a letter from France

As promised some time ago, I've begun transcribing a small cache of letters I've found from my grandfather, who was serving in the AEF in France during 1917 and 1918, to his sister Dorothea C. Paradise, who was living in England during the war.

There are ten letters: four from 1917, six from 1918, and one written after his return to the United States in 1919. I am dismayed to say that someone has disposed of most of the covers; I have only four, and it is guesswork assigning which goes to which letter. I should, I suppose, have begun with the first in chronological order, but this one was the first that I opened when I found the package, and it starts during an artillery bombardment, just after his position has been bombed by German aircraft, so it seemed the exciting in medias res to start off with.

I've added a few comments after the letter.

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[superscript at 90* in the upper corner, presumably as a postscript] 

It is splendid about your new gloves! Bravo!!

Hqrs. 56th Inf. Brig.

A.P.O. 744

October 23, 1918

My dearest Dolly

A Boche has just been overhead dropping bombs on us, so I begin to understand your feelings when they did it to you in London. They are rather dirty beasts, aren't they, although when they brought a prisoner in the other night I didn't feel much but pity for him. He was an Alsatian, the son of a French soldier, with three sisters & a girl in Paris. He was helpless and pathetic & it made me more disgusted than ever with the system that dragged him into this heartless, senseless business. It has seemed more unreal & more amazing since I have been here than it ever did before, & at this moment, when the roar of an artillery operation is going on, I can't realize [?] that it is grown men trying to smash other grown men in the lovely golden woods I looked at today. It is too bad that the spirit has to be born again in just this way. If all this labor had been put into something permanent & constructive, what a wonderful place the world would be to live in?

Just at that moment, they came in with a nice letter from you enclosing a very interesting one from Bob. He writes splendid letters, doesn't he? Well, there are two Paradises now in the arena & one just outside it. I wish he could get an assignment to a regiment, because you really do feel better in this part of the world even though it is very much dirtier & rather more dangerous. I shall send you back Bob's letter, because I have no way of keeping it in this land where you travel with a tooth-brush, & quite soon lose that. It seems incredible that people have houses and can have more than three pairs of shoes & two suits at one time if they want to! I left practically everything I own at La Brosse, which is an exceedingly nice place. Did I tell you that I saw my nice Countess in Paris for a few minutes & had a sad parting with her? We are really very good friends, & I like her a lot. She paid me the great compliment of saying that I was "délicat" & gave me an awfully nice cigarette holder. It was great luck from a selfish point of view, to fall in with the de la Chapelles, because we really saw something of France, & have an open house here whenever we want it. I don't suppose I can ask for leave for some time, now, because they will probably put this division into a more active sector before long.

I am too sleepy to know what I want to say & I think that I shall go to bed, & go on tomorrow. We shall probably get retaliation for this artillery fire pretty soon & I had better get my sleep now. Good night, my dear.

The next morning

They bombed us & shelled us & shot machinegun bullets at us & brought in German prisoners all night, but none of it was near enough to make us get up and hunt cover. But it was rather irritating because it wasn't very easy to sleep with our heads ready to drop at any moment. The French on the left picked one of them up with a searchlight & shot shrapnel at him, & it was a very pretty sight.

I shall appreciate the home in America after all this, although I must say the I rather enjoy this stuff. But I am nothing but a civilian in khakhi [sic] -- and I shan't be sorry to be in mufti again. It was a great thing to be born just when I was. Five years later & I should have left lost the greatest experience of generations, & the greatest opportunity. Life here is simple & uninvolved with nothing but Germans & things to worry about, nevertheless, and has distinct advantages.

I had a letter from Wayland in the same mail that brought your. He has been over here for some time -- having flown across the Channel in an aeroplane with some other people. Lately he has been in a hospital in Tours with the Spanish flu, which is one reason you haven't seen him. He liked you all very much, indeed.

Au revoir, donc, ma chérie. J'étais enchanté d'avais recu ta lettre, comme toujours, parceque elle me faisait comprendre un peu de la vie que j'aime si passionement. Toutes mes remerciements.

