World War 1: American Soldier's Letters Home

Letter written January 5, 1919

2009-01-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

I think the last installment of our continued story left me as advanced billeting officer in the vicinity of Gisors. Well, I and two other boys finally got the regiment all placed and settled in a little town called Chambord. Every thing was very exciting for just then the Bosche had broken thru and were still coming and it was believed that we were going to be used to make some sort of a counter attack along with several other divisions we had seen. Hence no sooner had the division arrived than we worked for about a week on open warfare and then set out for the line. Every bit of baggage was cut down to absolutely the low limit, the officers were allowed but twenty pounds total and the men to one blanket and their regular equipment. We even had orders that the horses should be led and not ridden so that when we finally arrived everything would be fresh that mattered. Our route lay up towards Montdidier from Gisors, passing thru Beauvais, a beautiful city where later I had some splendid times. We halted for two days at Thieux and then started into line. Never will I forget the first trip I made up. The Germans had been more or less stopped and the artillery fire had become proportionately greater as it does under such circumstances. At night the whole sky seen from a distance was one continuous flickering flash of white fire, not for a few minutes but always. We left about 6:30, by we I mean myself and two guns (155 mm.)with their crews etc., planning to get to the battery as soon as the darkness would let us. Within an hour we had gotten to where our long range guns were and from then on it was a continuous performance for the ten kilometers further to our position. I had had an idea that I knew what heavy fire was but this was a revelation. The road for a good way led thru woods and what wasn’t in that woods in the way of artillery never existed. They seemed to be behind every tree and in every conceivable place. The noise was so great that to speak to any one you had to get right beside him and howl in his ear. However, it helped in that you couldn’t hear what was coming after you. There were long guns that yelped and sent a shell over that sounded like a soul from hell with its shriek.There were big, short fat ones that went floom! and sent a ton or so of metal over to the Bosche with a noise like a slow freight. And everywhere 75’s (75mm guns) going on continuously with their crack and growl. It was wonderful and somehow so inspiring that somehow you didn’t mind the danger or discomfort - for it was also raining – at all. We took up a position that looked to me like suicide itself on TOP of a hill and finally a little before daybreak got the guns in and began to add our part to the fuss.There were no organized positions. The sector was too new and ours was simply an old farm laneway behind a hedge overlooking the village of Wells Perrennes. The whole thing was about two inches deep in water when we started and every time the old boys went off a shower of liquid mud would come out from under the trail spade (the trailing portion of an artillery piece which rests on the ground for stability in firing) and cover the gun crews and executive and worse luck by then I was executing. Just about dawn too, to make things a little more pleasant Jerry started in on the town with 210’s (210 mm.guns) and we watched the houses go up in dust in spite of the rain and wondered if he was coming after us. He didn’t tho and we had breakfast of rum, bread and chocolate sitting on the powder boxes in the rain a little later.

There seemed to be no limit to the amount of firing they expected of us. Five hundred (rounds) a day with a 155-mm. Howitzer is a large order for any battery but we thought that we were lucky if that was all we had to do. Usually about the time we thought that we were finished along would come a call for a barrage or a C.P.O. (order from a command post?) and when those were over it was time to begin work again.

After about a week of this I suddenly received my orders to report to the Ammunition Train for duty and discovered that I had been transferred. At first I wasn’t at all well pleased as I liked the battery work very much and we just had things running nicely. I didn’t find out until later that the Am.Train was known unofficially as the suicide club but soon discovered that it might well be. Taking twenty-odd three-ton trucks loaded with shells, powder and fuses to some battery and delivering it without trouble or confusion when the Bosche are doing their own little bit of shooting took, I found, a vast amount of head work and planning. Ammunition is the one thing that can’t be held up and has got to get there and it is up to you to do it and no one but yourself cares how you do it as long as they have it to shoot. However I had rather a splendid touring car to ride about in and little or nothing to do in the daytime.

About how we lived and more detail about the work I wrote you a great deal. How Reg, the Dr. and I lived and kept house in Beauvoir in an inverted style living at night and sleeping during the day.The Cantigny fight there was the only thing out of the regular fun but the work was steady, hard trench warfare. The weather throughout with the exception of the first week was perfect and we used to come home in the green and pink dawn and toast the new day in a glass of port and go to bed and sleep until noon. Thru it all tho there was the element of uncertainty for we all expected the second attack to come at any time and mostly we expected it thru us which wasn’t pleasant to contemplate.

Well this is all now so good bye.
With love
Paul

Letter written December 28, 1918

2009-01-12T07:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

As Kipling says there is “another mocking Xmas past”, and although it wasn’t nearly as bad as last year’s it was far from pleasant or anything that I would like to go thru with again. This year at least I had the advantage of being with friends which is something, while last year I had just arrived in a new outfit and knew practically nobody. However, try as one may somehow you can’t seem to put any cheer into Christmas away from home. It is easy enough to celebrate the armistice as a victory or something of that variety but Christmas falls flat. Moreover the environment this year wasn’t particularly of an inspiring nature. The Germans, tho I have a hunch it is their big day, weren’t at all enthusiastic in their demonstrations and rather naturally we didn’t do things for the children as we did in France. We staged a horse show in the morning and a large egg nog party. Some seven gallons being consumed without great effort or effect. In the afternoon we had a motor exhibition and an extraordinarily large amount of punch which held its chief merit apparently in its ability to depress. Our dinner at evening was rather splendid from the point of view of decorations and food, and there were thirty officers present. The room was draped with evergreen and on the table were three little very much ornamented trees such as we used to have on the table at home. Somehow tho everyone got more or less engrossed in his own thoughts and the excitement did not run high. Such was the day and I am tremendously glad it is over. As I said tho, it was an improvement and perhaps after a few more years I may begin to enjoy it again.

I hope you had the party at home just the same and everything went off in O.K. style, for certainly that is an occasion and one that I enjoyed always almost more than any other. I managed to go back to Coblenz a few days ago and got some presents for you all but the means at hand for sending them are still lacking as I don’t want to risk them by the ordinary mail and I am not yet able to register them. This peace time warfare somehow isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. True enough there are no more flaming, roaring dawns or hideous nights but after all that you can’t imagine how time drags – every day is just about like every other day and you feel pretty sure that the days coming are going to be just about like the ones just past. War is a horrible thing and I never want to see any more of it but nevertheless there is a terrible fascination in it. You may lie down to sleep and sleep peacefully until late the next morning or you may never wake up, or again you may be waked up in ten minutes and start on something absolutely different from anything you have ever done before. I suppose that as a matter of fact it is the lack of thrills and excitement now that palls but certainly there is something. On the other hand I am living more comfortably than I almost ever have anywhere else. The Major, a Capt. Delong and I have three rooms, two small bedrooms and a huge living room which is all hung with at least 20 heads of very good deer, boar, etc., and finished in dark wood and light blue of which very little shows. The house is owned by two splendid old ladies who treat us as tho we were their children.

I am enclosing another little picture of myself which I had taken back in Picardy last July at a little place called Beauvoir where we all had a wonderful time and were very happy even tho the fighting just there wasn’t exactly what one would term quiet.

This is about all there is to tell you just at this minute but I will write you again very soon and in the meantime will continue my serial story.

With love
Paul

Letter written December 21, 1918

2008-12-21T13:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

This is another break in the serial I am running but I have gotten tired telling what has gone on and am full of what is going on. We crossed the Rhine at Coblenz on Friday the 13th of December at five minutes before midnight. That somehow sounds to me to be very unlucky and just now the worst thing that I can imagine happening to myself is to have to stay where I am for a long time, which certainly looks to me as tho it might happen. We are finally settled in what appear to be our permanent resting places for the occupation. Ours in a town called Kilgert (sp?) about fifteen miles or so from the Rhine in a country that resembles the Adirondacks and New Jersey rolled into one. Fine high wooded hills and lots of splendid red sticky mud. Not one redeeming feature. All the inhabitants that are left are engaged in the absorbing pastime of making the mud into little ornamental pipes and marbles which they bake and sell to the unsuspecting. I am sending you some specimens for Xmas as they are the only things I can get hold of. Some day perhaps I may get back down to Coblenz from where I may be able to send you something nice. By the way if you can think of anything nice that comes from this part of the country, Germany I mean, let me know and I will send it to you. I doubt it tho for I haven’t yet seen anything around here that I would care to carry away. I don’t blame the Dutch much for invading some other country. It took them away from home. As you can see I am very low in my mind today and probably will be for some time if it is anything like last Xmas. Somehow a whole year’s homesickness seems to catch up with me at this time of year and makes me feel like jumping in the lake. I know too now why they call it sunny France: like everything else in life it is purely a comparative matter. France is a whole lot sunnier than Germany. We left Verdun on a perfectly beautiful day the 21st of November and since then I have seen the sun exactly three times and those have never been for more than ten minutes. That is why, I suppose, that the Germans have such pink and white complexions; there is no sun to tan them.

I am enclosing some orders which give you an idea of what the 1st Division did. It is the only division that was ever cited singly by the commander in chief and this order deals with probably the most disagreeable fight I was ever in. This is all now.

Good bye. With love
Paul

The reference in the last paragraph above is to:

General Orders No. 201, dated Nov. 10, 1918, from the General Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces:

“1. The Commander in Chief desires to make of record in the General Orders of the American Expeditionary Forces his extreme satisfaction with the conduct of the officers and soldiers of the First Division in its advance west of the Meuse between October 4th and 11th, 1918. During this period the division gained a distance of seven kilometers over a country which presented not only remarkable facilities for enemy defense but also great difficulties of terrain for the operation of our troops.
“2. The division met with resistance from elements of eight hostile divisions, . . . The enemy chose to defend its position to the death, and the fighting was always of the most desperate kind. . . .
“3.The success of the division in driving a deep advance into the enemy’s territory enabled an assault to be made on the left by the neighboring division against the northeastern portion of the Forest of Argonne, and enabled the First Division to advance to the right and outflank the enemy’s position in front of the division on that flank.
“4. The Commander in Chief has noted in this division a special pride of service and a high state of morale, never broken by hardship nor battle.
“5. This order will be read to all organizations at the first assembly formation after its receipt.
“BY COMMAND OF GENERAL PERSHING”

Letter written December 9, 1918

2008-12-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

Since we have not moved lately and are still hold down the village of Salmroh (sp?) I can continue the travels and adventures of one P. Hills. I think I was at Beaumont in (illegible) at the last writing doing a touch of artillery observation.We lived there, another lieutenant called Hatch and I, for over two months. For quarters we had a splendid dugout underneath the building the O.P. (observation post) was in the top of. It was proof against anything except the very largest shells and happily very dry and fairly warm. There was too a French O.P. nearby and the two of us messed (ate meals) with them and in fact imposed on them generally. We worked our duty in eight hour shifts since one of us had to be there all the time. I would go on at four in the morning and stay till noon when Hatch would appear and stay till eight at night when I would relieve him again and so on. The night hours were naturally by far the worst for we could have no heat or light except in the little cubby hole where the telephones were and cold wasn’t the word. Moreover outside of the regular fire works there was absolutely nothing to watch. It was just a question of keep looking and wait for something to happen and usually nothing did. Sometimes tho things would get livelier and livelier among the rifles and machine guns and then up would go a rocket of one variety or another and we would turn on all the artillery and try to see what the results would be. Some nights would be very quiet with hardly a cannon fired from ten at night until morning, others would be fairly lively almost all the time with things coming and going in fine style. However, the fire in that sector was never very heavy unless there was a barrage on and they happily were never of very long duration.

About this time it became fairly evident that the Bosche were going to attack somewhere and it was going to be a real attack since already there had been identified on a great many parts of the front units that had come from Russia. We talked about it unofficially quite a bit wondering where it would break and officially every defensive measure possible was taken all the way from Switzerland to the North Sea. Then finally it did come, about as far from us as it possibly could be and it was then that Gen. Pershing made his famous offer to Marshall Foch, and we were taken.

I was sent ahead to billet the second Battalion of the 5th (Field Artillery Brigade of the 1st Division) principally I suppose because I could speak French and also because I needed a vacation. I had been in the O.P. for two months without a break or change of any sort. Three other officers had been there with me but somehow the business hadn’t agreed with them and they had been given something a little less strenuous.

It was then that I passed thru Paris and had one day there. We were to billet in the vicinity of Gisons and it was to that town we (the billeting party) first went. It was a wonderful part of the country, by far the best I had ever been in with the City of Gisons wonderfully medieval and interesting. Wasn’t there sometime in history a Black Knight of Gisons? If not there should have been. For the place is just suited to him. Black towers, a big, dingy narrow cathedral, very narrow streets and a million crows all around.

This is all I have time for now with love Paul

Letter written December 5, 1918

2008-12-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

This has got to be more or less of an interlude in the sad story of my life for it is an occasion. In fact one of the few ambitions of my life have been realized for yesterday we came into Germany, that is real old Germany that always has been Germany.We were, as you remember, in Luxemburg until yesterday when we started and went down to the river Moselle along which we followed until we finally crossed some little stream the name of which I don’t quite remember and were in the ancestral home of the squarehead. It was really quite a thrill that one had and if anyone had told me a month ago that I would be in Germany today I should have put them down as quite mad. We followed along the river to Treves (or Trier, in German) and from there came over to where we now are, a village called Salmohr, not far from Wittlich. It is the invasion of Germany but vastly different than I ever had any idea it would be. I am sorry that we did not get into their towns as the Bosche went out the other side to the accompaniment of machine guns, falling walls, the black smoke of melanite and dust and noise, but this way is very much more comfortable. The invasion is more in the way of pleasure trip than anything else. We arrive and billet just as we did in the French rear area town.The inhabitants are not at all ill disposed and nothing in the world can keep the glorious American high ranking buck private from making friends with every and anybody. Ten minutes after they were in Germany the streets were full of Heinies and Americans swapping cigarettes and having the time of their life. The Dutch can’t cope with the situation at all. There seems to be some mistake. For here are these soldiers whom they have heard were such savages and brutes treating them better than their soldiers would.

As a matter of fact the people can’t do enough for us and the feeling against the Kaiser among them is tremendously high. It may perhaps be different in some other parts of the country as we go farther in but just now the feeling between the invaders and the invaded is thoroughly amicable to say the least.

This is about all now --- I will write more later
With love
Paul

Letter written December 3, 1918

2008-12-07T15:59:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:
I think the last installment left us at the battle of Gondrecourt.That finally ended or rather the weather ended it for us for the snow got so deep that the carriages could not move and things in the maneouver line became impossible.Then I went to school which school was at Gondrecourt itself. That wasn’t bad at all, more or less of a vacation from the point of view of physical exercise but rather strong on the mental effort. We learned a lot of things we knew already and a lot more that we did not know. The schedule was usually classes and theory in the morning and firing in the afternoon. The course lasted about five weeks and was very much worth while. During the last week we were there, however, the regiment moved into line and when school was over there I went too. The battery was in the Toul sector near a town called Mandres where battallion headquarters was. No sooner had I reported than I was assigned for duty on observation from which place I think I wrote you quite a good deal.That work was wonderfully interesting and we shot Bosche and shot at Bosche to our heart’s content. It was however a little too risky to be thorough unalloyed enjoyment for two or three times we just stood still and looked at each other waiting for the end to come and wondering what it would feel like. The O.P. (observation post)was under the roof of the least destroyed building in the village of Beaumont. There was a little slit in the tiles to look out of during the daytime and rather a large hole which we looked out of at night.We were quite well equipped having all varieties of instruments and maps and were connected with every battery round and other O.P.’s by telephone. There was plenty to do which helped a bit and made the time pass quickly. During the day we made adjustments on crossroads, etc. over on the Bosche side for all the batteries and when we were not doing that, watched and tried to locate Bosche batteries. When we located one we shot him up and our work consisted in keeping the guns on the target and reporting results. There is certainly quite a satisfaction in locating some Heinie outfit who has been worrying you, proving exactly where he is and then systematically blowing him up. Sometimes, tho, Jerry would get mad and shoot back which was as disagreeable as anything could be. One morning after we had made a raid he was very mad, shooting up most everything in sight but somehow not us and we were shaking hands with ourselves wondering how long it would last when a great big black one went up right in front of the house about 200 yards away. That was the first in that particular locality and we wondered what was up.The next one was in direct line headed for us about 50 yards closer and so the next one and the next with about 30 seconds between shots. Finally one hit just in front of the house, showering dirt all over the place.The corporal and I were looking out watching things and had a fine idea just where the next one would hit. For protection we had some high grade tiles and a sheet of first class tar paper.The situation to say the least was tense. The Corp simply kept on looking and said quietly “And the next one gets us.” I have had some really narrow shaves during this performance but never did I feel as I did while we were waiting for the next one that never came. Why it didn’t come heaven only knows but I do know that during that 30 seconds and the following two minutes I lived a hundred years. It isn’t the things that happen that scare you. It’s the things that might.

This is about all I have time to write about now but I will do some more tomorrow and try to tell you something about how we lived, ate and didn’t wash, which tho it was just our daily existence probably would be more or less interesting.

Good bye With love

Paul

Letter written November 30, 1918

2008-12-01T18:48:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

This will be more or less in the line of a second installment of the continued story I began in the last letter. As for myself just at present there is nothing new – we are still in the middle of Luxemburg and very quiet but I rather imagine that we will drag out before many more days.

We left off the last time if I remember correctly at the time we left the Luneville sector in Nov. (Paul is here relating his experiences as an officer in the U.S. Army’s First Division since beginning artillery training after receiving his commission. Before the Armistice, censorship prohibited his offering any details of operations or location in his letters home.) Well, we started from there to march to our winter quarters which were in the middle of the Meuse valley, probably the worst locality in France. At least it has that reputation for every time you even mention it to a Frenchman, he shivers, groans and makes some appropriate remark highly uncomplimentary. We were four days on the road and finally ended up in a little place about ten kilometers from Gondrecourt called Chassy. It was miserable, and medieval was the only word that describes it. I think I wrote you about it at the time for I was quite impressed and depressed also. However we started out almost immediately on a series of maneuvers which kept our minds off anything else. I don’t believe I ever worked harder or had longer hours in my life as did also all the rest of the division. In speaking about it still the men call it the Gondrecourt war and insist that it was without doubt the hardest battle they ever endured. There was one advantage, however, in that it made everything that ever followed it seem easy. That kept up until the first part of January with a welcome relief of one day off for Xmas and one for New Year’s. The weather was also in keeping with the whole performance as it alternately rained and snowed the whole time with now and then a day when it got so cold that it was almost impossible to breathe. The climate of the Meuse is more like that of Auburn than any place I have been since I left the village of the plain. I remember one day in particular we left Chassy to make a reconnaissance at four the morning. It gets light about eight at this time of the year. It was raining blue blazes and the roads were an absolute glare of ice. The major was along and all the officers of the battalion together with an immense detail of men carrying all the artillery instruments known to man. I have a hunch we looked something like the children of Israel coming out of Egypt. We rode away like blazes as the place of business was a long way off and of all the rides I ever hope to take that one wins. You could see absolutely nothing and we were supposed to be following the major. Every once in a while you would hear some one go down swoosh! Great cursings and howling would follow but those still up never stopped a second. Everyone that I saw afterward took one or more spills during that ride. Well, some of us arrived finally, the major unfortunately being one. I can see him yet as he stood there in the grey dawn with the water running off his nose and the slush into the top of his boots cussing everything under the sun and us in particular, for most of all we were late, and the others from the other brigade had gone on somewhere else. We were till noon getting that whole detail together and then having messed around for an hour or so we rode home again in the dark. Such was life but as I said everything after that seemed easy.

