Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1919-07-22
DOUGHBOYS TAKEN ON
SIGHTSEEING TRIP FROM
PARIS TO BATTLEFIELD

Paris, July 22.-Already Chateau
Thierry and Belleau Wood have be-
come shrines which every American
In France wants to visit. Last Sat-
urday announcement was made in
the newspapers here that the Y. NJ.
u A. would establish a daily free
sightseeing trip from Paris to
Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood and
Rheims, taking 100 doughboys a day
on the trip. On Monday-the day the
trip was inaugurated-nearly 1000
soldiers put their names on the wait
ing list. At present time the "Y''
at Rheims is serving 1900 meals a
day and providing sleeping quarters
Tor 500 officers and men. besides
furnishing sandwiches and coffee to
several hundred more. Even more
men are visiting Chateau -Thierry.
but the train schedules are such that
not SO many sleep and eat there.
The boys first are taken to Rheims,
the coronation city of France.
There they see the desolation which
makes those of them not lucky enough
10 get to the front during the war
deepen their sentiments regarding
the Huns. Rheims was a beautiful
city of nearly 100000 inha bitants,
but the Boche rained shells on it un-
til only fourteen of its 1900 build
ings were undamaged. In one day
the Germans threw 5000 shells into
Rheims, and for months they aver
aged a thousand shells a day. But
they were able to enter it only once,
and then the French drove them out
after a few days
Poppies on Flanders Fields
"N" guides with sightseeing trucks
into each of which sixty boys can
crowd. meet the boys at the station
and take them through the town to
Fort Pompelle, which was captured
by the Germans and recaptred by the
French seventeen times. About it
the ground is so torn by shell fire
that it is heaped up like sand dunes.
yet over it already new, vividly green
grass has grown, and acres of poppies
like those which blow on Flanders
fields. crimson red and suggestive of
the heroic blood shed there, glow in
the sunshine.
Under the grass and the poppies
the boys stumble over barbed wire,
and discover innumerable she'll
fragments. hand grenades and other
relics. German helmets are so
plentiful there, eight months after
the armistice, that boys hawk them
about the streets for two francs
each. In the post office in the big
gest Y. NJ. c. \. hut there yesterday
was stack of helmets, guns, pis-
tolls and similar souvenirs more than
twenty feet long, more than eight
feet high and fifteen feet wide at the
base, which the boys had mailed
home during the last three days.
From Rheims the boys are taken
to Chateau -Thierry, where again they
are met by guides and trucks and
taken on a trip which makes them
realize s never before how proud a
part America played in the war
First they are shown how the Ger
mans started their last drive for
Paris on May %, how they crushed
back the thin lines of French and
where the half-prepared Second and
Third American Divisions were flung
in to stop them. Reverently they
look at what remains of the two
bridges 0.herc the Seventh Machine
Gun men of the Third Division held
back the Huns for four days and the
spot where, after the bridges were
demolished, the Americans put a