoned when th[[strikethrough]] r[[/strikethrough]] ^[[e]] generals arrived. When I handed that paper toSummerall I knew it would be returned to me in a moment, and hadthought it unnecessary to button up again while waiting. I don't thinkSummerall actually expected me to do so, or that he was displeasedwith my performance. He was merel^[[y]] following the time-honoredmilitary convention that requires an inspecting officer to always scold ifhe can find any pretext for doin^[[g]] so. The convention requires himalso to wear an expression of restrai^[[ned]]] disgust as he scolds. I hadbeen in the army long enough to know those formalities. It was a miraclethat he had not noticed my unshaven face.

Some time later the signal rockets went off. I duly noted the time, andwe went through the prescribed pantomime of firing. Then we justwaited again until dusk came on. Finally a messenger arrived withorders and a horse for me. The men were to walk to the nearest road.There the battery, just starting on its way ho^[[m]]e to our winter quartersat Morley, would pick them up. I was to ride back to Houdelaincourt andthere take charge of our supply wagons, [[strikethrough]] L[[/strikethrough]] ^[[l]]eading them also home to Morley. FromHoudelaincourt it was about 15 miles.

Our journey in the dark was slow and tedious. It had turned cold and theroad was icy, the rain freezing as it fell. The horses kepts[[strikethrough]] t [[/strikethrough]] ^[[l]]ipping, threatening to fall andbreak a [[strikethrough]] k [[/strikethrough]] leg. We passed a 75 gun






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that had slid off the road into the ditch/^[[.]] It was lying thereunattended, but it was not my responsibility. The hour was late when wefinally reached Morley. There a sergeant took over the wagon detail andI went to battery headquarters. Lieutenant Julian Hume was therewaiting for me.He had kept some food and coffee from the eveningmeal, and warmed them for me on a bed of coast in the fireplace. Soended my 30-hour fast. I never enjoyed any meal more ^[[than]] thatone.

Of the next few days, my last in the artillery, I have only dimrecoll[[strikethrough]] r [[/strikethrough]] ^[[e]]ctions. I conducted routinegun drills, and o^[[n]]ce during that perio[[strikethrough]] n[[/strikethrough]] ^dd]] I took part, as Officer of the Day, in a formal guardmount.

I don't know whether the army still has formal guard mounts or not.Inthose days they seemed to be required weekly at every army post. Theguard mount was a ceremony as solemn as a high mass, and somewhatmore complicated. On this occasion the principal actor, besides myself,was an old-timer sergeant. To him it was a familiar routine, but he knewthat I was one of those new mail-order offices fresh out of civilian life. Icould see that he was watching me closely, expecting and maybehoping that I would blow my lines. Fortunately I had been put throughrather intensive drill on guard mou[[strikethrough]] j [[/strikethrough]]^[[n]]ts by Captain Sands at Fort Oglethorped. The affair went offsmoothly.

Then, about the 20th of January, I went ^[[to]] battalion headquarters onsome errand now forgotten. On the bulletin board I saw a notice invitingofficers of the infantry or fiels artillery, up to and including the rank ofcaptain, to apply for detached duty with the air service. Anyoneinterested could just leave his name with the battalion adjutant. I did so.

^[[Love, Dad]]






^[[14 14]]

May 29, 1973


Histories of World War I tell us that both sides used aeroplanes from thebeginning. At first the planes were unarmed and their mission waspurely reconnaissance. At once a race began, between the Germansand the allies, to improve and to arm aircraft. The Germans did most ofthe innovating and the allies then hurried to catch up. Let me try todescribe the state of affairs early in 1918, when I entered aviation. Tocomplete the aerial picture I should mention balloons.

The German dirigible balloons, called Zeppelins, had been active earlierbut were no longer flying. How that had come about is an interestingstory that I will not digress to relate. Both sides were however usingstationary "sausage" balloons as observation posts. They wereanchored two or three miles behind the front lines. Each side had acontinuous strong of sausage balloons extending from the North Sea tothe Swiss border. On a clear day an infantryman anywhere in the front-line trenches could see three or four balloons on his own side and asmany of the enemy's. When visibility was poor the balloons stayed onthe ground.

No on then had enough non-inflammable helium to fill even one balloon.They were all filled with hydrogen. One incendiary bullet was enough toignite it, and a burning balloon made quite a blaze. Since the balloonwas as big as a barn, you might think that they would have been easyprey for an enemy aeroplane. In fact, however, any plane pilot whoattacked a balloon ran a considerable risk of getting shot down. Eachballoon emplacement was guarded by a ring of heavy machine guns,whose crews kept a lookout for enemy aircraft.






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Balloons were set on fire from time to time. The observer in his basketmost often had warning by telephone from watchers on the ground intime to jump out and float to earth with his parachute. That was oneadvantage he had over those who flew in aeroplanes. The allies neversucceeded in adapting the parachute for use in planes. The Germansfinally did, but when the first German flyer jumped from a plane with aparachute the war had less than two months to go. The balloonobserver had another advantage in that he could use field glasses.They were useless in aeroplanes because of the vibration. The maindisadvantage of the balloon observer was that he was a long way fromthe objects he wanted to see. His balloon had to be out of range at leastof the enemy's light artillery.

By 1918 aeroplanes had become specialized for four different kinds ofservice. Each had its own organization and employed a different type ofaircraft. There were (a) day bombers, (b) night bombers, (c) observationplanes, and (d) pursuit or chasse planes. Bombing was in WWIrelatively unimportant, for the planes could carry only light bomb loadsand navigation was less reliable than it was later. As I had said before,compasses had not been made to work in aeroplanes. Bombers had tofind their way to and from their targets visually, by the map. Theiractivity was limited to clear weather. The French day bomber was theBreguet, a sturdy two-seater that was also used for observation workand was comparable to our Salmsons Day bombing was a dangerousbusiness because of the enemy's chasse, and the bombing planes flewin formations of six or more for mutual protection. Even so they rarelybombed targets more than 30 miles inside enemy territory.

Night bombers were the largest planes in use, with as many as






3

four motors. The British had their own, the Handley-Page. The Frenchused the Italian-made Caproni. They had a range of around 150 milesfrom their base, and they carried heavier bomb loads than did the daybombers. They were painted black to make them harder to see in thedarkness, but they could be picked up in searchlight beams. I was inParis at least twice during raids by night bombers. It was exciting towatch the searchlights converge on them and to see the shells begin tocrack around them.

Observation planes were nearly all single-engine two-seaters. I wrotesomething about them in an earlier letter. Neither side produced abetter one than the French Salmson. Its top speed, in level flight, wasabout 120 miles per hour. The only American-made planes ever used inbattle were brought in during the final weeks, after I had gone to ahospital. So I know about them only from hearsay. They were two-seaters equipped with the so-called Liberty motor. They were said to befaster than the Salmson, making about 135 miles per hour. But theycould carry only enough gasoline for about two hours' flight, and theyhad an unpleasant habit of catching on fire with no provocation fromwithout. Aviators I talked with in the hospital referred to them as "flyingcoffins".

Pursuit or chasse planes were relatively small but fast single-engineone-man craft with two or three machine guns geared to shoot throughthe propeller. The pilot aimed his entire plane at a target. In 1918 theGerman were equipping all their chasse squadrons with Fokkers,triplane or biplane. The triplanes had the advantage that they could flyat an upward angle better than any other. We dreaded them becauseonce a Fokker triplane got behind and under the tail of an observationplane he could stick there until he downed you.






4

Otherwise it was a standoff between the Fokkers and the French Spads.(If you are interested "Spad" is an acronym derived from the name of themanufacturers, the Societe Pour [[underlined]] l'Aviation et ses Derives).[[/underlined]] The sole function of the chasse pilot was to attack theobservation planes, day bombers or balloons of the enemy and toprotect the same members of his own side. The last duty brought himinto frequent combat with the chasse of the enemy. Thus the chassepilots on opposing sides did a lot of fighting with each other.

I did not yet know all this when in January 1918 I saw that notice on thebulletin board at the headquarters of the First Battalion, Seventh FieldArtillery. It invited me to apply for detached service with the aviation.From the newspapers I had got the impression, which I think mostcivilians shared, that aviators spent their time just flying around shootingat each other. The only flyers ever mentioned by name, except incasualty lists, were chasse pilots. That was natural. The exploits ofchasse pilots were more dramatic and more interesting to the averagereader than the doings of observation and bomber crews. The publickept track of the scores of the aces, much as it now does of the numberof passes completed by Joe Namath.

During my brief stay at Le Havre, late in September of 1917, I had paidmy first visit to a French barber shop. The barber seated me andhanded me a newspaper. He pointed to its front-page headline and said[[underlined]] "Guynemer est mort!" [[/underlined]] Although I must haveread about Guynemer I am ashamed to confess that I did not at themoment realize who he was. He had been the leading French ace, withofficial credit for shooting down 48 German planes and/or balloons. Hehad been missing for two weeks or so, and his body and plane had justbeen found. He seems by all accounts to have deserved his status as a






5

national hero. When I handed the newspaper back to the barber I sawthat he was weeping. He had to pause to wipe his eyes from time totime while he cut my hair. The French took the war more seriously thanwe did. No Americans had yet been killed.

That notice on the bulletin board said nothing about training me to be apilot. The words "detached service" implied that I would not even betransferred to the signal corps. I would remain an artillery officer, albeit aflying one. I could make a fair guess what the general nature of my dutywould be. I had never had any special craving to fly, but I went to theadjutant at once and asked him to enroll me as an applicant. I had tworeasons for doing that. One was Murphy. I had no evidence that he hadtried to do me any harm since we had joined C battery together. Thecommander, Captain Woodward, seemed to like me well enough. But Ifelt that enmity between two if its officers would not be good for themorale of the battery. I had another, stronger reason for wanting to getout. I felt quite gloomy about the prospects of the First Field ArtilleryBrigade. In an earlier letter I wrote of the trouble we had with gettingsupplies. The brigade was run by officers of the regular army who didnot seem interested in making use of anything we had learned atSaumur. My impression was that they were training the men to fightanother Spanish-American war, not the one we were about to take partin. Of my regular army superiors the one I knew best was Lieutenant-Colonel Sands. I did not doubt his courage and I admired hishorsemanship, but I had no confidence in his judgment. In that brigade Idid not want to be responsible for the welfare of enlisted men. I did notwish to command even a platoon.

Let me hasten to add that I took too pessimistic a view of the






6

American army as I had seen it. Those West Pointers may have knowntheir business better than I gave them credit for. Anyhow the FirstDivision got along surprisingly well after I had left it. It was sent first to aquiet sector of the front just to get broken in. Then in May it staged thefirst offensive action by Americans, attacking and capturing the village ofCantigny in Picardy. Cantigny was a mere fly-speck on the big battlemap, in comparison with the areas overrun by the Germans in theiroffensives of that spring. But the action helped allied morale.

An order came through for me to report to the Second AviationInstruction Center at Tours. I did not have to take the long wagon rideback to Gondrecourt. A small branch railroad passed through Morley,where our battery was billeted. I took a train from there to Bar-le-Duc,where it joined the main line of the Chemin de Fer d l'Est. After anovernight stop in Paris I arrived next day at Tours. I was just 40 milesfrom Saumur, which I had left less than a month before.

I don't remember the exact date of my arrival at Tours, and I have lostthe order that sent me there. But I do have a copy of Special Order No.94 of the A. E. F., which announced that I was on duty requiring me toparticipate regularly and frequently in aerial flights, from January 24,1918. So that was the date of my first flight, and I must have arrived atTours a day or two earlier. The magic words in that order entitled me toan increase of 25 per cent in pay from that date. The order was datedJuly 13, 1918, which meant that I collected extra back pay thereafter.There were 21 other names beside mine on that special order. Some ofthem did not live long enough to collect their back flying pay.






-7-At Tours I was surprised to meet Mort Adams, one of our group of sixTennesseans from Saumur. I never saw Guthrie or Price again. I wasHerbert Jones one more, in a hospital. He had been gassed in April.After I saw him he returned to his outfit and was killed in July. Adamsand I were trained together as observers. Later, as Americanobservation squadrons began to be organized and sent to the front, hewas assigned to the 91st, the third American observation squadron to goon duty. I was assigned to the 88th, the next one to go.






^[[15 15]]

June 12, 1973

Dear Alice,

I have not smelled the odor of burning castor oil since World War I. I firstencountered it at Tours, and thereafter, throughout my brief flyingcareer, it was the most familiar of scents. One of these days I am goingto buy a bottle of castor oil, soak a paper towel with it, and set the paperon fire. One whiff might awaken in my mind a whole train of long-buriedmemories. Marcel Proust got that kind of effect from the taste of one ofhis aunt's cookies. It is a great help in writing about remembrance ofthings past.

For some reason all aeroplane engines in WWI were lubricated withcastor oil. Perhaps it functioned better than any other oil then availableover the wide range of temperatures to which those engines wereexposed. Anyhow, you got a strong odor of burning castor oil wheneveryou were near an aeroplane engine that was running. Aeroplanesnowadays give off a different smell. Petroleum chemists must havediscovered an oil that is better, or at least cheaper.

The airfield at Tours, though one of the most up-to-date in France, hadno concrete runways. Planes landed directly into the wind and since thewind shifts direction a fixed runway simply wasn't practical. Every airfieldhad a mast with a windbag on top to show the direction of the wind atthe moment.

I sent [[strikethrough]] thee [[/end strikethrough]] ^[[you]] late^[[[ly]] twophotographs of the Caudron model G-4 aeroplane. If you say "G-4" inFrench it sounds to the American ear something like "Jay cat". Henceplanes of that model were called Jaycats by all the hundreds ofAmerican aviators who were trained in France. I don't know whetherJaycats had ever been used at the front or not. More primitive machineshad seen service there in the early






2months of the war. But the G-4 would have become obsolete for combatby the end of 1915 at the latest. In my time it was used only for training,and the French seemed to have a lot of them.

The maximum speed of the G-4 in level flight was about 60 miles perhour. It had as you can see two motors, and both of them were neededto keep it in the air. In June of 1918 I went for three weeks to a school ofair gunnery at Cazaux. There I flew in several types of obsolete Frenchplanes, including one, the Farman, that was older and more rickety thanthe Jaycat. The Farman had been fitted with pontoons to make aseaplane of it. From it I practised firing at targets floating on a lake.

Neither the G-4 nor the Farman had a fuselage. Instead, each has astructure called the nacelle, shaped somewhat like an oversizedbathtub. In it there was a seat for the pilot in the rear and one for theobserver in front.

On one of my early flights at Tours the right motor of our Jaycat failedjust after we got well into the air. We were passing over a forest, and theplane began to lose altitude. The pilot managed to clear the trees, butbarely. He had to land in a field so small that he could not touch groundin a flat glide. He came down at an angle so steep that the planebounced and turned a somersault, falling upside down. My seat belt wastorn loose and my head struck the ground with considerable force.Fortunately I was wearing a hard leather helmet with a thick lining.When I regained consciousness I was lying on the ground and the pilotwas sitting beside me. We were at the outskirts of a village, and severalpeople has gathered to look on. One was a nun who was standing overme and who took charge of the situation. The only other onlooker Iremember was a stupid-looking youth who had






3an adze in his hand and was chipping away at a perfectly goodpropeller. I shouted at him and the nun made him stop, though I amafraid the propeller had already been ruined. Then the nun hailed a manpassing with a cart and directed him to take the pilot and me back to theairfield. He did.My pilot on that occasion was Brunce Hopper, perhaps the mosthandsome man who ever came from Montana. He was a Harvardgraduate who had gone over in the American Ambulance Corps beforewe got into the war. After we became officially belligerent he went intothe aviation. I got into combat service before he did, but he was laterassigned to the 96th squadron, the first American day bombing outfit tobe sent to the front. He survived the war and eventually became aprofessor of Political Science at Harvard and a VIP on campus. He was,I heard, very popular with undergraduate students and something of acampus dandy.At Tours I began to learn what I was getting into. Both sides had longsince concluded that one-man aeroplanes were useful only as chasse.No one man could operate a plane, keep an adequate lookout forenemy aircraft and pay much attention to objects on the ground. Thechasse pilot, like all others, had to navigate by looking at the ground, butchasse planes usually flew in formation. Only the leader needed to lookat the ground at all. A man trained primarily for aviation might not knowwhat to look for in enemy territory that might be of interest to his ownground troops. Both the Germans and the French has set upobservation squadrons of two-seater planes in which the rear seat wasoccupied by an artillery or an infantry officer. In both the German andthe French services the pilots of observation plans were usuallysergeants. In the air the observer was in command






4of the plane. In the French squadron with which I served briefly, all theobservers ate at the officers' mess while only two pilots did. One of themhowever was the squadron commander, Lieutenant Denis; the other,Lieutenant Labauve, was the chief pilot. The Americans copied theFrench system except that both observer and pilot were commissioned.The British, as might have been expected, followed a plan that differedfrom anyone else's. In their observation planes the pilot was also theobserver. The extra man, commonly a corporal, served only as a lookoutfor enemy aircraft and as rear gunner in case of attack. In all Allied two-seater planes the [rear?] cockpit carried twin Lewis machine guns on aningenious movable mount. The pilot of a two-seater had one or twoVickers machine guns firing through the propeller, but he rarely got achance to use them. Enemy chasse always attacked from behind.An observer had to learn mostly from experience rather than at school.He had to learn to find his way over strange territory by map. TheFrench maps were excellent. We had to memorize the conventionalsignals made to us by cloth panels, the only means we had of receivingmessages from the ground. We had to practise diligently at sending dot-and-dash radio signals with the buzzers. We learned to recognize bysilhouette, at long distance, the various types of Allied and Germanplanes that were currently active on the front. All Allied planes bore thecocarde, the concentric circles of red, white and blue. German planes allbore the black cross. But nobody ever waited to identify a plane until itwas close enough to see the insignia. We learned something of thetheory of air gunnery, though we couldn't do any shooting from the air inthe area of Tours. That had to wait until I went to Cazaux in June. Butaiming a machine gun






5in air combat was a tricky operation, because the gunner and his targetwere both moving at high speed. You aimed directly at your target onlywhen it was moving in the same direction as your own plane and on aparallel course. An observer, firing at a chasse plane diving on him fromabove and behind, had to aim slightly in front of the target much as onedoes when shooting at a clay pigeon or a quail in flight. In all othersituations you had to lead your target still more, depending on the anglebetween its line of flight and your own.We also learned the theory of air photography, though practice on thatalso was deferred until later. The cameras we had then each carried amagazine of 12 plates. Working a lever by hand would removed a platealready exposed and take the next picture in the series. Those picturestaken over the enemy lines were used to spot enemy installations and torevise battle maps. It was a dangerous business. The pilot was requiredto keep the plane flying in a straight line at uniform altitude while the 12exposures were being made. He could not, during that the, changedirection of altitude to throw off the aim of anti-aircraft guns that wouldinevitably be shooting at him. The observer had to work the cameralever at such intervals that the pictures would overlap. He did that with astop watch, and it key him so busy that he could not, while so occupied,keep any lookout for enemy chasse. It was urgent to provide protectionfor an observer on a photographic mission. Our own chasse might havebeen expected to provide an escort, but somehow that rarely workedout. On the day of my last flight we were scheduled to have an escort,but it failed to appear. So we usually sent a formation of five observationplanes, the leader doing the photography and the others protecting him.Such a formation had quite a lot of fire power, and German chassewould usually keep at a distance from it.