This is about all now but as the Ladies Home Journal says “will be continued in our next number.

This is, I think, about time to wish every one a merry Xmas tho it seems queer.
With love
Paul

Letter written November 28, 1918

2008-12-01T18:42:00.001-08:00

Dear Mother -:

Today is Thanksgiving and heavens what a difference from the preceding ones that I have had.This one is probably as peculiar and original as any could possibly be for now instead of having a wonderful dinner at Nannoo’s as I have had or a great one at Concord, N.H. or like last year taking pot luck and wondering what the war would bring, I am now a member of the victorious invading army headed for the interior of Germany. Quite a change you will have to admit. Today we are resting, that is not moving forward any more, for a couple of days at least, in the middle of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg at a little place called Munsbach (sp?) not far happily from the city of Luxemburg. Just where we are headed for is not absolutely certain but every rumor seems to point to Coblenz as the ultimate destination of the A.E.F. (You see the censorship has been modified and we can say practically anything that goes on.) We came into Luxemburg about five days ago and I am rather keen about the country tho I do not find the people as agreeable as the French, principally I suppose for the reason that they speak sort of a bastard language, made up of every known living tongue mixed together and then distorted and naturally quite impossible to speak. Usually, however, you can find some one speaking French or English.

The country itself is beautiful but just now tremendously hard up. The H.C.L. (high cost of living?) would absolutely astound you. Bacon is 50 Frs. a pound. Soap 15 Frs a small cake, the cheapest women’s shoes 200 Frs. with men’s about 500. A suit of clothes costs the poor Luxemburger about 650 and he can’t even get an egg for breakfast unless he puts out 1½ Frs. Thank heaven tho, we are well provided for and I have everything I need for some time. Imagine trying to set up some sort of an establishment or worse than that having a large family.

I went thru the city of Luxemburg yesterday and it is a very beautiful place. Built in two sections, so to speak, with a great deep ravine dividing the two and wonderful piled up Maxfield Parrish castles hanging up on the sides of the ravine. If I get a chance to go there again I will get some pictures as it is really worthwhile remembering.

I am sorry in some ways that Carroll (brother) never got the chance to come over but on the other hand it is, I suppose better that he did not, for although it has all been a wonderful experience and worth a lifetime there have been a great many things that were neither pleasant, edifying, or elevating, and worse than that one’s sense of proportion seems permanently put out of commission; whether that will ever come back I don’t know but just now I do know that those who have been thru it all for a year or more are certainly a different lot than when they landed.

The lifting of censorship is a great relief and I am going to take advantage of it and tell you all I can but just how and where to begin leaves me in a quandary that I can’t quite cope with. I suppose I should invoke the Muse and keep up a classic trend for the adventures have all the aspects of both the travels of Ulysses and our friend Dante’s descent into the Inferno, not to mention something that if properly put out would do justice to Stephen Leacock at his best.

As you know I was commissioned here in the fall of 1917 and finally got orders to report for duty about the 15th of Oct. The place where I ended up was a little town called Valdahou (sp?) very close to the Swiss border and not far from the city of Besancon.Things were very pleasant there and the barracks were quite splendid, in fact as I look back now the men were better off than they have ever been since.The camp was on a hill and from it you could see Mont Blanc and a great deal of the Swiss Alps.

However that didn’t last overlong, for about a week later we left for the front as the first American contingent to go into line.As you can well imagine I was in a queer way, knowing about as much artillery as a pussy cat but probably more about actual conditions in line than anyone else in the regt. I was then in Batt. F of the 5th (brigade) and we had a very good crowd of officers and a fine lot of men. Taking everything as a whole we had everything except experience.

We took up positions in a sector just in front of Luneville, a very quiet one happily where they only shoot once a week to see if the guns are in order. We did a bit better than that, simply for the practice of the thing, for there was no need for the amount we fired. I spent then most of my time at the echelons or horse lines and had, taking it all in all, a fine time, tho I did work like blazes trying to catch up to the others in a knowledge of artillery.The horse lines were in a great little place, Rosieres aux Salines. We stayed in that sector about two weeks, only had three casualties which happened just as we were leaving and I think, I know for my own part, learned a lot.

This is about all now for I have got to buzz about a bit but I will write some more tomorrow and try to make it all into one continuous story, however bad in form and all it may be.
With love,
Paul

Letter written November 28, 1918

2008-12-01T18:42:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

Today is Thanksgiving and heavens what a difference from the preceding ones that I have had.This one is probably as peculiar and original as any could possibly be for now instead of having a wonderful dinner at Nannoo’s as I have had or a great one at Concord, N.H. or like last year taking pot luck and wondering what the war would bring, I am now a member of the victorious invading army headed for the interior of Germany. Quite a change you will have to admit. Today we are resting, that is not moving forward any more, for a couple of days at least, in the middle of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg at a little place called Munsbach (sp?) not far happily from the city of Luxemburg. Just where we are headed for is not absolutely certain but every rumor seems to point to Coblenz as the ultimate destination of the A.E.F. (You see the censorship has been modified and we can say practically anything that goes on.) We came into Luxemburg about five days ago and I am rather keen about the country tho I do not find the people as agreeable as the French, principally I suppose for the reason that they speak sort of a bastard language, made up of every known living tongue mixed together and then distorted and naturally quite impossible to speak. Usually, however, you can find some one speaking French or English.

The country itself is beautiful but just now tremendously hard up. The H.C.L. (high cost of living?) would absolutely astound you. Bacon is 50 Frs. a pound. Soap 15 Frs a small cake, the cheapest women’s shoes 200 Frs. with men’s about 500. A suit of clothes costs the poor Luxemburger about 650 and he can’t even get an egg for breakfast unless he puts out 1½ Frs. Thank heaven tho, we are well provided for and I have everything I need for some time. Imagine trying to set up some sort of an establishment or worse than that having a large family.
I went thru the city of Luxemburg yesterday and it is a very beautiful place. Built in two sections, so to speak, with a great deep ravine dividing the two and wonderful piled up Maxfield Parrish castles hanging up on the sides of the ravine. If I get a chance to go there again I will get some pictures as it is really worthwhile remembering.

I am sorry in some ways that Carroll (brother) never got the chance to come over but on the other hand it is, I suppose better that he did not, for although it has all been a wonderful experience and worth a lifetime there have been a great many things that were neither pleasant, edifying, or elevating, and worse than that one’s sense of proportion seems permanently put out of commission; whether that will ever come back I don’t know but just now I do know that those who have been thru it all for a year or more are certainly a different lot than when they landed.

The lifting of censorship is a great relief and I am going to take advantage of it and tell you all I can but just how and where to begin leaves me in a quandary that I can’t quite cope with. I suppose I should invoke the Muse and keep up a classic trend for the adventures have all the aspects of both the travels of Ulysses and our friend Dante’s descent into the Inferno, not to mention something that if properly put out would do justice to Stephen Leacock at his best.

As you know I was commissioned here in the fall of 1917 and finally got orders to report for duty about the 15th of Oct. The place where I ended up was a little town called Valdahou (sp?) very close to the Swiss border and not far from the city of Besancon.Things were very pleasant there and the barracks were quite splendid, in fact as I look back now the men were better off than they have ever been since.The camp was on a hill and from it you could see Mont Blanc and a great deal of the Swiss Alps.

However that didn’t last overlong, for about a week later we left for the front as the first American contingent to go into line.As you can well imagine I was in a queer way, knowing about as much artillery as a pussy cat but probably more about actual conditions in line than anyone else in the regt. I was then in Batt. F of the 5th (brigade) and we had a very good crowd of officers and a fine lot of men. Taking everything as a whole we had everything except experience.

We took up positions in a sector just in front of Luneville, a very quiet one happily where they only shoot once a week to see if the guns are in order. We did a bit better than that, simply for the practice of the thing, for there was no need for the amount we fired. I spent then most of my time at the echelons or horse lines and had, taking it all in all, a fine time, tho I did work like blazes trying to catch up to the others in a knowledge of artillery.The horse lines were in a great little place, Rosieres aux Salines. We stayed in that sector about two weeks, only had three casualties which happened just as we were leaving and I think, I know for my own part, learned a lot.

This is about all now for I have got to buzz about a bit but I will write some more tomorrow and try to make it all into one continuous story, however bad in form and all it may be.
With love,
Paul

Letter written November 19, 1918

2008-11-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

My career as a member of the G.H.Q. was to say the least not over long due to the fact that upon the arrival of peace my expert advice was no longer needed and now I am back again once more as a member of the 1st A.T. (ammunition train) and a real fighting man with no one to fight. There was one thing splendid tho, while I was on the staff. I managed to get in my car which was a wonderful great Cadillac and run up to Paris. That was a couple of days ago and from what I knew of Paris it was a changed city. During the day one great blaze of the tricolor and at night a blaze of light. It was also very gay but so crowded that to get hotel accommodations was practically impossible. We had a regular Ivy (Paul’s club at Princeton) dinner. There were six of us all of whom I knew very well at college although only two of them were in my class. Bill McAdoo was there and on the crest altogether; it was a wonderful celebration. The next day I consecrated to shopping and bought a whole brand new peace time outfit so that now I am one of the snappiest looking young lieutenants you can imagine with the toil and grime of war completely wiped away. The end coming when it did certainly blighted my promising young military career for now promotions have been called off and I understand that my captaincy for which I was recommended about three weeks ago is also called off. However, it is cheap at the price and the end could not have come any too soon.

Were I in your place I would not expect me home too soon for heaven only knows when it will be. Being in the regular army as I am I have a hunch that we will probably stay in France after all the others (units formed for the wartime army) are gone, to fill up the trenches and roll up the barbed wire.The opinion seems to be that we as professional soldiers have no ties or interests while the others, some of whom have been here as long as six months must get back, I suppose to make the world safe for democrats and prohibition. I have taken during the past year two pet aversions, one the Y.M.C.A. and the other the prohibitionists which speaks for itself. As to the latter I am, however, trusting to the care and forethought of my friends so that it will not be necessary to commit any crimes however venial they may be. The States are certainly going to the dogs but after things have settled down a bit we can all come back to France together and do as we want to.

I saw Mildred (Woodruff) for about five minutes while I was in Paris. She was very well and seemed to be enjoying herself immensely as is every one there just now.

There isn’t a great deal more to say just now so I will call things off for the present. Good bye with love
Paul

Letter written November 12, 1918

2008-11-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

The war is ended and just in time to let me stop as a soldier and not as what I became a couple of days ago, for then I was transferred from the line to the office of a G.H.Q. (general headquarters) colonel who is an authority on something and who had an idea I might be of some value to him. I had arrived from the front from where I last wrote you only a few days earlier and had not done much of anything when the end came. The way it came was quite remarkable and I suppose quite different from what anyone at home would imagine it would be like. We all knew that the German envoys had arrived and were trying to negotiate but peace has been so far from everyone’s mind for so long that it seemed absolutely incomprehensible that it would end. As soon as I got up yesterday morning tho, the rumor was all about that the armistice had been signed but there was nothing official; later it became more insistent until about 10: 30 it was finally announced and posted all over the city. The bells of the cathedral rang for a while, the children shouted a bit but it was very quiet and this is in a town that has been connected, and that intimately, with the war since it broke out. Among the older people there were more tears and hysterics than anything else, while the soldiers and people who had been actively in things couldn’t seem to realize it at all; they simply wandered aimlessly about, repeating “la guerre est fini, c’est la victoire.” Later in the day there was a band concert in the Place and things let down a little. All the national anthems of the Allies were played and the crowds which were large cheered a little but it was all very solemn. No one can seem to realize that the war is over and we have won. They know it but as yet they can’t feel it. I have heard that in some places there were real joyous affairs but for the most part it was as I told you. Too big an occasion for a frivolous celebration.

I suppose now that we will occupy some German territory for some time and then start coming home. When that will be heaven only knows for just now there is no making plans of any variety for certainly they will be all wrong. Personally, if I have to stay here any length of time what I am doing now would please me as much as anything for about all I have to do is to ride around the country in a marvelous automobile and look things over and then come back and pass out what some people are foolish enough to believe is expert advice. However I want really more than anything else to come home.

This is all now .

With love
Paul

Letter written October 26, 1918

2008-11-07T18:42:00.000-08:00

Dear Nannoo-:

I received your letter a few days ago and enjoyed it very much in spite of your comments at the end that was a “stupid scribble”; as a matter of fact I think that your letters contain more actual information than any I receive. I also received at about the same time a notification from Morgan Harjes (Paris office of the Morgan Bank –Ed.) that they were authorized to issue me a new letter of credit for 5,000 francs. You made no mention of it but I am sure that it must have been you who sent it to me and I want to thank you more than I can possibly tell you. I do not as a fact need it at all for I am never away from the front and consequently have little or no opportunity of spending anything. If this war keeps up long enough I shall certainly end up a monied man for even during the past year when I lost my complete outfit twice I managed to save nearly 1,500 Frs plus that which I did not draw of the letter of credit you gave me a year ago which is something around 3,500 Frs.

I wrote Mother a few days ago that I had at last managed to be promoted and now am a long-ranking 1st lieutenant with fair prospects of becoming a captain before many moons. However, the future is always uncertain but for the present I am very well satisfied.

Your remark that you did not know what organizations I belong to certainly was a surprise for I thought I had told you dozens of times. Just now I am adjutant for the 1st ammunition train which is part of the 1st field artillery brigade and that in turn is the artillery of the 1st division. You see I am first, at last, in everything, something if I remember correctly you always wanted me to be, tho perhaps this wasn’t quite what you had in mind. It is quite a comfort now that we are getting an army over here to realize that we were the first Americans here and the first to take on the Bosche for any sort of a fight and are now looked upon by the others as more or less veterans, tho getting to be veterans certainly was not all that it might have been.

As for me I am still just the same and not finding my duties as adjutant overly onerous. My office is separated from the (ammunition) train by several miles as I have to live fairly near the guns but equipped with half a dozen orderlies and messengers and a telephone and a splendid Hdqs. (headquarters) mess. I manage to make fairly good times of it tho the hours are uncertain to say the least. More than that I have an automobile and chauffeur to run around with when necessary so things are not altogether disagreeable. Were it not for the Dutch and the certain amount of uncertainty that they add to things, life would be one long pleasant dream.
Things in the war line tho are certainly looking better and more remarkable still is the effect on those engaged. When the first news began to come that we were beginning to go ahead (that was a long time ago) everyone seemed to take on new life. The most impossible things were accomplished in the most terrible conditions.Even the horses seemed to know that it was victory, and where they would have ordinarily dropped they seemed to pick up new life and carry on. Since then we have been going ahead steadily and almost continuously. It has been wonderful. We have lived in Bosche shelters, used any amount of Bosche material and even eatern Bosche food. I would not have missed it for anything tho heaven knows I would like to come home with a soft billet as an instructor for a while. How Nelson Jr. (apparently a friend or relative from Auburn – Ed.) managed it is certainly a mystery to me for good as he may be as an instructor of troops I don’t quite understand how he in one visit to the lines could qualify as a seasoned warrior with the experience of war to draw on. However, as I have often said the ways of the army are stranger indeed than the ways of women and someday I may wake up and find myself military attaché to the Republic of Liberia. This is a very long letter and in it I have not managed to say a great deal tho I have covered a lot of paper, but they say that old age and strange modes of living make people garrulous and perhaps I am suffering from both for I feel that I have in the past two years lived at least 100 years.

This is all now, Nannoo, but I want to thank you again and again for letters of both varieties.

With love,
Paul

Letter written October 17, 1918

2008-11-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

(Beneath date, a pencil notation by William Hills, Paul’s father: “This letter arrived the morning of Nov. 11, 1918, the day peace was announced. W.H.” )

Dear Mother -:

I am still on the front but with the new work I told you about it is not particularly unpleasant especially considering all that is going on. The Dutch are certainly beaten or at least beginning to be and the results are wonderful. Everyone is willing to and wants to give everything he has in him to keep it up and as you can imagine the work as in all advances is not easy. The weather has been vile and the roads and country a perfect sea of mud but somehow the thing is being managed tho the poor horses are suffering terribly.

I spend about six hours a day at a desk and about six more chasing around the country locating the ammunition that I have directed from my desk. However things are beginning to become a little more easy for me now and someday perhaps I will able to sleep 24 hours a day and know that everything is working OK as it should.

The promotions that were sent in at the same time that mine was are just beginning to materialize so perhaps it will not be a too long time before I begin to amount to something in the way of rank.

You wanted me to write you a letter describing just what I looked like. I don’t really believe that I can, especially considering the fact that I don’t believe that you ever saw anything that looks at all the way I do especially after a day’s or night’s work. About all there is to it is a trench coat with boots sticking out underneath, a gas mask on its chest and topped off by a tin hat covering one eye and half the face of what always has been underneath. Splash the whole variously with different colored mud and you have it or at least all that can be seen of it under ordinary circumstances.

Since I began to write this the long expected promotion did arrive and I am now a full blown 1st lieutenant with the assurance of the commanding officer that at the first possible opportunity I will go up for captain. It is really quite something for you to be proud of that, while others were getting theirs training or at home, etc., P. Hills nailed his on the front. I just happened to be figuring it out the other day that since there have been any American troops in France, there hasn’t been one single fight of any size that there have been any American troops in that I haven’t managed to be in on too.

(As to the foregoing paragraph, it was an abiding source of both pride and frustration to Paul Hills not only then but in future years that, while contemporaries in military service in World War I achieved higher rank in non-combat duty, his promotions and assignments were in the course of extended battlefront duty.)

In some ways, that is from the point of view of leaves, etc., it has been a decided disadvantage, but the experience has been worth anything even tho a little concentrated, and I doubt if anyone has had more advantages, if they may be called such, of seeing real downright war from the best side, which is none too pleasant, to the worst, which is that in all respects and any way you look at it.

This is all now so good bye
With love

Letter mailed October 10, 1918

2008-11-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

I am terribly sorry about not having written more lately but you have no idea how it has been. You have probably seen by the papers all that has been going on (the heavy fighting around Soissons). Well, as usual I haven’t managed to miss a single bit of it. Then I was sent to school and immediately sent back again with the result that I tore from pillar to post and upon returning found myself in the thick of it. I went (this is true but unsanitary) for one whole week without taking off my clothes and four days without even taking off my boots. The great part of it all was, tho, that after I was nearly dead and wished I was and wondered if I would last an hour more I found myself suddenly in a fine new job. To be exact I am now the regimental adjutant and having a great time with prospects of a fairly quick promotion and a very pleasant existence. The commanding officer is a corker and it was thru him that I landed the job, as he was about the first officer I knew in the army over here and I have seen more or less of him ever since. Lately he was put in command of our outfit and here I am. Well, so it goes and tomorrow morning I may wake up and find myself in jail.

Even with it all, tho, I am still pining for quiet and rest. There is no sign yet of any leave and I doubt if there ever will be any. On my hurried trip to school and back which consumed four days I spent one day in Paris and had the good fortune to see Mildred and take dinner with her. We absolutely gorged and then went to the Olympia (a legendary music hall in Paris -.Ed) for a while. The next day on the way to Nevers, I accumulated a new girl. Very homely, very funny and extremely interesting since before the break-up in that realm (the Russian revolution of 1917 -.Ed) she danced in the Imperial Russian ballet. She has taken me on a (illegible ) but due to the fact that I only saw her for four hours and probably never will see her again I fear greatly that nothing will ever come of the affair. Those were the only events worth of interest during the journey and I returned as I said before to the very thick of things where I still am. Somehow I just can’t seem to keep out of war no matter what happens. I have got a great deal more to tell you but just now have no time.

