well i was a surfing the internet looking for belmont memorabilia and sometimes i just do that for fun and i came across on a antique shop in arizona that they had this series of memorabilia which drew my attention to it originally was the program from hundred belmont celebration for the returning world war one veterans in then i started looking through it and there were actually a lot of other memorabilia both personal photographs battlefield photos and other postcards and such from a privately rowing man  lived on beach street i was concerned that some world war one memorabilia collector from anywhere in the world would just snap it up and it really should come back to belmont no one had picked it up than the other groups weren't sure if they would acquire it or not i just decided to buy it and wanted people to actually see it and thought it could be a good educational tool for the th anniversary of the armistice and so the store full society was gracious enough to do some background research and be the recipient of it and they were they said that they would show it and they would use it as a teaching tool and they would help preserve it and keep it i think it sort of takes the whole conflict and reduces it down to one belmont residence experience which i think really makes it more relatable is interesting that he enlisted who's age twenty nine if you look at his card i mean back then well i'm back then people serve older as you got towards the vietnam era where the average age was one teen age of the soldier went down down down down down but from what i understand that serving it listing at age twenty nine and world war one was not unusual there are two photographs from the field one is looks like private man in a truck with a gun in the front and the other is him and someone else posing behind what looks like a machine gun nest of some sort and again like you say the the field is just destroyed the trees are totally true in a limitless and just dead and the waste is just there's nothing growing anywhere oh i mean it must have been horrible how they even got those photographs i don't know and as you say the of all the photographs in the collection those two were in the worst condition one would imagine that taking the pictures in the field was probably not the easiest thing to do back in one thousand eight hundred the americans were involved in a battle and he l and the goal of that was to then go on and take met that which was a town and from judging from the photograph in the postcard where they tore down the german statue in metz one would assume that that happened and that private man was there he was it was assigned to the headquarters for the for the his field artillery so he wasn't in the battle per se but he was there after the battle and there's some pictures of him in the memorabilia where he is on the battlefield which was just it looked like a wasteland in those photographs and apparently he then looks like he went to metz and got those photograph postcards and sent them back to his wife josie it's just i can't even imagine what it would have been like to be in the trenches and be involved in that we're fortunate the private man returned home safely and there are pictures of him growing older but a lot of people of the computers didn't get that ability  i was very primitive in fact we didn't even have weapons we didn't have assault rifles we had to use in some cases some french assault rifles like the bell and also some  enfield that we got from the british and now is the war progress we began to make them here in springfield the springfield armory made the famous lee and  enfield is like the state of the our assault weapon for the st war but we were not able to provide all of our troops with lee enfield because we couldn't make them fast enough so they wind up using mostly the labelle and labelle is a very dangerous weapon because it's it's rigid loaded well over the top and sometimes when you put the clip in the top it would create a spark and people would you know the piece would blow up and you'd get facial injuries and all that so it was not as nice enfield was a much more efficient it was borne unloaded like i was a bit in the clip so the big difference between the labelle and the lee enfield i was like two different generations of technology so we got a mix of the two we did so it could fire all day and it's never it's protected it's usually behind some berms but then when you have the other one on the other side which is so you have about maybe about ten miles this is between this battery and that battery neither of which can fire far enough to get to the other battery which is why the front was so deadly you can never eliminate the other guy's artillery guess he's too far back and you're too he can eliminate you so you have this peculiar phenomenon of tool batteries firing at will all day long the french seventy five is legendary and you could actually with a very well trained crew you could fire twenty shells a minute so picture a battery and seventy five dollars millimeters firing twenty a minute each that's a continuous barrage out of position is devastating and the result of it is the shell itself has to hurts people in two ways causes two kinds of damage if it blows up in the air maybe one thousand and fifteen meters high and it's think of an upside down cone so the bottom part of the  circle at the bottom of a hope skirt you don't come down so you can put maybe six or seven people in that and that diameter and every one of them gets showered with red hot the equivalent of a  bearing sprayed red hot so causes either death or serious injury in fact the germans actually didn't mind it was just not kill the fact if you kill somebody that was a disadvantage because if you ai somebody you take two or more people out of business who have to carry the person back to the to the medical station so the germans were happy when people were getting hurt because that would tie up a lot more people and the other kind of injury from the shells was a surface lateral surface shockwave which were does it just blows your legs off that's why when you see parades of veterans in france  lot of them have one or two legs missing because a common thing was that that concussion wave across the surface one or two feet high would blow your legs off that was great for them because the germans like that because you're lying there bleeding out so you've got to get somebody to help whom gain