6Tours was a bigger and livelier town than Saumur. An opera companyput on two weeks of performances while I was there. I think it was alocal effort, not a travelling company. I attended performances of "Faust"and "Manon" for the first time. At Tours also I was invited to dinner witha French family for the only time until 1957. It was not a great socialachievement on my part. I was invited as an extra man.At the aviation school I had formed a causal friendship with a LieutenantBergner, from Philadelphia. I was told by others that he belonged to awealthy family in the brewing business. Bergner somehow had becomeacquainted with a Captain Bataillon who lived in Tours. He was what theFrench called an embusqué, which was to say that he had a safe non-combatant job. He has something to do with the control of railroad trafficin the area. He owned a hotel, not the best in the city, but respectable.His wife and daughter ran the hotel when his military duties kept himoccupied. He invited Bergner to dinner with his family, and askedBergner to bring a friend. That was how I came to be there, in a privatedining room of the hotel.After we got there it became evident that the dinner had been arrangedto have Bergner meet the daughter. They did it because eligible youngFrenchmen were becoming scarce. A million and a half of them hadbeen killed off, and Mlle. Bataillion's prospects of marriage were fading. Ithought she was an attractive girl. So did Bergner, but after we left hetold me that he had a fiancee waiting in Philadelphia. So nothing cameof the dinner. Mlle. Batallon was one of the many European womenwhose lives were deranged by the slaughter of the young men of theirage group.






August 13, 1973^[[16 16]]^[[15]] [[/strikethrough]]

Dear Alice:

My training at Tours lasted barely a month. Then I received an order,dated February 19. It stated that I had successfully completed thecourse there, and directed me to report to the First Corps AeronauticalSchool, at Gondrecourt, for advanced training in aerial observation. Thatmeant going over the same journey I had made at the New Year. Istarted from Tours instead of Saumur. I did not take an extra day inParis again, though I had to stop there overnight. And when I reachedGondrecourt I found quick motor transport out to the airfield. All myrailway travel in France, except the first trip from LeHavre to Saumur,was first class. As I wrote in an earlier letter, I enjoyed that mode oftravel.Gondrecourt had grown during the eight weeks since I had first seen it.New wooden buildings for the Americans had sprung up all over theplace. The First Corps Aeronautical School was about five miles east ofthe town, near a dreary little village called Amanty. The American postthere included much more than the First Corps School. It has a largelanding field, with hangars enough to accommodate three or foursquadrons at a time. (A squadron, in the French and American services,consisted of 18 planes, with their crews and accessory personnel.) Thelanding field was bordered on two sides by a forest. Dispersed throughthe woods were wooden barracks with camouflaged roofs. Amantybecame the place where pilots and observers were sent to wait forassignment, and where newly formed squadrons assembled their menand equipment before being sent into action.The first air squadrons ever put into service by the United






2States were the 94th and 95th Pursuit. One day in March I watchedwhile the pilots of the 94th brought their new planes in to land atAmanty. The planes were Nieuport 28's. Spads were still so new thatthere were not enough of them to go around. Many French squadronswere still using Nieuports. A few still had an older model, the Nieuport27, which had the distinction of being the noisest plane in serviceanywhere. When a 27 was approaching you could hear it long beforeyou could see it. Its motor, which generated all that noise, was I believecalled the Gnome, or maybe it was the Rhone. I always confused them.The Nieuport, in its various models, had a long and honorable history inthe French service. Guynemer, in the early part of his career, flew aNieuport model that was, I believe, the smallest plane ever used incombat.

As the 94th came in that day the leading plane did a barrel roll over thefield. It was the first time I had seen that maneuver. I heard later that thepilot was the commander of the 94th, Major Raoul Lufbery. He wasFrench-born but an American citizen. He had served in the LafayetteEscadrille, made up of American volunteers flying in the French service.Most of them transferred after we got into the war. Lufbery had officialcredit for shooting down [[handwritten]] 17 [[/end handwritten]] Germanplanes, but he was himself killed in May, after the 94th had been at thefront only a few weeks.

Jumping ahead a bit, one day in August I met Lufbery's successor ascommander of the 94th. He was Captain David Peterson, anotherveteran of the Lafayette Escadrille. I met him because I was anunexpected guest of the 94th at luncheon. I had taken off that morningto help protect a photographic mission. My pilot was a new replacementwith whom I had never flown before. As we were






3

in formation on our way to the front he complained that he could notsteer the plane properly because the ailerons kept sticking. He droppedout of formation and landed on the field of what was by then the FirstPursuit Group (the 94th, 95th, and 27th). The men of the 94th invited usto lunch while their mechanics worked on our ailerons. The mechanicscould not find anything wrong, and the ailerons worked perfectly wellwhen we headed for home. Mechanical troubles, appearing like that inflight, seemed to happen to certain pilots. It made an observer wonderabout them. A little later I heard that Eddie Rickenbacker had beenmade commander of the 94th. I don't know what happened to Peterson.

Amanty was an excellent place from which to observe the beginnings ofthe American air service. It was and long remained a branch of theSignal Corps of the Army. Only a few regular army officers had yet takenup flying. Of those who had, most passed through Amanty while I wasthere. We had five West Point majors: Ralph Royce, Lewis Brereton,******* Reynolds, Harry Anderson and Joseph McNarney. Theycommanded, in the order name, the first five observation squadrons thatwent into action, the 1st, 12th, 91st, 88th and 90th. I met them all butnever got really acquainted with any except Anderson, who was our firstcommander of the 88th. The army took no unnecessary risks with thosemen. They led their squadrons to quiet sectors, and after a month or sothey were prom[[strikethrough]]p[[/strikethrough]]^[[o]]ted to the rear. Welost Anderson, and Littauer took over, before the 88th had any realfighting to do. In July, when the First Squadron relieved us on a hotsector, Royce was no longer their commander. He had been succeededby First Lieutenant Robert H. Schauffler, an ex-musician who hadbecome a wartime pilot. There






4

may have been regular army officers flying in some of the chassesquadrons, but I never heard of any.

Of our five West Point majors, Reynolds was the oldest and the onemost respected by the younger men. I don't know what became of him.Anderson, by then a full colonel, was killed in a flying accident inGermany after the war. The others won glory in WW2. Royce wasMcArthur's air commander in the Philippines. Brereton, a three-stargeneral, commanded the Tenth Air Force under Stilwell. I gather fromBarbara Tuchman that Stilwell didn't like him. I didn't either. McNarneyacquired four stars, became Chief of the Air Service and head of theJoint Chiefs of Staff in the 1950's.

The regular army office I knew best was then First Lieutenant GeorgeKenny. I played poker with him. When John Ransom came to visit meat Amanty, as related in an earlier letter, I am sure it was Kenny whotook him up for a ride at my request. Kenny left Amanty before I did, asan ordinatry pilot in the 91st squadron. The next I heard of him was inWW2, when he was a four-star general and overall commander of theair force in the Pacific area.

Life was rather dull at Amanty. Neither the village nor Gondrecourt hadanything to offer in the way of amusement. If you followed the highwaythree miles further east, you descended into the valley of the Meuse andcame to Domremy-la-Pucelle, the birthplace of Joan of Arc. I went theretwice on Sunday walks. I gather from the Michelin guide book thatDomremy now has a museum and a hotel. In 1918 it had neither. Therewas not even a guard at Joan's house, which you could wander throughand look into the room where she was born. Someone however kept thepremises in order.

At Amanty I fell into bad habits. We had poker games nearly






5every evening and it was not the penny ante that I had played with myfellow-Tennesseeans on shipboard. The stakes were higher. Over mytwo years of army service I came out a net winner, but I had a run of badluck at Amanty. I recall one dismal session when I played until midnightwithout winning a single hand. I lost $80 that night and sold a pair ofboots to settle my score. Then one evening we had a party to celebratethe opening of a new mess hall. We did nothing but sing and drink. Wewere drinking champagne flavored with cognac, and I did not realizehow potent the mixture was. I became more drunk than I have everbeen before or since. I remember being escorted back to my barracksby a pilot named Battle from Columbus, Georgia. He insisted on holdingmy arm and I resented it. when I woke next morning I saw the ceilingrevolving slowly in a counter-clockwise direction. When I got out of bed Icould not stand. So I missed the roll-call and setting-up exercises weroutinely had before breakfast. For that I was confined to camp for aweek. Three or four others shared my punishment, and it was not ahardship since there was nowhere I wanted to go. But I felt disgraced.

In the army you meet many men briefly and casually. I met some atAmanty whom I disliked, some oddballs, and some whom I would havewished to know better. In that last category I recall a pilot namedDykema, who played the piano and reminded me of Don Davidson. Atthat drinking party he played accompaniments for our singing. In thepauses between our choral numbers he would play snatches of Chopin.He was from that Dutch colony around Holland, Michigan. Like Kenny,he went off with the 91st and I never saw him again. I stayed at Amantyuntil early in April. Then an order dated April 6






6sent a group of us for a tour of duty with the French. I was to report tothe Commandant de l'Aeronautique of the Fourth French Army, atChalons-sur-Marne.

In 1938, with Helen, I revisited Amanty. Nothing was left to show that theAmericans had ever been there. The ground that had been the landingfield was back in cultivation. All the buildings were gone, the thriftyFrench having no doubt put the lumber to good use elsewhere. Youngtrees had been planted where the barracks had stood.

[[handwritten]]P.S. In 1978 I found Dykema's name and address on a roster ofsurviving overseas flyers of WWI. He still lives in Holland Michigan. Iexchanged letters with him.[[/end handwritten]]






^[[17]]

^[[October 2, 1973]]

Dear Alice:

As we finished at the observers' school each of us was sent to the frontfor a few weeks of duty with the French. That began in March of 1918,and early in May the first ones to be sent out were recalled. ThenAmerican observation squadrons began to be formed and put intoaction. I was one of 30 observers sent out from Amanty under an orderdated April 6th. The prospect of becoming a target scared me rathermore than I had expected, but I tried not to let it show. I had asked forand trained for that kind of job. I took comfort in the thought that my firstexcursiona over the lines would be with experienced pilots, and on somerelatively peaceful sector of the front.

At that point in time (notice how I pick up all the newest expressions) thewhole stretch of front held by the French was quiet. With Russia out ofthe war the Germans and Austrians had been able to move all theirforces to the west during the winter. They had virtually knocked out theItalians (vide Ernest Hemingway) and had mauled the British badly inan early spring offensive. The French knew their turn was coming, butthey did not know when nor where. As it turned out the sector to which Iwas sent remained quiet while I was there. Hell broke loose a week orso after I had left.

Nine of us were assigned to the Fourth French Army, and reported at itsair service headquarters at Chalons-sur-Marne. There we were loadedinto three autos that took different roads toward the front. With me wereJohn Roulhac, a Sewanee man from Memphis, and Sam Bowman, aPrinceton man from somewhere in Ohio. We took the road that leadsnorthwestward, toward Reims.It passes through rich Champagnefarming country. After about 35 miles we stopped at a big estate calledthe Ferme d'Alger, Algiers Farm. It had an airfield occupied by the 40thSalmson squadron.

The manor house was used as the officers' billet. It also housed thesquadron office. Roulhac and I shared a big bedroom, where we set upour army cots. Each morning about 7:30 there was a knock on the door.It was a middleaged orderly in a baggy blue uniform, bringing ourbreakfasts. We had the choice of cafe au lait or chocolat,






-2-

toast, butter, and confiture. We were too far from a bakery to getcroissants, and we drank from bowls instead of cups.

Lunch and dinner were more formal. We gathered in the dining roomand each stood behind his chair until the commander, Lieutenant Denis,came in. He always entered exactly at the scheduled hour. We saluted,he returned the salute, and we all sat down. They the meal becamequite sociable. I was told that the cook of our officers' mess had beenthe chef at a French hotel in London. Whether that was true or not, thefood at the Ferme d'Alger was the best I ever got at any army post. (Istill shudder at the memory of the junior staff officers' mess at theheadquarters of General Bullard's Third Corps, where I later spent aweek in August).Carafes of red and white wine were placed along thetable. I noticed that several of the French officers diluted their wine withwater.

At that time the city of Reims, about 18 miles away, made a dent in theGerman lines. The Germans had half encircled it. They had capturedthe forts that had defended it on the north, and had the city underintermittent shell fire. It seemed likely that the next German push mightcapture Reims and the millions of bottles of champagne that were storethere. The French could not spare railroad cars to move the wine out.So champagne could be bought at bargain prices in Reims. Our messtruck brought out a load from time to time, and Veuve Clicquotchampagne, then a noted brand, sold in our mess at one franc, twentycents, per bottle. I sampled enough of it to decide that I preferred stillwines. I still do.

The office of squadron 40 kept a record of all my flights. It was given tome when I left, and I still have it. It has only fourteen entries, beginningApril 11 and ending May 20. My longest flight there lasted only twohours and fifteen minutes. Since I was being paid about #190 permonth, your computer will tell you that the hourly rate, for time spent inthe air, was generous. And I do not think that the French observersworked on a heavier schedule than we did. They took all thephotographic missions, which were most dangerous. They took what Ithought were excessive precautions for our safety. It was just that lifeon a quiet sector was easy. When the German push did come,Escadrille Salmson Quarante was practically wiped out.






-3-

My record is headed "Lt. Boyd. Carnet de Vols." In French "vol" maymean either "flight" or "theft". So the same heading might be used forthe dossier of a shoplifter. But the first entry reads

"Jeudi... 11/4... avec Sergt. Gaujour ... Reconnaissance."

To an American 11/4 means the 4th of November. To the more logicalFrench it means the 11th of April. Sergeant Gaujour was short, darkand jovial. I think he enjoyed breaking me in. Our Salmson had barelycrossed into German territory when I heard shells cracking near by.They left swirls of black smoke. I don't know how the arrangementbegan, but German anti-aircraft shells gave off black smoke while theAllied shells gave off white. So when a plane was so far away as toappear only as a dot, you could identify it as Allied or German from thecolor of the smokepuffs around it. That was a great help to the chasseof both sides, guiding them to their prey. Gaujour gave no sign that hehad noticed those first shellbursts at all.He kept serenely on a straightcourse toward the German hinterland. The next anti-aircraft volley camecloser, and the bursts were louder. But again Gaujour seemed not tohave noticed it. He flew straight ahead until the next volley was almostdue. Then he turned the nose of the plane abruptly upward. In ourvertical climb the motor may have stalled or Gaujour shut it off, I don'tknow which. But the plane began falling out of control, tumbling in theair like a dead leaf. I had heard the shells bursting close by just as westarted to fall, so I naturally thought we had been fatally hit. Perhaps theGerman gunners thought so too. But after we had fallen a few hundredfeet Gaujour switched the motor on again and buzzed off in a changeddirection. The Archies had to start adjusting on us all over again. Thatsort of performance went on during the hour or more that we spent onthe German side of the lines. Gaujour varied his evasive maneuvers.

After that I don't remember ever flying over German territory withoutbeing shot at. On some missions we flew too low for the anti-aircraftartillery, but that brought us within range of machine guns or rifles fromthe ground. We learned not to worry much about the Archies, thoughoccasionally they brought down a plane. (They got one of the 88th'safter I had left it). Shell fragments or bullets hitting a plane most often didit no harm, since so much of the surface was simply canvas. Each timea plane returned from a mission it was inspected for holes. Wheneverany were found they were covered with






-4-

glued-on patches. Eac^[[h]] such patch was marked by a small, blackGerman cross stencilled on it. No plane stayed in service long withoutaccumulating at least a few such markings. Once in July we found around hole about 3 inches in diameter in the upper right wing of aSalmson in which I had been on a mission with one of the 88th's pilotsnamed Pete McNulty. Evidently a German 77 shell had passed through,but its fuse had been timed to go off farther along in its trajectory.