With love
Paul

Letter written September 30, 1918

2008-11-02T06:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

The mail still continues to be lacking and with the exception of the two cablegrams which I wrote you about I am without any news of you or in fact with the exception of a few papers of any news whatsoever of the world outside. We moved away from the front again a few days ago and are now in a pleasant but exceedingly rural rear area without a great deal to do but wait. I still have my company and really enjoy the work a great deal. There is more to do and more responsibility but it is good fun to have your own separate command and to see what you can do with it. Also my recommendation for promotion has gone to G.H.Q. so there is a reasonable chance perhaps after a few months it may come thru tho the affairs of the army are, as I have often said in a terrible semblance to the mills of the gods. People grow old and gray just waiting for some paper of great importance to go thru channels while a small order about the use of soap flies thru with amazing speed. However, due to the fact that the promotion of a mere sous lieutenant isn’t an affair that the fate of the nation depends upon there is some chance of its happening before I am due to have longevity pay.

You should see the place I am living just now. It is quite a splendid billet but its location is unique as it is in the back room of a café and to get to it I have to pass thru all the rooms of the establishment including the bedrooms of M. and Mme. And also that of the not unhandsome two barmaids. My nocturnal habits make, as you can well imagine, some situations that are a scream. The first time that my orderly came to call me he arrived, having run the gauntlet, a trembling wreck.

I am enclosing a little medal I picked up on a walk the other evening so I can vouch for its authenticity. This all now.

With love
Paul

Letter written August 21, 1918

2008-11-02T06:52:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

My hoped for raise arrived at last and tho the actual rank hasn’t pulled in yet, I am in command of a company and along with other privileges drawing a captain’s pay. When my advancement in actual rank will come heaven only knows since such things having to go to the States and back again take time but I am reasonably sure that I will get a 1st lieutenancy within a couple of months and a captaincy in the not terribly far off future, that is all barring accidents as any day I may make the necessary mistake and shoot the whole business to pot, but c’est la guerre and I am hoping and doing the best I can. Along with other things I inherited my own touring car and chauffeur which is a great relief. We are doing exactly the same work as ordinarily , that is leading rather a sundodging existence delivering ammunition to three batteries and so forth but happily on a less strenuous scale here than elsewhere since, as I told you this is a quiet part of the line and not a great deal of shooting is done.

I also have prospects of a leave, just when I don’t exactly know but I have prospects and they are fairly bright. If they come true I shall certainly go to Cannes and see Cousin Josephine. It will be quite the wrong time of year for Cannes but that is about as far away from the war as any place I can think of, and more than that I long for the flesh pots of Egypt, not, strange to relate, in the sense of a riotous time but more in that of quiet, lazy comfort. I am so sick of eating at messes and cafes that I could weep.

The other day I met Pell Foster, who was in my class at Princeton and in the club and also another boy called Charlie Latrobe whom I knew very well.We met in town and fortunately as I could get hold of the commanding officer we were able to have dinner together and talk for hours.

You see I am just full of good news and afraid to turn around for fear some of it will turn out to be only a pleasant dream. I imagine Mildred (Cousin Mildred Woodruff of Auburn) is in Normandy or Brittany just now. When I saw her she intended going there for her vacation. She has done, I gather, a great deal of work exceptionally well, as she is now the head of the service. Just what the name of that particular service is I never have been able to find out. This is about all now so good by

With love Paul

Letter written August 11, 1918

2008-11-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

Yesterday and today have been quite banner days. I had just begun to think that as far as I was concerned the mail service between Auburn N.Y. and the A.E.F. had been permanently discontinued when I received a letter from Nannoo and two telegrams from you. It was great of you to remember me on that day (August 6, his 24th birthday) for tho it was not quite as disheartening a birthday as I had a year ago, I was away from everyone and to say the least did not have a highly cheerful day

I told you in the last letter that we were holding a quiet sector. It continues as such and as a result we have very little to do. Day before yesterday I spent the afternoon in a fair-sized town near by. It was really quite a sight. The city itself is a beautiful old place. The day was not hot but very bright. At about five there was a band concert on the Place. All the allied nations seemed to be represented and the scene as you can well imagine was splendid. All the café terraces which gave out on the square were crowded with brilliant uniforms of all description and apparently all the lovely ladies of the town were present. I forgot to say that it was Sunday and consequently the crowd was extraordinarily large. Under the tunnel of trees which surrounded the open part of the square promenaded all the favored nations of the world. From the black, blue and silver of the chasseur and the blue and scarlet of the infantry officer to the long gown and turban of some Arabs who had drifted in from no where in particular. So it goes on and were it not for little times like that, real flashes of the extraordinary, the war would be quite unbearable. But fortunately there seems to be a sense of balance or proportion behind the whole thing and just about when you are ready to give up, something pleasant happens, you have a day or a few hours off or an extra good time for a few minutes and you are ready to carry on again for a while.

I hope Carroll (younger brother) gets into something good before he finishes and if possible goes to college as long as he possibly can before he comes over. Tell him again for me that there is no hurry in spite of the fact that the gov’t has seen fit to discard age limits for both officers and officers training camps. Also I am more than ever convinced that he would not like and isn’t particularly suited for the infantry.

Give my love to Papa and Day. Also how are the dogs – you have not told me anything of them for some time. This is all I have time for just now so good bye

With love, Paul

Letter written August 6, 1918

2008-11-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

I haven’t written you for nearly three weeks and I am very sorry about it but the this time it actually could not be helped. If I remember correctly at that time I was quietly installed in a farm and expecting quite a rest. But somehow or other I can’t keep away from the war and the next day we moved off to this last attack, that beginning July 18 of which you have probably read something by this time. Things went splendidly and although I never did so much work or went thru more it was well worth it all for it set the ball rolling and it hasn’t stopped yet and better than that we advanced. That is the first time we have ever advanced when I was along in the 15 months that I have been here. You really can’t imagine the satisfaction of moving into a territory which the Bosch had recently left and left in a hurry. We stayed in that affair for about a week and then came out with expectations of a little rest at least. The day we got out, however, I received orders to go to absolutely the other end of France to get some material. The trip was wonderful but needless to say not a great deal of rest. I saw some very wonderful country tho, and had, strange to relate, remarkably fine weather all the way. We were gone ten days and I came back yesterday to find the outfit again installed on the front, heaven be praised, tho a very quiet one. On the way back, I stopped for two hours in Paris or a little more and saw Mildred (Cousin Mildred Woodruff of Auburn, living and working in Paris) and had dinner with her. Anna, I think her name is, was there too and we had a perfectly great time just talking. I would have liked to stay longer but I had to leave early the next morning and my convoy was about ten miles out. I told her to write you which I hope she will.

I am beginning to be tremendously cheered up the way America is getting into this thing and there certainly seems to be ground at least for hope. At one time the outlook was certainly poor enough. The fine summer weather too helps. For certainly France in the summer is the most heavenly place I can think of. The mere thought tho, of another winter makes my shiver all over and turn blue. If ever this blooming war ends I am coming back here with all of you some May and stay until October. Then tho, we will go somewhere there is more heat and light.

This is about all now, Mother. If only we will stay in one place for a little while I may begin to get caught up on my writing.

With love
Paul

Letter written July 9, 1918

2008-11-02T06:45:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

I have at last left the front and I can’t say that I am sorry. It was a long, long seige and that on a sector which was to say the least not noted for its tranquility. Everything, however, went well with me and my affairs especially since I took up with the ammunition work with which I still am. The battery I was with before was over-officered and gave little chance for getting ahead, compared to which this outfit, while still the field artillery, is quite the opposite, and with another action or “show” like the last one I feel tolerably certain that I may get ahead a step. I was sorry as the deuce to leave the old outfit but I see them now whenever I want to, besides having the advantages which I wrote you before. Riding in an automobile and being, or rather trying to be, diplomatic with the French isn’t half bad sport especially considering the fact that I get to the very front line at least once a day and live in comfortable quarters and eat like a prince. The place we are in now is, thank heaven, out of the sound of the guns and last night I had the usual experience of not being able to sleep because of the lack of noise. I woke up about midnight and was really scared because of the lack of sound, no continual grind of wheels, no noise whatsoever of the artillery. Really it was weird. By the way, I forgot to tell you that the wonderful outfit I had in the spring is gone, gone without a trace. I imagine the Bosche have it and it makes me boil to think of some fat Heinie sporting around in my new clothes and boots. However, revenge is sweet and I live in hopes of doing some looting some day on my own hook.

I am sending Day in a little package a real Alpin beret and if I can find it a regulation cor de chasse to put on it. The cor is worn over the left eye and the beret pulled down over the right ear.

The families of chasseurs affect the beret and claim they have the sole right to the cor so Day can put herself in that number.

You would smile I think to see how we are living here, quartered in a perfectly wonderful chateau quite modernized – that is, bathrooms have been added. We have the mess in the big hall and the twenty of us sitting there at the long table surrounded by the ancestral paintings and silver make the darndest pictures of luxury you can imagine. It seems however a little too good to last. Things like that are anything but common in this war and I fear for our future. However we eat, drink and be merry while we can.

This about all now so good by with love Paul

Letter written July 1, 1918

2008-11-02T06:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

I have quite a little time just now with nothing to do but as luck will have it nothing at all to write to you about. Every single thing that I know about is exactly the same as it has been for the last two months and as you can well imagine, being here as long as we have, the monotony is getting to be rather dreadful.

I am sending you a photograph which a passing Frenchman took of the officers of the unit about a week ago. I am, if you are unable to recognize me, occupying the lower right corner, the facial expression being caused by the bright sun and not permanently put on by the horrors of war. Thank you very much for writing Jared (Ingersoll, an old friend from school and college –Ed.) for me. I received a letter from him a long time ago and answered it but that was the last. Have also had a couple of letters from Hunt Talmage, who is frantic because he went home and since that time he has been able neither to get into any sort of work on account of his eyes nor get back to France, having no excuse for coming. Adding worse to worse, his lady love is on this side which makes it very annoying from his point of view.

My work is still as it has been, going out at night with a convoy of trucks and delivering ammunition to the batteries, but now since things have quieted down a little we only go out about every two nights and in the rest of the time I censor letters of the company, of which since they are not too busy or tired there is a vast number. That does not sound hard but actually it is the most disagreeable task I have. First it is a perfectly horrible bore. Nine tenths of them say exactly the same thing, with varying mistakes of grammar. The other tenth vary from one or two actually clever ones, to all the tongues of Babel. More than that it takes just about three hours per day. (And he was also responsible for censoring his own letters. -.Ed)

The eternal Reg Windham (an acquaintance of Paul Hills and his family from before military service who coincidentally served with Paul in almost every unit, from the ambulance service to the same field artillery unit -.Ed) left yesterday on some sort of detached duty but things have happened so that I have turned up with him so much that it won’t be long, I am sure, before we both meet unexpectedly on the same work at some very out- of-the-way place.

This is about all there is now so good bye

With love
Paul

Letter written Sunday, June 23, 1918

2008-11-02T06:37:00.000-08:00

Dear Nannoo-:

Your letter with the clipping in it came a few days ago and interested me very much. The more I hear the more I become certain that when things are over and I manage to come that it will be moving to a strange country, and every one I ever knew the head of a rapidly growing family. Certainly the younger generation, judging from its start cannot be accused of race suicide.

As for myself things are going much as always. I told you all, I think, that I had been put in the ammunition train which occupies itself in bringing up shells, etc., to the batteries. The work is not as interesting as being at the battery proper and you do not have the satisfaction of actually shooting Dutchmen and believe me that is a real satisfaction. On the other hand, however, the life is vastly more pleasant. We live better, eat better and have quarters above ground, with the added distinct pleasure that you may make plans for 24 hours in advance without having always in the back of your head that condition “if I’m still here”. The work tho is entirely at night which, tho luckily, I have ceased to mind and simply consider it as a known fact that during certain hours it is dark and certain others light. Night and day as set periods to sleep and work have ceased to exist. And night by the way is the fashionable time at the front. You could stay in one place all day long and be lonely as anything but just as soon as it becomes dark and the balloons (observation balloons –Ed.) go down, things begin to come out and move around and the whole front, I mean that strip of country which the Bosch can see in the daylight becomes the most busy section of the world. Caissons, guns, men, horses, food and in fact supplies of every conceivable sort are going and coming and are everywhere. The immediate vicinity of the front is as different at midnight and noon as at 5th Avenue, only just the opposite.

There isn’t a great deal more to tell you now so I will stop. With love, Paul

Letter written June 14, 1918

2008-11-02T06:35:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

I started a letter yesterday but something or other interfered and when today I came to go on with it, it was such a stupid thing that I decided to begin another all over again. Really to know what to write is quite a problem. You have quite enough at home of the blood and thunder, far more indeed it seems than we who are in it, and to always write about one’s self never leads anywhere. But now first a bit of the other side. Last evening or rather yesterday afternoon, for it doesn’t get dark until about 10, I went up to one of the batteries of the regiment and managed to arrive just about as they were finishing dinner. The position was in a woods, not an American woods but a real French one with no bushes or low undergrowth and tall trees with no low branches – Howitzers have the advantage of being able to fire from such a place. The table was laid under what the French call a “tonelle” – (spelling questionable) about a hundred yards back of the guns near the officers’ dugout and there, as it was under the branches it was such as we would be proud to have at home. A wonderful old oak table with fine white and gold porcelain and cut glass looted from a nearby smashed chateau, I am sorry to say. The meal was in proportion. Four courses, two sorts of wine and port after. During the whole time I was there the guns were going, one shot a minute only, simply interdiction fire on a point where all it is necessary to do is to load and pull the string. Here, tho, nobody was in a hurry, nobody overworked and as you can imagine the life there was comfortable since the battery has been there three weeks and firing about 600 rounds a day and no shell has ever come anywhere near it. And with it all this is a sector that has the reputation of being one of the liveliest on the entire front. You see, even this war isn’t without its pleasant moments and pleasant work, for certainly to fire a battery all day is pleasant when you are not fired back at by Heinie from over the hill.

As for myself I am becoming more and more nocturnal in my habits. A day or so ago it occurred that I did not have to go out at night and had aspirations towards a real, normal night’s rest. I went to bed about ten but it was like going to bed in the middle of the morning and I stood about as much chance of sleeping. Strange how easily you become absolutely turned around. This about all now, Mother, so good bye. With love, Paul

Letter written June 4, 1918

2008-11-02T06:32:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother -:

Yesterday when I had begun to think that all the mail service between U.S. and France had been completely stopped I got about six letters from you and one from Nannoo and also some clippings from Papa. It was great to hear from you and get all the news from home.

Tyrant certainly seems to have disgraced himself for fair, but the people of Auburn give me an awful pain with all their picking and noise about it all. (Tyrant was one of two Great Danes the Hills family had at that time, and apparently committed some kind of serious offense. –Ed,) It seems just like some of the people you mentioned, tho I hardly expected it of the Clarks.

I supposed that Mildred W’s letter from Paris was a bit mystifying as to my movements but she really didn’t know herself exactly what I was up to. Now it doesn’t make any great difference. Due to the fact that I can speak French, when the division changed sectors, which it did about that time, I was sent ahead to arrange the billeting and had to pass through Paris on the trip. It was rather good fun and I particularly enjoyed the twenty-four hours I had there. I have about decided that this ability to speak French, tho, is a decided detriment to a military career. Everywhere I land I become sort of semi-official interpreter and am given all the odd strange jobs that involve the mysteries of the Gallic tongue. The result is that I am never at anything more than a short time and while I do a hundred and one odd jobs, never complete any large one and gain the merit attached thereto. Verily if ever I am transferred again I shall keep said knowledge under my hat and confine myself to my calling of shooting Bosche. I haven’t managed to land a leave yet and have no prospects. They are given again to those not on active service in the advanced zone of operations. That means that anyone with a soft pleasant post in the rear gets leave to rest him from the rigors of his work while the lucky individuals close up who live in holes, sleep about two hours a night and escape with their lives by a hair about twice a day (or don’t) are left there to enjoy themselves indefinitely. All that last description doesn’t apply to me for I have told you I think that I have splendid living quarters. However the leave arrangement makes me very ill.

This is all now – so good bye With love Paul

Letter written May 27, 1918

2008-11-02T06:30:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

I haven’t written lately simply because of he fact that if possible I have been a little more busy of late than before. I told you about my new work, well, it continues as before pleasantly but with very, very long hours. A couple of days ago, tho, it slacked up slightly and out of the ensuing twenty-four hours I managed to sleep 16 without stopping. Now, tho, I feel like a new person and am ready to begin again with a vengeance. It certainly is more pleasant to live a little behind the lines and to go up to them for work than it is to stay there continuously and live sort of a subterranean existence, coming up only at night.

We have a house left by the inhabitants, a one-story affair with three bedrooms and two sitting rooms.The late tenants left most of their worldly goods, as from everything I can gather they went in rather a hurry. As a result we have quite splendid china service, decanters, furniture, beds, etc.. With this outfit and our three orderlies we keep house very comfortably and tho perhaps it wouldn’t quite come up to your standards, it all does very well. By long practice I have become quite adept at domestic affairs and when I get home I shall certainly have to get a position of steward or housekeeper or purveyor of wines or something of that sort. For the last month that I was with the battery I acted as mess officer and had a great time. I would go to market in the nearest town, buy supplies and plan meals therewith, engage and discharge cooks and hear complaints from seven lieutenants and two captains who ate nevertheless with enjoyment what the board afforded. This war is certainly a liberal education but I am beginning to think that it is very nearly time the course ended and I got my degree. I am a little disappointed in W. (an old friend in Auburn) that he isn’t doing something in this war. It wouldn’t take a great deal of effort on his part to get into it and we can never have enough Docs. Perhaps being in it so deeply myself I have lost sympathy with the way the outsider feels but I can’t see anything that anyone should do but put himself into it. It isn’t money we need, it isn’t to such a great extent material, but it is men quickly and in quantities. Tell Day (sister) I got her letter and thank her very much and tell Papa and Nannoo that I will write them the first chance I get. With love, Paul

Letter written May 12, 1918

2008-11-02T06:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-
Have been at the front again now for nearly a week and consequently have had more to do than any one person has a right to attempt. This time, however, I am not on O.T. work but have a work which if things ever settle down a little will be quite pleasant and comfortable but not nearly, I am glad to say, as responsible. I am with the division munitions train. That is an automobile truck service and like most of the things I have ever been connected with a “fly by night”. We start out from where we live every day about 5 p.m., go to a munitions dump and deliver the shells, powder and such to the batteries. I suppose I got the job because I could speak a little French. As a matter of fact I might say I speak it well now and know a bit about road conditions, etc. My company consists of twenty trucks, a couple of motor cycles and a touring car in which with another I ride around, lead the procession and fight with the French munitions officers. It is only a temporary thing, however, and in a little time I suppose I will lose the luxury of a touring car and chauffeur and be back strafing Fritz with the high explosive again in the old style.

I am very glad Papa is getting better. You really have no idea how much his being sick upset me. Especially the letter he wrote me with his left hand.

If you get a chance, do all you can to see the Chasseurs Alpins that are in America now. (Paul’s ambulance unit, which served the French Army, was attached to the Chasseurs Alpins, an elite divison, until he entered the American Army at its arrival in France) They are still in my mind the best troops in the world and certainly some of the most striking looking, and what is more I am one and can wear a beret and the cor de chasse. Once a chasseur, always a chasseur.
This is all now. Good by with love Paul

Letter written April 27, 1918

2008-11-02T06:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-: I am really dreadfully ashamed and sorry about the way I have not been writing lately but it has been absolutely impossible. Just why I can’t tell you now but there has been no chance. Also I haven’t had any word from you for nearly a month but that has been for the same reason. I have been almost continuously on the move and when I was still, so far separated from things that the mail has had no chance to catch up to me.