their citizenship when they got off the boats and they signed up in exchange for they get this in the ship when they're done very interesting way of becoming a citizen the middlesex county  maine new hampshire vermont and the th was basically fifty percent of it was middlesex county all the towns and that sort of dawn of the round met what they call the metro west area that was one hundred the st to arrive in france and the st to be mobilized in the front pershing was a very very good general who was very straight arrow good organize a good commander understood military attacks had experience fighting in mexico they were just different kind of people and it was was put it this way it was a soldier a soldier pershing was the commander soldier so people to use a common parlance people would be willing they would take a bullet for edwards they would die for him the boy and the pershing they would do their job for him pershing had a prejudice he kind of thought of the yankee division then actual guardsmen as glorified boy scouts he just didn't believe they were really serious federally trained soldiers so he had a bias going in so the idea of these boy scouts getting to france st getting train the mobilized for us was annoying to him and it was able to organize that and get it done faster than the federal troops which was a source of irritation also we didn't do a serious amount of training here our training here was fairly primitive we had kids we had know soldiers training with big believe wooden weapons they could shoot them they were real good weapons nothing wrong with that because what it does trains in the be part of a unit and it creates unit morale that's all fine but not a lot of real warfare training gas training for example of the just wasn't there a whole lot of that because there wasn't a whole lot of materials for so when they went across what happened was they want to sail as air  france and then when he got to st louis there they were train across france to new chateaux but a five hundred mile trip and they got on those trains they were very enthusiastic and when he got there they chose a division of french division was matched up with the inca division and they trained him for several months and all reports are that the training was very effective very a company which is about two hundred dollars men they usually came from one town so they all knew each other so there was corroboree and sometimes the chaplain will be a local priest or a local minister or a local rabbi they all knew each other playing the same football teams baseball teams and that sort of thing so there was a lot of that unit cohesion already before they got there that's a big benefit in terms of esprit de corps so here comes off of the train all of these tall good looking into c s like singing american boys while the women thought they were the most beautiful handsome boys i've ever seen and it would say they said it they sent us all their officers why did they set us all their offices where the enlisted men and they were told they're all enlisted men only a small number of like five percent of them are officers well how why they tall well they're american and we have better food better supplies of food better health and our kids grow taller because the average french soldier was on the whole usually a foot shorter than the average american soldier but the woman didn't know that what they saw were these cheerful happy enthusiastic tall young men so they they were extremely excited and they create it was a big huge boost the morale on the part of the french people because they were the  family lost a father or brother or cousin so the see these fresh americans meant we might get out of this alive when you finish training in new should we were then sent right after the holidays  quiet the german soldiers on that front had we had retreated from the front because they were waiting they were being quiet as they were waiting for reinforcements to come the russian had surrendered  lift off so now the germans are coming down to join the other germans so we were sent there as a kind of our initial preparation for the battle get used to hearing shells firing over doing night raids getting a little bit of action not too much and there were only there about a month and they were withdrawn negative vision when backed into should tell and got involved in a no and another fr called the same hero front replacing the st division from new york and there were a series of four battles against the german rear guard c a rear guard is a unit units that protect retreat you can't retreat unless you have somebody behind you protecting you because if you don't have anybody behind you protecting you then the then the the assault group which would be the division it's easy for them to cross over the right into the left fla both sides and then eventually surround this call double and filleted and they do that and then that they surround the body of germans then they capture them and enclose them in that and the trying to penetrate the american positions that was the force so what you had is four consecutive battles in the st one was a place called up romo that's the one that's most famous and what happened is an equivalent and the germans were shocked because the germans intention was to really hit the young americans hard scare them send them out with their tails behind their legs and to show that they were not ready they were on fighters and that the germans would eventually prevail well that didn't happen they came back three nights later did the same thing same thing over again and the same thing happened they were stopped dead their tracks and that was  amazing all come that no one ever anticipated in fact the general the general of the adjacent division that was fighting with them general pastika was so impressed with the americans that  that it got to the point this is legendary it got to a point where they brought the cooks into the fight because it was do or die and there were stories about the cooks killing germans with knives and clean repulse attack and repulse four times and finally the st which of the who the irish division out of boston and in each case the germans were repulsed when the information about that sort of made its way to germany they were saying i don't know what the german word is but the americans boys are crazy they love fighting who are these boys they're bigger stronger more determined brave and they got a real