On one of my early reconnaissance flights from the Ferme d'Alger Ihappened to see on the ground flashes which I was sure came from theguns that were shooting at me. I thought I had made a discovery thatought to interest the French. I carefully marked on my battlemap theexact spot from th which the flashes had come. Back at home I reportedwhat I had seen to Lieutenant Joseph Philippe, the only officer of thesquadron who could converse in English. His comment was "You are agood observer. That is precisely where the guns are." I said "You knewthey were ^[[then?]]" "Oh, yes" he replied. "They have been thereseveral weeks." I said "But they are less than two kilometers from thefront lines. They are in easy range of your ground artillery. Why haven'tyou blasted them out of there?" "My friend, you do not understand", saidPhilippe. "The Boches know where ^[[underlined]] our [[/underlined]]anti-aircraft batteries are. If we shoot at theirs, they will shoot at ours,and nobody will be any better off. If they start a drive here they willshoot up our anti-aircraft and everything else within range. Until then,both sides are treating this as a quiet sector. You may have noticed thattheir chasse just now isn't bothering our reconnaissance planes. We arereturning their courtesy."

To an American that seemed an odd way to carry on a war. But then Ireflected that the Germans and French had been fighting for nearly fouryears. They had built up a tacit understanding to live and let live as longas neither side was trying to capture territory.






^[[18]]

October 18, 1973

Dear Alice:

In all my flights with French pilots in Champagne I never saw a Germanon the ground. That was quite normal. Most likely the Germanobservers who came over daily during the same period never saw aFrenchman on our side. Infantrymen in the trenches did not movearound when an enemy plane was overhead. A German in his field-grayuniform, standing still against a trench wall, simply could not be seen byan observer half a mile above him. Binoculars were of no help in aplane, because of the vibration. On reconnaissance we usually flew at1200 to 1500 meters, which is nearer a mile than a half.

The sector on which we were operating was the very model of trenchwarfare. In spite of bloody fighting from time to time the front there hadremained stable since 1914. Hence both sides had had time to dig totheir hearts' content. The ground was moderately elevated and rolling,so there was no such drainage problem as the British hadto[[strikethrough]] conten [[strikethrough]]contend with in Flanders. Allthe trenches in which there was much traffic had walkways ofduckboard, so that the feet stayed dry even in rainy weather.

From our field the most direct route to the front lines was due north,about ten miles. On the way you passed over reserve systems oftrenches, complete with barbed wire and parapets, that the French hadprepared to fall back on in case the existing front should be overrun.Four or five miles from the front you began to see shell holes, whichbecame more numerous until they were finally merged ^ [[into]] a so^[[l]]id expanse of churned-up earth. There was hardly any vegetationwithin a mile of the front lines. The subsoil in Champagne is chalky sothe shelled areas were white. Two or three miles from the front youpassed over the dead village of Prosnes, so battered that I do not thinkthere was a piece of wall six feet high left standing. On the Germanside, with their front trench ^[[runn]]ing along its southern border, was anarea of rubble that had been another village, Nauroy. A little furtherback on the German side were the remains of a larger village, Beine. Itwas in about the same state as Prosnes.

Our sector ran almost straight east-and-west. Just beyond the westernend of our beat were two of the forts that had defended Reims. One ofthem, Nogent l'Abbesse, was in German hands. Opposite it on






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the French side was the other, the Fort de la Pompelle. From the air allyou saw of them was two low heaps of broken stone, but you knew thatmen were living underground there and keeping watch on each other.The eastern end of our sector included a row of three round-topped hillscalled the Monts de Champagne. They were named Mont Sec, MontHaut and Mont Bland. The French held all three, no-man's land runningalong their northern bases. The German had made repeated efforts totake those hills. They were to try twice more. Late in May of 1918 theytried and failed, but they did break through west of Reims and drovedown to the Marne at Chateau-Thierry. They made a final try in theirlast offensive of the war on July 15. At that time the sector was held bythe American 42nd (Rainbow) division. That was MacArthur's division,though I am not sure he had then risen to its command. He was at firstone of its brigadiers.

One day I was taken with three French observers to visit an infantrybattalion in the line. A chauffeur took us most of the way in a car. Heparked it behind the hills, where it was out of sight from the Germanlines, and waited for us there. We went another miel and a half or so onfoot, following zigzag trenches. We came out on the north slope of MontSec, where a major met us, talked with us briefly and turned us over tosubordinates of our own rank. We walked freely along the front trenchof the battalion's domain. No shells were falling in the neighborhood, noGerman plane was in sight and our heads did not reach to the top of thetrench. You had to mount a firing step to see over the parapet, and weknew that would not be prudent. We did however get a good look at theGerman parapet, barbed wire and no-man's land from an observationpost. This was a steel cylinder set upright into the front wall of thetrench at a high point. It was tall and big enough for a man to standupright in it.It had a steel cover. It had two openings, an entrance in therear and a slit peephole in front. A sliding door was so arranged thatwhen you pushed it aside to enter it covered the peephole in front beforeit admitted any light from behind. Thus the Germans never could seelight coming through. The whole structure was covered with earth ontop and in front except for the peephole. We visitors took turns spyingon the German trenches, where there seemed to be no on at home.






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We saw the sleeping quarters, dugouts cut deep into the hillside andwith roofs reinforced with heavy timbers. Then there was a longconference, of which I understood but little. The question before thehouse was what the Germans were up to. Notes were compared onwhat the infantrymen had seen and heard; what the observers had seenfrom the air, and on a series of recent aerial photographs.

A week or two later the infantrymen returned our call. They were amixed party of commissioned officers and sergeants. They had lunchwith us (the sergeants ate with our pilots, most of whome were non-coms). Then the sergeants, and one or two of the officers, were takenon flights over their own positions to judge for themselves how goodtheir camouflage was. These back-and-forth visits obviously helpedtoward intelligent cooperation between the airmen and the infantry.

Here let me jump ahead of my narrative, to say that this kind ofcommunication was at first totally lacking in the American forces. Partly,no doubt, this was because the American divisions that summer werenot working on quiet sectors with time for social amenities. But also itwas something we had to learn for ourselves, the hard way. In August,when the Germans had been pushed out of their entrenched positionsand were being driven slowly backward, we found ourselves workingwith the American 77th division. Its infantrymen never responded to oursignals. It was not their fault, for no one had thought to tell them whatthe signals meant. They did not even recognize our planes asAmerican. Very likely they thought that the rockets we fired in the air infront of them were some devilish new German weapon. Not knowinghow to distinguish an allied from a German plane, they simply shot atany that came within range.

Soon after that division moved in our fliers of the 88th began to suspectthat we were being shot at by our nominal friends. The evidence wascircumstantial, but cogent. When reconnoitering over German territorywe usually flew high enough to be beyond reach of machine guns orrifles on the ground. On coming back to our own side we descended tonear tree-top levels, to drop a written report at division headquarters.Planes returning from such missions more than once showed freshbullet holes. One day the last doubt was removed from my mind. Flyingat a low altitude well inside our lines I felt the normal






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vibration of the plane suddenly change to a violent shaking. The pilot,slowing down his engine as much as possible, limped home. Onlanding we found the source of the trouble. A bullet had split off a smallpiece of wood from one end of our propeller. The groove left by thebullet was visible on the split surface.

Such experiences moved Littauer, our commander, to request throughchannels that an effort be made to educate the men of the 77th division.The upshot of that was a delegation of infantrymen camped beside ourairfield the first week in September. It included one man from eachinfantry platoon in the division, while our pilots took several of the menfor rides to show them what the war looked like from the air. I neverknew how the experiment turned out, for just when it was finished oursquadron was ordered east to take part in the St. Mihiel lark. The 77thdivision became someone else's responsibility.

Please do not think I am singling out that division for criticism. It wasone of several divisions that were made up of drafted men, and ithappened to be the only one of that kind I ever worked with. From whatI heard later I doubt that the others were much better trained. No doubtthe men of the 77th were on the average as brave and as intelligent asthose of any other. It was all due to inadequate training.

In 1955, with Helen and Bess, I drove over the old familiar road leadingfrom Chalons to Reims. The manor house of the Ferme d'Alger wasgone and I could not even make out where it had stood. A lot of newroadbuilding was going on where the airfield had been. The village ofProsnes had been rebuilt, but you could not even see where Nauroy hadstood. Its site was covered with tall weeds. A new road had practicallyobliterated the old German front line. Along the slope of Mont Sec theFrench front line trench that I had visited in 1918 had become a gullythree or four feet deep. In the intervening 37 years earth had crumbledand washed into it I have a picture somewhere of Helen picking wildblackberries in that old trench. For a mile or so on both sides of the oldline the ground was vacant and uncultivated, as I had seen in otherparts of the old battle front. Trench warfare affected the terrain much asstrip mining does.






^[[19]] October 29, 1973

Dear Alice:

The last two entries on my flight record from the Ferme d'Alger readthus:

"Lundi ... avec Lt. Denis ... 20/5... Reglage... 0:20

"20/5 ... aves Lt. Denis ... Reglage ... 2:15 "

On them hangs a tale of frustration, of the most unpleasant experience Ihad in France until the day of my final crash. Note that I made twoflights on the same day with the same pilot. He was the commander ofthe squadron. Our flight in the morning lasted only 20 minutes. Thatwas because Denis broke off our mission in a rage and came home.When we got out of the plane he was so angry that he refused to speakto me. I knew that my time with Escadrille 40 was nearly finished(actually the order recalling me was dated that day). It looked as if Imight be sent back to Amanty in disgrace. But before we set out on ourafternoon flight Denis and I were friends again., and our mission went offsmoothly.

We had set out in the morning to do what the Americans in World War 2called "spotting" artillery fire. But in WW2 the spotter could conversefreely with men on the ground by radio telephone. That simplified thejob so much that it was performed by one man, flying alone, combiningthe functions of pilot and observer. In WW1 he could not have donethat, for we had no radio telephones. In August of last year I wrote youdescribing the clumsy ways we had for communicating between groundand air. In the instance of which I am now writing, the technologicaldifficulties were aggravated by a linguistic barrier between pilot andobserver.

On the bulletin board of the squadron was a list of 8 or 10 numbered"reference targets" the French artillery used from time to time.Targetsthey really wanted to destroy were apt to be so well camouflaged that toan observer in the air they were inconspicuous. It was hard for him tospot shellbursts in relation to such a target. The reference targets wereobjects easy to identify and to locate on the battlemap. Those mapswere highly accurate. Once the guns of a battery were properlyadjusted on a reference target, they could be shifted to fire on any otherin the same vicinity.

On that morning we had been scheduled to work on reference targetnumber 4. It was the intersection of two trenches, a quarter-mile or sobehind the German front line. An aerial photograph of the area






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which I still have, was given to me. On it I drew in ink tqo lines throughthe target. One marks the direction from the battery, the other crosses itat right angles. Other lines were drawn parallel to these, separated byintervals corresponding to 100 meters on the ground. My job was tospot each shellburst in relation to those lines and to report to the battery,in Morse code, how far it was off target; so many meters over or short,so many to the right or left. I went over the photograph with Denis, tomake sure he knew the location. He would have to fly back and forth,as I directed him, between the battery and the target. Once in the air heand I could converse through our speaking tubes, but unfortunatelyDenis did not understand English and I knew only scraps of French.Denis was however an old hand at "reglage", and if we had beenallowed to follow the original plan I would have needed to use only twowords of French: "Allez." and "Tournez.".

Our mission was not to be that simple. For some reason I never learnedthe battery commander, after we were in the air, decided to change thegame plan. He told me that, and gave me my new instructions, bydisplaying certain panels of white cloth on the ground at batteryheadquarters. It was the only way he had of getting a message to me.He had cloth panels of assorted sizes and shapes. Every observer hadto memorize a dozen or so arrangements of those panels, each of whichhad a different code meaning. That kind of language could not conveysubtle nuances of meaning. It did suffice to express the simple thoughtsof an artilleryman about the aiming and firing of his guns. But it wasinfortunately a language that Denis, a pilot, had mot learned.

As soon as we were aloft I unrolled our radio antenna and let it trail inthe air behind us. The length of wire let out determined the wave lengthon which I was broadcasting, and the battery had been informed of it inadvance. Each means of communication we had was strictly one-way.The battery talked to me with cloth panels. I talked to them with dot-dash radio, much of it also in code. I can remember now only that threedashes meant "Fire!". The battery was supposed to respond by a salvo;that is by firing each of its four guns at intervals of a few seconds,allowing me time to spot and note each shellburst.

When we reached the battery headquarters I found displayed there asignal that meant "Wait a few minutes". All I could think of to translate toDenis, was "Attendez". He understood that it meant "wait", but






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I could not explain to him that it was the battery, not I, who wasdawdling. Anyhow we waited, just circling overhead.

Finally the first signal was removed and another put out. To my horror itmeant "Change to target #6". I looked up # 6 on the list I had in mypocket. It was on my aerial photograph, though a long way east of #4. Isent a code radio signal that meant "Understood". I had no inked lineson the photo to help me judge disatnces from # 6. The worst of it wasthat I did not know enough French to explain to Denis about the changeof targets. I tried, and he shouted back something that in turn I did notunderstand.

A signal meaning "Battery ready" appeared on the ground. I said toDenis "Allez" and he headed for our original target, number 4. Being anexpert pilot, he flew at an angle that gave me an excellent view, if I hadwanted it, of target # 4. He himself was watching that target, expectingto see shellbursts. Meanwhile I was trying to see # 6, and managed todo so by leaning out of my cockpit to the right, in a strained posture. Atmy command the salvo was fired, and I noted where the shells fell.Then I said to Denis "Tournez!" and we returned to the battery. On theway I sent down the corrections. We made a second run in the sameway. The battery fired a second salvo, and again I noted the results.But Denis still had seen no shellbursts around the target he thought wewere shooting at. When I directed him to turn he did not go back to thebattery. He obviously thought I had somehow goofed. He went backand landsd at our home field. When we got out of the plane Denis'sface was flushed and he just glared at me. I tried to speak to him, buthe waved me away.

I went to our billets and sought out my English-speaking friend,Lieutenant Philippe. I told him what had happened, and asked him to goto Denis and explain it. I urged ^[[him]] also to telephone to the batteryto verify my story. Philippe went, and a little later came back to say thatthe misunderstanding had been cleared up. At lunch that day Denisdeparted from his usual routine. Instead of going directly to his seat, hewalked around the table to where I stood. He held out his hand, and forthe first and only time he spoke to me in English. He said "I am sorry.You have...understood ..zem ?" I shook his






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hand and said that I had understood. Then, running out of English (Isuspected that Philippe had given him a quick lesson) he said in Frenchthat we would finish our reglage that afternoon. We did, amicably.

Except for that foul-up of May 20th, my association with the French wasalways pleasant. My few weeks with Squadron 40 contributed more tomy real education than any year I spent in college. I say that partlybecause of the hillbilly background I came from. But I think it would stillbe true even if I had grown up in an Ivy League setting.

The squadron roster included the only observer I ever heard of who flewan aeroplane back to his home field bearing the body of his dead pilot.That happened in Squadron 40 within two weeks after I left it. The deadpilot was Denis. The observer was a little Frenchman named Chappuis.I remember him seated at the piano in the manor house of the Fermed'Alger, playing the Poet and Peasant overture with a cigarette danglingfrom the corner of his mouth. I heard about it from an American,McDonald, who joined Squadron 40 just after I left it. Late in May therewas heavy fighting on that sector, and squadron 40 lost much of itsflying personnel. McDonald said he was kept on the ground while itlasted.

In observation squadrons the mortality rate was somewhat higher forobservers than for pilots. I had three personal friends, observers, whowere brought home dead by their pilots. That was because the planeshad single controls, in the pilot's cockpit. To reach them Chappuis hadto climb out on a wing. In his place I don't think I would even haveattempted it. If I had succeeded I would not have known what to do.

Since I flew only twice a week or so, I had a lot of time to kill at theFerme d'Alger. Denis was indulgent in the matter of passes. Twice Ihad leaves of 24 hours or more, once to Paris and once to Nancy, at theopposite end of the Eastern Railway. At Nancy I ordered a tailor-madeuniform, my first. I cannot now recall why I had it made there rather thanin Paris. On the return trip from Nancy I had a little adventure,illustrating things I liked and disliked about the way the American armywas run.

On the return my train, on time, stopped for 10 minutes at Gondrecourt.It arrived at 12:50 P. M. and was due to leave at 1:00. Americaninstallations at Gondrecourt were still growing. There was now a fix PXright beside the railroad station. Having lived with French for severalweeks, I badly needed razor blades and cigarettes among other things.So I went into the PX for a shopping spree.






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The place was open and the crew was standing around, but I was toldthat no sales could be made during the lunch hour, which ended at 1:00.It was an enlisted man who gave me that information. I explained to himthat I was on detached duty with the French, that I had not seen a PX fora month or more,and probably would not see one again for at least aslong; and that my train was due to leave at 1:00. The man consulted thelieutenant in charge. The lieutenant ruled that we could notconsummate the sale until 1:00. He conceded that in the meantime mypurchases could all be assembled and the bill added up. If any currencyhad to be changed that could be attended to. Thus at the stroke of 1:00I should be able to lay my money on the counter, grab my merchandiseand dash for the train. I did, and the train left just as I was going out ofthe door of the PX.