I am now in a part of France I have never been in before and a very pretty and interesting one, particularly so now for it is really spring and the whole country is a mass of green fields and apple blossoms. The battery is just now resting but that isn’t at all as it sounds for rest means simply one grand clean up, clean out and adjustment, which keeps everyone more busy than they ever were at the front. I rather hope tho now we stay at it for a little while as I would like very much to write a few letters and see what I have left of my personal equipment.

I can’t understand your not having gotten my letters. I wrote you at least twice a week or more all of February and March. I have heard from Hunt (Talmage, a Princeton friend with whom he first entered the ambulance service in April, 1917) lately, that is comparatively lately. He went home for Xmas and somehow didn’t manage to come back. He gave up his position in the embassy hunting for a commission in the army and now being out of everything is very sore. If you get a chance, look him up in N.Y. as he could tell you some very interesting things and would be glad to. He is still at the Ritz. This is about all now. Good bye, With love, Paul

Letter written April 25, 1918

2008-11-02T06:20:00.000-08:00

Dear Papa-:

When I started to write this I had really no idea what to tell you about until I realized that at home you had very little real knowledge of exactly what sort of an outfit I was with or what it looked like or what we did and I think that would be as interesting to you as anything else. The battery itself, which is Batt. C of the 5th, consists of about 220 men, 200 horses and four guns . There are four lieutenants in the outfit and a captain who is our battery commander. The guns would interest you more than anything else for they are absolutely the highest development of heavy field artillery that exists. You can’t really imagine anything any more perfected than they are. They are of the howitzer type, that is short guns of about six-inch caliber. They can throw ninety-odd pounds of steel and explosive about nine miles and in order to get away from it when it lands you have to have over fifteen feet of solid cover over your head and sometimes that isn’t enough. By solid I mean concrete, railroad iron and logs. Consequently as you can well imagine we aren’t particularly popular with the Bosche especially considering that the guns can shoot from any place at any time and with eight horses attached are very mobile. We can when necessary fire six shots a minute out of each of our guns with an accuracy that is really terrible. This science of artillery is really one of the most fascinating and wonderful things that there is. You know just what you can do to a fraction and given the necessary information you can set out and when you are finished be sure that it is done. For example, with one of the guns of our battery, I could with an accurate map sit on the piazza at Garnston (another reference to the family’s summer cottage on Owasco Lake near Auburn, N.Y.) with the gun on the back lawn, figure for ten minutes, fire a certain number of shots and be absolutely certain that the railroad station in Moravia was completely destroyed without anyone having seen a shot land or even bothering to go and see where the station was to make sure. It is certain.

But enough technical information and war and guns for the present. It is spring here and perfectly beautiful and during the past year I have had so much of the former and am so fed up on it all that I don’t care too much about doing any more with it all than I can help. The thing that I would like more than anything else just now would be to sit down at home with the family and the dogs and be clean and comfortable and quiet for an indefinite period of time. And more than that, stay in one place for a little while. The first thing any one does after arriving any where over here now is to wonder where the next place you are going to will be and how long it will be before you go there. Usually it is about a week and you go to the place that seems least possible of all those that you have figured on and you are warned about ten minutes before you start.

That, as you can imagine is a bit trying on one’s good nature and a bit hard on the personal belongings. I have things scattered from one end of France to the other and if ever I get the chance it will take me at least a week to collect them, traveling all the time. Some people are in a worse fix than I for they don’t even know where theirs are.

This is about all I have time for now so good bye, and best luck for your recovery which I feel sure is quite complete by now. With love, Paul

Letter written April 13, 1918

2008-11-02T06:19:00.001-08:00

Dear Mother:-

I suppose that by this time you think that I am at least dead or a prisoner or something of that order but not at all for it is simply that I have not been able to write. I was sent away from the front on an official trip of a sort and have had till now absolutely no chance to write. During the course of my move I had about ten hours in Paris and managed to see Mildred Woodruff and have lunch with her. Paris, as you can well imagine, isn’t exactly gay but nevertheless I would certainly have liked to stay a week. Two months in a cold, lonely, and not too safe observation post may be in some ways an education in itself but it, if nothing else, brings out the desire for civilization, comfort and luxury. I will write more later but just now must stop. With love, Paul

Letter written April 7, 1918

2008-11-02T06:13:00.000-08:00

(For the duration of World War I, Paris was a train ride of only several hours from the battlefront, and Paul Hills made the trip to Paris several times on leave. On one of those brief trips, he met one of his many Auburn cousins, Mildred Woodruff, then living and working in Paris; she then wrote “Cousin Alice,” Paul’s mother, an account. It reads a little like scenes from a World War I novel, but it was a fact, not fiction, that the battlefront was somewhere between 50 and 75 miles from Paris for most of the war. Many American civilians were a part of the city’s international community from 1914 to 1918, and of course thousands of Allied military personnel were on duty there during the war. –Ed.)

Dear Cousin Alice (Paul’s Mother):

I almost hate to tell you that I have seen Paul again, but next best to seeing him yourself is hearing from someone who has, so I want to get a letter right off to you.

Friday morning early I was out in front waiting for a car when I saw a taxi stop in front of our apartment house and a good-looking American officer get out. Knowing that we are the only Americans living in this house I knew there was an even chance of its being someone for me, so I went back and to my surprise and delight discovered it was Paul – although I hardly recognized him at first with a mustache. He had arrived at midnight and was leaving again at five – had the 6 a.m. train not been taken off he would not have been able to stop over, so we thought we were in luck. He had come to ask me to have lunch with him and as I happened to be having a vacation I very promptly accepted. I met him at Brentano’s and he took me to the Café de Paris for lunch and I never had such a meal. He was all for going all through the long menu, but the waiter was forced to remind him that they were only allowed to serve three courses. However, by serving salad with the meat and forgetting to count the hors d’oeuvres, they managed to give us a marvelous lunch. Paul was so interesting that I almost forgot to eat. We did a bit of shopping together and he sent Cousin Will (Paul’s father, William – Ed.) a book, but we finally gave up trying to get anything for you, because we did not seem able to find just the right thing. He was so sweet and I am sure he did not think anything we saw was quite good enough for you. Next we took a taxi up to the Etoile and then walked almost the entire length of the Champs Elysees, just plain taking in the sights. We ended up by sitting outside a café – always an amusing pastime. We ran across a Buffalo boy who had been in Section 5 with Paul, (Section 5 was the ambulance unit attached to the French Army in which Paul Hills served before the U.S. troops reached France in 1917. –Ed.) so he joined us and I never heard more interesting, thrilling conversation. Paul had his orderly with him and I only regretted not getting a look at him. It was such fun walking with him and seeing all the exchange of salutes. I can assure you that I was pretty proud of my handsome young cousin. He looked and seemed very well, but we agree that we would be pretty glad to have this hideous war over and to get home. I don’t think any of us who are over here will ever again complain of Auburn being too quiet.

I am so sorry that Cousin Will (Paul’s father – Ed.) has been ill and glad to hear he is so much better. What a winter it has been!

Paris is very hectic these days, but tremendously thrilling as you can imagine.

My love to you both- Always affectionately, Mildred Woodruff

Letter written March 29, 1918

2008-11-02T06:10:00.000-08:00

Dear Papa-:

I was tremendously sorry to hear that you had been sick and hope by the time that you get this you will be well enough to feel as tho you had never had anything the matter with you.

As for me I am doing exactly the same thing now as I started in on about the first of February. As you can well imagine I am just about fed up with observation and looking forward to nothing as much as a change. No matter what variety. My work I suppose is as interesting as any other and I hope is doing as much for the country. However eight hours of work and then eight hours of rest day after day for two months with most days pretty much alike is bound to get a bit tiresome. What some writer said about modern war was the truest and about the most correct definition I have ever heard. He said that modern war was damn dirty, damn dull and damn dangerous. There are changes, however, and it is those that keep things from getting overpowering. This afternoon for example at the beginning it was clear. We saw a crowd of Bosche come out of the woods about nine kilometers off with a wagon and start to unload a lot of material. We located them, reported them in and a battery started in on them. The first shots weren’t very close and gave them time to get away. You should have seen those Dutchmen scatter. I don’t believe we hit any but at least we discouraged their architectural efforts for the day. That is just one of the things we do, although our main task is spotting and helping put our guns on German batteries that are shooting at us. There is really a great deal of satisfaction in catching a battery in action, directing the old heavies until they land right on it and then see it suddenly cease firing. You really feel as tho you had done something. It is a great deal as tho the guns were at Garnston (the Hills summer cottage on the west shore of Owasco Lake near Auburn –Ed.) behind the hill and I was on top of the hill with a telephone to you, telling you how your shots were landing on Scipio Center or Woods Pond (small communities several miles distant –Ed.) Quite a bit cold blooded and distant but when things get all tuned up and working perfectly and you can move your shots around just as tho you were there yourself it doesn’t seem that way at all. Then there are other times too when Fritzy gets angry at something and heaves over something like a garbage can full of Melinite. It comes at you like a train of cars, blows up like a thunderstorm and completely changes the topography of about a half acre of ground. You sit still and hope and wonder where the next one is going to land. Those times aren’t nearly as nice or interesting but it’s all in the day’s work.

It is great of you to keep sending me the newspaper clippings and they really make me feel as tho I was not quite as far away as I really am. This is all now, good bye, hoping you are better. With love, Paul

Letter written March 25, 1918

2008-11-02T06:04:00.000-08:00

Dear Mother-:

Well, I have finally acquired the long lost and much anticipated Xmas boxes and they are wonderful. They came yesterday afternoon and if my system ever recovers from the shock I gave it there is hope that I will get thru the war. The fruit cake like all good things do must have improved with age for it was remarkably good and didn’t seem stale at all. (Paul changes to pencil at this point)The ink seems to have given out hence the change in technique. The woolen things too were great and in spite of the fact that summer is nearly here will come in very nicely for I haven’t worn anything cotton in so long , not even sheets by the way, that I can’t imagine what it would feel like. Those little sweaters too of which I now have four are one of the best inventions produced by the war, doing duty for undershirts, sleeping garments or just extra warmth. Thank Mrs. Clark too very much for her little addition. I haven’t managed to eat them yet but am sure that they will be fine. It was great of her to remember me. The last two days have not only been banner ones in every way in that my long-lost uniform which I had thought gone for good came and although I had already bought another it will be welcome and I can be a “jeune officier tres pimpant” (very natty young officer- Ed.) This afternoon I took a bicycle ride to see some people I know – while I was off duty. The weather was perfect and it certainly seems as tho spring had really arrived for some of the little bushes are beginning to have leaves and the grass is quite green everywhere. We are all just now tremendously excited over the Bosche attack on the English and everybody is as anxious for news as tho they were not in war at all. If only they can really give the Dutch a good rub this time it seems to me that it must be if not the end at least some where near it. The whole war when you look at it from a sane, cool point of view is hard to believe. The forces of the whole world all entered on one end – destruction – and as a matter of fact doing a fair job of it. Heavens what a terrific inextricable mess the whole world is in. This is all now - Good bye With love Paul

Letter written March 24, 1918

2008-06-30T18:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Well here I am as usual in my O.P. (observation post) doing the same as I have done every day since I arrived while outside it is a beautiful Palm Sunday, as warm and bright as any one could possibly wish for and for a wonder with very little war going on. For quite a long time you could sit here and not even be persuaded that there is a war and a very terrible one going on. Then from one side or the other comes a burst of sound that is for all the world like a boiler factory. The shells that have been fired pass by with that uncouth sucking shrieking whistle that they make and then everyingis quiet again.

When I said I would probably have my Xmas boxes for Easter I was nearer the truth than I had any idea of. For yesterday they arrived in the regiment at the horse lines and now all I have to do is to send someone to go and get them for me. The mills of the gods certainly are slow. As for the uniform, I have given that up as a bad job and bought another one which I can just about wear out by the time the first one gets here. When I think of the civilian clothes I have left at home it rather makes me smile and I imagine that if they are of any use to anybody they had better be used up since by the time this war is over they will either be ruined by age or so out of date that they will be done.

I have gotten letters lately from the most surprising people. One from Kit Hunt andthen one from Emily Avery (friends from Auburn) and from a couple of boys I hardly knew at college. I wonder if it is whether they have just realized I am gone or just begun to miss me. I flatter myself it is the latter but rather think it is the former. Good bye. Paul

Letter dated March 24, 1918

2008-06-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Nannoo (Grandmother Woodruff)-:

(Ed: Paul begins this letter with a long, apologetic explanation to his grandmother of how his personal financial affairs had become entangled and would be rectified at the first opportunity, before returning to report on life at the front)

I am still doing just what I have been for the last months and a half – observation work. I sit up in my airy perch and in the day time try to plot out the Bosche in his evil doings and give directions how to shoot him and at night do the same thing with the addition of watching for rocket signals which appear in every conceivable color and shape. My mania for fireworks is gradually being satisfied. You should hear the sector when it really gets fully going. Imagine ten thousand gigantic iron horses galloping wild and loose over the country and you have some idea of what it is like at least that is the only thing it ever seems like to me. The guns seem to just trample and trample and bellow and snort. And the funny part of it all is that to set the whole thing going all that is necessary is to lift one of those silly little French telephones from its hook and say about three words.This is about all now, Nannoo. I am sorry as the very deuce about that money business and will do everything I can to make it right as soon as I can.
Good bye With love, Paul

Letter dated March 19, 1918

2008-06-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Nannoo (Grandmother Caroline Beardsley Woodruff)-:

A perfectly great package of sox came from you day before yesterday and I want to thank you ever so much for them. They came in very nicely as I have been separated from the world without, so to speak, for over six weeks and without my heavy baggage was beginning to get rather short on things to wear generally.

As Mother has probably told you I have been at the front now for six weeks and over, after leaving school and although life here is never what might be termed enjoyable I imagine that I am making out with it all in an as agreeable style as is possible. My work is forward observation for the artillery which is particularly interesting if for no other reason from the fact that you see everything that is going on and have a hand in it all and more than that what you do see has a great deal to do with what does go on. Happily enough too spring seems to have come to stay and the weather during the last two weeks has been wonderful, quite warm and clear and dry. We have started to make a garden on top of our dugout – it seems queer, doesn’t it, that such things should amuse people whose present object in life is destruction. However it does and although some morning we will go to look for our garden and it won’t be there, it is fun making it in the quieter times.

Hearing about Papa’s being sick really upset me quite a bit and although I suppose he will be well again soon it gave me quite a turn being so absolutely separated and not really knowing within a month just what was happening at home.

The dogs must be perfectly great now. Mother sent me a picture of them which came yesterday and it certainly seems as tho Tar Baby had outgrown all his children’s ailments for he appears to be quite as large and upstanding now as Tyrant.

There isn’t a great deal more to say now, Nannoo, and besides it is getting close to four o’clock in the morning when my turn to go to bed comes so good bye
With love, Paul

Letter dated March 17, 1918

2008-06-30T18:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Your two letters telling about Papa’s being sick came yesterday and the day before and upset me more than I can tell you. It doesn’t seem right at all in the order of things that he, always so strong, active and healthy should for no obvious reason be suddenly made temporarily an invalid. Here it is rather different and a day does not pass but that some strong man out of a perfectly clear sky is struck down and becomes suddenly simply someone that has been this or that and may be this or that when once again in the future he is on his feet. However, to have anyone in a place of peace and quiet ill seems somehow not at all fair and I can’t reconcile myself to it at all.

I am still just where I landed at the front up in my airy perch plotting out and trying to figure just what the Bosche is doing. By now tho as you can well imagine I am quite fed up with it and not a little bored. Spring seems to have fairly arrived and the weather the last week has been beautiful, quite warm and with wonderfully clear sunshiny days. Therefore I am getting less keen about staying in one place from which I only get away for two hours every other day. My leave which is due now for over a month seems to have been put off indefinitely so perhaps I may instead of going to Cannes as I had planned in the spring, it will be summer at least before I get there which is a time not so pleasant from everything I can gather.

My French is steadily getting better, I think, for I am still eating and living with a crowd of French and enjoying it as much as anything. I have dreams in French now very nearly as much as I do in English which seems to be quite an advance.

You wrote me that the coin of the realm is rather scarce at home. If you need it I can manage to send you fifty or seventy-five dollars a month for I am in the situation as long as I am at the front of not being able to spend, try as I may, the amount I get. It is the first time in my life that such a thing has happened and is certainly a unique sensation. I also the other day or rather quite a while ago spent the money I was going to send Carroll for Xmas on insuring my life in his favor for $10,000 which should anything happen I figured would help out not a little, especially since he will probably be in college then if the war doesn’t last for twenty more years.

You weren’t right in your guess about my being at (Ed: place name illegible) but tell Mr. Fougerey that I already have had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with the wine of that country.

A perfectly great package of sox came from Nannoo the other day and they were certainly welcome as I had just about run out here, having been separated from my heavy baggage for over a month. Well, this all now
Good bye. With love, Paul

Letter dated March 1, 1918

2008-06-26T07:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother:

I suppose I haven’t been much lately on the correspondence but the fact is that I haven’t at present even enough time to wash and shave let alone write letters. I am still on the same work I have been that I wrote you about that is observation but there have been a lot of changes in the men and with it all quite a lot to do so the result is that about eighteen hours a day is my average and in the remaining six I sleep and eat. It is a great life, tho in the present weather conditions, chiefly mud, rain and snow all I can do is to wish it were all over and I could come home. Shooting Bosche may be good sport in fine weather, but when you have looked out into a night as black as a hat for about four hours with the wind howling about a gale and a mixture of snow and rain in the air, all the time waiting for something to happen that didn’t happen, war loses its romance with a sickly thud, and I can’t help thinking of the people who are at home in comfortable barracks, etc. And crazy to get to France to fight.

I have one thing I am glad about, tho. I am not forgetting my French and in fact am learning more all the time. The other observation officer and myself are taking our meals and sleeping in the same dugout with the French observers who are next to us and the result is wonderful, as when we eat we eat very well, and the abri is very comfortable comparatively speaking.

How is Auburn’s crop of brides and babies coming on? I dreamed not long ago that I came back and found that the whole town was made up of nothing but orange blossoms, wedding breakfasts and baby carriages all turned out with the most surprising speed. This is about all for now for I have got to work as usual, so good bye with love, Paul

Letter dated February 22, 1918

2008-06-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

The last letter I write you was I am frank to admit rather vague for the reason that I hadn’t the slightest idea what I could say and as a result sort of talked around without saying anything. Now, however, I find I can tell you a few things.
We are again at the front and as I told you, having acquitted myself at school not perhaps excellently, but at least satisfactorily I have a new job. I came directly here from school and started work immediately finding everyone tremendously busy. You can see by the papers about where our sector is and at present I am somewhere on that line. Well, to tell you what I am doing: My present work is observation. I spend twelve of every twenty-four hours sitting up in a little observatory, that looks from the outside exactly like what it isn’t, and surrounded with every variety of telescope and with a telephone control that would be the credit of a small town. I plot the destruction of the Bosche. For helpers I have an observer or two,and a couple of telephone operators. There is another lieutenant who does the same thing and has the same staff for the other twelve hours. As a matter of fact we alternate every eight hours so that no one will have either continuous day or night work. However, as we had sort of a Cox and Box existence, each only seeing the other at the end or beginning of our work, you couldn’t say we were exactly clubby. I eat and sleep in a remarkable series of quite palatial dugouts underneath and am as a whole quite enjoying myself. There is certainly a real satisfaction in finding Fritz up to something, finding out just what and where it is and then giving the instructions necessary for blowing him up. That is on lively days, tho. On quiet ones I haven’t a great deal to do but just keep looking and keep other people looking as I am now while I am writing this which I am managing to do on the telephone bench with a charcoal brazier underneath my chair to keep away the chills of a dank Washington’s birthday morning. Writing on fete days seems just now to be my forte for the last letter I turned out if I remember correctly was produced at about the same hour on Valentine day morning.Pretty soon now I will eat my breakfast cold and consisting of almost anything I can find and go to bed. I usually when I am on duty at this hour manage to get up for dejeuner which is quite the event and what is more the big meal of the day. By the way it seems to be true in the American as well as the French army that the nearer the front, the better the food for we are really living quite well and know not the hardships of meatless and wheatless days, moreover since every day is a bathless one we don’t have the hardship of those.

