Italicized text added by me.
If I had gone looking for a letter to fit this day of solemn remembrance, I would have come up empty-handed. But this random selection from the box says everything. It was written June 19, 1919.
Armistice Day was November 11, 1918. The Treaty of Versailles has been drafted and is yet to be signed.
"Dearest Mother:
Last letter I had from you was of May 29th and Edison's letter was enclosed. Am
glad and proud that he won the scholarship. It will be a great help to him. He
is going to be awfully educated before he finishes.
I took an automobile trip Sunday. Went to Verdun and down through the old
battlefields. Was thru the country the 5th Div. fought over. Some of those
places certainly do look quiet and peaceful compared to what they were when we
were there. Now the country is covered with grass and flowers. The poppys are
wonderful. There's acre after acre of this torn up country that's covered with
poppys. It doesn't look nearly so desolate as in the wintertime when all of its
ugliness and bareness was exposed to view. Went up on top of Dead Man's Hill
(Hill 295). This was taken and retaken several times by the French and Germans
when the battles of Verdun were raging. The hill is of
lime rock and almost nothing grows on top of it but a few poppys. The poppy
petals I enclose grew on top of it. In the battles fought around Verdun, about 1,300,000 men were
killed during the entire war. The towns that were on the battlefield are
absolutely demolished. There's nothing left of them but a few jumbled piles of
stone that are crumbling to dust and being overgrown by grass, flowers, etc.
At
Consenvoye on the Meuse river saw the spot where a captain, who is now with
this Bri(gade) and was with me
Sunday, was wounded and captured by the Germans. He was recrossing the river
after having carried a telephone line across when discovered by the Germans. He
was hit by their machine gun bullets and also wounded by a hand grenade. In the
fight he killed three Germans and wounded several with an automatic pistol. The
Germans carried him into a dugout under an old church where he stayed for
several hours until the place was captured by the Americans. He was in the
hospital until a month or two after the Armistice. He was awarded the D.S.C. (Distinguished Service Cross) for his
conduct in this fight. Of course it was very interesting for him to go back over
the scene of this former exciting experience.
The city of
Verdun is very badly shot up, although it was never
taken by the Germans. It has a fort or citadel that is very strong. Has
underground passages that will hold 20,000 people. These passages are all
electric lighted, walls cemented up, and places for sleeping, cooking and eating.
In fact, the town could almost go ahead with its business underground. This
country is certainly a wreck. At
Mount Faucon we saw two old men working in the cemetery
trying to straighten up and repair their family vaults. In many of the
cemeteries the skeletons of the persons buried were blown out of the ground.
Not even the dead were left undisturbed."
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