I had left my only luggage (a musette, something like a flight bag) in mycompartment on the train, and it was now on its way to Paris. I wentback to the lieutenant in the PX and asked, in effect, "What do I donow?". The lieutenant kindly offered to telephone for me to the militarypolice at Bar-le-Duc, the next stop up the line. If I could supply thenumbers of my car and compartment, he thought the M. P's could bepersuaded to board the train and retrieve my bag. Fortunately I had thatinformation. He telephoned and told me the matter was arranged.

I went back to the PX counter, and bought a box of cigars, to reward theM.P's for expected favors. I boarded a later train that afternoon. Whenit reached Bar-le-Duc a man wearing an M.P. armband was standing onthe platform, holding my bag in his hand.

It's marvellous how efficient we Americans are.






^[[20]] November 5, 1973

Dear Alice:

In my file from WW1 I find three items dated May 20, 1918. One is theflight record, mentioned in my last letter, of my missions with Denis. Theother two are both travel orders, directing me to return to Amanty. Onewas from the Service Aeronautique of the Fourth French army. It runs"Il est ordonné au Lieutenant Boyd de se rendre a Amanty (par Gare deGondrecourt, Meuse). MOTIFS: Rejoindre son unite." The other wasfrom Advance Section. Air Service, A. E. F. The French order had leftunnamed the unit I was to rejoin, but the American one was morespecific. I was to report at Amanty to an outfit I had never heard of, the88th Aero Squadron.

I remember nothing whatever about receiving those orders, nor aboutmy departure from the Ferme d'Alger. My best guess now is that I wentin obedience to the French order, and that after reaching Amanty I foundthe American order lying in the postoffice there. I base that guess onthe usual behavior of the army postal service. Any^[[h]]ow I found atAmanty several weeks' accumulation of mail. It included still anothertravel order, this from the headquarters of the First[[strikethrough]]Dision[[/strikethrough]] ^[[Division]]. It directed me to goto Saumur to serve as an instructor. (A capy of that order is enclosed.The stamp on it merely shows that the military police in Paris were onthe job, checking the credentials of a any Americans arriving there).The order was dated April 24, and was therefore nearly a month old.

I felt sure that my name had been included in that order by mistake,since my practical experience with the artillery had been limited to threeweeks in January. Nevertheless I was an artilleryman, carried on therolls of 7th F. A. of the First Division (I still belonged to that regimentwhen I was shot down in September). I was merely on detached dutywith the air service, and therefore felt that the order from the FirstDivision had to take precedence over any that came from the aviation. Iwas in a quandary.

I found the office of the nascent 88th squadron, and reported to itscommander. He was Major Anderson, a pleasant West Pointer whoseemed about my age (then 24). I explained to him my conflictingorders, hoping that he would do a little telephoning on my account.






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He made no such move. Instead, he suggested that I go to Saumur andget the matter straight there. He said that the 88th would not be movinginto action for at least a week. Meanwhile he had nothing for me to doat Amanty, so I might as well take a holiday. I welcomed the idea. Iwanted to see how the Saumur area looked in springtime. The tripwould involved stopovers both ways in Paris. So I went.

As I had expected, Saumur was beautiful. I know I was there on May23rd, for that is the date on the pass the adjutant there gave me toenable me to get back to Amanty. He told me that the order of April 24had been rescinded, so as far as I was concerned, on April 27. I hadnot yet received the rescinding order, but I did some time later. Theadjutant told me what had happened. The school was replacing Frenchinstructors in the junior grades with Americans. Those officers who hadrated highest in the first graduating class were being recalled to teach.The school had requested the First Division to send back the six officersnamed in the order of April 24th. The First Division headquarters hadcomplied without checking to see what had become of us since wejoined it. When I failed to report with the others in April my absencefrom the division had finally been discovered. In a letter of last April 24(1973, not 1918) I mentioned the names of the five men whom ourFrench instructors rated highest in Section 1 at Saumur. Four out ofthose five names are on that order of April 24 1918. The missing nameis that of Aragon, the mathematician from the University of Illinois whoplayed chess with me. I found him at Saumur. I don't know when hewas ordered there. He was not appointed in my place. That honor wentto a man from the second section, Willard Walker.

I stayed at Saumur only three or four hours, taking an afternoon trainback to Paris. I had hoped to see John Ransom, but he was out,probably on field exercise. I had lunch with Aragon at the Grand Hotelde Londres, where he was boarding. It was then the best hotel inSaumur. When Helen and I were there in 1938 I went to the Londreswithout bothering to look it up in the Michelin guide. I made a bigmistake.

I do not remember feeling envious of my friends who had gone back toSaumur. They were ensured of safety and a comfortable life.






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Those considerations were less important to me then than they wouldbe now. I thought my line of work was more exciting and interestingthan theirs. I still think so. But as time passed I became aware that Iwas trapped in a blind alley as far as promotion was concerned. Thatwas because (a) I was an "emergency officer" to be promoted only onspecial recommendation for "merit"; (b) I was serving two masters, theair service and the artillery. The first could not promote me, the secondwould not. That situation was not remedied until near the end of thewar, after I had become physically disqualified for further service andwas therefore out of the running. Until then I never heard of an observerholding a reserve or a National Guard commission who was promoted. Iwant to comment on that in another letter.






^[[November 20, 1973]]

^[[21]]

Dear Alice:

In the last week of May 1918 the 88th received its 18 planes. To takecare of them, and of the squadron's other paraphernalia, it hadassembled about 120 enlisted men. It had 40 officers, including 4 whowere non-flyers. They were an adjutant, a medic, an engineer and anordnance man. Those four had authority over all the enlisted men.Each plane had a crew of (I think) three mechanics to keep it in order,but their relation to the pilot of the plane was merely as consultants.Their boss was the engineer. The 36 flying officers had only oneresponsibility for the lower ranks. We had to censor their letters.Postage stamps were not required. The words "Soldier's mail", writtenin the space where the stamp normally would belong, entitled them tofree postage. We as officers did not have to submit to the indignity ofhaving someone else read our letters, but the enlisted men did. Thecensoring job was rotated among the flying officers, two being assignedto it each week. The outgoing mail was divided between them. Eachletter was supposed to be read through and deletions made ifnecessary. Place names especially were forbidden. When he finishedwith a letter the censor sealed it and wrote OK on the upper lefthandcorner of the envelope, with his own name and identifications.

Most of the enlisted men did little writing, but there were a few who gotoff a letter daily. I still recall long, impassioned letters that PrivateAndrew J. O'Donnell addressed each day to Miss Blanche Pelkey in hishome town of Providence, R. I. I knew him only by his literary style, notby sight.When the days passed uneventfully the censor's job was light.But let something exciting happen, such as an air battle with casualties,and we could expect an avalanche of letters next day. Let me jumpahead here once more, to tell about the night late in July when Germanbombers raided our airfield. They came in some time after midnight,and made several passes over the field. They scattered bombs all overthe premises, making quite an uproar. A guard came to the officers'sleeping quarters, to warn us that we should get into the sheltertrenches that had been dug outside for such occasions. Some fled tothe trenches as they were, some put on their pants first, and somestayed in bed. The tumult woke an observer named Wheeler, whoasked what was going on. When someone told him we were beingbombed he said "My God! Think of the letters I'll have to censortomorrow!"






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the field, (2) the major's car was moving along that same road at thatsame time. The plane scraped the top of the Cadillac and bumped it offthe road. Carr managed to land unhurt, and the occupants of the carlikewise excaped injury. But Major Anderson was understandablyannoyed. Carr left the squadron a few days later. We all liked him andwere sorryb to see him let out. To us it seemed that the chauffeur of thecar had been at least as much to blame as Carr. That is the sort of thingthat happens to men in the army.

On their test flights our pilots developed a habit of landing for a brief visitat Amanty, their olf home. The practice became such a nuisance thatMajor Anderson issued an order forbidding our pilots to land anywhereexcept at Ourches, except in real emergencies. On June 6th I was sentup with a pilot named Curphy to test the radio set that had been newlyinstalled in his plane. In the air I exchanged a few signals with our radiocrews on the ground. Then I reported to Curphy that the set wasworking properly, and proceeded to roll up the aerial. Curphy said "Let'sgo over to Amanty, to see if we have any mail." I replied that he knewthe major's order, and that we had better not. He said "Hell, nobody'sgoing to report us. We'll only be gone a few minutes". So we went toAmanty. In landing there, Curphy had the misfortune to hit the ground attoo steep an angle. He wiped off our landing wheelsand we were luckyto escape with only minor bruises. When we got out Curphy said to me"You go and telephone the squadron. Ask them to send a car to get us".It was obvious that we would need ground transportation, and thatCurphy's plane would have to be hauled back to Ourches for repairs. Itold him to do his own telephoning, and he did. When a car fromOurches finally came for us, one of my friends, Ed Wagner, had comefor the ride. He told me that an order had just come through directingme and two other observers of the 88th to report to the French School ofAir Gunnery at Cazaux.






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made the long run to Bordeaux, stayed overnight there, and on the thirdday took another train southward along the coast. About 40 miles southof Bordeaux we passed Arcachon, a town to which I returned onSundays while I was at Cazaux. It was the first seaside resort I had everseen. That may explain why I have always remembered it as the mostbeautiful. It was not that the buildings were especially splendid. It wasrather the setting. The harbor is almost circular, with lovely beaches allthe way around it. It was dotted with sailboats. In the background weresand dunes. I have never seen Arcachon since 1918, and I have neverheard of American tourists going there.

I spent three weeks at Cazaux, at great cost to the American taxpayer.It still disturbs me to think of all the ammunition I shot away there. Wenever shot when both the marksman and the target were stationary.With French cavalry carbines we shot at toy balloons rising in the air.(The French had surplus carbines and cartridges for them, becausecavalry had been useless since the first weeks of the war.) We firedwith shotguns at clay pigeons. We fired machine guns from speedingmotor boats at targets floating on the lake. We went up in old Parmans,fitting with pontoons and fired down with machine guns at floatingtargets. Finally, flying in old-model Caudrons, we fired machine guns atwindbag targets being towed by other planes.

That trip to Cazaux had some depressing aspects. First there was thedetour we had to make around recent German conquests to reach Paris.On that detour we passed a camp where a division of Italians werebeing kept in a kind of quarantine. It had been involved in the debacleat Caporetto. Its morale was so low that the Italian command hadshipped it out of Italy for fear of the influence in might have on the homefolks. No longer trusted for any combat service, those Italians stayedthere consuming rations until the war was over. Then at Cazaux I hadmy first contact with Indo-Chinese.

I don't know whether those I met were Vietnamese, Laotians orCambodians. They were not called by any of those names. And as faras I can remember I first began to hear the name Indochina some timeafter WW1. In my school geography the whole region now calledIndochina was lumped under the name Annam. The French called themAnnamites, so we did also. They were the smallest men I had everseen. A few of them worked at menial jobs around the school. Iremember one in particular who carried big bunches of toy balloons andreleased them






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anywhere in France. I suppose the kitchen crew got standard armyrations to work with, It was the cooking that was lousy. General Bullardand half a dozen of his top brass ate in an intimate small mess of theirown. I hope they fared better than we did. The rest of us ate in a bigofficers' mess. One morning at breakfast a French colonel took his seatbeside me. They brought him pancakes and coffee. His cakes, likemine, were dough and stone cold. He did not touch them, just looked atthem and shuddered. He took one taste of his coffee, then got up andleft. I could not figure how they gave their coffee such a revolting taste.

Each night while I was there German planes came over and droppedbombs around the village. Evidently they knew it was the general'sheadquarters. I did not hear of any casualties, but each time they camethe alarm sounded and we all had to rush to shelter trenches outsides.Then the Germans began shelling the town. It was at very long rangeand no great damage was done, but General Bullard had had enough.His head quarters moved, the day before my week was up, to a bigcastle the name of which I cannot recall. It was three or four mile milessouth, toward our rear. All the junior officers were moved first, and wehad three or four hours in the castle before the brass arrived. In one ofthe big vacant rooms we found a piano, so had songs. It was then that Ifirst heard "The Bastard King of England" and "Abdullah Bulbul Ameer".

One other bright spot during the week was a seven-handed poker gameI took part in one evening. The players included a colonel, two secondlieutenants, and four in-betweens. By an odd freak of chance the onlywinners at the end of the session were the two second lieutenants. Iwon approximately a hundred dollars. It more than made up for adisastrous session I had had at Amanty.






^[[22]] November 28, 1973

Dear Alice:

The observers of the 88th went to Cazaux three at a time. I was sentwith the first trio. Our pilots never had any special training in gunnery,for it would have been all but useless. Each pilot had on his plane aVickers machine gun geared to shoot through the propeller. He couldhave two if he wanted them, and some of our pilots did. But the pilotfired those guns only if he decided to dive and shoot at something onthe ground. He never got an opportunity to shoot at a German plane.

That was because an observation plane fought only to defend itself.When we passed near German observation planes, as we sometimesdid, both parties went about their business. We fought only Germanchasse. It was always they who attacked us, and never singly. By 1918chasse pilots no longer roamed around alone seeking adventure. Whathappened was that the leader of a formation would dive from above andbehind us, opening fire when he got with 100 yards or so and keeping itup until he had to turn away to avoid running into us. If he missed asecond started his dive to cover the getaway of the first. Still a thirdwould be waiting his turn, and so on. None of them ever passed in frontof us to give the observation pilot a shot. Only the observer could fightback. His main worries, aside from being hit, were (1) that one or bothhis guns might jam, (2) that his magazines might become empty whilethe attack was still going on. He carried reserve magazines, but it tooka few seconds to change them and the Boche could get in some freeshots during that time.

The observer had two British-made Lewis machine guns (a type nowobsolete) fixed rigidly side by side about a foot apart. The machineguns you see in the movies nowadays have cartridges fed to them froma belt. The Vickers gun used belts, but the Lewis did not. Cartridgeswere fed into it from a round metal magazine or drum that fitted on top ofthe gun. Each drum held 100 rounds. Both guns were controlled fromthe firing handle or pistol grip of one. You could at will fire the right gun,the left, or both. If an observer panicked at the beginning of a fight hewas likely to fire both guns continuously at the first attacker and findthem empty when the next one dived. The right course was to fire onegun at a time in short bursts of half a dozen rounds or so, then re-aimbefore firing again.






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The he weng back to sleep.

In an earlier letter I wrote that Gondrecourt was about 50 miles from thefront. Since writing that I have found an old road map that forces me torevise that estimate. Gondrecourt and Amanty are in the northeasterncorner of France. Toward the east the front was about 50 miles away.But to the north it was only about 30 miles. In that direction lay thesouth face of the St. Mihiel salient. That was the sector on which the88th first went into action, so when we mpved out from Amanty we didnot go very far. We occupied a field near a village called Ourches, onthe Meuse about 15 miles north from Amanty.

Our planes were British-made Sopwith two-seaters of a model that wasobsolescent. We were however going to a quiet sector, where theGermans also used their oldest planes. It was perhaps just as well thatour pilots got broken in on Sopwiths rather than the better and moreexpensive Salmsons. The planes had to be outfitted with guns andradio sets. That was deferred until we were established at Ourches.Our pilots were encouraged to take a few trial flighd without crossing thelines, just to get the feel of the Sops.

The first damage suffered by the 88th was not a result of enemy action.It came from a collision between one of our planes and MajorAnderson's Cadillac. Command of the squadron carried with it a fringebenefit that nowadays we associate with members of the president'scabinet, or with exxalted exxecutives of Exxon. Major Anderson had aCadillac and chauffeur. I should explain that the Cadillac of 1918 wasnot quite the same vehicle that General Motors offers you today underthat name. The only glass that entered into the construction of themajor's cadillac was in its windshield and its lighting fixtures. Like all theother military passenger autos that I can recall from WW1, it was a"touring car". (Remember that expression? My grandchildren probablyhave never heard it, and would not know what it once meant). The 1918Cadillac had no heater, no air conditioning and of course no radio. Inthose days even Cadillacs burned fuel mainly for locomotion.Nowadays they burn it mostly to make the passenger comfortable and toenhance his dignity. But I digress.

One of our pilots, Joe Carr, was bringing his plane in for a landing. Hisapproach to the field was rather low, but it would have worked out wellexcept that (1) he had to cross a road that bordered






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one by one for us to shoot at. He looked like the pictures I saw yearslater of Ho Chih Minh. I learned that there was a whole division ofAnnamites in a camp between Cazaux and Arcachon. Like the Italians,they were being fed in idleness. They had been brought to France forarmy service but would neither fight nor work. The few I had seenemployed at Cazaux exceptional cases.

I supposes that the Annamites figured it was not their war. But otherFrench colonials had just as much reason to feel that way, yet some ofthem, notably Moroccans and black Senegalese, were good fightingtroops. The Senegalese were far better fighters than our own^[[strikethrough]] n [[/strikethrough]] negroes, thoug^[[h]] the latter wereexcellent labor troops. The Annamites at that time had given noevidence that they were capable of fighting at all. So we Americansgenerally looked on them with contempt which I now realize wasunjustified.

Some other things I heard during that time made me feel more cheerful.The American Second division had gone into action near Chateau^[[-]]Thier^[[r]]y and did valiant service there holding the Germans as theytried to push further toward Paris. We began to hear about the marines,Belleau Wood and all that. And on the train returning toward Paris inlate June I met a naval officer. He told me that American supplies werepouring into St. Nazaire and being moved promptly. He also told me that180,000 of our troops had landed the previous week at Bordeaux. It[[strikethrough]] be [[/strikethrough]] looked as if we might begin to pullsome weight.