By the way, when you were at Wells did you ever happen to have known a woman by the name of Morgan who married a Mr. Stanton. At (artillery) school I met a boy of that name who on learning my habitat said his mother was from Aurora and went to Wells. By the bye their present home is in Cleveland.

All sorts of interesting people are turning up. Tell Papa that I have meant to tell him for a long time that there is in the regiment an Edward E. Hills from San Francisco who is a descendant of the Joseph Hills side.
Must stop now. With love, Paul

Letter dated February 14, 1918

2008-06-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -:

I hope you will forgive the form of this letter and I won’t even go as far as making any rash statements as regards the substance making up for the form. Well, school is over and in some way I am not a little glad. I think I got a lot out of it but living conditions there weren’t all that they might be and the food not particularly favorable. It might have in some places been termed plain but wholesome, at best. More than that tho, I am glad to be back with the regiment. There is quite a lot in being able to come back to one’s old orderly and be with the same men and officers again. As a result of my school I have a new role to fill and hence the start of this letter, for it is practically all night work and just now it is very nearly four o’clock on a misty Valentine’s day morning, and I look and feel just like one of Bairnsfather’s pictures. (Bruce Bairnsfather, who served in the British forces, created the classic cartoons of men in the trenches in World War I, somehow making humorous scenes in the midst of the desolation --Ed.)

I got a whole lot of mail today from you. A letter written on your birthday and another Jan. 22, a letter from Nannoo and a Xmas card. Also Papa sent me al lot of clippings about this great war chest business.

It is great of you to tell me so much about the dogs (great danes -- Ed). They must be wonderful and I would about sell my soul to have one of them with me and try as I may I can’t seem to find any dog here I want.

I am glad you liked the picture I sent you for it is one I have liked ever since the first time I saw it and it is also of the “chasseurs” which still are in my mind the best troops I have ever seen and ever hope to.

This all now. With love, Paul

Letter dated February 4, 1918

2008-06-12T19:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

I haven’t been much on the writing lately but this school life if nothing else occupies one’s time and in strenuousness is up to anything I have ever encountered. From physical drill in the dawning till the end of studies at night we are pretty well on the qui vive with very little time to do much of anything else.

Lately too we have been doing a great deal of firing which necessitates wandering all over the landscape for observation. However there isn’t a great deal more of it and after, only the Good Lord and the high command of the armies know what will become of us and unfortunately both of them are particularly chary with their information.

I am sending you in this a picture which I had taken for my identification cards. It isn’t good but may serve to give you some idea how the trials and tribulations of the great war have somehow not managed to change me a great deal.

I never got my picture as a “diable bleu” (blue devil, member of the French army’s Chasseurs Alpins division--Ed.) but some time in the shadowy future if I ever manage to get to Paris again which I doubt, will certainly have one snapped as I still have my regimentals.

I have finally decided that the army is exactly like the mills of the gods. “Slow but exceeding fine” You remember that I wrote you I had lost a uniform overcoat and all my Xmas boxes had never arrived. Well, the overcoat arrived the other day and I have located the boxes . It will take at least a month to get them but they will be nice for Easter. The uniform is still among the missing but I haven’t the slightest idea but that some day it will turn up perhaps before the war is over.

Today too I got a letter from you dated Dec. 10, and a lot of clippings from Papa. It was great of him to send me them and take all the trouble for they were very interesting to me.

Auburn’s crop of war babies and brides certainly beats anything I ever heard of. I only regret that I am not home. I might perhaps be made a godfather or something to some of my friends’ offspring and have the privilege of donating silver spoons and porringers for the rest of my natural life. Were I home tho I am afraid that perhaps the present demand might triumph over the Hills boys hard luck and I should be snapped up. Carroll had better watch his step very carefully.

I had a letter from Will Shoen today. (Shoen and Paul were close friends and on the hockey team at Princeton -- Ed.) He is in France and I hope some day to be able to see him. It really gives you quite a lot of pleasure to know that your friends are beginning to arrive. I have met several Princeton and St. Paul’s people but none of my real friends and it certainly will be great to see some of them again. There isn’t a great deal more now so good bye, with love, Paul

Letter dated January 21, 1918

2008-06-12T18:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother –

I am still at school and quite enjoying life due chiefly to a wonderful break in the weather. For over a week now it has been warm and the last few days without any snow you would certainly say spring had come. The climate here has the advantage of being if nothing else even. It was cold for exactly one month with but one break of one day. Never above freezing and never horribly cold but just even winter.

Your two Xmas letters came Saturday and I can’t tell you how much I really liked them, especially yours. The description of everything you did was great and I could almost think for the minute I was back again home. Christmas here as I told you was the worst day I ever expect to spend in my life and to know that things went on home as usual and that some where things weren’t all upset was quite a relief. The letter from everybody else at home too that was at the party was fine and very good of them to think of me. I shall certainly answer them all sometime or rather if not all a few at any rate.

My only regret is that up to the present none of the Christmas packages have arrived and I am beginning to give up hope of ever seeing any of them. Also a new uniform and an overcoat which I bought and paid for in Paris have become lost somewhere and my wardrobe and appearance are suffering accordingly. Someday perhaps if I wait long enough everything will turn up. I have become quite a fatalist in that line. If you wait long enough everything turns out all right. If you have a bad day the next one or someday soon will be a good one again and things will go the way they ought to. The wait, however, is often not only aggravating but uncomfortable.

I think I told you that the orders had arrived giving everyone seven days leave every four months. When my turn comes I shall certainly go to Cannes tho perhaps Cousin Josephine may then see it another way if she has a house full of crocked up Americans. There isn’t a great deal more to tell you just now but I will write you again quickly. With love, Paul

Letter dated January 11, 1918

2008-06-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother –

I haven’t yet broken my record and have yet to remain one place more than two weeks. You will be glad to hear, and I am rather glad myself, that I have been finally sent to school. Practically all the old officers were taken away from the regiment and sent to school to specialize in one branch or another of the finer points of artillery while the officers just over from America will take their places until after the course is ended, which will be quite a little time from now at least tho just how long I don’t know.

We live at the school in a group of little wooden huts on the grounds of the ruined chateau. We are about six in a hut and have a stove which while it is running keeps the temperature at least above 0 but the moment it goes out everything freezes solid. Compared to my last quarters it is not luxurious and I particularly miss my orderly whom I had to leave behind. However the work is much easier than it was with the regiment so there are some compensations. Just before I left we had maneuvers for several days in the snow and I nearly froze to death. That however was an improvement on the last day when we started at 4:30 a.m. and did not get back till after dark and for the whole time it did not stop raining for one single second. Several of the horses got pneumonia but luckily only a couple of the men. C’est la guerre tho and now the maneuvers are over.

You would think from this paper (American Y.M.C.A. stationery) that I was really doing something but the Y.M.C.A. is the only really warm place in town and in that way alone does any amount of good.

This is about all now but I will write some more tomorrow.
Good bye with love, Paul

Letter dated January 3, 1918

2008-06-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Nannoo (grandmother--Ed):

I have been very poor about writing lately but busy hasn’t been the word. I never in my life remember having had so much to do in such a limited time. We have been undergoing what is known as intensive training, which is all that the word implies and more too. From 6:30 a.m. when we get out until anytime after 9 p.m. when we finally get back to our quarters we haven’t one minute to even turn around let alone time to attend to our personal affairs. I understand that it will be over the 15th however, which is some consolation tho what they will do with us after that date heaven only knows. Your letter came Xmas day with the draft in it and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. You were perfectly great to send it to me, and it with what Mother sent me constitutes my Christmas for none of the packages ever managed to get thru, tho undoubtedly they will in the end. Everything here seems to come to him who waits provided only that he keeps above ground long enough to wait for that much anticipated moment. The sweater which you sent me too is wonderful. I wear it any time I am indoors as sort of a house coat and it fills the purpose to perfection. For as you know the winter heating facilities of French country houses according to our standards leave much to be desired.

I have up to now drawn my pay twice and am beginning to feel that I am quite a capitalist for it gives me much more than I need to live on and the balance I put in the bank. As I wrote Mother the other day, I managed to get a couple of days off and got to Paris. I saw Mildred Woodruff and had quite a visit with her, and besides that managed to get a few Xmas presents. I sent you two posters of the war which tho they may be a little lurid for your house I think are rather attractive or if not that perhaps at least interesting.

The part of France we are now in is one I don’t believe you have ever been in for it is quite out of the way and if nothing else wild, barren, cold and not particularly interesting but the amount of work we have to do keeps the mind off anything not concerned directly with the subject at hand. Whether that is fortunate or not I haven’t yet figured out but it has its advantages. This is about all there is to say now or rather all I have time for so good bye. With love, Paul

Letter dated December 29, 1917

2008-06-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -:

I haven’t written much lately simply because I haven’t been able to. I have been in the last two weeks transferred three times and besides that we have been going thru what is known as intensive training which doesn’t half describe just how intensive it is. You get up at 5, are on the road by 6:30, do not get back some times till 8:30. Then have critiques by the commanding officer and rest of the night you have to eat supper, sleep and eat breakfast. Christmas day I did have off but I couldn’t write then. Low wasn’t the word for the way I felt. I wanted to get off by myself and just do nothing. I don’t believe I was ever so close to being downright homesick in my life. I also got on that day five letters from you, Day (his younger sister – Ed.) and Nannoo ( grandmother –Ed) all written on or about Thanksgiving day. It was wonderful of you to send me the check and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all you are doing for me.

Christmas here reminded me of nothing so much as that little poem by Kipling which ends “Another mocking Christmas past.” It wasn’t another and I hope there never will be another, but I think I crammed enough sensations into that one to last me some time.

Last Sunday I got Sunday leave and managed by traveling for two nights to spend it in Paris. I saw Mildred Woodruff and took her to tea. I also bought some Christmas presents and spent all my spare moments in a hot bath which may not be good for the constitution but certainly cheers up the inner man.

I sent Nannoo some more war posters such as I sent you a time ago. To you I sent a picture which I had been admiring ever since I first saw it about six months ago and due to the expense of which will have to do as a present to both you and Papa. I know he will like it, tho for you it may be a little militaristic. To Day I sent a little arrangement for her desk and to Carroll (brother –Ed) since I could find nothing sendable that he would like a simple check.

The marriage epidemic in Auburn certainly is the most screaming thing I ever heard of in my life and my frank advice to Carroll is to get somebody and settle down right off or he certainly will be left, while myself I have already put down as a hopeless bachelor with the only hope being to catch some one here or come home and be content with being my friends’ children’s “Uncle Paul” the rest of my life.

The Christmas books which you sent me and which I am wild to see haven’t arrived yet but “c’est la guerre” and perhaps if I stay long enough in one place they may eventually find me. Most other things have, tho some of them have been as much as five months in doing it, like the Brainard cigarettes which if I remember rightly started off in July and which I received exactly a week ago. The box is still half full in front of me so you can see that things ordinarily do come out all right tho some times it takes a terrifically long time.

Your cable sent Xmas came yesterday and I only wish I could have sent you one too but the lines for all greetings were closed for us. It cheered me up quite a lot and I appreciate it more than I can tell you. I wrote Morgan Harjes (the volunteer ambulance service attached to the French army in which Paul served before the arrival of American forces) to telegraph you at the first opportunity.

Your list of questions too I filled out and mailed to you today and hope they give you the required information. This is about all there is to say now or rather all that I have time to say. Good by. Lots of love, Paul.

(Those questions, a typewritten list, referred to in the last lines above, and Paul’s handwritten, mostly one-word replies, here in italics: --Ed)

Is Hunt (Talmage, Princeton friend with whom Paul Hills joined the Morgan Harjes ambulance service in April, 1917) with you? No

Has he returned to America? No. Is in legation

Did you receive cable sent you on our birthday? Yes

Have you received cigars sent by Mildred? Two days ago

Have you received sweater and socks sent by Alice Beardsley? Yes

Have you ever received cigarettes sent by Mrs. Brainard? Yes

Did you receive sweater and wristlets sent last August? Yes

How many times did you receive tobacco from Benson & Hedges from London? Once

Did you receive cigarettes sent by us for your birthday sent from here last of July? Yes

Is there any chance of your being sent to America in three or four months? Not a great deal now

Have you a moustache? No

Are you thin? No

Are you fat? No

Do you want any food sent you? No

Any sweet chocolate? No

Any warm clothes? No

Any underwear? No

Are you with any friends? Not old friends

Are the officers French or American? American

Are the officers a fine lot of men? Yes

How often do you get a furlough? Never a long one

Do you speak much French? No

Are the commands given in French? No

Did you receive cable sent you by Papa when we knew of your Commission? Yes

Letter dated December 9, 1917

2008-06-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -:

I have moved again and am I am glad to say now in a more comfortable place. I was transferred to the battalion staff and am now learning all about communications to and from artillery of every known form. It is a good job tho I imagine one that every one in the regiment finds fault with and has the added advantage of being if anything safer than being with the batteries themselves.

The army regulations, however, require that every officer make out a will so if you receive any notification of same don’t think that I am in any new danger or beginning to think I am. It is simply a rule. I made Carroll the beneficiary since all it is for is the personal effects I have with me at the time and six months pay.

I think the packages you have sent me must have arrived in France as I have had two notifications from Morgan Harjes of packages and have told them to forward them. It was great of you to send me the things and I can’t thank you enough for it must have been a fearful bother getting them off let alone that of getting the things together. Thank you all ever so much again and again. I only hope I get them for Christmas for the army I have discovered is like in one respect the mills of the gods; as to its fineness I haven’t yet determined but I am hoping for the best.

There is something funny I have never remembered to tell you. You don’t of course remember Reggie Windham. Well, I knew him years ago when we were at Swampscott. Then I knew him again at Manlius. Then he was at St. Paul’s with me tho a couple of classes above. Then he came to Auburn for a house party of Elizabeth’s. Well, the first person I met in Paris in the ambulance was Reg. He went out tho with another section and I lost him for six months. Then I met him again when we were taking our exams for the artillery. When finally I was assigned to a regiment, who is the first person I meet again but Reg, big as life and twice as natural, and now to cap the climax when I am transferred here who turns up directly after me but Reg. Isn’t that the strangest string of coincidence you ever heard of.

I received some cigarettes two days ago from Carolyn and have written her it was great of her to send them and to make it better they were perfectly wonderful cigarettes. I don’t exactly see why she sent them to me except that you had had her to dinner and made a wonderful hit (she couldn’t pay you enough compliments) But nevertheless it was wonderful of her and I give you a great deal of the credit. This is a rotten letter for I can’t seem to concentrate and write at all tonight but I will try to do better the next chance I get which will be soon for my new job is one of the gentleman’s type with short hours and late rising. This is all now. Goodbye with love, Paul

Letter dated November 26, 1917

2008-06-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -:
Again we have changed places and now are in a part of France the most miserable imaginable. There are absolutely no large towns and the country is bleak and absolutely desolate with great forests and great open places where nothing grows. Worse than that heaven only knows how long we are going to be here.

The only good thing I have been able to discover was that last night when we arrived after a three days march I found here waiting for me fourteen letters from home. It was wonderful as they were the first news I had had from home or from anywhere for that matter ever since I became a member of the American Expeditionary Force. I have been what one might term isolated, arriving as it were at an opportune or rather an inopportune moment as it happened.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed the letters. I sorted them all out according to their dates and have been ever since yesterday evening when they came till now which is the evening in reading them At first when I began I was worried that you had not heard from me but towards the end it seemed as tho a number of my letters had eventually arrived. I rather missed out on my system of numbering but I will try to begin it again now that I am settled down for a little time. It has worked wonderfully with your letters. By the way, one of your letters came that was dated Aug. 11 with a picture of the two Danes (dogs –Ed.) on the lawn which was very good.

I wrote you in one letter that I got the telegram you sent me on my birthday but evidently that letter never did arrive. It was great of you to send it and also the cables congratulating me on my commission which came yesterday with the other things.

The little sweater which you sent me is the must useful thing I have. The American uniform is too tight to get any heavy clothes underneath and that is just the thing as it is warm and takes up very little space. I haven’t yet put the hood or the wristlets into operation but I imagine that as it gets colder they will be just the thing.

I wish you could see the place I am living now; you certainly would smile. The town as I told you is practically nothing and needless to say the dwellings correspond. Another lieutenant and myself live in a large stone house the sole occupant of which is a woman eighty-five years old with a face like a withered apple. We have a huge bedroom with feather beds that you sink out of sight into but it is too cold to stay in and the life of the place centers in the kitchen.To look about the kitchen no one in the world could be made to believe that he was alive in the A.D. 1917. There is no stove. One side of the whole room is a huge fireplace with pots and things hanging down and a little fire in one corner. Right on top of the fire in the fireplace sits the old woman who I am sure is a witch. She certainly looks the part and is continually fooling with herbs and making messes in a big black pot and swearing perfectly vilely. She is honored to death to have Americans in her house for the first time. The kitchen which was what I began to tell about is floored with flagstones, roofed with hewn beams and walled with tile. Altogether taking everything into consideration including the old witch it is the most medieval thing I ever inhabited. Our only light is needless to say candles and I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up some morning and find all the guns and men gone and a knight in armor tooling down the road. It is a locality as apart from the newer France as anything could possibly be. As far as I can gather the only sport seems to be hunting wild boar and wolves with spears and dogs. Imagine it all.

I have got to stop now to do a few things but I will write you again soon. With love, Paul

Letter dated November 23, 1917

2008-06-12T18:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:
I have rather a long story to tell this time and it is only a question as to whether I can get it all in, in the time I have which just at present isn’t particularly long and when such things are put off you know the answer: they never are told. The censorship regulations have been lifted a bit, I am happy to say and we can tell a little of what we have done.

Not quite a week after I became junior officer of the 5th F.A. (field artillery- Ed.) we were ordered into active service which news I am frank to admit disconcerted me not a little being so frightfully new at the game. We moved into the Lorraine sector and there proceeded to strafe the Bosch a little. I being the junior was left behind at the little town I wrote you from to care for the extra horses and material. Later I did get to the actual front and it certainly was a change from the fronts I had been on before; comparatively it was like a church, hardly anything doing and safer than living at home. It was a relief tho to feel that at length I had taken some really active part in putting the blink on the Bosch. After two weeks on the front the regiment moved down again and now we are in winter quarters where I imagine we will stay until spring, absorbing knowledge and trying to keep alive. A number of officers have already been sent to America to instruct by which sign I am kept alive in hopes that some time in the dim and dusky future my turn will come too.