even though it's only a division wide issue it sent the message to berlin that it's going to be a long war so now after the four battles in the same hill salient underneath it now the next attack is to move paris it was a blocking area so it was important to secure that when the marines had captured it but this was a month before that and they needed to be sure that that was reinforced interestingly enough in spite of pershing's animosity towards edwards because of the yankee divisions behavior in the same he'll sell you he had to recognize that occupation and then afterwards the activision then went into the main part of the main modern offensive in the amer offensive was tough and that was also it was the germans again retreating but they have like i mentioned really tough guards and we had a lot of trouble with that it was our most difficult battle each regiment has three battalions of the so forth where the keep all of your regiments battalions companies lined up in a straight line moving in a consistent pattern why you continue conducting a what they call a rolling barrage in front of them so maybe your artillery batteries are firing maybe fifty to one hundred yards in front of you and they're moving ahead it's easy for one company to move faster than another and that was happening to us so what happens when you move faster than another is not going to you subject your troops to too friendly fire from you know  the get ahead of the other ones you also say yourself for being flanked so those are the tactical issues that were difficult because we hadn't fought this kind of war no one had this is a whole new kind of war you did have wire communications in the trenches because that's stationary and you run wired on the trench so you could communicate by telephone but you can't do that in a war of maneuver when you're pushing to try to push the germans back out of a sector or even still better surrounding them and capturing them that's a moving war st thing we need to is participate in the same he'll offensive and we came in from the northeast and we met in the middle with the new yorkers in the middle and there were same as the as the blue hills in boston so you just think you're on top of blue hills and you're looking east and the way way down and the very few you can see from here is a place called mets which the time was a german city because it had been captured it was in the rain but today it's as a french city while looking towards metz sixty miles away this is looking towards me this is full of german divisions and this is a hill about the in a letter home he writes on september th the artillery opened up on the entire front at each hour hour attacking battalion with over the top and behind a beautiful brush to the st line of bush trenches with very little trouble and from then on it was comparatively easy sailing we took a great many prisoners in the st system of trenches we got them right in their dug outs where artillery kept them down the next morning we reached the last hills and then before stretch the great claim and in the distance the hills before metz germany as i sat there on my horse i counted fifteen villages on fire this is a very important statement because there was a tendency for the germans when they retreated to burn villages down and sometimes sometimes poison wells it's a it's a behavior that is hard to understand because they're leaving anyway the number going to be there again and they're doing maximum damage on the way out and it's just something that flat was offended by because they could see the fires being set all the way across the south as far as the eye could see in the same he'll salient that's his memory the plane for the germans was to divert about ten divisions north sort of flank left the north and go back into the line up in the upper upper northern section of use argo and that's what the intention was so we were given the order by pershing to do it  think which is a classic military maneuver for us to we were given the order while the other divisions were told go straight north we were told to go straight east and behave as if we were going to push them all the way past minutes to create an it worked they believed it so they pushed back they saw what they saw was a freshman superior force pushing forward so they immediately went back into germany instead of north to mews are go so basically we succeeded and cutting them out of the joining their fellows up and use are gone it's like a sacrifice fly we got nothing we didn't get much out of that it wasn't about defeating them we just  what was left were many many old trenches in addition to all trenches there were a lot of shell holes so at night the troops had to get down in the shell holes of these old trenches and what they ran into if you get this letter is description of this you get bones leftover bones from the not the year before but two years before nine hundred and sixteen battle over done and it's disgusting smelly scary very very bizarre and lot of battle debris and sometimes exploded shells and it was it was a it was because no one had it it had been abandoned for a year and a past the neptune sector by that time it was the armistice and it was all over for us for the division we never got into the main corridor or the muse are going to valley we were still over on the right hand side so altogether thousand people made it to france and out of them there were about one hundred and thirty divisions that got across and only eighty nine saw so action and by the way just so you know out of the eighty nine divisions including federal and national guard we were number four  effectiveness no i can't it's hard for me to explain in some kind of a rubric they have to you know how many readers you would dance how many men did you lose per metre what was the whole there's a whole series of numbers you get a plug into this one formula and i don't know what that is but we were rated number four of all of the eighty nine which is a significant accomplishment for bunch of boy scouts they came out of a realization part of the germans that we were they were going to win this billy mitchell father of the air force the air force back that was part of the army with the support of the a stop fighting it's a cease fire that's not that's and the assumption was on the part of the germans all well it's just the rest will come back when we get some are in are because the soldiers when they came back from the arm