^[[23]] January 10. 1974


When I returned to the 88th from Cazaux, at the end of June, I foundsome changes in personnel. Tehy concerned mostly men from theChicago area, for whom the 88th seemed to be an unlucky outfit. Therehad been four of them on our original roster of 40 officers, but only onewas left. Those missing were the two pilots, Carr and Curphy, whosemishaps I wroye about in a recent letter, and our adjutant, LieutenantMahan. Mahan had handled the finances of the officers' mess. Therumor was that Major Anderson had fired him after an audit of hisaccounts. Mahan was an ex-policeman from Chicago, so perhaps hehad just been doing what came naturally. I never saw any of thosethree again, and the only one I had news of was Joe Carr. He was livingin the 1930's in one of the north shore suburbs.

Still with us was Fletcher McCordic, a pilot from Minnetka. He wasperhaps the most unlucky of the four. He survived the war and wentwith the 88th to Trier, in the army of occupation. There he was killed inan accidental crash while flying a German plane. Our first commander,Major Anderson, died in the same way at about the same time.

We had three Jewish pilots in the 88th. All were brave and expert attheir job. Though all three are dead now, they all survived the war andstayed with the squadron until it was over. They were Kenneth Littauer,our second commander; Louis Bernheimer, who teamed with myroomate John Jordan; and Victor Heilbrunn, a Ph. D. in zoology.Heilbrunn was said to have been the youngest Ph. D. turned out fromthe University of Chicago up to 1918. After the war he eventuallybecame head of a department at the University of Pennsylvania. Wewere both members of the American Physiological Society and used tosee each other at the annual meetings. So I saw him more often thatany others of the 88th after ^the war. He was killed in an auto accidentin Virginia ten or twelve years ago.

Heilbrunn was about the most unselfish and kindhearted man I everknew. In the fall of 1919, soon after I had entered the University ofChicago, Heilbrunn came through and proposed that we pay a visit ofcondolence to the parents of Fletcher McCordic. We went. TheMcCordics had a fine house. The room I remember best is the onewhich Fletcher had occupied, and which they were preserving just as hehad left it. He had been their only child, and it seemed to me that wewere just stirring up their grief by coming there to talk about






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him. They said he had always been interested in aeroplanes, and thathis only ambition had been to become a pilot. They showed us, hangingin his room, several model planes he had built entirely on his own.Balsa-wood kits with accompanying blueprints had not been available tohim.

In the 88th Fletcher had been called "The General", usually abbreviatedto "Gen". He had brought that nickname from training, and I neverlearned how he acquired it. He was regarded as a first-class pilot withamusing eccentricities, qualities that combined to make him popular. Hewas the most taciturn man I ever knew. He was not surly, justdisinclined to talk. When anyone spoke to him he answered pleasantlyenough, but always in a manner that seemed to close the subject. Anduntil someone did speak to him he remained silent. Now and tgen agroup would gather around McCordic and question him on varioustopics, just trying to make him talk. At such times his face wouldbrighten into a faint grin, the only trace of expression I ever saw on it.He would kibitz for hours at our poker games, but never made anycomment, and his facial expression never changed. In short it alwaysseemed to me that McCordic's mind worked well along mechanical linesbut that otherwise his development had been seriously retarded.

Somehow I was never assigned to fly with him until one day early inSeptember of 1918. Other observers who had flown with him seemed tolike him. But his behavior, on theat one flight of ours together, stillmystifies me. At the time it made me resolve never to let him pilot meagain, and I notified our adjutant that I would not. On that day I hadbeen sent to reconnoiter along a short stretch of the Aisne river, ten ortwelve miles inside German territory. We had to fly below brokenclouds, and cruising above those clouds was a patrol of Germanchasse. They showed no disposition to come over to our side after us,but when we started a run toward the Aisne they moved as if to cut offour retreat. I shouted through the speaking tube to McCordic, but hekept going as if he had heard nothing. Again I shouted and got noresponse. Then I fired a couple of shots. He heard and looked around.I pointed to the Germans and gestured to him to turn back. He did.After stalling around for a while we tried a second run toward ourobjective and exactly the same thing happened. Finally on a third try wereached the Aisne. As usual we saw no Germans on the ground, only apontoon bridge that no one was using at the moment.. When we gothome and landed I found tha McCordic had






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never connected the speaking tube to his earpiece, so that he could nothave heard anything I said to him during the flight. It was his duty totake orders from me in the air. Moreover the pilot could not see enemyplanes coming from above and behins, while th e observer could. Icould understand that McCordic might have forgotten to connect thespeaking tube when we started. But when I had to fire my guns to gethis attention he must have known what was wrong. Either he wasunbelievably stupid or he had deliberately left the speaking tubedisconnected.

Yet Ensign, our man in Chattanooga, admired McCordic and stillreminisces about his feats At our last meeting he told me of how one ofour planes once made a forced landing in a field. Mechanics werebrought and repaired whatever was wrong, but the plane's own pilot didnot dare try to fly it out. He was afraid he could not clear the hedgesthat bordered the fields. McCordic offered to fly it out and did.

Major Anderson had left the squadron before I returned to it. CaptainLittauer, his second in command, took over. I welcomed the change. Ihad nothing against Anderson, having known him too briefly to form ajudgment of him. But Littauer was my friend from the beginning. Whilewe were still at Ourches I went with him on an overnight trip to Nancy,about forty miles away. We went to with a truck to pick up somefurniture which the Red Cross had bought for our officers' lounge.Nancy was being bombed almost nightly, and furniture could be boughtthere, second hand, at bargain prices. On the way Littauer and Idiscovered that we had a common interest in chess. So we bought asmall chess set and spent the evening playing the game in our room atthe Hotel d'Angleterre. Part of the hotel had been destroyed by bombs.There was an alarm that night but no bombs fell anywhere near.

Littauer was one of the squadron's pilots, but as commander he did notfly as often as the others. But on photographic missions that seemedlikely to be dangerous he nearly always flew in the protecting formation,out on the tail of the V where he would be the first target in case ofattack. And I flew with him more often than any other observer did. I felthonored, though scared.






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Our new adjutant, Mahan's successor, was Leo Powers. His family ranthe Powers Hotel in Rochester, New York. I gathered th^[[at]] it was anold and respected hostelry. It was still in business when I visitedRochester in the 1950's, though I was booked elsewhere, at one of Mr.Hilton's homey establishments. So I did not get a chance to ask aboutLeo. He had come to the 88th from Blois, where the AEF maintained astation to take care of misfits. There they were reclassified and assignedto new duties if a suitable job could be found. Leo had been trained asan observer, but after a prior experience at the front he had decided tostay on the ground. In WW1 that was his privilege. Any flier could quitwhenever he wished, simply by giving notice to his commander. Iunderstand this was changed in WW2, when fliers who wanted to quitwere turned over to psychiatrists. In WW1 psychiatrists were called onto treat what was called "shell shock", but not to treat men who were justplain scared. I don't know ^[[strikethrough]] hw [[/strikethrough]] how theline was drawn between shell shock and ordinary fright. So Leo becameour adjutant and he was very good at the job. We all liked him, and Inever knew anyone to twit him about his past.

Only one of our original 36 flying officers elected to quit. He was FirstLieutenant Boylan, an observer, and he happened to be the only one ofus who held a regular army commission. The pilots were all"emergency" officers in the U. S. Reserves. The observers, exceptBoylan, were either U. S. Reserve or National Guard. So it was by nochance coincidence that Boylan was the only one of our observers to bepromoted during the time I served with the squadron. After Boylan gavenotice to Powers that he was though flying, he had to stay with us a fewdays awaiting orders that would sen^[[d]] him to Blois. While he waswaiting he received his notice that he had been promoted to captaincy.He had already been promoted once before joining the 88th. He hadoriginally been commissioned a second lieutenant at ^[[strikethrough]] a[[/strikethrough]] the end of the first officers' training camp, just as I hadbeen. Any of us that summer could have applied for a regular armycommission. I would have done so, but did not think I could meet thephysical requirements. I still had the same bad teeth that had made meresign the West point appointment in 1911.

Now I am glad that I did not become a professional soldier.






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Regular army officers each had a definite position in a promotion file orpecking order. It was something like a mile-long escalator, with oneman and one only on each step. Men with commissions like Boylan'sgot in the escalator below all the West Point men, but the escalatormoved upward as the army expanded. As long as Boylan did not incura dishonorable discharge he was assured of promotion at brief intervals.There was no such automatic promotion for the officers of the Nationalguard or the US Reserves. Each man was on his own. He could bepromoted only on special recommendation by his immediatecommander and approval by the higher-ups. When Littauer, in August,recommended promotion for Jordan, Wheeler and me, he was told thatthe Air Service division of the Signal Corps had no authority to promoteus. We were not Air Service but Artillery. When the recommendationswere sent to our respective units (The First Division, for Jordan and me)they was turned down. Littauer of course did not tell us about this at thetime. He told me long afterward.

Eventually, in the final weeks of the war, this foul-up was straightenedout. All the observers were transferred to the Air Service division of theSignal Corps, and there were promotions. But by then I was out of therunning.






^[[24 24]] February 18, 1974.

Dear Alice:

Early in WW1 the Germans drove a wedge between the two Frenchfortresses of Verdun and Toul. Both places are on the river Meuse,which at Toul is flowing westward. After 12 or 15 miles it makes a right-angle bend to th4 north, at a town called St. Mihiel. The Germansreached St. Mihiel, and the wedge of territory they had captured wascalled St. Mihiel salient. They held it until September 1918, after tryingvainly to widen it in 1916 by their bloody assualts on Verdun.

During its first six weeks at the front the 88th squadron operated on thesouth face of the St. Mihiel salient. Our airfield at Ourches was also onthe river, between Toul and St. Mihiel. In those days of early summerthe sector was as quiet as the one in Champagne had been during mustay there with the French. We suffered no casualties. The Germanchasse hardly bothered us at all. They made passes at two of ourplodding old sopwiths, but 1 left only a few innoucuous bullet holes.They did not seem to be trying very hard for a kill. I was absent atCazaux for more than half of that period. On my return I recall flyingover our beat, where the Germans sat on high ground and looked downat the Americans and French. I could not have had more than three orfour missions, and do not remember any special adventures.

More vividly I remember Toul. It was the first walled town I had seenfrom the air. The wall was almost a perfect circle, with four gates. Seenfrom close by, on the ground, it turned out to be rather an embankment,15 or 20 feet high. It was so thick that a road runs along the top. Iassumed then that it had been built in modern times, but I have readsince that it dates from the 17th century. The real modern defenses ofToul were in innocent-looking hills that rose separately from the plainoutside the town. I was told that inside each hill there were elevatorshafts, living quarters, and tunnels leading to gun emplacements at thesurface, all cut from the solid rock. All was so camouflaged that youcould see nothing warlike from the air.

Meanwhile the first drafted men from Tennessee had reached France inthe 82nd division. It moved into line north of Toul, just






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to get broken in on a quiet sector. I don't recall how we made contact,but on the 4th of July I had lunch in Toul with a friend from Carthage.He was Hubert Turner, and he had been an athletic hero at Vanderbilt.After graduation from law school in 1916 he had come home toCarthage to practize, and had coached our school team that fall. Afterthe war he married the daughter and sole heiress of the wealthiest manat Carthage. I am not sneering about it, for I liked both of them. It wasprobably a handicap to Turner in politics, however, for some years laterhe was badly beaten when he ran against a poor boy named AlbertGore for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator.

When we met in Toul Turner was first sergeant in an infantry company.I don' recall where we ate, but I believe I had to arrange for service in aprivate room. The American army in those days was quite fussy aboutcommissioned officers eating in public with enlisted men. The Frencharmy was more democratic.

Another sergeant of the 82nd division made the headlines three monthslater. I never knew him and saw him just once, when he spoke brieflyand modestly at Peabody College in the summer of 1919. His namewas Alvin York.

On July 7th our squadron moved about 125 miles westward to a livelierfront. The pilots naturally flew their planes to the new station. Each tookas his passenger a mechanic instead of an observer. In case of aforced landing the mechanic was likely to be more help. Thedisadvantage was that on such a move, flying over strange territory,some of the pilots always lost their way. They had to land at strangefields to get directions. Now and then one would stray across the lines,but there was little danger that he would land inadvertently on a Germanfield. The German anti-aircraft, as soon as he came within range, couldbe counted on to let him know that he was headed in the wrongdirection. In ordinary flying, the pilots were accustomed to depend ontheir observers for navigation.

Since Littauer went in his plane, his Cadillac on that trip was loaded withobservers including me. The squadron had as I recall four otherpassenger cars. One was a Dodge (made then by Dodge Brothers, notyet affiliated with Chrysler), one was a Fiat (a bigger car then than now),and we had two model T Fords. Our destination was an airfield about40 miles east of Paris, near a hamlet called Francheville.






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Somehow our quarters at Francheville were not ready for us on the 7th.We stayed overnight at the nearest town, Coulommiers, at the GrandHotel of the Bear de l'Ours). It was still in business in 1955, according tothe Michelin guidebook of that year. Michelin gave it a low rating, and itwas not much better in 1918. Next day we moved out to Francheville,where all our planes eventually arrived. The whole squadron wasbilleted in the buildings of one farm. They made a rectangle around acentral big courtyard.

Francheville was a few miles south of the Marne. Upstream, theGermans were on the north bank at Chateau-Thierry. The front onwhich we operated ran from there six or seven miles northwestward,past Vaux, Torcy and Belleau Wood. Those were places where theSecond American division had done good service in June. That divisionhad been relieved by the 26th, a New England National Guard outfit.The convoy in which I had crossed in September of 1917 had carriedover part of that division. It was one of our best. In the Chateau-Th9erry region neither side had an organized trench system. The frontthere had not been stabilized long enough for much digging. Theinfantry of both sides had dug "foxholes", known in earlier wars asriflepits. They were simply pits in which a man could by crouching orkneeling get his head below ground level. Here and there shorttrenches had been dug to connect one foxhole or one shellhole toothers. Foxholes were often started from shellholes, which saved somedigging.

At Francheville we were about 20 miles from the front, twice theconventional distance for trench warfare. It was planned that way. TheGermans were expected to make another drive toward Paris. We wouldbe in their path, and no one could predict when we might have to movein a hurry. All our equipment not in daily use was kept packed andloaded on our trucks. The gasoline tanks of our planes were kept filled.The Observers' guns, which ordinarily hung in the armorers' shopbetween flightts, were loaded and mounted on the planes, with extramagazines of ammunition.

The Germans on July 15th began their last offensive of the war. Theydid not, as we had expected, strike westward toward Paris. Theycrossed the Marne at Chateau-Thierry and for a stretch eastward fromthere. They captured the hills that overlook the Marne from the south.They pushed in that direction. They drove back the French and oneAmerican division (the 5th, I think). By noon we were informed that theallied command did not know how far the Germans had penetrated.






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They had lost contact with their forward infantry units. Littauer wasordered to send someone to reconnoiter the area and try to locate theline of combat. I got the assignment.

I wish I could say that I found and reported what I was looking for, but Ididn't. First, the area was quite unfamiliar to me and much of it washeavily wooded. There was little chance of seeing troops moving in theopen, and I did not see a man. German chasse kept appearingoverhead. Our planes were painted green on their upper surfaces, sothat in the summer they were not easy to see against a background offoliage. We were flying close to the ground, but I had to look out forattackers. The shelling seemed to be concentrated at certain places,and those I reported. But I could not tell which side it was coming from.






^[[25]] ^[[25]] February 25, 1974

Dear Alice:

That German offensive that seemed so scary on July 15, 1918 did notget very far. Crossing the Marne on the first day, it drove southwardthree or four miles on about a twelve-mile front. Next day we heard thatthe Germans were being held. Another day passed. Our guess was thatthe Germans, each night, were moving men, guns and supp^[[l]]iesacross for a renewal of their drive. Maybe they were, but on the 18ththey had someting else to think about.

On the night of July 17th, after I had gone to sleep, a guard came to ourquarters and woke me. He also woke Howard Douglas, our chiefobserver, a first lieutenant of infantry. We were to report at the squadronoffice. We dressed and went. It was nearly midnight. At the office wefound Littauer, our adjutant Powers, and a stranger, a colonel. He wasAmerican. I have forgotten his name, but he came from the staff ofGeneral Mangin, the French commander of the allied army operating onthe western side of the Chateau-Thierry salient. It was a mixed army ofFrench and American units. Normally orders to us ^[[strikethrough]] we[[/strikethrough]] would have been transmitted through a corps ordivisional staff, but our squadron had not yet been assigned to any suchsubordinate unit. So the messenger had been sent to us directly. Hebegan by saying that the allies were about to launch an attack nextmorning on the whole Chateau-Thierry salient.

That was surprising as well as exciting. The allies had been on the^[[strikethrough]] the [[/strikethrough]] defensive ever since I had arrivedin France, and I had come to think of that as the natural and normalstate of affairs. But the Germans around Chateau-Thierry were in apocket they had created. Their situation invited a flank attack, and nodoubt Foch had long been itching to deliver it. He had had to wait for theAmerican buildup to give him the necessary manpower. And now theGerman drive on the 15th had simply made them more vulnerable.They had deepened, without widening, the pocket they were in.