Our work here is now and will be for some time principally organization, that is preparing for the winter. It is as I told you a perfectly miserable town and the task consists in making barracks for the men and horses so that they won’t die before spring and trying to arrange a program of learning for the officers so that they won’t all become raving maniacs before spring from ennui. It sounds simple enough but somehow it isn’t, considering the fact that we work in a sea of mud and only have about 7 1/2 hours of daylight.

Two of the packages arrived today from Ethel Beardsley at Cannes and to say the least they were most welcome. I can’t thank you enough for the hoods, wristlets and cards tho I am frank to admit that nine packs of the latter will certainly take me some time to use up. I am thinking of starting a regimental gambling den.

Today too is Thanksgiving day and therefore for the men a red letter day. There is very little work to do, only horse exercise in the morning and feeding and watering the rest of the time while the men in the meanwhile feed themselves to the fullest possible extent.They had a huge dinner this noon and at two thirty were still going strong. We officers had a quiet dinner in the house which serves for our mess and I could not help thinking of you all going this evening to Nannoo’s. Lord how I would like to be there. This and the time I went duck shooting on Long Island are the only times since I left St. Paul’s that I have been away, and now if you could see me sitting writing by candle light at 4:30 in the afternoon with the old witch sitting by the fire swearing at her cat Cocotte you certainly would say I was away.

I have got to stop now, with love, Paul

And many thanks again for the helmet, wristlets and cards. Had a good letter two days ago from Carroll (Paul’s brother –Ed.)

Letter dated November 15, 1917

2008-06-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:
I have now been in the American army long enough to feel that I am quite a part of it, and moreover, being a part of that, a part of nothing else in the world, for never in my life did I feel more out of things and away from home. Since I have been out I have not had one word from home, from Paris or from anywhere. American efficiency isn’t all that it might be just yet as concerns the incoming mail and as regards the outgoing if it works the same way by now you probably think I am dead. Anyway I have written quite a lot lately to you, Carroll and Nannoo and maybe some day they will arrive.

As you can well imagine we did not stay long in the pleasant place we first arrived in but moved out into a much more disagreeable locality.

I am at present billeted with a charming old French couple who look after me as if I was their son and together with my orderly reduce living to a matter of doing the things you can’t tell other people to do for you. I have a great room in about the best house in town.

The bed is a huge four-poster affair hung with yellow silk curtains. The rest of the room is all long mirrors, long windows, blue paper and a marble fireplace. Very pretty but not practical since I don’t believe that for a moment since I arrived has the temperature been much over freezing in spite of the fire which I have burning practically all the time. The town itself is horrible, about 1,200 inhabitants in about two acres of stone buildings that stick up out of a sea of mud and look as though they were built at some antediluvian date. They are old but not attractive, so in fact quite the opposite, like some people.

All the inhabitants seem to be of two varieties, very dirty children and very dirty toothless old ladies.

Imagine a town like that, add a few hundred odd cows for scenic effect and then pile on top of the whole, suddenly, a battalion of heavy field artillery on the move to stay only about a week and you have our present situation. The height of luxury in some things and the height of misery in others. Just where we will go next no one knows but I only hope it will be somewhere warm for the rest of the winter. It isn’t that I am cold but simply that I’m never quite warm enough. That sounds queer but it is perfectly true. There isn’t a great deal more to tell you just now and besides I have got some wild duty to perform just now such as seeing if all the horses have their drink of water before they go to bed or all the men are tucked in or something. We have some of the craziest things to do you can possibly imagine. Good night now.With love, Paul

Letter dated November 8, 1917

2008-06-12T18:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Carroll (Paul’s younger brother -Ed)-:
This is a fine time to begin writing to you when I have been away nearly six months and you have never had a line from me but you know how writing is and besides in my letters to Mother I have said practically everything there was and those letters were for the whole family.

Let me begin tho by congratulating you on your birthday today and wishing you many happy returns of the day and all the luck in the world great too that you are going back to Treats (Carroll’s school – Ed.) for from everything I can gather it seems to be a much better place than the Rosenbaum school which the family seems to have had in mind. Enjoy life too along with doing all the work you can and don’t be in a hurry to get into the army. If the war keeps on another three years, it will be plenty time enough and for the present one of us here is a great plenty.

My ambulance career drew to a close about the 20th of October. I went to Paris and came out to the American army a week later as a 2nd lieutenant in the 5th field artillery. I was very sorry to leave the ambulance for I imagine there I saw as much or more war than I ever will again and there were a great bunch of boys in the service which itself was great fun not too hard work and quite comfortable. Nevertheless I suppose we must all take our flyer at doing something and I don’t know but what I am better off where I am now if for no other reason than that I am paid and feel that for the first time in my life I am earning some money – can you imagine it, me earning something. It seems like a huge joke especially considering that about all I do is to boss a crew of men around, ride a horse and do problems in mathematics. That last I will admit is worth any amount of money but the others aren’t too difficult.

The guns we have are 155 mm. howitzers, about six inches in American measure, and go around the country drawn by eight horses. When you try to aim one of the things you have to take into consideration everything but the rotation of the earth for the shell takes about one minute to get there.

I have got a wonderful lot of war relics which I have managed to collect for you if I can ever discover any way to send them home which just now doesn’t look too promising. Did you by the way get the briquets I sent you and Papa. One lot I sent by Penn Sefton and the other by Billy Seward. If they never arrived, when you see either of them ask them for them. I also sent some glass from Soissons, a shell fuse, a trench ring and a Bosch button, in the box that was to come by Penn.

There were some rather good pictures I sent with Billy (Seward – Ed.). And I hope they arrive as I think you would find them very interesting. I did not take them myself not being much of a hand with the camera but the boy who rode with me on the car (ambulance – Ed.) took them and they are all of places I have been and stayed and I was there when most of them were taken. Will stop now. Best luck, love Paul

Letter dated November 5, 1917

2008-06-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother: I understand the mail facilities of the U.S. Army are not all that they might be so I am sending you this letter by the regular French postal service just to let you know I am still alive and enjoying life immensely. Since I wrote you the first letter after I joined my regiment, which by the way is the 5th Field Artillery in case you never the get the other letter, we have moved over quite a lot of France and are now sojourning in a nasty little town waiting for further instructions. I am horribly sorry we have moved since the last place was much more comfortable, and also in the shuffle I have missed Stanley and others who followed me out completely. They have probably been attached now to other units and we are separated for the rest of the war. The closer Thanksgiving, Xmas and all the festal days get the more I wish I were home but I try to look at it from the philosophic standpoint that a good education should have given me. However that doesn’t seem to work at all the way it should and when I think of myself muddling around this blessed country for heaven only knows exactly how many more years I get decidedly down. I have, since I have changed my nationality, discovered a few radical differences in the American and French armies. In the American, one has better quarters but worse food than in the French. The French seem to accomplish exactly as much but they do it in a different style, easier, exactly how I can’t explain but that is how it works out. We haven’t been in the war yet long enough to lay emphasis on the little comforts which with them have become a science. With us it is a continuous performance, always talking shop, which they never do. When the day’s work is finished, it is over, that is all and they turn to more pleasant things.

Tomorrow if I can get off I am going over to the nearby large town to buy some Xmas presents to send home to you. They will have to be small and compact and just how they will ever arrive heaven only knows but it will be worth while trying. It seems queer to be buying them now when all the leaves are still on the trees, all of a queer yellow pink color about like the 1st of October at home.

Today I have been officer of the day, sort of a general boss of the camp who walks around and sticks his nose into every conceivable cranny to see that everything is going well. One rather funny thing happened: we post a guard in the top of a church steeple here to look for avions. Today the sexton came along, locked up the tower with the two men in it by mistake and went off to get his coffee. It was my job to get the men down and then after that since their breakfast was long past to see that they got fed.

Another thing I had to do was to get the exact location of every one of the 675 horses that the battalion has billeted all over town. When I got thru I considered myself lucky that I had only 84 missing.

I think when I have done it a few more times I would be a good administrator for an orphan asylum. I think I had better call a halt.

Letter dated November 3, 1917

2008-06-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -: Well, 2nd Lieut. P.W. Hills, Battery F, 5th F.A. is on the job at last and as a matter of fact enjoying himself immensely. I am leader of a platoon of about forty men and the same number of horses and my efforts to maintain my dignity as an officer and also to appear to know something of my job would make you laugh.

I came out here from Paris on the twenty-ninth which gave me just enough time there to be able to get everything I needed and get off in good style.

Aside from the distinct effort of maintaining my dignity my work here couldn’t be easier or more pleasant. In the morning we ride or have target work with the guns which are what the French call 155 shorts and the Americans 155 howitzers (about 6-inch). In the afternoon we have lectures on gunnery and officer school which to my confusion consists mostly of mathematics. They however are not too complicated. In the rest of the time I study, censor mail or ride for pleasure. I am taken care of by an orderly who does everything for me but put me to bed, I eat good food, live in good quarters and for doing it all am paid about six dollars a day. The other regimental officers are a fine crowd and also the commanding officer. As you can see I am quite enthusiastic especially considering the fact that before it all happened I thought myself a wanderer on the face of the earth and without any particular calling.

It certainly will be a funny outfit if we ever get to the front. Only two of the officers beside myself have ever been under fire and none of the men. I imagine tho, they will get away with it as they seem a very adaptable crowd.

As for my address I think you had better continue to write me c/o Morgan Harjes since I may at any time change organizations and I can tell them bout it quicker than any one else.

I don’t know how the mail system is here yet but I understand that it is worse than anything ever heard of. The men kick and say their letters never do get home and their letters from there are months in arriving but as usual c’est la guerre and from the looks of the situation just at present it will always be c’est la guerre. Stanley (Metcalf from Auburn –Ed) up to the present which is a day after I began hasn’t turned up but there is still time. Must stop now rather hurriedly. Will write soon again. With love, Paul

Letter dated November 2, 1917,

2008-06-09T18:37:00.000-07:00

TO HIS GRANDMOTHER, MRS. CAROLINE BEARDSLEY WOODRUFF:

Dear Nannoo: Well here I am theoretically an officer and I hope a gentleman in the U.S. Army. Officially now I am 2nd Lieut. P.W. Hills, 5th Reg. Battery F. Field Artillery. Can you beat it. It makes me laugh even to see it written down.

It was perfectly great of you to cable me and I received at about the same time two letters from you, one telling about the new letter of credit that had chased me to the section, back again to Paris and in fact had quite a journey. The letter of credit notification too came at the same time and the best part of it is that I myself did not need it. There was just enough of the old one left to buy my officer’s outfit and set me up in business, and now I am being handsomely remunerated to the tune of six dollars a day. The first real money I have ever earned.

I did tho lend quite a bit of it to Stanley who was absolutely broke and had to buy his outfit at the same time. He himself hasn’t come out yet but I hope to see him soon. Getting an outfit isn’t quite all that it might be especially considering that boots are a necessity and come at 300 francs a pair.

Everything however worked out wonderfully for me. I arrived in Paris from the section which was relieved at that time, the twenty-second of October just at the end of a wonderful action on the Chemin des Dames again and left the twenty-ninth for here. It gave me just enough time to get everything and enjoy a bit of a vacation in Paris. I was tho particularly sorry not to be able to go to Cannes but that, God willing, will come later when I get my first permission (leave-Ed.) from the American army and it looks as tho now the war were going to last long enough to let me enjoy several of those periods. I am tho sorrier that I can ever say not to get a chance just yet to come home.

My new duties aren’t particularly onerous. I get up rather early but on the other hand sleep all of every night. We ride, have target practice etc. with the guns in the morning, have lectures and so forth for the rest of the afternoon for a little while and that is all. We have good food and there are a wonderfully good crowd of officers, a great many of whom have done just what I have. I am at present leader of a platoon of about 40 men to whom as far as I can gather I am combination king, nurse, policeman and papa. It certainly is a strange sensation ordering, instructing and taking care of men old enough to be my father and who know more of the army than I will ever know.

I am very glad I am in the artillery since first to me it is without doubt the most interesting end of the game besides being one of the most comfortable and safest. There is too a wonderful chance for promotion since the service is being increased every day. It has however its disadvantages. I have to do a tremendous amount of mathematics and as you can probably remember that never was my forte. You should see me puzzling for hours over a range finder and then discovering finally that I only missed by some two hundred meters at the first try. Luckily tho there are observers and it is possible to correct after the first try. I will write you again very soon. Thanking you again for the letter of credit. With love, Paul

Letter undated, some time in late October, 1917

2008-04-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

HAND-DELIVERED TO PAUL'S MOTHER IN AUBURN, NEW YORK BY “BILLY” SEWARD, NOV. 19TH, 1917

Dear Mother -:

I met Billy Seward on the street today and find that he is going to America by way of England tomorrow. I now have about ten minutes to get everything ready for him to take to you from me.

The first package I gave to Penn to take home but he hasn’t arrived and I understand will stay in England. This one I hope will have better luck. In it there are two (illegible) not as nice as the last ones I sent, a package of photographs of practically all the places I have been and a bible which I picked up in a place the Germans had left rather hurriedly. I wish I had time to continue writing and explain everything. I am writing you a very long letter, a regular book, which when it is finished I will send. As you know I have received my commission and expect to go out very soon to Saumur or Fontainebleau to train for a while as an artillery officer. The chances look just at present wonderfully good both promotion and coming to America within a very few months. This all I have time for now. Good bye.

With love Paul

Letter dated October 21, 1917

2008-04-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

FROM PARIS

Dear Mother-:

The first part of my war career is over and as usual in my case I am out of the frying pan into the fire for tomorrow I begin on the second phase of that career. To speak in more exact terms however the ambulance work is finished, taken over by the U.S. gov’t and tomorrow I take the oath of office as a 2nd lieut. Artillery, U.S.A. I wish I could write you how the ambulance service was relieved but just now it is not up to me to criticize the gov’t which is paying me.

I don’t know exactly what Stanley (Metcalf) will do. He passed his examination but is so homesick that he is thinking of throwing up his commission and going home with the chance of being a private in the infantry, a worse fate than which no one can possibly imagine.

We were relieved on Thursday, convoyed that day and the next and arrived in Paris Friday night, turned in the cars and were thru. It rained all the way and the car I was on had to be towed all the way. I must have been tired when we arrived here for the first night I slept 14 hours and last night 14 more and in the meantime have not wanted to do anything but eat and sleep. About tomorrow I shall begin and write you a very long letter all about everything but for the present, good bye.

With love Paul

Letter dated October 10, 1917

2008-04-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Nannoo-:

I wrote Mother yesterday about the good luck that had come to me. I have passed my examinations and am now to all intents and purposes a 2nd lieutenant in the American artillery that is unless they make some new law in Washington annulling the appointments made on this side of the water. Getting the commission when I could seemed the best idea taking everything carefully into consideration tho I hated more than I can ever say to put off, as it has, coming home. I wanted to do that more than anything I know and now, tho it may be soon that I see you again the chances are that it will be a long time.

The mail just arrived at the minute and there is in it a letter from you, one from Mother and an absolute confirmation of my commission from Washington by cable.

It is perfectly great of you to send me all the clippings etc. They are very interesting and I think in one of your letters there is more real news than in any other I ever get. I think that the package you sent me has arrived and although I haven’t seen it yet I want to thank you very much. I received a notice today that there was a package for me at Morgan Harjes.

The weather here is perfectly vile and we have been working rather hard so you can imagine the result. It has rained now for exactly eight days at least 2/3 of each day. Stanley and I had made sort of a little house underground and it has rained so much that there is over three inches of water on the floor and the only way to keep dry is to go to bed. However as we are only there every other day and sleep the rest of the time anywhere we may be, it isn’t as bad as it might be. The roads now too, these dark nights are the worst things you can possibly imagine. From a military standpoint they are excellent for moving things unobserved and consequently everything in the country moves. It took me three hours and a half the night before last to go four kilometers. It has gotten too dark to write any more now so I will stop and write again soon.

With love, Paul

Letter dated October 8, 1917

2008-04-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -:

Things at last seem to be breaking in the right direction. I heard at last from my artillery examination and have been recommended for a 2nd lieutenancy in that branch of the service. As yet I have not actually received the commission but it is as sure as anything in that line ever is and all there is to do now is to wait for orders. The section, too is in the process of being taken over so it has all happened just about the right time. We will be here just a few more days and then when the men who have taken our places arrive , we will be set adrift. I rather hope I am not ordered to active service directly as I am quite fed up on the war in general and would like to go to Cannes for a little rest and quiet, Cousin Josephine having given me a standing invitation of the most attractive sort imaginable.

Since I wrote you last saying how wonderful the weather was it hasn’t stopped raining for a minute and we are living and working in a perfect sea of mud and have no chance to get dry or warm unless you go to bed which isn’t all that it might be as the tents are rather fragile and the only other accommodations are under ground.We have too, for the last few days been working rather hard so you can imagine our state, just walking, shivering cakes of mud.

I don’t quite understand the fall season here. It is colder than it is at home and as yet none of the trees have turned but are still green and fresh looking.

It certainly seems funny – everyone at home getting married or engaged and things. When I do get back there won’t be an unattached soul that I know. I feel it coming: I shall be the official Paul Clark of our crowd. (Paul Clark was, at the time, a still unmarried Auburn contemporary of the parents of Paul Hills. –Ed)

If you want to read a good book about the war and one which in my mind is the truest to the life of the French soldier get a thing called Le Feu (titled Under Fire in translation)
by Henri Barbusse. It is the book of the year here in France and one which everyone has read and talks about simply because of its wonderful reality.

I forgot in my last letter to put in the citation I told you about but I will put it in here for certain.

There isn’t a great deal more to tell you now so I will call a halt.

With love, Paul

Letter dated October 5, 1917

2008-04-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Two letters from you came yesterday and it certainly was great to hear all that was going on at home. I haven’t yet heard any result of my artillery examination but hope to get the news soon. If I pass it, everything will be fine for we will go into training for a few months in the French methods and then either be sent back to the U.S to train troops there or attached directly to units here, but exactly what will happen to me I am afraid is looking a little far ahead, for I have yet to pass the exam and become a lieutenant. We are at the front again here at a place we have been before doing some work but mostly just sitting around and getting things ready for the riot which is due to start any day now.

I have just discovered much to my disgust that the “Esprit de Cor” (French army publication) which I sent you will probably never arrive since they contain a little too much accurate information. That remains to be seen, however, and I am hoping, for they are quite interesting. Driving here now isn’t nearly the sport it was the first part of the summer. Then it was light from about 4:30 till 10:30 while now it doesn’t begin to get light till six and is dark again by seven. If I get my artillery commission please don’t worry about me for certainly I won’t see any active service for a long time and when I do the casualties of that branch are not any higher if as high as the work I am now in and besides that I will be leading a more comfortable and pleasant existence 2/3 of the time.

I am enclosing in this letter a copy of a few more citations we have received which you can put in the family skeleton closet but which seriously speaking are very fair things to have. The first gave the section the Croix de Guerre with a palm, the second added a gold star and the third a silver star. I had a letter from Billy Seward here wanting to know what I was going to do, etc. He is considering the aviation and may enter that tho I can hardly imagine W.H. 4th as an aviator, can you? The weather here lately has been wonderful – hot, bright days with nights that were so cold that you could hardly keep warm. The moon is full now so our nights are consequently not quite all they might be on account of the Bosche avions, which every bright night persist in sailing over and dropping things on the depots of material near our cantonment. They are the damndest things (I mean the air raids). You are soundly sleeping when suddenly there comes a terrific riot from the anti- avion (anti-aircraft) guns right beside you, everybody jumps out of his tent in pajamas and helmet usually wearing beside that a blanket and sabots (wooden shoes) to see the fun. The air becomes full of search lights, rockets, bursting shells, tracer shells and the ground all around makes the most terrific noise. The bursting of the bombs, the anti-aircraft guns, all the mitrailleuses (machine guns), etc. After a little while it is all over and we go back to bed for another few hours. Needless to say they never hit the avions but they have a tremendous amount of fun trying to and likewise the Dutchman never does a great deal of harm.