Mille tendresses,

Burton

OK

N.B. Paradise

2nd Lt., Inf., A.D.C.

[Translation of last paragraph: Goodbye, then, my dear. I was delighted to have received your letter, as always, because it made me understand a little of the life that I love so passionately. All my thanks.

A thousand tendernesses, ]

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I have to thank my grandfather, Burton (who, to my sorrow, died in 1942, before I ever had a chance to know him) for his excellent handwriting. It's generally very clear, and the few words that are sometimes tricky I can usually deduce from context.

Factoids: I'm hoping to learn more about the de la Chapelles, of whom I assume his comtesse is one. I'm hoping they are related to le Comte Jean Joseph Xavier Alfred de la Chapelle, who was a bit of a daring adventurer in the 19th century: California Gold Rush man, travelled to Australia, then to Morocco during the French conquest, then participated in and wrote a history of the war of 1870. I don't know whether La Brosse is their home; I'm assuming it is, but both la brosse (the brush) and la chapelle (the chapel) are such common words that it will take much more than Google work to find more information. (Though Google did help me find this entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: La Chapelle, Victor Octave Xavier Alfred de Morton de, Count de La Chapelle in the French nobility (1863–1931), lawyer and wildfowler, possibly this friend of Burton's.)

I'm pretty sure that the comtesse is the same person who, according to a family story, entertained Burton and his brother Bob (a decorated flyer) at a hunting lodge after to war and, when they sighted a handsome stag as they were out shooting one day said, "Oh, but that is Teodor! We NEVER shoot Teodor!"

I'm not sure who Wayland was, other than to presume he's a family friend (it's not a family name that I recognize).

I'm interested to see if NBP's attitude towards the war remains the same. I came across some stuff he wrote while he was in training back in the States, and it's pretty Boys Own Paper bumpf about freedom and humanity and fighting the beastly Hun. I don't know if this rather starry-eyed view of the war survived whatever front line experiences he had. 

Edited to add: I'm pretty sure, by the way, that the last text block, which is written in the bottom left corner of the last page, is the "passed by censor" mark. Which suggests that he was taking advantage of his position as an aide de camp to the division commander to "censor" his own letters. Tricky bugger. :-)

Primary Source Teaser and book report: Foch

I was going through boxes and boxes of old family photos, most of them from 1980-2010, I came across one box that had old, old photos, clearly from circa 1900-1950. Among the other things in the box, an amazing find: a collection of about half a dozen letters from my grandfather in the AEF to his sister back in the US! Other materials include some poems he wrote (I can hear Richard Clarke scoffing now :-) and a rather starry-eyed essay about the dedication of American fighting men to defeating Imperial Germany. I'll be transcribing all of these and sharing them here.

I should also add that, in the long time since my last posts, I finished reading Michael Neiberg's brief biography of Ferdinand Foch (Foch: Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War, Brassey's, 2003). It's a workmanlike piece, only about 125 pages. It describes his early training and professional development, laying out some of the factors that would underpin both his success and his challenges during the war. Most of the book is devoted to his war service. Neiberg depicts him as a pragmatist, a Catholic but not a political Catholic, and a man willing to recognize and learn from his mistakes while sticking to his principles. His contention is that Foch never lost faith in the pre-war doctrine of the offensive, but sought to refine and reinterpret (almost reinvent) that belief in the face of the army's wartime experiences. Instead of following the early pattern of an unsophisticated, unrelenting, infantry-based tactical offensive, Foch became a supporter of complex, combined-arms operations that used intelligence preparation of the battlefield, planned and sophisticated artillery fires, and evolutionary tactics to create, develop, and maintain the operational offensive in pursuit of clearly defined ad realistic strategic goals.

Neiberg does go into some detail concerning the difficulties Foch and other officers found in coalition warfare, and he shows the growing tension between Foch and Clemenceau that led, as the war was ending and in the immediate aftermath, to outright conflict between many of the French Army's senior officers on one side and their civilian leaders on the other. Foch did not directly challenge the civilian government, though he came close to doing so, and he did not take the advice of many of his supporters and leave the Army for politics, but he continued to be frank, outspoken, and even combative over France's future safety until his death in 1929 at the age of 78.