One advantage of being an observer was that you got such briefings asthe colonel gave us. To do his work intelligently an observer had to beinformed in advance of any offensive operation of his own division andof those adjacent to it in line. The colonel outlined to us the whole planof attack of Mangin's army. Most of the attacking






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force was being moved into line that night. The heaviest punch was tobe struck north of us, near Soissons at the top of the pocket. As shocktroops there Mangin had brought in the French Moroccan division andthe American First and Second. On our part of the front not so muchpower was being concentrated, but each division was expected to gainsome ground. Douglas and I were to carry out "infantry contact patrol"with the 167th French division. I described that kind of operation in aletter to you written in August 1972. Neither Douglas nor I had ever doneit before, but we had been drilled on it rather thoroughly. Littauer offeredeach of us a choice of pilots from the squadron. Douglas had firstchoice, and I do not recall whom he picked. I chose Victor Heilbrunn.We had other pilots who were more skillful at handling planes, but someof them were apt to balk at flying close to the ground over enemyterritory. On this mission we would have to fly low and I knew I coulddepend on Victor. Our orders were that Douglas was to take off atdaybreak. The infantry would then be moving out. I was to follow exactlyan hour later.

The front of the 167th centered on Torcy, a village just to the left ofBelleau. The division was attacking the strongest position the Germansheld in that area. The infantry would first have to cross a small stream,then a narrow-gauge railroad track. Then they had to climb Hill 193 (thenumber simply means the altitude, in meters). The face of Hill 193 wasrounded, high, and steep. It had scattered clumps of bushes, excellentcover for machine guns, nearly all the way to the top. Then you came toopen ground extending two or three hundred yards beyond the brow ofthe hill. Then you came to a village, Monthiers. The whole terrain waspitted with shell-holes, and some of them were connected by trenches.

Each attacking division had a tentative time schedule for its advance, asuccession o^[[f]] objectives it hoped to reach at specific times. Theschedule of the 167th called for an advance nearly halfway up Hill 193by the time Douglas arrived. By the time I got there, an hour later, theFrench were expecting to be over the brow of the hill, on open groundapproaching Monthiers. If they had been sure in advance of meetingthat schedule, Douglas and I would not have been needed. More often^[[than]] not such schedules went haywire ^[[strikethrough]] after[[/strikethrough]] after an






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attack was started. Our job was to find out, if possible, just where thefront line of the attacking troops actually was. That information wasneeded especially by the supporting artillery, so that its ^[[strikethrough]]its [[/strikethrough]] barrage could be adjusted to fall at the properdistance ahead of the infantry. The infantry had been informed inadvance of special markings that would identify our planes, and directedto respond to our signals.

I don't remember how well I slept that night. I I do remember climbingnext morning into Heilbrunn's plane a few minutes early We sat therelistening the heaviest gunfire I had ever heard.. We looked at ourwatches frequently, although we did not need to. Powers, the adjutant,was standing by to give us the starting word. I remember vividly our tripto the front. We could not see the Marne when we crossed it. The nighthad been cool and the river was hidden by fog. All the little tributarystreams that ran into it were likewise hidden by fog. The higher groundwas clear. I was startled to see batteries standing out in open fields,firing away. I had never before seen a battery anywhere near the frontthat was not elaborately camouflaged. Those guns that stood in theopen had been moved in the previous night. I suppose that guns wereequally crowded over the whole 30-mile stretch of Mangin's army. Irecall feeling the plane jump once or twice when a big gun was fired aswe were passing over it.

At the front fog still hid the jumping-off line of the 167th. I could not seethe stream nor the railroad, but I could see flashes from German shellsthat were falling there. On the German side shells were falling onMonthiers and on the open ground in front of it. On that space, where Iexpected to find the French, shells were falling so thickly that the groundwas obscured by smoke. We flew straight over the route our infantrywas expected to take. Over Monthiers, about 100 yards from theground, I fired a signal rocket. It meant "Where are you?". Infantrymen inthe front line of the attack, and only they, were supposed to respond byspreading on the ground small square panels of white cloth. One man ineach squad carried such a panel. Ordijarily it was carried rolled up, andthe outer surface was khaki-colored. The observer in the plane was thensupposed to note on his battle-map the exact location of each panel anddrop the map with his report at division headquarters.

No cloth panels appeared in response to my signal. Thinking I mighthave missed them because of the smoke, I asked Heilbrunn to^[[strikethrough]] cir [[/strikethrough]] circle again over the area in front ofMonthiers. Suddenly, passing






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over a patch of clear ground, I saw 30 or 40 men in a cluster ofshellholes directly below me. They were German, not French, and frOmone shellhole a machine gun was pointed at us, presumably firing. Iaimed my two Lewis guns at those shellholes and emptied them. I neverknew, of course, whether I hit anybody or not.

We returned briefly to our side of the lines while I considered what to donext. Those Germans I had seen were being heavily shelled, so theFrench evidently knew that their men had not got that far. The hillsidemust have been visible from ground observation posts on the Frenchside. I loaded my Very pistol with another signal rocket, went back to thetop of the hill and fired it in the air. Then I searched the hillside foranswering signals. There were none. I wrote out a brief report, droppedit in a tin can with a cloth^[[strikethrough]] e [[/strikethrough]] streamerattached at d^[[i]]vision headquarters, and we went home. Our otherplane had returne returned, and it also had failed to make any contactwith the troops on the ground.

Later that day we learned that the attack of the 167th had been stoppedat the railroad track, at the foot of the hill. The Germans continued tohold Hill 193 f0r the next three days. Then they moved out,because theallied drive had the hill almost surrounded. Overall the allied offensive ofJuly 18 was highly successful, especially at the top of the salient, whereit counted. That day was the turning point of the war.[[three long lines]]

FOOTNOTES

1 1. A plane on this kind of mission had to fly low and ahead of its owntroops , else its rocket signals might not be seen. The men on theground would naturally be looking forward, and not up at the sky. Theplane thus was exposed to rifle or machine-gun fire from the ground. Itwas also in the line of fire of the artillery of both sides^[[strikethrough]] ,[[/strikethrough]] , and both sides were doing a lot of shelling. Both of ourplanes on this mission were heavily peppered with bullet-holes, but wewere lucky.

2. A Colonel Very, a British rocket expert, invented the Very pistol. Itwas in effect a miniature trench mortar, firing specially designed rocketsinstead of bombs.

3. All this messing around with airplanes, rockets and pieces of clothwould have been unnecessary if we had had walkie-talkies in World War1. We had wireless telegraphy, but it was ^[[strikethrough]] onf[[/strikethrough]] of no use that day. The radiotelephone had not yetbeen invented.

Love,






^[[25A]] March 7, 1974

Dear Wanda & Co.:

On the morning of July 20,1918, I was ordered to make areconnaissance flight over Hill 193 that afternoon. The allied push wascontinuing, but the 67th French division was still stuck at the foot of thathill. Divisions on the left and right had moved forward, so that theGerman position was now exposed to allied fire from both flanks. Theycould not hope to hold the hill much longer. I was to look particularly forsigns that they were moving out.

Later that morning an order came assigning our squadron, the 88th, toduty with a newly created American Third Corps. The first ObservationSquadron was to take over our current duties with the 167th Frenchdivision. The orders became effective at noon that day, which meantthat an observer from the First squadron would be named to take overmy mission of that afternoon. The man who got the assignment came tosee me about it. He turned out to be an old friend from training days atTours and Amanty. He name was Hermann St. John Boldt.

I had a battlemap of the hill and its surroundings, neatly pasted on myfolding plywood map board. Boldt had not had time to prepare one, so Ilent him mine. I gave him also some notes I had made about theGerman positions. On that mission Boldt was shot through the head bya bullet from the ground. His pilot brought his body home. I retrievedmy bespattered map board.

No one can ever know how I would have fared if I had made that flight.The cards would not have been shuffled for me in exactly the sameorder as they had been for him. All one can say is that I was sparedfrom taking the risk. I had not asked to be excused. Yet I could not helpfeeling some involvement in Boldt's death. I had liked him, and hadbeen sorry when we were assigned to different squadrons from Amanty.

Boldt's parents had been immibrants from Bermany. I don't supposethey came over as steerage passenbers, for his father became managerof the Waldorf-AStoria hotel. Boldt always carried in an inside pocket aletter his father had written to an uncle still in Germany. The letter wawmeant for delivery in case Boldt should be taken prisoner. He said theuncle was "an admiral in the Boche navy". The rest of us usuallyreferred to the enemy as German, but to Boldt it was always "Bouche". Isuppose he used that word to show where his loyalty






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was. If my surname had been German I might have done the same.

He was a staunch Princeton man. From him I first heard thatscandalous song about the privations men suffer down at Yale. He wasa little below medium size, but he was well built and his uniforms alwaysfitted him neatly. They had obviously been fitted by a good tailor. Therest of us, having been outfitted with hand-me-downs in a hurry beforeleaving the states, mostly looked as if we were wearing someone else'sclothes. He wore a wispy musrache which he ought to have given up asa failure. He was sociable and a good listner. When you talked to himhis face wore an expression of pleased anticipation.

When he learned where I came from he asked if I knew three brothersnamed Douglas who came from Lebanon. They had been at Princetonwith him. I had come from Carthage, not far from Lebanon, and I hadheard of the Douglas brothers although I had not met them. One ofthem, Beverly Douglas, had been a slassmatr of Boldt and had, Igathered been admired by him.

Twice in later years I ran into reminders of Boldt. One was his father'sportrait, which hangs (or did hang) in a room on the lobby floor of theWaldorf. It may have been replaced by a portrait of Conrad Hilton.

One day Dr. Beverly Douglas, Professor of Dermatology in the medicalschool at Vanderbilt University, called at the office of the NationalFoundation in New York. I talked with him. The main subject of ourconversation was Boldt, whom he remembered well.






^[[26 26]] March 20, 1974

Dear Alice:

On July 21,1918, Littauer went in search of General Robert Lee Bullard,to report our squadron for duty with his new Third Corps. So far a corpswas the largest unit to be commanded by any American officer in thefield, in France. American ground troops, as corps or divisional units,had been incorporated into armies that were made up mostly of Frenchor British and commanded by French or British generals. Later on twowholly American armies were formed, and Bullard was to command oneof them. The big offensive the allies had haunched on July 18th wasmainly a French effort, though several American divisions had beenplaceed in key positions. One of them was the First Division, whichBullard had commanded.

The corps typically comprised four division. At any given time twodivisions would be in the line of battle and two in reserve. Ideally alsoeach corps had a group of three squadrons of observation planes. Onesquadron was assigned to duty with each division in the line, while thethird was the "corps squadron". Its duties were mainly air photographyand the adjustment of heavy artillery on its targets. Divisional artilleryhad no guns heavier than 155mm. (6-inch) howitzers. All heavier gunswere classified as Coast Artillery and were directly under corpscommand. But at the time of which I write there were not enoughobseration squadrons to go around. The Third Corps had only onesquadron and we were it. We did errands for everyone until September12th, when we were shifted again.

Littauer took me with him to see General Bullard. That honor properlybelonged to Howard Douglas, our chief observer. But Douglas was inParis, enjoying a disguised three-day leave. At that critical time noformal leaves were being allowed, but Littauer had found a way to getaround the ban. We had just begun to trade in our Sopwith planes forSalmsons. The exchange was made at Orly field, just outside Paris.That was only a half-hour flight from our field at Francheville. Pilotsalone could have completed the business easily in a day, but Littauersent an observer along with each plane. He gave the men three days tocomplete their errand. Each was provided with a written order, to satisfythe M.P.'s. Douglas had gone with our first instalment of 6 Sops. Ishould be hypocritical if I criticised Douglas for being party to suchsubterfuge, for I find






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in my file a similar order made out to me and dated July 30th.

That morning Littauer first tried by telephoning, without success, to findout where General Bullard was. Then we got into the Cadillac anddrove to army headquarters. It was at Trilport near Meaux, back in thedirection of Paris. So far as anyone knew, Bullard was still at the frontwith the First Division. His headquarters had been at a village calledTaillefontaine. When last heard from Bullard had been preparing tomove his headquarters, eastward, following the advance of his troops, toanother village called Mortefontaine. (Those names have stuck in mymemory all these years).

Those places are a few miles southwest of Soissons, a sizable city THEGermans had captured in their May drive. I don't recall the route wetook from Trilport to Taillefontaine. If you drive 60 miles from Paris toSoissons, as Helen and I did in 1938, the route borders the Forest ofCompiegne on your left. Just beyond the forest is Pierrefonds, a townwhich has one of the biggest and ugliest castles in France. Two orthreee miles south of Pierrefonds is Taillefontaine. General Bullard wasnot there. We found him at Mortefontaine, where we arrived quite late inthe afternoon.

It had taken several hours to drive there from Trilport, not more than 40miles away as the crow flies. That was because we had been caught inthe kind of traffic that went on behind the lines during a big offensivepush. Trucks made up most of it. An endless line of loaded trucks wasmoving toward the front and an equally endless line of empties wascoming out. The drivers of some of the French trucks were Orientalswho looked like Chinese, too big to be Annamites. I never found outwhere they came from. The last miles of our journey were made on sideroads, country roads. They were not hard-surfaced, and two-way trafficcould move on them only by using the road shoulders on both sides. Atsome points they were too narrow even for that. At such bottlenecksM.P.'s were stationed to let traffic flow in one direction for a while andthen in the other. M.P.'s also worked at each junction or intersection ofroads. A cloud of dust hang overheard, and our faces soon becamecaked with it. Our chauffeur, Weaver, looked as if he were wearing amask.






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I had rarely seen any vehicles moving that near the front in daylight. Ikept thinking what a target we offered to a strafing German plane, butwe saw none all day. The allies had concentrated so many chasseplanes on that sector that they had control of the air. Trucks were notthe only kind of traffic on the roads. Occasionally we saw anotherpassenger car carrying officers; motorcycles with or without sidecars;and more often ambulances. We met several groups of Germanprisoners. More than 6000 had been taken on that sector, and we musthave met a thousand on their way to the rear. They were a welcomesight, though a grim one. They were being escorted by kilted Britishsoldiers. I learned later that they had been brought in to relieve one ofthe American divisions in the line.

We also met coming out a considerable body of French cavalry. Thatsurprised me, for I had thought that all the French cavalry had beendisbanded and the men transferred to other services. I heard later thatone division of cavalry had been maintained. The idea was that if thewar ever got out of the trenches cavalry might once more becomeuseful. When the allied offensive of July 18th was planned the Frenchhad hoped to open a gap in the German lines. The cavalry had beenplaced in readiness to gallop through and do its thing behind the enemylines. That hope was disappointed. There had been no breakthrough.The German line had been pushed back several miles, but it had heldtogether. I was witnessing the last appearance of cavalry on the stageof modern warfare. I gather that both sides used cavalry in the Russiancivil war between Reds and Whites, but the Russians had not kept up todate.

We found General Bullard at an opportune time. He had that day turnedover command of the First division to his successor, GeneralSummerall. (I mentioned General Summerall in an earlier letter. Hewas the man who, in the presence of General Pershing, admonished meto button up my overcoat). So the entire staff and entourage of the Firstdivision had gone somewhere else with Summerall. Bullard(affectionately called Sitting Bull by the enlisted men of his command)had not yet assembled the larger staff he would have as a corpscommander. The only officers with him at Mortefontaine were hispersonal aide and a French liaison man. Both were colonels whosenames I have forgotten. So the general invited Littauer and me to havedinner with him. It was the only ^[[meal I ever had at a general's Table.]]






I don't remember what we had to eat, but I do recall something of theconversation. As a mere second lieutenant in that company, I spokeonly when I was spoken to. Most of the conversation was betweenGeneral Bullard and the Frenchman. They were speculating on whatthe Germans would do next. The allies were keeping pressure on themall around the Chateau-Thierry salient. That pocket had been narrowedat the top, increasing the possibility that it might be pinched off.Nevertheless Bullard thought that the Germans not only would try tohold all their ground, but would continue the drive south of the Marnethat they had started on July 15th. The Frenchman maintained that thesituation forced the Germans to pull all their troops back north of theMarne and to shorten their lines. The resistance they were making atsuch places as Hill 193, he said, was meant just to buy time to extricatethemselves. His guess turned out to be the correct one. Within threedays after that conversation the Germans had given up Chateau-Thierryand were very slowly retreating northward.

It was well after midnight when we go home. The traffic was not quite sothick as it had been on the roads going in, but we were driving at night,without lights, through strange territory. French M. P.'s, with flashlightsand maps, guided us through Villers-Cotterets and La Ferte-Milon.

That allied attack of July 18th was a favorite subject of [cross out]American fiction writers of WW1. The best account I found was in anovel called "Through the Wheat"' by Thomas Boyd. The author washimself and infantry officer in the Second division. There was also alively book entitled "Chevrons". I don't remember the author, but hisstyle was less restrained than Boyd's. I don't think I would have made agood infantryman. Our life was easier that theirs.






^[[27

27]] March 30, 1974

Dear Alice:

Among the many books I discarded when I left Scarsdale was GeneralPershing's "My Experience in the World War". As you may deduce fromthe title, it was written before they had begun to number world wars.Now I wish I had kept it, to check on some details of thesereminiscences. At that time, 1967, I had no idea that I should ever bewriting about my own experiences under Pershing's command. I findnow that memory sometimes fails me For example I wrote you oncethat the First Division's attack on Cantigny was in April 1918, whereas itactually took place in May.

During the last ten days of July 1918 the Germans slowly withdrewnorthward from Chateau-Thierrry. They planted numerous machineguns to cover their getaway. The emplacements were so wellcamouflaged that they could rarely be spotted from the air. Americanand French troops were pressing hard after the Germans, but theirinfantrymen had to offer themselves as targets to find out where themachine guns were. So the operation was a costly one for the allies. AtFere-en-Tardenois, nearly the middle of the salient, there is anAmerican cemetery. There is another at Belleau Wood.