I hope by this time you have gotten the little box which instead of mailing I ultimately gave to Penn Sefton to carry to you. (Pennington Sefton, also in the ambulance service and also from Auburn, New York. He and Paul Hills later married sisters, respectively Mary Seymour and Jane Seymour, also from Auburn.)

This is about all there is to tell you now.Before I change my nationality back to an American again I will have my photograph taken as a Diable Bleu and sent to you. In the meantime

Faut pas t’en faire – which is pure slang but expressive – et bientot la guerre est fini (and the war will end soon.)

With love Paul

Letter dated September 25, 1917

2008-04-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

I wrote Morgan Harjes (the French-American bank sponsoring the ambulance unit) to cable you that I was taking my exams for a commission in the American army but as I did not get to their office while I was there taking the exams, I do not know whether or not you have replied. I sent them a note to forward any such thing to me at section, but since then we have been all over northern France and the mail hasn’t yet managed to catch up with us.

As for the exam I don’t know yet whether or not I have managed to pass it. I traveled to Paris Friday night sitting up all the time, took exams all day Saturday and left again Sunday for the section which had in the meantime moved some fifty miles and took us a day and a half to find.

I am hoping and praying all the time for it seems like the last gasp, for a commission in America being entirely shut down and there being the best chance here. If I miss it I shall certainly be in the soup for fair with nothing to do but enlist as a private here in the sanitary service or come home and enlist as a private there with never a chance in either case to get ahead. Even Stanley, who would give his neck to get to America, is worried that he did not get by.

But enough of gloom and possibilities: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” I am now back at the front again in one of the old sectors which I know so well now that it seems like home. After a month’s absence, it isn’t much changed except that there is now a vast amount more troops and as for artillery it is practically wheel to wheel. Our division has only a few men in the lines up to now so our work is comparatively easy but it is a good thing since when they all sit up and the show starts in good earnest there will be work enough for everybody.

Being again in the same sector certainly gives one a funny feeling. Here I am still looking at that line of hills, just like the other side of the lake from Garnston (his family’s summer home on Owasco Lake in the Finger Lakes of central New York) and knowing that there isn’t any power in the world by which any one can go over and down the other side.

I had an awfully funny time yesterday. I had a new aide just arrived in the section and together we went up to a little town near the lines. He had never been under fire before and in fact hadn’t the slightest idea what war was like. No sooner had we arrived than Fritz started one of his periodical hates and shelled the place violently. Houses fell over, dust rolled out of everything and the noise was fearful. Naturally we retired under ground and waited but the thrill my aide got was wonderful to see. I don’t know whether or not he will ever recover as it certainly was a rough reception.

There isn’t a great deal more to tell you now but I will write again soon.

With love, Paul

Letter dated September 19, 1917

2008-04-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Just after I had written you the other day asking not to send any more packages what should happen but that two should arrive.One from Benson & Hedges in England and one from you at home. Thank Papa ever so much for the tobacco which is wonderful and thank you for the cigarettes.They are perfectly great and that is something that here is as rare as a white crow.

You were right about the chasseurs being the blue devils that you read about. There two division of Chasseurs Alpins, the one we are with and another and a couple of divisions of “chasseurs a pied” which are practically the same thing but not quite as good. They are called diable bleu principally because of their character and wonderful spirit, being about
the best attacking troops in the world. The blue comes from the fact that they are dressed in “bleu foncee” (dark blue) instead of the ordinary horizon blue of the regular French soldier.

One should be, tho, a student of ethnology to be able to dope out exactly what a man is in the French army. There are men from every part of continental France speaking every dialect you can imagine and added to the other divisions from all the colonies: Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalis, Spahis, chasseurs d’Afrique, Zouaves and the Foreign Legion. Most of the chasseurs with whom we work are from the Vosges or extreme southern France down next to Italy. They speak a language which is the weirdest thing you ever heard in your life. Every syllable is pronounced very distinctly and all the nasals have a “g” on the end of them with an “e” not quite mute on the end of that. This matin is “matinge” and soixante quinze is “soixanty quinzy”.

I am sending you a copy of the Esprit du Corps with a poem in it of real colloquial “poilu” French, the kind that every soldier of any sort can speak and understand.

We are still waiting in the sleepy old town I told you about to be called into action again and I imagine it will not be long now before we go, as everything has been ready for days now and all that is necessary is the order to move and believe me when we get there, there is going to be a hot time in the old town tonight as the preparations being made are enormous. I am hoping that my U.S. Army exam won’t interfere with my being in on the show as Fritz is going to go for the loop of his young life. Did Nannoo ever get any of the letters I have written her? They are quite a few and I have had no answers. There isn’t a great deal more to tell you now but I will write again as soon as I am able.

Good bye With love,

Letter dated September 16, 1917

2008-04-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got five letters from home all in a bunch after a previous gap of two weeks totally without mail. Things are certainly seen strangely in the line of mails. The picture of the Danes (Great Dane dogs) was among them and they certainly are wonderful. It is the greatest thing I have ever seen the way they have grown.

Well, as I told you in my letter from Paris might happen, the American Red Cross as such is done and after the next action which promises to be a good one we will all be wanderers on the face of the earth. I have cabled you what I am doing and hope you won’t feel badly about it, for having looked at it in every way, it seems the only thing left. There is only the alternative of signing up for the war as a private in the ambulance service which somehow doesn’t seem to me to be all that it might.

I was fortunate enough to meet an American major whom I knew very well in Paris and learned from him exactly how things stood. There are to be no commissions given out to civilians in America after the camp which is going on now is over, and the only way to get anything there is to enlist as a private and take your chances on making good. Here, however, there are still some chances and the result is that I am taking my examination for a lieutenant’s (commission) the next week. I am trying for the artillery since to me that work is the most interesting besides having the additional advantages of having a lower percentage of casualties even than the ambulance. There are besides other things to be considering. If I make the grade I become the proud possessor of an income of $2,000 a year which will take off your hands a financial responsibility which has already in my mind hung on too long. Last of all there is the real crux of the question which is that I have got to do something for the country and this seems in every way the best thing.

There are two boys from the club at college who I met and who have decided to do the same thing. Also, Hunt has taken his examination but has not yet heard from them, and Stanley is going to take his with me. The only drawback I can find is about getting home. I may be able to come a short time after I sign up and it may be a very long time. That I don’t like for I want more than anything else to come home and see you all and stay a while and I think you want to see me but “C’est la guerre” and some day it will be over and we will all be together again just as before.

I don’t think just now you had better send me any more packages since I have never gotten any of any kind and it is just a dead waste of energy and money. I don’t know where they are going but someone somewhere is profiting largely at my expense. This is all now. I will write more right away.

With love, Paul

Letter dated September 8, 1917

2008-04-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Here I am back from “permission” and the division still on “repos”, however we go back again into action on Monday or Tuesday, I understand a little to the left of the places we have just been. I am not nearly as keen to get back as I might be or have been before for I have quite satisfied my curiosity as to what war looks like and feels like. Still it will be a change from this wonderful sleepy old town in the middle of Valois where we are now. The place is the most medieval thing you ever saw in your life.The streets are about eight feet wide and run all every which way. Most of the buildings absolutely have been there for over eight hundred years and some even longer. The middle of the town is on the top of a hill where the center is marked by a peach of a cathedral and it slopes down on all sides. It is without doubt the most picturesque and one of the most beautiful places I have ever been or heard about in my life. More than that too, it is large enough to have very fair shops and an inn which has managed to preserve in its cellars some of the wine of ages past. However, as you can well imagine the whole atmosphere of the place is sleepy and settled to an extent which palls. It will be a good place to live when one becomes old and wants to really settle down. Until you have been here you can’t in the slightest degree appreciate the meaning of that phrase. People settled here when France was still Roman and are still living in the same house.

But to talk of things more current. The soldiers are always giving entertainments and yesterday at one of them Maurice danced with Florence whom he had gotten the general’s permission to have out from Paris.(Maurice Mouvet and Florence Walton, Americans, were an internationally popular dancing couple at the time.) In spite of the fact that the music was a French band augmented by clarions and cors de chasse (bugles and hunting horns) they got away with it in fine style and the soldiers cheered loudly if for nothing else out of politeness.After dinner a few of us and some chasseur officers had a huge party with F & M. Every one kissed F goodbye and put her on the train back to Paris. That was just one day. Every day the soldiers are staging something. The other day it was a circus and one of the best you ever saw. There are band concerts three times a day and in fact everything to give them recreation and keep up their spirits.

I had really a wonderful permission (leave). Stanley (Metcalf) and I made our headquarters in Paris and as a number of people from the section were there at the same time you could always find some one to do just what you felt like. I traveled round quite a lot going to Versailles, Blois, etc., and enjoyed myself thoroughly. The more you see of France the better you like it and the French people. This is about all now.

With love, Paul

Letter dated September 1, 1917

2008-04-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Papa- :

I found your letter at Morgan Harjes yesterday and was very glad to hear from you. I am going to make a try at telling you where I am going and have been tho it will be probably like the other attempts a failure since you have no idea and I have written about it several times.

We have spent the summer on what is known as the Chemin des Dames, which is that section of the front between Craonne and Moulin Lafeulx. At one time we lived at a place called Nailly and worked in front of that – at another time we were in front of Ferme Hurtebise and lived at a place called Villers en Prayes which is on the map near Fismes. In fact if you look anywhere along that line you will find towns that we have worked in or lived in. The Chemin des Dames itself is a road leading from Craonne to the left along a ridge and has been and still is between the French and Geman lines.

Good bye with love, Paul

Letter dated August 27, 1917

2008-04-01T18:38:00.000-07:00

Paris

Dear Nannoo, (Grandmother Woodruff)

I got your letter just before I left the front for my “permission” (leave) which I am now on. It is rather a welcome relief to be where things are a little quieter and your next minute is a little more certain, tho as for that matter nothing is ever quite certain.

Stanley (Metcalf of Auburn, also in the ambulance service) and I decided to stay in Paris for our permission as a great many of the boys from the section were also in at the time and altogether we could have a fine bit of a time.

I had a very nice letter from Mrs. Brown inviting me to Cannes whenever I could get off. I think if everything goes well I will go there when my time is up for a few days if for nothing else to see that part of France for although we see a great deal of the country our operations are limited to that strip of country about ten miles wide behind the lines from St. Quentin to the Vosges which as you can well imagine isn’t just now at its best. It was great of Mrs. Brown to ask me and I only hope that I can get there ultimately.

I wrote Mother yesterday telling her how the Americans or rather the American administration over here is spoiling things including the Red Cross. Have her tell you about it. Heaven only knows what is going to happen next. The inrush has also naturally bounced the prices and we are paying just about double for the same room practically as we had in May. Food however, praises be, remains nearly the same and you can get a huge meal with very few restrictions very cheaply.

The restrictions, tho, are enough to make you laugh.Tuesday and Wednesday are no cake days. Monday and Tuesday are no meat before six o’clock days. Saturday and Sunday are the only days when can have hot water baths. You can only drink alcohol at certain set hours of the day and so it goes on, the rules always changing and no one paying much attention to them but each getting and using anything that they are able. I am enclosing in this letter rather an interesting little contrast of places I have lived this last summer. It was a case of alternatives – one day we would be in the wonderful garden where the swans are and the next in the small section of hell which was once a town. I have some really wonderful photographs, all of which I will send home to you when Billy McCarthy comes home as I do not dare put them all in one letter which might be lost or stopped and the pictures are absolutely impossible to ever be duplicated.

There isn’t a great deal more to tell you now but I will write you very soon again.

With love, Paul

Letter dated August 26th, 1917

2008-03-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Here I am in Paris for my “permission” (leave) and if Paris can be called a rest this is certainly one well deserved.

We worked the Chemin des Dames sector for just exactly one month without a single day’s rest and as you have probably noticed in the papers that is what is commonly known as a warm corner. I was at the end quite petered out and fed up generally with my nerves so on edge that I couldn’t sit still. From your last letter you have some impressions which added to those that Nannoo wrote in hers seem to tell me that you have quite some wrong ideas. In the first place I am not a lieutenant, at least that I know of, but still a “conducteur volontaire d’une voiture sanitaire.” That paper that I enclosed in the letter was my copy of the citation the section received for bravery, good works, etc. In the second place the transfer to the chasseurs was simply that the section as a whole was transferred to that division to evacuate their wounded instead of those with whom we had been so long. I am still as I started but seeing much more active service simply because the division is the most active one in France.

All this, however, was up until yesterday, for then the U.S. govt. with their customary blundering methods and misconception of affairs in general has taken over the whole
Red Cross and I understand is going to give to all the conducteurs their choice of signing on for the war or getting out tout de suite. The idea of signing on for the war as a private in the U.S. Army somehow doesn’t appeal to any of us and the result is that everybody is getting out. When that comes off I am going to start on a wild chase for a commission in the U.S. or English artillery or transport service for, from what I can gather, commissions are not to be had at home and here, although gettable, they are very difficult. Nevertheless don’t worry at all as to what I am doing when you get this for before I do anything definite I will cable you. Every time I think of the way the U.S. is bungling things I get so mad I can’t speak. Imagine it. Here we were running perfectly, members of the French army and doing work which, according to the French could in no way be bettered. The U.S. with their politics, etc., comes along and butts in and in a little while, according to everyone who seems to know anything at all, the whole business will be such a mess that nothing will be able to be done at all, there will be no conducteurs and how the poor wounded will be gotten out God alone knows. . The whole French sanitary service is frantic. But enough of disagreeable things for the present. I am well, happy and fat, with seven days before me out of the country where things blow up, men die quickly and everything smells bad and looks worse.

I had a nice letter from Mrs. Brown inviting me to Cannes whenever I could come so I have always a haven of refuge in time of need. It was great of her to do it.

I am sending you a small package of things I have picked up. Two cigar lighters which everyone over here in the war uses, as matches at the front are unobtainable. Papa may like them. The soldiers sit around and make them when they have nothing else to do.Tell him to give one to Carroll as he I imagine would like it for a souvenir although if he goes back to St. Paul’s he will not use it. For you and Day there are some other little war trinkets of no practical use but odd. There isn’t a great deal more to say now as I have told you all the news and all about the work at other times and if I keep on I may start in again on the American gov’t.

Goodby with love,

Paul

Letter dated August 14, 1917

2008-03-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -:

I got two letters from you the other day, one saying that you had had no letters from me and the other that you had just had two.The mail service is at its best short and extremely uncertain, and I rather imagine that you have gotten very few of my letters. I have written on an average of at least twice a week. However, perhaps you will get them all after the war when the powers that be see fit to let my indiscretions pass on. It was great of you to send me the cigarettes and I only hope they arrive by and by for I am spoiling for a real American smoke. Tell Day that I enjoyed her letter tremendously and will write her again.

I am writing this letter on a notebook across the wheel of my car as usual outside the old Cheval Blanc waiting for my turn. Yesterday was in many ways a banner day as far as excitement and interest went. In the first place the Germans took a very violent dislike to our town.

As usual I was cut off in the midst of writing that last to go out and since then two or three days have passed with just about the same variety of goings on. This morning we were decorated again for bravery and there was quite a celebration. Likewise some individual Croix de Guerres were given out to two of the old men and to the two boys who were gassed. It is a nice thing to have but I would rather have my lungs in good shape and theirs will not be so for time to come. That (gas) is without doubt the most devilish invention in the world. You can’t see it and it smells nicely. The first thing you know you begin to cough and choke. I got a good whiff the other day and couldn’t smoke for half a day and felt quite rotten.

Our work here in the sector is almost over, tho, and I can’t say that I am sorry. We will be having some time around the 20th for a “repos” and after that a new place. A little danger and excitement are fine but every day for nearly a month is rather a strain. Hardly a day passes without some hairbreadth escape or what seems to be the direct intervention of Providence, and always there is the continuous round of tragedies among the soldiers or brancardiers that you know and have spent time with. I wish to heaven the war was over.

I am sending you under a separate cover a copy of the little newspaper the Division prints and I hope you get it as it is quite interesting and although a little broad in places will show you something of the spirit of the men and the sort of French they speak.

In an attack the other day the division caught a number of Bosche. I carried four of them who were wounded, the oldest were only twenty, the other two were 19 and 18. Not any of them had the slightest idea that America had entered the war and when they found it out seemed quite discouraged. They were all thinner than rails and said they had not so much as seen a potato for eight weeks.

There isn’t a great deal more to tell you just now. As soon as we get in repos again, I will write you a regular book.

With love,

Paul

I think it would be a good idea if I numbered my letters to you and Papa and then we can get an idea as to how many get by. We will call this one number 1.

Letter dated August 4, 1917

2008-03-25T17:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

This is probably the strangest birthday it will ever be my good or ill, whichever you consider it, fortune to pass. I am on duty to stand by outside the dugout of the medical director and wait for orders. It is a twenty-four hour séance and usually there are no orders. I was a little lucky and in the afternoon took his nibs to S---- which relieved the monotony a little. Otherwise there is nothing to do but sit and read and watch the rain. This is the fifth day of it (the rain) and you can imagine what the roads with heavy traffic all the time are like. I have today read one book thru and wished I had another. The few French men around aren’t a great deal of help as they are Gascons and when I tried this afternoon to fall into conversation with them the effort socially speaking failed for they couldn’t speak French and I could neither understand nor speak Gascon. The result was that we struggled for a while with “pas beaucoup”, “ca va” and “mauvais temps” and the result was that both sides retired in disgust, the enemy richer by two cigarettes.

The weather seems to have completely quelled both sides for, tho here I am very close to the lines there is hardly a sound. Every once in a while a gun goes off and that is all, as much different from recent days as night from day, and a little relief too, for I saw a little too much war then.

The God that protects fools, drunken men, and college boys must also do a little looking out for ambulance drivers. One of our cars was towed in the other night with 68 holes in it. The driver wasn’t there when it happened but had gotten out for a minute to see what was stopping the traffic ahead in the road.

Last evening we had a big party. Our French lieutenant is leaving and we gave him a send-off. We had a wonderful dinner with several kinds of wine, sang and made speeches and had a fine time all within range of the Bosche and most of the people there having seen and done things that most people are glad never occur during their lives. Rather unique, wasn’t it? I wrote you Maurice and a few other curiosities were coming to the section. Well, they all arrived but M., who couldn’t have things just to suit him, is still consequently in Paris. The others were all fine boys and fell in with the work nicely, tho a little horror-stricken at first.

Aug. 8 – So many thhings have happened since I began this letter that I might just as well tear up what I have written and begin again but I will keep on just for the humor of the thing. Well, to begin with when I got back to camp Maurice was there after all, having just arrived and had the scare of his life. He was talking blue blazes and hasn’t stopped yet. He was quite scared his first day out but managed to live thru it, but I rather imagine rues the day he ever became attached to section cinq. You certainly should see him scraping the mud and blood off a car and taking a swallow of brandy with a crust of bread for his breakfast at 4 a.m. on the road. It was great.

