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 letters span just a two week period, from Aug. 4 to Aug. 18, 1918.
The first of these letters, sent only three days after the long newsy one from my last post, marks a shift. 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. I'd been wondering about this because his initial letters had him attached to a different troop but I knew he was very proud of being part of the Yankee Division, collecting books and newspaper clippings, and staying connected via the foreign legion later. I'll write more about the legendary division in the future.
He joins the Yankee Division just as they're called away from the front for their first relief after spending a very long six months in the trenches. “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.). It may be the first time my grandpa mentions taking a bath but it's not the last which makes me think the opportunity may have been few and far between.
Aug. 9 letter, a few days later
"Boobs Abroad in 1919"
He mentions moving around a bunch, although he still hasn't yet reached the front and of course can't say exactly where he is (I do actually have loads of detail about his movements by day and location -- more on that to come.). A couple of times he mentions trains but otherwise it sounds like he's traveling predominantly by foot. "When I get back home and ever think of going to Chagrin Falls, Akron or any other town all I have to do is take a loaf of bread, a piece of bacon and a bed on my back and start off. No distance too far, we do it over here, rest in some town over night and start out in the morning again... I'd like to be back home just now and take a long hike with Leonard, Johnny, Bill and Dave and George and WOW if I could not hike them to a finish it would not be worth trying." The bravado!
I loved reading that because it reminded me of a story my dad used to tell that always shocked my sisters and I. Once, when my dad was around 11 years old, he and his pals made a canoe out of old crates wrapped in canvas. My grandpa dropped them off in the river with a couple of cans of beans and said he'd pick them up in a couple of days at a particular bend of the river down the way. Can anyone with kids imagine that happening right now?! My dad was pretty nonchalant about the story but obviously it was a memorable adventure and I wonder if he maybe even borrowed some of my grandpa's stuff from the war, like the tent or canteen. But I can see my grandpa being encouraging of the expedition based on his own "hiking" during the war.
In a couple of the letters my grandpa asks his family to send some newspapers from home and he says he includes 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.
"I see America go singing to her destiny."
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 beginning of the war, people in France were 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, including notes for centimes. It's interesting because the result is loads of banknotes being issued by different chambers of commerce, all of them with unique designs. Scroll through this site to see a ton of additional notes. They're very pretty!
Then my grandpa writes: “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.”
By the last of these letters, sent on Aug. 18th, he hasn't made it to the front yet but is ready for it all to end. "Hope this is over with pretty soon so I may get home and see you all again," he writes. He still hasn’t received any mail from home and wonders if moving around so often has caused a delay in delivery. I’ve done just a tiny bit of reading about the mail service during the war and hope to research that a bit more because it’s really amazing when you think about it, that the soldiers actually received mail and that they could send letters too.
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 before getting shipped across the ocean 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 those photos 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, maybe in Paris.
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