We stayed at Francheville through July. The front had been 20 milesaway when we moved in there on July 7th. , and now it kept movingfurther from us. Around the end of the month the Germans had reachedand crossed the Vesle river. That stream runs through Reims andthence flows westward to join the Aisne at Soisonns.The Germans decided to make a stand at Vesle and for six weeks theyrepelled American attempts to cross it. General Bullard's Third Corpsplayed a leading part in all that campaign. One of its divisions was the32nd, a National Guard unit from Wisconsin and Michigan. It had somehard fighting in pursuit of the Germans as far as the Vesle. There it wasrelieved about the middle of August. Florence's brother Bernard was inthe 32nd. He was killed just south of the Vesle. When Florence first toldme about him she thought he had been killed at a village calledDravigny. Later she heard that it was at another village, Chery-Chartreuve. I knew both places well from the air, and in 1938 withHelen I revisited them. Both had been






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destroyed in 1918 but in large part rebuilt in 1938.

When the 32nd had gone the front of the Third Corps was the southbank of the Vesle. On the left we had the 77th division, made uporiginally of drafted men from New York State. On the right we had the28th, a National Guard unit from Pennsylvania. Near the middle of thesector, but just inside the zone of the 28th, was the town of Fismes witha peacetime population of 3 or 4 thousand. I had been partly destroyedwhen we got there, and German shelling completed the job duringAugust. I recall a tall, round brick smokestack which stood apparentlyundamaged with only rubble anywhere near it. In 1938 we foundFismes also largely rebuilt. It had a new bridge across the Vesle, withan inscription stating that it had been built by the state of Pennsylvaniain memory of its men of the 28th.

My reco;;ection of those last days of July is patchy. They wereenlivened by a raid of night bombers on our airfield. I mentioned that inan earlier letter, It stirred up much commotion but did little damage.The 88th had its first casualty when one of our pilots, Larry Evans, wasshot through the leg from the ground. It was only a flesh wound and hewas jot lost to the squadron. I can remember only two flights of my own,though there must have been more. One was the first I ever made withLittauer. We were on an early morning reconnaissanceand there was heavy fog near the ground, thicker that it had been on mymorning mission of July 18th. Perhaps that is why I happened to see,for the second and last time, German soldiers on the ground. We wereflying low and suddenly came a small open field that was clear of fog.About a platoon of Germans were crossing it. Littauer dived on them,firing his one gun. I could not bring mine to bear until we passed overthem. By then they had scattered, and I had to shoot at single runningtargets. On another day a dozen or so British fighters, Sopwith Camels,made rendezvous over our airfield with a patrol from the First AmericanPersuit Group. We took advantage of that company to send over aphotographic mission There were three of our planes, and in one ofthem I was flying as protection for the man with the camera. It was thelargest assembly of allied planes I ever took part in, the only mission onwhich I ever had a fighter escort.






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The German anti-aircraft seemed to go wild at having so many of usoverhead. That was the occasion I mentioned in an earlier letter, onwhich our plane got a direct hit from a shell. It passed harmlesslythrough a wing without exploding.

Then on July 30th I got my three-day leave in Paris. When I returnedI found that the squadron was about to move.






^[[28 28]] April 9, 1974

Dear Alice:

Somewhere around August 1 the 88th moved 20 miles eastward. Themove brought us nearer to the front, which had been receding. Our fieldwas at an isolated farm, the Ferme des Gréves, on a plateau thatoverlooked the Marne from the south. The place had been overrun bythe Germans in their final offensive of July 15, but they were not at asafe distance to the north. In a letter of two and a half years ago(September 1971) I tried to described the Ferme des Gréves.

In the old farmhouse I shared a small room with another observer, JohnJordan. He and I had become close friends. He was from Indianapolisand had gone to the University of Indiana. He had become the Numberone camera man of the squadron. All of us had been trained in serialphotography at the observers' school, but it happened that onphotographic missions after the 88th went to the front. They hadperformed so well that they kept getting more assignments, Jordanespecially. Only those two ever took pictures over the German lineswhile I was with the 88th.

Air photographs were much used, to study for new enemy installationsand keep battlemaps up to date. The squadron would get an order forphotographs of a designated strip of German territory. That meant flyingin a straight course and at a constant, recorded altitude over the strip,and taking a series of pictures so timed that they overlapped at theedges only. Nowadays such pictures would be made on film, with acamera that can be set for successive exposures at any desiredintervals. In 1918 aerial photography was primitive. Jordan's camerawas loaded with a magazine containing 12 glass photographic plates.He had to figure out what time interval should be allowed betweenexposures, since that varied with the altitude and the speed of flight.During a run of 8 or 10 minutes he had to sit hunched over his camera,working a lever with one hand and holding a stopwatch in the other.That meant that he could not keep a lookout for enemy planes. Norcould the pilot, who had to keep the plane on an exact course and whohad a very poor view toward the rear anyway. A plane doingphotography needed a protective escort.

The logical course would have been to provide an escort of chasseplanes for each photographic mission. We tried that. We found our






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chasse always willing to make appointments for such duty, but quiteunreliable about keeping them. For the mission on which I was shotdown, in September, an escort from our First Pursuit Group had beenscheduled to accompany us. It failed to appear. In my last letter I toldyou of the only flight I ever made with a chasse escort. The 88thadopted the practice of sending five of its own planes on eachphotographic mission. Four of them flew in V formation above andbehind the camera plane for its protection.

Those missions became more risky when the Germans, having decidedto make a stand at the Vesle river, brought in one of their mostaggressive pursuit groups. In 1918 chasse pilots no longer roamed theskies alone. They flew in packs, usually six. They could easily pick off alone observation plane, but a formation of five often was allowed to gounmolested because of its firepower. At least twice I flew as protectionfor Jordan with German chasse hovering overhead and not daring toclose in. The crews of our protecting planes were rotated, but Jordanand his pilot, Louis Bernheimer, were neearly always carrying thecamera. That may seem unfair, but our commander was not trying toget Jordan killed. He was risking 5 planes and ten men to get somepictures. He simply could not afford to put an untried man in charge.And after all Jordan and Bernheimer had the safest position in theformation. Attacks always came from above and behind. Enemychasse had to dispose of the protecting planes before they could get atthe camera crew. As it turned out Jordan and Bernheimer both survivedthe war, while five men were killed protecting them during the month ofAugust.

On August 11th five of our planes crossed the Vesle to get somepictures. They were attacked and one was shot down. McClendon andPlummer, pilot and observer, were killed. Another observer, Burns, waskilled but his pilot brought the plane home. Their formation was brokenup, and one of the Germans got a crack at the camera plane. A steeringwire was cut by a bullet, and Jordan told me that they fell nearly to theground before Bernheimer managed to get the plan under control. Heand Jordan began congratulating each other, but their talk over thespeaking tubes wa broken off by the sight of tracer bullets flying pastthem from behind. The Germans had followed them all the way down tomake sure of his kill. Jordan brought his guns into action and theGerman left them. A bullet hit Jordan in the deltoid






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muscle, just missing a shoulder joint. Jordan stayed on duty, letting oursquadron medic take care of it. Their D.S.C citation notes approvinglythat Jordan and Bernheimer brought home the pictures they had set outto get. I might add that one of their plates was cracked by a billet that hitthe camera.

Jordan was badly shaken by that experience. When I woke during thenight I would often see a cigarette glowing in the dark from his bunk. Hesaid that when he did manage to get to sleep he had dreams of airfighting and woke in a cold sweat. A week or two after that first flight hewent on another similar mission. Again it was attacked, and anotherprotecting plane was show down. The dead observer, Moore, had beena close friend of Jordans and mine. The pilot, Hitchcock, was the onewho had brought Burn's body home from the earlier flight. That nightJordan told me he had decided to ask for ground duty ( we observershad that privilege, at any time). But he did not give notice at once to theoffice. I told Littauer the state of mind Jordan was in. Littauer gave bothJordan and Bernheimer a three-day leave in Paris. When Jordanreturned he seemed quite serene. He and Bernheimer continued flyingtogether through the rest of the war.

After the war I saw Jordan just once. In 1920, while I was at theUniversity of Chicago, he came to the city to get married. He worked fora brokerage firm, Thomson and McKinnon, at its Indianapolis office. Weexchanged a few letters, then lst contact. In 1952, visiting Indianapolis, Itried to reach him and had a brief telephone converdation with hiswidow.

The 88th squadron had not Jewish observers, but 3 of our 18 pilots wereJews. They were brave men and good flyers. One was our squadroncommander, Kenneth Littauer, a veteran of the Lafayette Escadrille. Inmy personal circle of acquaintance, he is one of ^[[two]] or three men Ihave most respected in my lifetime. As commander, he did not fly onroutine reconnaissance mission. But whenever we had an assignmentof exceptional danger, he always went along, flying as protection at thetail of the formation. On such occasions I was his observer, an honorthat flattered and scared me. That is how I happened to be his by sixGerman bullets, but brought down to earth alive, on September 14,1918.

Anther Jewish pilot was Victor Heilbrunn, the one I chose for ^[[my]]mission of July 18th, 1918. He was a scholar, the youngest Ph.D. thathad been turned out until then from the University of Chicago.






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In later life, by chance, I saw Heilbrunn and Littauer more frequentlythan any other survivors of the 88th. Heilbrunn became a professor ofphysiology at the University of Pennsylvania. I went into the same line ofbusiness, and we used to see each other annually at our Societymeetings. He died in an auto accident in the late 1950's. Littauer wasfiction editor of Collier's magazine. After it folded he became a literaryagent. After I moved to New York in 1947 we used to arrange lunchtogether at least once each year. He died in 1969.Neither Littauer nor Heilbrunn ever seemed to feel that being Jewish sethim apart from the rest of us. Bernheimer's attitude was different. At thatperiod songs and ^[[j]]okes were ^[[c]]urrent, especially in the northernstates, about the supposed cowardice of Jews and their aversion tomilitary service. Bernh^[[e]]imer was aloof with strangers, and becamefriendly only when he was convinced that they accepted him as anequal.As a southerner, I sympathized with Berheimer, for there was at the timelittle anti-Jewish feeling in the south. At Vanderbilt, and at the Universityof Tennessee, Jews were admitted to fraternities from which they wereexcluded at northern schools. So Bernheimer and I were always ongood terms. He was determined to show by example that a Jew couldbe as brave as anyone else, and I admired him for it.He faltered once, but his squadron mates never knew [[strikethrough]] it[[/strikethrough]] it. Only Littauer and perhaps [[insert]] ^[[Jordan]][[/strikethrough]] knew^[[|]]at the time.Littauer told me about it at one ofour luncheaon meetings in New York^[[|]]long afterward. WhenBernheimer and Jordan went to Paris on that three-day leave,Bernheimer overstayed the leave by two ^[[d]]ays. When he reportedback to the squadron he confessed to Littauer that he had boarded atrain from Paris headed toward the Spanish border, intending to desert.Thinking it over during the hours on the train, he had changed his mind,got off at Bordeaux, and returned. Listauer, after listening to his story,agreed to forget the two days ^[[o]]f AWOL. Bernheimer returned to dutyand continued his teamwork with Jordan for the rest of the war.After the war Bernheimer went to work for a New York newspaper. Oneday in the early 1920's he was found dead in his apartment, a suicide.P.S. Our southern ,friendliness toward Jews, before E E ^[[1]], did not[[insert]] Love, ^[[Dad]] [[/insert]]mean that we were more toleran^[[t]] [[insert]] ^[[than]] [[/insert]] Yankeeswere.We just had not come into contact with thenorthern type of Jew. Southern Jews were mostly of old families thathad lived here long enough to become assimilated. The north had someJews like that, but most were recent immigrants .






^[[28A]]

^[[28A]] September 16, 1971

Dear WandaJessicaTed:

In parta of France, in 1918, there were still some old farms that hadoriginally been laid out for use as strongholds in time of war. Most ofthem dated from the 15th and 16th centuries. Their buildings, of thickstone, were arranged in rectangular patterns to enclose a courtyard. Ifthe buildings did not suffice to complete the enclosure, the gaps werefilled in by high stone walls. the whole was surrounded by a moat. Themain entrance was reached by a hridge across the moat and a[[underline]] porte cochere [[/underline]] guarded by an overhead tower.

One of the best novels about World War 1 is centered around such afarm, in what is now French Flanders. The Spaniards once ruled thatarea and built what we would mow call a facility, with both agriculturaland military purposes in mind. In World War 1 the place was called LaFerme Espagnole, "The Spanish Farm", and that is the title of the bookby V. H. Mottram.

About the first of August, 1918, the 88th squadron moved into just sucha place. It was called the Ferme des Gréves, and it was located four orfive miles southwest, and across the Marne, from Chateau-Thierry. Ithad been overrun by the Germans in their drive across the river thatbegan July 15, the beginning of the second Battle of the Marne. It hadbeen retaken by the allies in their counter-offensive that started July 18.We moved there after the Germans had been pushed back beyondartillery range.

The airfields of World War 1 did not have nor need concrete runways.All you needed was to find a level field of 30 or 40 acres, fill up anyholes, mow the grass, and fly in. The Ferme des Gréves had such afield, though there were many shellholes to be filled. The buildings alsohad been heavily bombarded. Jordan and I had the good luck to bebilleted together in a small room on the third floor, The patch of roofdirectly over us was intact, but plaster from the walls littered ^[[the]] floorand kept crumbling off while we stayed there. No glass was left in ourwindow, but we substituted oiled paper backed by chicken wire. Itadmitted some light, but to see outside we had to open the window. Thescene from there was not attractive.

The moat below us was dry, except for three or four pools covered






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with greenish scum. When we arrived the courtyard and the moat werecluttered with rubbish. In the moat beneath our window was arepresentive collection. It included some broken chairs, a German gasmask, an unexploded shell, and a stinking pile of overripe garbage. Thelargest item was a loosely rolled-up mass of rusty barbed wire, higherthan a man's head. By some freak an egg, apparently undamaged, waslodged between two parallel strands of wire near the top. The spectacleattracted visitors to our room, for how the egg got there was a puzzle.The hypothesis most favored was that it had been placed there byhuman hands, not by the hen; that someone had done it as a joke.Even so, it was a feat that none or us would have attempted, for thejokester must have climbed a small mountain of barbed wire. After afew days the egg seemed forgotten by everyone except Jordan. To himit became more and more of an eyesore. One day, coming into ourroom, I found him at the opened window, tossing stones down at theegg. He had brought up a handfull from the road for that purpose, butthey all missed.

Usually we kept our window closed, for when open it admitted the smalland the flies from the moat. The unexploded shell was soon removed.The barbed wire was still there when we left, a month later. Theremaining refuse had been raked together and finally buried, after anunsuccessful attempt to burn it.

On our flying field, across the road, the loose earth that had filled in theshellholes gradually settled and the holes reappeared, not quite so deepas before. An incoming plane, after touching ground, would sometimeshit a hole and topple forward on its nose. Among the hedgerowbordering the field were the dugouts and gun replacements of anabandoned battery position. At the rear of the farm buildings was avegetable garden, and beyond that were woods. Woods and gardenwere dotted thickly with shallow holes made by German 77 m. shells. Inthe woods some of the smaller trees had been cut down by shellfire,leaving stumps of varying height. In the woods also were numbers ofthose those shelter pits called "foxholes", with straw bedding at thebottom. Some had been used as temporary graves for their occupants.They were marked by wooden crosses to which identification tags hadbeen nailed.

In short, the Ferme des Greves as I knew it was an exhibit of the






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environmental effects )to use a modern expression) of war beforenuclear weapons were invented. I wish I could have seen the place inpeacetime.

Aw week or so after we moved in the owner of the farm returned withhis wife and two small children. All were loaded on a wagon withbedding and other household effects they had taken with them whenthey fled in July. They had spent the intervening time at Coulommiers,he said, about 30 kilometers away. The people there had beenhospitable but they were g;ad to get home. The farmer's wife got therejust in time to have her third baby. The delivery was handled by oursquadron medic, Captain Solomon Boykin. He had been a small-townpractitioner in Mississippi. He probably felt more at home with obstetriccases than with gunshot wounds.






^[[29]] ^[[29]] May 1, 1974.

Dear Alice:

Among my papers from WW1 are citations for alleged gallantry in actionon two occasions in August of 1918. One is a diploma-like documentsuitable for framing. It is dated March 27, 1919, and bears the signature(or a facsimile thereof) of John J. Pershing. It attributes to me"distinguished and exceptional gallantry in action during the Oise-Aisneoffensive, August 18, 1918". It does not describe what happened, and tothis day I simply do not know. By the time I received the citation I couldno longer recall what I had been doing on the date referred to.

The other citation must have reached me still later, for it is dated June 1,1919. It is in the form of a pamphlet, listing perhaps 200 men as"entitled to wear the Silver Star on the Victory Medal ribbon asprescribed by Paragraph 1, G. O. 75....". The explanatory note after myname reads "for gallantry in action between the Vesle and the Aisne,France, August 8 1918, while protecting a photographic mission". Thatis a bit more explicit, but not much. I do recall flying on such a missionwith Littauer, only a few days after we had moved to the Ferme desGreves. That may have been on the 8th.

All the action in which our squadron was involved that month took placeover the strip of territory between two rivers, the Vesle and the Aisne.The two, both running westward, gradually converge to join at Soissons,which lay to the west of us. Most of my flights that month were single-plane missions. I did routine reconnaissance, and at least twice Iadjusted artillery fire for the corps's 155 mm. long guns. But I also tookmy turns at flying protection for photographic missions. Through thatwhole month I had the good luck not to encounter any German whoreally closed in on me.