The book is a quick read; it is clear, well written, and informative. I don't know the state of historiography on the marshal's life, but I would think on the surface this appears to be a solid, basic introduction to the professional life of one of France's most famous military officers and the man who, as much or more than any other, guided the French Army to victory in the Great War.

new books!

A friend introduced me to the excellent Daedalus Books in Columbia, Maryland, who deal primarily in remaindered books and have an excellent military history section.

While perusing their web catalogue, I came across two titles I simply *had* to have that are very apt to mention here. I ordered them immediately, and they arrived today, along with a few other choice items.

One was Gentleman Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in the Great War, August 1914-September 1918. Another was Letters from Verdun: Frontline Experiences of an American Volunteer in World War I France. My grandfather and great uncle, as previously mentioned, were in the American Ambulance Field Service before America entered the war (Great Uncle Bob being awarded the Croix de Guerre, I think for service with the French 32e Division during the French Second Offensive at Verdun in August 1917). So I'm very excited to find something about the American volunteer services.

I also picked up a(n unexpectedly huge) book of military maps and Come On Highlanders! Glasgow Territorials in the Great War because, well, a book about the GW, a book about the Highland Light Infantry, a book about my soon-to-be adopted home, and all for less than $7? Who could resist?

All three of these Great War titles will get added to the (voluminous) reading list and I'll try to report on them in due course.

Meanwhile my painting project still looms, and my film festival. :-)

Opening Post

In 2010, Richard Clarke of Too Fat Lardies published Through the Mud and the Blood, a set of wargame rules designed to depict tactical-level combat on the Western Front of the Great War. I had been corresponding with him for about two years at that point, discussing history and gaming and other topics. Reading my newfound friend's powerful and heartfelt advocacy of the "anti-donkey" school of Western Front history, and the opportunity to acquire a small library of volumes on the Great War sparked an interest in me in a field of military history that I had never found terribly interesting before.

Mud and Blood, as it has become known, became popular quickly, and the rules have been extended and adapted to many different theatres and conflicts. Other concerns and projects diverted me, and my correspondence with Rich fell somewhat into abeyance. But I continued to add slowly to my World War One library, just as he continued to publish more work on the Great War.

Last year I helped my older sister clear out some old tat of my parents'. Among the rubbish, we found a few small treasures, including a Verdun medal that had apparently been awarded to my grandfather during his service in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France. It now lives in a display case with the flag from his funeral (many years after the war) and a poppy from the British Legion, kindly supplied by the British Embassy. Near it sit a French novel that bears his name inside the cover, along with the inscription "Hqtrs. 151st Inf. Brig.", and an original copy (separately acquired) of the AEF manual Instruction in the Offensive Action of Large Units in Battle (thankfully, clearly marked as declassified in June of 1990!)

I never knew my grandfather, but by all accounts he was a gentle, quiet, and introspective literary man (after the war, he taught Elizabethan literature at Yale) who struggled with some unknown demons. I can only wonder if these had anything to do with his service in France. He and his brother Robert (who became a hugely brave and decorated flier) served as volunteers with a Red Cross ambulance unit attached to the French Army before America joined the war. I've been able to find almost nothing about his service with the US Army, such as where he was stationed or what he was involved in (the 56th Brigade, which he was transferred to after the 151st, was part of the 28th Division and fought in the Argonne, which is probably where the medal comes from). I do wonder, if shell shock had been as well recognised and addressed in their day as post-traumatic stress disorder is in ours, whether my grandfather might have lived a longer and happier life after the war.

So, while still not as deep an object of fascination for me (yet), as the American Revolution, the Great War has come to have a deeper and deeper interest for me as I read and learn more about it and as I feel more strongly the family connection. Hence this blog, which I hope will include information about both my historical research, my family research, and my Great War gaming.