With Our Boys Overseas

I spent twelve months in crossing Flanders Field and France, I saw the devastation created by the Hun, I saw our men as they marched through England and over the fields of France and Belgium. The Hun had trained his men for the world conflict he had prepared for. The men of ours were of many nations flowing through their veins. The Hun blood was the same that had come down for hundreds of years, unchanged in its ways and brutal treatment. I followed the victorious army over the fields of Chateau Thierry; I was in dugouts that were occupied by the Hun and found there the intimate garments of women. They had not been satisfied with the leveling of homes and making bare the earth of peace -- not with the blood of Huns coursing in their veins; and they knew nothing of virtue, nor womanhood; nor the graces of civilization that the other nations were battling for.

Too much cannot be said of the American soldier of many bloods, they had came to the front ready to do or die for the saving of the world. It was the flower of American manhood, and not just the ordinary class of men who went. It was the man of education, the aristocrat if you please, the minister of the gospel of every creed, and men of all walks of life who had taken arms for the safety of the world.

I believed and still believe, that we got in at a late hour. I do not know that we would have been in it at all had not it been for that great man whom the world was called upon to mourn some months ago, whose vision outreached that of all other Americans, and whose sterling Americanism awakened the country to a realization of the impending fate should the Hun win his battles.

Unless you were in France you could not realize the extent of human suffering can throw a nation in grief.

One day a woman of about sixty years or more came to the little French town in which my company was billeted. She was on her way she knew not where. As she entered the village over muddy and rocky roads, every American soldier stopped and gazed at her. She was old and wrinkled, ragged and dirty, her feet were bare and bleeding, and as she trudged on she mumbled while poking her stick at loose stones and swinging a dirty cloth bag in which was contained all her earthly belongings. I have traveled all of America; in Mexico, and all of Europe, but I have never beheld a sight which so gript my heart and weighed down my soul as the plight of this wretched human being.

She stopped at the little village store for a rest and a charity drink of the "vin rouge" the national drink, the soldiers gathered about her in wonderment and pity and several of us who managed to speak a little French engaged her in conversation.

You may have seen miserable homes in America, you may have heard pitiful tales of domestic misfortune, you may have wiped your eyes at touching scenes on the stage, but never could you in the wildest flight of imagination conceive of a scene like this.

Before the war this woman, whose features still showed traces of refinement and beauty had lived near the border of France and Germany. She was the mother in a happy family consisting of a providing father, a daughter, and two sons. When the Huns came with their lust for blood, the candle of happiness in this home was blown out.

The Huns captured the town, seized the food, mistreated the old and the young, subjecting the daughter in this once happy home to the most vulgar and inhuman indecencies. The husband and father was shot when he endeavored in a feeble way to protect his daughter. The lustful "Hun" drove him mad, said the old woman, but he was not match for the Uhlan. With one hand on this throat the Uhlan held him in a corner while with his other fist he beat him into insensibility.

"Like a wild woman I shrieked and scratched and scratched with my finger nails at the eyes of the intruder" she yelled in French, while enacting the scene before us; "but I could do nothing with him. My daughter was in a half-conscious state, limp and helpless.

Next she said more soldiers entered the house and dragged the half dead man from the floor to the street, where with a score of other older citizens he was shot and killed.

The battle raged for days around the village, and with her daughter the old woman became a refugee, fleeing with what few things they could carry in a bag.

From one village to another they fled, until the girl, exhausted and suffering from her ill-treatment, died one night upon the roadside. The mother learned at the same time that one of her sons had been killed in action. Where the other one was she did not know.

Crazed with grief, this poor woman begun to wander like a lost soul, going here and there without object or aim. For four years she had walked over the hills of France that still remain untouched by shell and shrapnel. For four years she had waited for the hand of God to avenge her suffering, her story was at an end, and it is no reflection on the strength or bravery of the American boys there to say that there was not a dry eye among those who heard her story. The old woman had collapsed and sat sobbing on the platform leading to the little store.

Suddenly she arose, raised her hands towards the heavens and her broken voice rang out in the stirring strains of "THE MARSEILLAISE" she still believed in her country, that France would be victorious, and live and that somewhere there was a just God who would avenge the wrong done her. She knew and every soldier about her knew there could be but one outcome, and every soldier who heard her story was a better soldier and man for having heard her.

We took up a collection bought her shoes and clothes and wanted her to stay, but she would not. She said she must be on her way. There was still another boy waiting for her somewhere. She had to find him and she trudge on, poor, bleeding soul, over more rocky roads and muddy hills. This and more was the spirit of the women of FRANCE.

Chateau Thierry; long will I remember. I had been living in ease and comfort in London for about three weeks wondering if we had not been forgotten and thinking that we might be some of the many that fought some of the battles of PARIS and LONDON and other places of the S. O. S. However, we soon found that we had not been left in the rear, along came a P. D. Q. for FRANCE, and off we went Southampton, then Cherburg, then Bordeaux, here we received orders to join the 26th Yankee Division and three days later found us entering the lines. Oh, how I remember this, it was warm yet, I was cold and shaking, the Star shells, flares, etc., seemed to light the universe. Morning found us in the lines and up against the Kaisers most dependable divisions the 200 Jeagers and the 216 Reserve Division. The orders of attack came and we mixed at close range. Oh, how the yanks did yell and shout, we knew we had them. A few days of this and then the salient of Chateau Thierry was free. A dazed Prussian Officer taken prisoner said "How did you do it. We are storm troops." "Storm Hell," said a yank. "I come from Kansas where he have cyclones."

Until now Marshall Foch had thought the Americans were not yet trained. General Pershing had told him they would go and make good. They made good the word of their chief. Next we met Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria's troops in Flanders. Then to St. Mihiel. This salient was a huge bulge twenty miles in depth from the village of Combred to the north base at Hattonsville and making a half circle around St. Mihiel and the village of Ailly and had been held for four years by the enemy. This attack so surprised the enemy with it's rapidity and energy that they fled with only a small rear guard resistance.

For our boys I heard nothing but words of praise, one officer told me this "I believe that an Eastern Shoreman could go through Hell and never get scorched" they had nerves of steel and were never known to say "It can't be done."