The camera man on that mission of (maybe) August 8 must have beeneither Jordan or Wheeler, but I do not remember which. The order forthe pictures was rather urgent, but the weather made our job verydifficult. It was a day of broken clouds. You could get useful picturesonly in sunlight. On a clear day the camera man would have finished hisjob in one straight, continuous run over his target area. at an altitude of3000 or 4000 meters. On that day he had to photograph the areapiecemeal, following patches of sunlight as the clouds moved.Moreover we had to stay below those clouds to keep oriented. We flewat only 1200 meters, which meant that each picture covered less than






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a fourth of the normal area. That in turn meant that we had to get fourtimes as many pictures as usual. The camera man had to carry extramagazines of plates, and change them in flight. Altogether theoperation must have taken us nearly an hour. On a clear day it wouldhave been less than 15 minutes.

We had five Salmsons flying in a tight V formation. The camera was atthe apex, with Littauer and me in the left rear position. We passedrepeatedly over the emplacements of German sausage balloons.^[[They were grounded]], perhaps because of the clouds, though in anycase they would have been hauled down in a hurry when we came intosight. Each time we passed over one, however, we had a spectularfireworks display of what we called "flaming onions". Those were bigcombination tracer-and-incendiary bullets, fired from heavy-calibermachine guns that guarded the balloon emplacements. They did notbother us greatly, for at 1200 meters we were ^[[at]] the limit of theirrange.. Yet it always made me uneasy to see those things come siftingup past the wings. I knew they were interspaced with invisible bullets.

More alarming was a patrol of German fokkers that hovered above theclouds during the entire period. They never seriously attacked, thoughthey evidently were trying to scare us away. Twice, when we came intotheir view through a hole in the clouds, they dived as if to attack. Eachtime their leader came near enough to fire a few shots at long range,then he turned away. I did not return his fire, for an observer in such asituation could not afford to waste his ammunition at long range. It wasbetter to reserve it for close quarters, and not have to changemagazines on his machine guns at a critical time.

If that German chasse pilot had closed in, he had it in his power toinsure that one of us would go down. He had only to keep coming untilhe was so close that he could ^[[not]] miss. That would have entailed acertain risk for him, but the advantage was all on his side. During hisdive he sat behind his engine, completely shielded except for his head.The engine had a conical metal cover that deflected bullets. Virtually myonly hope of downing him was to hit his head or his propeller.Meanwhile his target, the observer in the two-seater, stood as if posingfor a full-length portrait. He was in full view from the waist up. From thewaist down he was hidden only by canvas stretched over a






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light wooden frame. The German chasse pilot knew this. But he alsoknew that if he dived on me he would draw fire from the other planes ofour formation. I suppose that was what saved us from a serious attack.But the enemy did sometimes close in, as in two instances mentioned inmy last letter. I well remember the relief Littauer and I felt that day whenthe camera crew finally finished its job and turned toward home. Thatcitation must have been given to me as a consolation for being scared.

Jordan was the only one of our observers who always flew with thesame pilot. That was because they specialized in photography, andJordan could trust Bernheimer to handle the plane correctly during arun. The rest of us went with whatever pilots the office assigned to us.On special occasions we might be allowed to choose a pilot, as I haddone on July 18th. We had no better pilot than Littauer, but when I flewwith Littauer it was because he as squadron commander so ordered.Early in August I did make a working agreement with another pilot,Morden Murphy. I was to choose him whenever I had the option. Theoption came on that mission of September 14th when I was shot down,but as we were about to take off Littauer called Murphy out of the planeand took his place.

I like Murphy. He was another New York Irishman, but not of the type Ihad earlier come to detest. He was a Princeton graduate, and I believean Episcopalian. He reentered the service in WW2 and became acolonel in the Intelligence division of the Air Service. When I moved toNew York in 1947 he had become a vice-president of the Bankers Trust.He used to meet with Littauer and me at our annual luncheons, but afterthe NF moved uptown in 1957 I sort of lost touch with him. He retiredearlier than I did. I have not heard from him since 1967.

Some time during the latter half of that August I was sent as air serviceliaison officer to the headquarters of the Third Corps, giving me a weekof ground duty. On the way thither, in the side car of a motorcycle, Irecall passing by the roadside a large wooden cross bearing the nameof Quentin Roosevelt. The Germans had erected it after shooting himdown. The corps headquarters was at a village called Coulonges, fouror five miles south of the Vesle. A good many incidents of that weekstick in my memory, too many to write down. The most vivid memory isof the food, which was the worst I encountered






^[[30]] ^[[30]] May 12, 1974.

Dear Alice:

In an earlier letter I mentioned the [[underline]] carnet de vols[[/underline]]^[[,]] or flight record that the French 40th squadron gave mewhen I left it. The entries are all written by hand. The writer must havebeen the little cross-eyed squadron clerk whose uniform was always toobig for him. (I have read somewhere that the French army issued pantsin only two sizes). If I ever knew his name I have forgotten it. He spentmost of time at a desk in the office, but he was always on the field,notebook in hand, to record each takeoff and landing. Thanks to him Ican even now give you the date and duration of every flight I made fromthe Ferme d'Alger; the pilot's name and the purpose of the mission.Most of those flights have faded completely from my memory. I haveonly his written entries to remind me that they ever took place.

American squadrons did not take that much trouble with theirbookkeeping. I have no record of my flights with the 88th, except thethree for which I was cited. Most of them likewise have dropped out ofmemory and are sunk without trace. I have written only about a few thatI happened to remember. Oddly, I remember well the faces andpersonalities of pilots in both squadrons with whom I cannot rememberflying although I must have done so. Around the end of August wemoved about 15 miles northeastward, to a battered little village namedGoussaincourt. It had an airfield which the Germans had been using inJuly. The only flight I remember making from Goussaincourt was theexasperating one I had with Fletcher McCordic. There must have beenmore. It was at Goussaincourt also that we gave our little seminar to adelegation of infantrymen from the 77th division. We hoped they wouldlearn to recognize our planes as friendly, to understand our signals andto refrain from shooting at us.

In my file is an order from Littauer dated September 9, 1918. It directsfour of us to go to Neuilly-sur-Seine, "on business connected with theaviation service". The other three were Boykin, our squadron medic;Vrooman, the enginner officer, and Victor Heilbrunn, a pilot. MaybeBoykin and Vrooman had legitimate business at Neuilly, The Americanshad depots there. But Heilbrunn and I never got there. As far as wewere concerned the order was another disguised three-day leave. I hadnot asked for it, but I enjoyed it. To get to Neuilly you went by way ofParis. I have documentary evidence of some of my activities there.One item is the stub of a ticket to the Opera Comique for the






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evening of September 10th. It was the first performance of Carmen Ihad ever seen. Another item dated the same day is a receipted bill fromMacDougal & Co., tailors on the Rue Auber for a uniform to be deliveredlater. That turned out to be a fortunate investment, for when I waswounded four days later my clothes were cut off me. My baggagestayed with the squadron until some time in 1919. At the base hospitalat Beaune I had no clothes except the pajamas and robe issued topatients. One day in October a Red Cross man asked if there were anyerrands he could do for me in Paris. He brought out my uniform fromMacDougal, and it came in handy when I got back to the States. I didnot see Paris again until 1938. (Moths eventually ate up the uniformwhile it was stored in a basement at the University of Chicago.)

When Heilbrunn and I reported back to the 88th, on the morning ofSeptember 12, we found it in the process of moving. Jordan hadpacked my trunk and bedding-roll, and they had already gone on atruck. We were going back to the St. Mihiel salient which we had lefttwo months before. This time, however, our destination was Souilly,justoutside Verdun on the western face of the salient. The Americans hadthat morning begun their first big independent offensive of the war, anattempt to wipe out the salient. As before, I travelled with a party ofobservers in an auto. We stopped for lunch at Bar-le-Duc, It was only alittle more than 20 miles from there to Souilly, over the road the Frenchhad used to supply Verdun during its siege in 1916. Ever since thenthat stretch of road has been called the Voie Sacrée. Each kilometermarker on it was topped by the blue helmet of a dead Frenchman.

Souilly had a big airfield. When we got there we found two other, newersquadrons already established. They were the 99th and 104th. Bothhad been assigned to the Third Corps, so that now for the first time ithad a full-strength observation group of three squadrons. Littauer'snose, to use a homely figure of speech, was put out of joint because hewas outranked. He was a mere reserve captain, while the commanderof the 99th was a regular army lieutenant-colonel named Christie. Thatautomatically made Christie the group commander. He had alreadydesignated his own outfit as the corps squadron, leaving the 88th and104th to work with the two divisions in the line. We were to serve the26th, a New England National Guard unit which was one of our best.






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Next day, the 13th^[[,]] I flew on reconnaissance over the sector of the16th just to become acquainted with the terrain. A high ridge, steep onboth sides, but more so on its western face, runs along the eastern sideof the Meuse all the way from St. Mihiel up to Verdun. When our attackbegan the Americans held the crest of that ridge for most of thedistance, the German line running along its eastern slope. On the firstday of the attack the Germans had been pushed off the ridge, and onthe 13th fighting was going on in the foothills and flat lands below. Wesaw no Germans in the air that day, and the men from the othersquadrons told us that hardly any had been seen the day before. Onthe evening of the 13th Littauer took Howard Douglas and me with himto visit General Edwards, commander of the 26th division. Hisheadquarters was in an interesting location, a big artificial cave on thewest slope of the ridge, three or four miles south of Verdun. When wereturned to Souilly Littauer went to a conference with the other squadroncommanders. Before going to sleep we heard that a photographicmission was to be sent next day over Conflans, the German railhead forthe salient.

Next morning, the 14th, we got the details of the plan. The idea wassound enough. Photographs of Conflans ought to reveal somethingabout the enemy's intentions; whether he was evacuating the salient orbringing in reinforcements and supplies to bolster his resistance. Theplanning was bad, however, and as it turned [[insert]] ^[[out]] [[/insert]]the execution was worse. It was clearly an errand for corpsheadquarters, but Christie was unwilling to have his own squadron carryit out. Instead, he proposed to send six planes, two from eachsquadron. The camera plane and one other would be from the 99th.Murphy and I were to man one of the protecting planes, but we were toldonly where to fly in the formation, rearmost on the left . We had noopportunity to talk over the mission with the other participants. Our jobwas simply to stick with the leader wherever he chose to go. We weretold that an escort of American fighters would arrive over our field at1:00 P.M. and that we should at that time be in the air at 3000 meters.

We assembled at the hangar, preparing to take off. While Murphy'sengine was being warmed up an incoming plane of the 99th came downon the field and stopped near us. The pilot jumped out and shoutedsomething. An ambulance ran out to the plane, and they pulled a deadman from the rear cockpit. He was Raymond Hill, a red-haired






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observer whom I had met and liked at the school of air gunnery atCazaux in June. He had been on another photographic mission, withtwo of the 99th's planes protecting him. They had been attacked, theirformation had been broken up, and Bill had been shot through the heart.His protecting planes straggled in a little later. The Germans probablydid not know that they had made a kill.

Evidently we no longer had the air to ourselves over the salient. TheGermans no doubt had brought in some defenders overnight. But forthe mission to Conflans we had the promise of an escort of Americanfighters, to scare away any Germans who might threaten us. And wewere preparing to take six Salmsons. That number should be able toput up a fight in any case.

^[[Love,

Dad]]






^[[31]] May 23, 1974

^[[31]]

Dear Wanda and Ted:

Littauer had come to the hangar to watch us set out for Conflans. Whilewaiting he saw a plane land and stop near us bearing the buffalo-bullinsignis of the 99th. After the observer's body had been removed from itLittauer went out and talked briefly with the pilot. By that time Murphyand I had boarded his plane and started to taxi out on the field. Littauerstopped us. He said "You climb out, Murph. I'll pilot this ship". Murphyhad no choice but to obey. I don't know whether he felt aggrieved not.Littauer took over, and one after another our six Salmsons left theground. We climbed in circles over the field, expecting to find ourchasse escort overhead when we reached 3000 meters.

At 1 p.m., the appointed time of rendezvous, no chasse was in sight.Then an ugly thing happened. One by one three of our planes droppedaway and returned to the field. We had been stricken by an outbreak ofalleged engone trouble. Undoubtedly airplane engines, in flight, didsometimes begin misbehaving. But engine trouble also could befeigned. It excused the pilot from missions of which he was afraid, andno one could overrule his diagnosis. In this instance the odds weresomething like a billion to one that three of our six engines would notreally have gone haywire within a few minutes of each other.

To go back and check all those engines would have taken more timethan we had to spare. QW had three planes left, one from eachsquadron of our group.

We three circled the field, waiting for our fighter escort, until we hadburned as much gasoline as we dared. The chasse escort neverappeared, and the expedition as originally scheduled had dwindled froma dozen airplanes to three. Finally the camera man from the 99th, ourleader, gestured to us and we moved out. As we left the field we beganclimbing again and finally levelled off at 5000 meters, 16000 feet. Theold Sopwiths we had once flown could not have reached that altitude. InWorld War 2 flyers were required to use oxygen at any altitude above12000 feet. We didn&t have any oxygen. I began to feel as if I had had3 Martinis.

Conflans is about 25 miles due easr from Verdun. All except the firstthree or four miles were in German held territory. Fifteen

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miles beyond Conflans is Metz, on the Moselle river. It was then aGerman city, in that part of Lorraine the Germans had seized from theFrench after their war of ^[[1870]] [[strikethrough]] 1760 [[/strikethrough]].Our leader did not head directly for Conflans, as Littauer and I hadexpected him to do. He made a wide detour to the south, and when wefinally reached Conflans it was by way of Mdtz. We went south to St.Mihiel, thence east to the Moselle river. We followed it northward(downstream) until we neared Metz. Our leader then veered to the left,and took the straight course from Metz to Conflans.

Until he made that turn Littauer and I thought he was lost Possibl^[[y]]he chose that long and seemingly more dangerous route, ^[[because]]he would ^[[Thereby]] approach Conflans from the German side andtherefore be headed fo^[[r]] home when he began to photograph therailhead there. Since I could not communicate with the camera man Ihad no way of knowing what was in his mind. But it was our duty to staywith him for protection, whether he was lost or not. The confusion couldhave been avoided if a ten-minute briefing had been given to our wholeparty before ^[[taking off.]] None was given. I had never met the manfrom the 99th who was leading us, and never found out his name.

The first intimation of trouble came when we had almost reached ourobjective. The anti-aircraft fire suddenly stopped. Until then shells hadbeen cracking around us, as usual, ever since wd crossed into Germanterritory. I mentioned in an earlier letter that anti-aircraft shells alwaysgave off black smoke if they were German, white if they came from gunsof our side. That convention enabled the AA gunners of each side toguide chasse planes to their prey. The smoke was visible from agreater distance than a plane was. Over hostile territory, if the AAsstopped shooting at you, it generally meant that their own chasse wasapproaching. So it turned out.

In a letter to Albert Williams, written from a hospital bed a few days later,I described the ensuing fight. The letter was published in a Nashvillenewspaper, and I still have a clipping. Littauer was keeping us on theleft rear of our leader, and slightly higher. Six German planes came atus from above and behind. They concentrated their attack on me. Fiveof them took turns diving at me, each firing continuously until he had toturn aside. His getaway was covered by the next attacker starting hisdive. The first one did no apparent damage. The second hit me in theleft foot, and it gave way under me. When I regained my footing,standing on one






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leg, no one at the moment was shooting at me. I had time for a lookaround. A German, perhaps the first attacker, was trying to sneak intothe blind zone behind and just below us. Through the speaking tube Ishouted to Littauer "Bank right!" and he did. It gave me a good shot, butI never knew whether I hit the German or not. Another came at me fromabove. He hit me in the right elbow, and the arm became useless.When he had left two more dived on us. While they were coming mytwo magazines became empty. I had spare magazines, but could notchange them with one hand. So toward the end I could only point theempty guns.

Then the Germans broke off the fight and left us. I have neverunderstood why, unless they had run out of ammunition. They had notattacked the other protecting plane nor our leader. Some time towardthe end of the fight we were enveloped in a cloud of steam. TheSalmson had a water-cooled motor, and our radiator had sufferedpuncture. When I told Littauer that the Germans were leaving he waspleased, but said that iur ebgine was overheating and that he wouldhave to shut it off. And we were a long way inside German territory.

From 16,000 feet, however, you can glide a long way.

We must have passed over Conflans during the flight. Littauer askedme which direction led to the nearest American lines, I advised headingwest and a little south, which would bring us to the sector of our division,the 26th. We headed that way, just gliding, and leaving our other twoplanes.

I felt weak, and I remember lettong my head rest on the rim of thecockpit, taking off my helmet, and letting the breeze fan my face. Oncewe sighted a German two-seater which nosed toward [[insert]] ^[[us.]][[/insert]] German and allied observation planes usually followed a live-and-let-live policy, figuring that duty did not require them to pick fightswith [[insert]] ^[[each]] [[/insert]] other. When I stood up and shifted myempty guns in the direction of the German he went on about hisbusiness. I remember also passing over the emplacement of a Germansausage balloon. The balloon was hauled ^[[down]] frantically as weapproached.

We had not much altitude left when Littauer saw ahead of us that long,high ridge that runs along the east bank of the Meuse between St. Mihieland Verdun. He coulf not clear that ridge, and there was no landing fieldon the near side of it. He had to make a forced landing.






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Theodore E. Boyd World War I Collection - Memoirs and ... · Theodore E. Boyd World War I Collection - Memoirs and Correspondence Sent to Family, numbered 1-31 Extracted on Apr-13-2020

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