A portrait of my grandpa Stephen Gohring
Yankee Division patch
The next four or so letters from my grandpa describe what must have been a weird time: a bit of limbo between the excitement of landing in a new country and then actually being able to hear the guns on the front lines, knowing that’s where he’s headed.
The first of the letters, dated Aug. 4, 1918, just three days after the long newsy letter from my last post, has a very different tone. The previous letter was all questions about what’s happening at home and observations about food available in town in France and the wooden shoes that people wear. But now, just a few days later, the reality of war is setting in. In the Aug. 4 letter my grandpa shares that he’s been transferred to Co. H. 102 Infantry, which is the Yankee Division. These guys, primarily from Connecticut, had been at the front in the trenches for a very long six months and joining my grandpa, wherever he was, was their first relief in all that time.
“I suppose you know that a man gets run over with fleas in the trenches for these men were all carrying them,” he writes. My grandpa and all the guys are sent down to a disinfection station and to take a bath in the Marne (I suppose that’s a hint about his location that the censor let slip!). Check out the comic strip that we found in the filing cabinet with all the letters and other written materials – it’s pretty funny (It didn’t quite fit on the scanner so my apologies that the edges are cut off a bit.).
"Boobs Abroad in 1919"
My grandpa asks his family to send some newspapers from home and he includes in his letter some pressed leaves for his favorite (at least I think so) sister Lene.
There weren’t any leaves in the envelope for that letter but we found a few others inserted into books and notebooks that my grandpa appears to have carried with him and brought home. I kinda love the song book with the Walt Whitman quote.
Three days later he writes again. “I am feeling fine now and hope I always will. Things are getting like the real thing now for I can hear the Big guns roar at night and during the day. But will be right in the noise most any time now for we move with this Co. just as soon as their rest expires.” And then immediately: “I wish you could send some chocolate to me for I seem to have a sweet tooth all of the time.”
He sends two more letters home, on Aug. 9 and then not again until the 18th, and he still hasn’t received any mail from home. He wonders if moving around so often has caused a delay in mail delivery. I’ve done just a tiny bit of reading about the mail service during the war and hope to write more about that in the future because it’s really amazing when you think about it, that the soldiers actually received mail and that they could send letters too.
He writes a bit about what things cost in the towns he's able to visit, translating the approximate worth of Francs to the dollar for the benefit of his family. Tucked into a small notebook we found a cache of paper French currency. The notes are tiny -- I've included a quarter in one of the images for scale (the notes are all approximately the same size). I've read that around the start of the war, people in France started hoarding coins for the value of the metals. So then local chambers of commerce started issuing bank notes that were backed by the central bank. It's interesting because the result is loads of different banknotes being issued by different chambers of commerce, all of them with different designs. Scroll through this site to see a ton of different notes. They're very pretty!
One update about my previous post before I close. I realized that the photo portraits of my grandpa couldn’t have been the ones he referenced having taken when he was at Camp Merritt because of a couple of clues I missed. One is that you can see the Yankee Division insignia on his sleeve, and when he was at Camp Merritt he wasn’t yet in the Yankee Division. I also noticed that the cardboard folder they are inserted in says “The Webb Studio, Euclid Ave.” I couldn’t find any evidence online of a photography studio called Webb but I know that Euclid Ave. is a main street in Cleveland. There are Euclid Ave.’s in other towns but now I’m thinking those photos must have been taken when he got home, after the war.
We have a few other photo portraits of my grandpa in his uniform including the one at the top of this post. It’s clearly a studio shot and my guess is it was taken at a different time than the others but I only say that because I think his hair looks different. He has a few postcards sent or given to him by friends, also in uniform, and I wonder if those and this one were taken when they were on leave in Paris.
Sign up for updates. Share this post on socials.