Keokuk High School - Comment Yearbook (Keokuk, IA)

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sr g 10 THE COMMENT low down. perhaps, also you had had a friend killed, as for instance, in the Argonne, when my old pal, fraternity brother, Lieutenant Steve Durrett, had been killed just back of my battery, you didn't much care whether you ever got back or not. Now, however, I feel that I have a number of good reasons for Wanting to see the old town again. It has been a great experience, one that I would not be overly keen to go through again, but at the same time glad that I have had it. I hate to see the battery break up, also. I have had a fine bunch of boys. We won the brigade contest for accuracy and speed, were the first battery in the brigade ordered to position on the front, and offi- cially fired the brigade's first shot in the war, as a reward for winning this contest. In the Argonne the battery was called on to turn over thirty horses to be divided among the other batteries of the regiment, which spoke well for the way our horses were taken care of, and, as a curious coincidence, fired the last shot of the regiment in the war on November 9, 1918, at Beaumont, just south of Sedan. I have seen my boys killed and torn up, and I have come to think the world of every bloomin' one of them. There is nothing like the battlefield, as Colonel Williams said the other d-ay, to weld men together. You come to know a man then. Walter was with me here for a week, and last Sunday we went down to a little town on the Spanish border and spent the day sight- seeing in the Pyrannees Nlountains. He has gone on to Nice to finish up his lea-ve. He told me to tell them back home that he was healthy, wealthy and wise, and hoped to be home about August. I told him he looked the first, I knew damned well he wasn't the second, as he had just touched me for a hundred francs, and hoped he would some day be the third. The commandant of U. S. forces in Toulouse, Major John D. Harrison, is a good friend of mine. He has just received his majority, and was formerly with the 80th division. At the beginning of the No- vember drive our outfit supported the 80th, Whose artillery was at Verdun. We co-operated with them so well and results accomplished were so pleasing that the commanding general of the 80th made re- quest that the 82nd artillery also wear the 80th division's insignia. He also cited the outfit in an order which our brigadier had distributed down to every single man in the brigade. However, the good old 32nd is home to us. Our infantry were a good bunch and they know the game over here pretty well. Entering the battle of the Argonne on October 5 be- low Exermont with 3,000 effectivesi per regiment, they fought their

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THE COMMENT 9 TOULOUSE UNIVERSITY, April 10, 1919. MY DEAR PARENTS! ' I am- writing to tell you that my request to G. I-I. Q. to come home with my regiment and division has been approved and We should sail some time about the 20th of the month. When I came down here a month ago I thought I would be content to stay in France a few months longer in order to learn French, but the sailing of the 82nd for home caused me to suffer a change of heart very quickly, and with my letter approved, I :am leaving here to rejoin my regiment in a few days, they now being located at Bordeaux. , VVell, I am coming home without medals of any kind or anything except my service chevron, and some are wearing those, who never ate a tin willy or smelled gas, or felt a shell-burst. I have had all the latter sensations, and in two weeks more I would be entitled to my second gold chevron, although I suppose we will leave before that is authorized. When I left America I was the ranking battery com- mander in the regiment, and I believe we certainly had at least aver- age battery commanders. Everyone was a graduate of the three- months School of Fire at Fort Sill, and everyone has gone straight through with the regiment from start to finish. Although promotions have been handed out rather lavishly to oflicers in the states, and of course in the infantry where casualties were very frequent, not a single one of us has been promoted, although we have been in the service now, on May 10, for two years. Major General Rhodes, in writing to Colonel Williams, our regimental commander, also stated that the Chief of French Artillery, in speaking to General Pershing, had stated that our brigade, the 157th Artillery Brigade, was the finest American artillery brigade he had seen on the front. However, we can take our pleasure in the knowledge that we have served well. From a position of service at Chateau Thierry on until the ninth of November, we Were always on the front, or mov- ing from one sector to another. In the Argonne, we had thirty-four days of continuous fighting without an hour of reliefg longer than any other artillery outfit I have heard of. And We had a colonel who be- lieved in always keeping up to the front and that infantry should be supported in something beside name only. For this reason we were sometimes forced to move during the day, carriage at a time, at one- half hour intervals, over roads on which the Boche had direct obser- vation. There were a good many times when I thought I had seen old Keokuk for the last time, and to tell the whole truth, sometimes on the front when you were wet, cold, muddy, fagged out and mentally

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THE COMMENT 11 way to Champigneully and Lardres, St. George. On November 1, having attacked again and again, been reduced to less than 500 men per regiment, with three-fourths of their officers killed and wounded, and havingcaptured the famous Hill 223 and a number of towns, they were leap-frogged by the 80th. One of the towns, Comay, which the 82nd division men will always remember as , Bloody Comay, the Doughs took three times, and three times were driven out by the furious attacks by Prussian troopsg but the fourth time they took it they held it, and drove the Boche back from the woods encircling it. Here four captains in one regiment were killed in one morning and here my friend, Lieutenant Carl Goldsmith, of Atlanta, was killed by a bullet through the head. On crossing the Decauville railroad near there, one of our officers came across one of our men and a Boche, dead, cheek to cheek, each with his bayonet driven through the body of his opponent. The position we occupied on the night of October 5, I will never forget. The ground for half a mile was absolutely covered with dead Americans and Boche. We stumbled over them in the dark, drove over them, and worked with every ounce of strength to get in before daylight, as our infantry attacked at daybreak. Shells were filling the woods full of sneezing gas, which we paid no attention tog and, worst of all, the mud was nearly knee deep. I sometimes had sixteen horses on a carriage and about 3 a. m. our horses were so fagged out that they quit and we had to get the rest of the way by man power. We would no sooner get a carriage out of one hole than one would go into another, and some of the shell holes there were about eight feet deepg so you can imagine the job. That night I Worked like a mad man. l was down under a carriage in a hole lifting one minute, driving a team another, and making a reconnoisance another. At 4:30 I laid down in the mud for twenty minutes, turned my collar up around my neck and just relapsed for the twenty minutes. I had to, as I was so weak I felt like throwing up. At the hrst break of day we located ourselves, laid our guns, I figured my barrage, and at 6 a. m. opened up. It was a tough night, but only typical of a good many worse ones I imagine a lot of others went through 'during this show. You know for the next twenty years I imagine this scrap will be fought over around some club, cigar store, or wherever men congre- gate. It's easier to understand some of the ubeaucoup parleying we used to see some of the old G. A. R. going through, at any rate. If I bore you with this kind of stuff again, shut me off quickly. What we would all really like to do most is to forget ,it altogether.