Then Hunt T (Talmage) got wounded. He was sitting on top of a bank watching the war when a shell landed right beside him. It blew him off the bank and twenty feet away while a piece went thru his sleeve and part of his arm and another scratched his head. Rather a close call but he did not even have to go to the hospital while the poor beggar beside him was killed quite dead.

Then I got some very disagreeable disease and thought quite certainly I was going to die. However as it is only the good that do that at my extreme youth, I have staged a comeback and can move about today again.That is about all the news of particular interest for the present but I will write again when there is more

With love,

Paul

Letter dated August 1, 1917

2008-03-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Nannoo (Grandmother Woodruff) ,

Your letter of June 29 came quite a while ago and I am very ashamed not to have answered it before. You were quite wrong about your letters being of no interest to me – they are very much the opposite and in fact the one I have gotten had more condensed news on it than any I have yet gotten from anybody.

We are again on service and I am writing this during what I consider a well merited day of rest, for during the 60 hours preceding I had had just five hours sleep. There was an attack and a great number of wounded to be carried. It rained of course as it always does when the French go to do anything and the roads being a sea of mud and the nights blacker than the ace of spades made the work doubly hard. The way we managed the driving was that one of us- there are always two on a car- crawled as far forward on the front mud guard as he could and shouted back the things that were in the way and there always are a good many. Donkeys and mules loaded with hand grenades and driven like sheep, not led, are bad enough but great double caissons of ammunition going at a dead run and drawn by six horses are the worst. I have hated to think what would happen should I bump into one of those donkeys and he should blow up but one of those caissons would completely obliterate me, the car, the blesses (wounded) and all. Then as you get nearer the front the roads are shelled and there is always the expectation of waking up suddenly twanging a harp or lying in a rear hospital. You go along the road hoping that the flashes and noise all round you are your guns and not shells coming in. One of our posts is 600 meters from the German lines so you can imagine there is lots going on. The locality also is the “Chemin des Dames” which is just now the liveliest in France.

The attack was a success and the division took two lines of trenches and a lot of prisoners – the roads all day have been full of them. They seem quite happy to be taken and I don’t blame them. They, however, are thin, terribly thin and from what they say sick to death of the war.

I am still growing fat and prospering and am not yet at all sick of the work and wouldn’t miss the things I am doing and seeing for anything. I do miss the lake, tho, and the luxuries of home will be certainly welcome. Give my love to everybody.

With love,

Paul

Letter dated July 30, 1917

2008-03-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

I haven’t done a great deal of writing lately but have the excuse of having been
busier than ever before since I landed in France. We are on service in the busiest sector of the whole line and as you can imagine there is no little to be done.

I think that perhaps if I told you what a day’s work is like you can get a better idea of the way we live and the work we do.

We are billeted in a woods about 8 kilometers (5miles) behind the line, at least that is our base of supplies and where we go back after service. Take day before yesterday as an example: I woke up about 8, had coffee and saw that the car (ambulance) was alright. Lunch or dejeuner was at 10 and at 10:30 the ten cars on service that day start out and go to the town which is our reserve post.

There we live in the “Au Cheval Blanc” which in its day must have been quite an inn. Now, however, it has no roof, the walls are mostly gone down to the 1st story, and the windows stopped with sandbags and stones. The thing in its favor tho is that it has an elegant big vaulted cellar into which all of us can get at once.

As soon as we arrive the three first cars get their directions and go on to the advance posts. Today I am at one called “Ferme –“. We go out from the town of the Cheval Blanc three streets that look like a war photo of “stricken France” and take a road that winds up a hill along the edge of a valley and then cuts up thru a ravine like our glen to the Ferme, which is on the edge of a plateau. The road through its entire length is protected with brush camouflage both above and on the sides. There is artillery firing on both sides which seems at times to raise your helmet right off your head. All along the road are big paper signs “Route battu. Defense de stationner.” (Battle area. No parking) Hence one hurries a little. The Farm itself is at the head of the ravine as Elmer’s would be to our glen. It might have been a farm once but now they might just as well call it the stone quarry or the macadam road in the making. It resembles these more.

The post itself is in a cave about 100 meters from the Farm. We put the car under a bank and go quickly to the mouth of the cave around which a number of men are standing, none very far away. The door of the cave is about as conspicuous as a woodchuck hole but inside it is immense. Without exaggeration you could put our house in it three or four times over. You go down thirty or forty steps and there you are: room after room but here and there with a candle by which you can see men stretched out sleeping. Some in groups are talking in low tones or playing cards; others eating, always with a knife out of a tin can. We go to the head of the brancardiers and find that just then there aren’t any wounded, talk over the news in a mixture of French and English and sit down to wait. Sometimes we sleep on a brancard and other times we go outside the door and watch the farm become further macadamized. There is a whiz over your head and a geyser of black smoke blacker than ink jumps a hundred feet out of the ground with a bang that cracks your head. Everybody ducks, says “Sale Bosche” or something like that and stands up to wait for the next one. Sometimes the whiz sounds too close and everybody slides head over heels on top of everybody else down the steps, and when the shell has gone to nearly the same place, all get up and laugh at each other.

By and by we get our load, put them in the car and go back by the Cheval Blanc where we tell another car to come and take our place. We take wounded on to the hospital about 10 kilometers away and come back to the C.B. where we wait again for our turn, usually about an hour, just long enough to get doing something or just asleep at night. At night, driving is more difficult since the roads are absolutely full of artillery coming and going, re-supplies and men. This keeps up all the time until the relief cars come up the next day at about 11 o’clock when we go back to the cantonment, have lunch, spend the afternoon cleaning ourselves and the car, have dinner and go immediately to bed. The next day we are usually in service again and it is the same things over again with variations.

I was writing this in the cave I told you about but had to stop for a load and now with everything finished am back again at the cantonment.

I have never exactly told you what the section consists of. There are 20 cars, 10 Packards and 10 Fords. There about 35 drivers, a French lieutenant , an American lieutenant, 4 French mechanics, 2 cooks and 4 or 5 other Frenchmen who do odd things.The drivers are all American volunteers like myself. Ranging in age from 1 older than you are to 1 younger than Carroll (his mother was, in 1917, about 50, and his younger brother was about 17). Most, however, are between 20 and 30. As an average they are a wonderful crowd and as sporting as they make them, perfectly willing if they are told to drive a car right over to Berlin and get the Kaiser.

The next time you hear anyone say anything against Billy McCarthy (from Auburn, New York) tell them what you think of them. In the last two months I have seen him do things that not 1 out of 10 men who criticize him would even consider for a minute. Takes his life in his hands to help other people and beside all that live a life that Sir Galahad himself would have not the slightest kick on.

This letter is a long lot of stuff about the way we live, and I hope it interests you. It isn’t very well expressed tho for I never was strong on that. If you want to get a better idea get a book called “Bullets and Billets” by Bairnsfather. If I had written it myself there will not be a truer expression of my own sensations. Substitute only an ambulance driver for a machine gun subaltern and you have it cold.

Good bye now, love

Paul

About my address: The one on the back of the envelope is for the censor and mine at present, but may change. All my mail is forwarded from Morgan Harjes and there is only one day’s delay. I think you had better keep writing me there since anything on the way when my address changes is as good as gone. Paul

Letter dated July 25, 1917

2008-03-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Papa –

It was great of you to send me the tobacco and tho it hasn’t come yet it will be doubly welcome when it does arrive. I smoked the last of the good cigars a few days ago which I had been treasuring up for weeks. Good tobacco is the hardest thing possible to get and I haven’t yet quite gotten the taste for the French variety which is like nothing else you ever smoked. We leave definitely tomorrow for one of the posts where we have been before. I wrote you all about it before. It is the same place for which we received the citation I wrote you about and sent Mother the copy. Tell me if you get it. The Bosches have been raising the devil in that particular locality and it is evidently the job of our division to chase them out. It will be a messy time to say the least for they have been sending all varieties of troops up there beside our division, troops especially for attacking. They are not the kind of crowd I would like to have after me and I fear Fritz is going to have rather a thin time for the next few days.

I haven’t yet told you of some of the funny things that happened to me during our last action. We are usually quartered in amongst the artillery and after we have arrived the men come and make very formal calls which we are expected to return. You remember I told you of some artillery men with whom I had become very friendly and who had given men some photos. Well, I went to return their call just about the time they started to shell the German supply center and was very interested in watching them work the guns, when Fritz decided that battery was doing too much harm and that it should be put out of working order. Shells began to drop all around, not way off but right on top of us – a man standing a few feet away from me was killed and needless to say we and the gunners who were not working ran like the deuce into the abri under the guns, about ten feet under ground. The noise was fearful, the guns making quite a bit of it and the big Dutch (German) shells doing the rest. Every time one of them landed it was as tho your head was going to cave in. Than, all of a sudden came the worst row you ever heard. The whole ground rocked and for a moment no one could even breathe. To make a long story short, the gun above us had been hit and blown up. Fortunately no one was working it at that particular moment and no one was hurt but you should have seen the wreckage – a big hole and at varying distances, wheels, pieces of barrels, sandbags and shells that belonged to the gun. Needless to say I got a pretty good scare out of that and will hereafter be more careful about my calling hours. It does, tho, speak rather well for the strength of a French abri (shelter), doesn‘t it, considering that the blowup was practically over our heads. This is just one incident that happened to come to me – almost everyone has these of the same variety and the addition of them all would certainly make a great book. There isn’t a great deal more to say now. Perhaps after a few days I will have some more tales to tell or some more of the ones already past to write down but just now I am suffering from writer’s cramp. Good bye

Love to everybody, Paul

Letter dated JULY 18, 1917

2008-03-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

I wrote you just a note from the last place that we were, saying that we were starting again for the front. We are now in a little town about ten miles back for a few days before the division goes into the trenches. I was sorry not to stay longer where we were for it was a perfectly great place, not far from Paris and right on the Marne. It was a large enough town to have a good hotel and restaurant, and we could go swimming, canoeing, eat, drink and be merry and sleep in beds the first time for over eight weeks. It was too good to be true tho and we were only there four days.

Our division went into Paris for the fete (Bastille Day, July 15) and it was by that that a few of us managed to get the 24-hour “permission” (leave). I sent you a photograph from there and hope you get it tho people tell me it is doubtful. I have a number more very interesting ones, one of which I am enclosing. This is the way they bring the poor beggars who are wounded down to us. It was taken in a little place we were at about a month or so ago and is one of the best of its kind I have ever seen.

It is wonderful being with the new crowd. They are the best troops in France by far and their attitude is certainly a welcome change. They are chasseurs and most of them so neat and snappy that it makes you feel sloppy even to see them. Moreover instead of being gloomy and disheartened they are always cheerful and fooling around singing and raising the devil. They have, too, a perfectly great band which plays on occasion and is a great success especially considering that France just now is a music-less country. You should hear a Chasseur trumpet corps! Ask somebody who has and they may be able to tell you about it. I can’t as it is one of the most inspiring things I have ever heard.

I have cut off my mustache but miss it so much in spite of its weedy condition I think I shall try again. We are still in this town and may not leave for several days and then go back to a sector we have worked in before.

I will be glad to get into action again as the “repos”, changing divisions, etc., good fun as it is, isn’t quite up to chasing around at the front.

Last night a few of us went as the uninvited and likewise unseen guests of an entertainment of the officers of the division. It was great fun and a wonderful concert. They are doing everything they can to keep the men cheered up and in the best of form for the work to come and certainly succeeding.

There isn’t a great deal more to tell you just now. Will write tomorrow.

With love,
Paul

P.S. The pencil part of this letter was written two days after the ink part.

Letter dated July 17, 1917

2008-03-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

We are on “repos” again for a few days so I have another chance to write you a good letter. The last action was wonderful and as I think I told you very interesting. It was not quite as hot as the last sector before that but we had all the work to do that was necessary to keep us quite busy.

I was afraid for a time that we would not have any fourth of July celebration and I would miss that more than any thing but I think for noise this last fourth outdid anything that I ever have or ever will go thru again. Our post was right in the midst of about six French batteries of 75’s in a valley in which there were over three hundred guns. That day and night were particularly active and they were all going most of the time. You couldn’t speak or rather if you did it wouldn’t do you any good for no one could hear you. At night the same thing went on but the air was full of lights of all kinds and colors, star shells, and signals not just in one place but for as far as you could see. Our post was in what was left of an old monastery the true beauties of which, however, I could not quite appreciate since walking around in that vicinity wasn’t all that it might be. The artillery men, however, were wonderful to us and I became quite friends with two of them, one of whom gave me some wonderful pictures he had taken.

As I told you I was on duty on the fourth but Mr. Harjes had sent us out a lot of things and they brought us up our share. You should have seen us down in a cave eating lobster salad and drinking Champagne with the guns up above going to beat the band and the shelling coming in nearly as fast.

On the fourth, too, we were cited by the general of the corps for some sort of conspicuous action which also helped make that a gala day. I am enclosing my copy, save it, as it is probably the best thing in the line of papers it will ever by my good fortune to acquire. Yesterday evening, however, we moved out and are now in a peach of a little town way back and as quiet as they make them. You wouldn’t believe it but last night I couldn’t sleep because of the lack of noise.

Tomorrow we have managed to be transferred from our old division to the 66th Chasseurs, which is the crack division of France. It will be good fun to be with them but leaving the old crowd was like leaving a lot of old friends. The brancardiers (stretcher bearers) and doctors were a fine lot and we knew them very well. However, from now on I sport a beret which is some consolation. This is about all that has happened lately so I will stop.

With love, Paul

Letter dated July 14, 1917

2008-03-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother- :

Am just in Paris for the day on a 24-hour permission which the section was lucky enough to get today and having a fine time.

I think we are going back into action again with our new division the first part of the next week, which I hope comes up to the last place for interest and excitement.

Am enclosing a picture, the only one I can seem to discover of the profligate son on the field of battle. I hope you get it tho it may not arrive. If I get one in which you can see something of me beside a blotch I will send it Will write more when I get back to the contonment again. With love, Paul

P.S. Found better picture sending it instead. The little valley of which I told you is directly behind me underneath. (?)

Letter dated July 2, 1917

2008-03-22T15:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother –

Our new position here is all that I imagined it would be in the way of being lively. However, it is wonderfully interesting, and there is a great deal more to see and watch than our last action. I don’t believe the military authorities would mind my telling you that we are on the line between Rheims and Soissons near Fismes. This is a particularly interesting sector just now since the Germans are trying to get back some of the ground that the French have taken away from them and there is something doing all the time. The last two days I have been at the advance post and worked to death tho it was all very much worth while. Today, however, I am on rear evacuation. The other cars bring down the “blesses” from the “poste de secours” and we carry them from here (a large field hospital) to the base hospital several miles back. This kind of work is rather lazy as we only get a few calls during the day and the rest of the time sit around and watch what is going on. There is enough of that tho to keep very well amused mostly in the matter of aerial work. A Bosche “avion” starts over the French lines to see what is going on and the French shoot at it with shrapnel. Then a Frenchman does the same thing and the Germans take a few cracks at him. The French shrapnel makes white smoke and the German, black, so you can always tell who is receiving the attention. Sometimes when there are as many as twenty “avions” of the two sides up at once the whole sky is a mixture of black and white balls of smoke that look mostly like cotton at first and then break up after a few minutes and drift off. You wonder why they don’t hit the wrong avion but as a matter of fact they never seem to hit any and each one is shot at an unbelievable amount of times. I have watched this business now for every day for over a month and haven’t seen a single avion brought down.

Then, if you want and feel slightly cold blooded, you can watch the doctors fix up the wounded. It is perfectly marvelous the things they do and the speed. If I ever get hurt I pray heaven it will be in France with one of the doctors who has had war experience to fix me up. I keep wondering at myself to see how used I have gotten to things. I can now sit around and eat crackers while watching things that a while ago would have turned me inside out completely.

When I was just writing this last we had a call and had quite a long trip with six “blesses” to two rear hospitals. Now we are back and will probably have nothing to do until about eleven tonight when according to schedule there will be quite a number since usually they bring them down at night after dark and it does not get really dark until after ten.

I got a letter from you yesterday dated May 13. From what you said I evidently made quite a faux pas in clearing out when I did but “c’est la guerre” and unfortunately I am not a mind reader. Nevertheless I suppose it is all for the best, and as for my young heart being put permanently out of commission I imagine it will be quite intact when the next opportunity offers itself.

Who do you suppose have come to our section today? – Maurice - the dancer – Hill of Fair & Warmer (?) – and Mrs. Castle’s brother. All the boys have already named them the circus and are thinking up the most horrible terrifying lies possible to scare them with. Can you imagine Maurice slopping in mud to his knees, sleeping in a manure pile and handling very disagreeable fragments of things? I can’t.

The Bosche is certainly a very annoying sort of person. This afternoon he persistently shelled a hospital, smashed two of the tents all to flinders and wiped out two rows of beds. If ever I get a wounded one I certainly will give him the ride of his life. I am beginning to believe all the tales of barbarism I have heard. There isn’t a great deal more now to tell you but I will write you again soon. Best to every body home.

With love, Paul

Letter dated June 25, 1917

2008-03-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Tomorrow we are going into action again in one of the busiest and hottest sectors on the line. I am very glad of it as this last week of “repos” has gotten to be quite a bore. However I may not get a chance to write again for some time so if you don’t hear from me don’t be worried. All your letters – four of them – came day before yesterday and it certainly was fine to hear from you and all the news from home.

If Elizabeth’s wedding comes off according to schedule get what you can together of what I am apt to acquire in the way of a birthday present and buy her some sort of a wedding present. It doesn’t have to be much as I intend to get her something else when I get where I can buy things again but that will not be until after the first of September at any rate and I would particularly hate to be among the missing at the showdown.

I wrote Nannoo (grandmother) a long letter a couple of days ago and hope she gets it all in good time. The way all your letters here pyramided and then arrived in a bunch was quite remarkable, and I certainly hope that mine do not do the same thing. I will write Carroll (brother) the first time I get a chance and have anything to say and will be always more than glad to hear from him.

The division to which we are attached cleared out this morning and we follow tomorrow. There are big rumors that the Germans are starting something and have to be discouraged. I hope we accomplish our ends and take the Bosches for a good loop but such things aren’t apt to happen much these days.

There is no more now. With love, Paul

Letter dated June 22, 1917

2008-03-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

FIRST LETTER TO PAUL'S GRANDMOTHER WOODRUFF

Dear Nannoo

I have been rotten not to have written you before but now I will try to make this a good one and see if I can’t make up a little for lost time. As I suppose Mother and Father have told you we came out to the front about the first of June and have until the last week been on the steady go ever since. I wrote Papa all about that and told him that he should show you the letter but if he happens to forget it remind him of it.

It was all wonderfully interesting, dangerous enough to make it exciting and something doing all the time. Since then we have been resting and getting repaired generally and will probably go into action again the coming week as that is about when our division is due again to go to the trenches. During the action tho that is past, a lot of things occurred which were rather funny.

There are two classes of wounded: “assis” who are too badly off to walk, and “couches” who can’t even sit up. One day one of the boys was taking a load of assis down from the trenches and stopped in a village to fix his car for a moment. When he turned around all the assis were sitting drinking in a café nearby. Another time we were taking some couches down and a shell burst near the car. All the couches, mind you men even too badly hurt to sit up, opened the car and got out and ran to beat the band. A lot of things like that took place and I can’t begin to tell them all. One of the best was to see us all one time run for the same small hole in the ground at the first sign of a shell.

I stopped writing here yesterday because I had to go out and in the meantime have gotten some mail from home. Four letters from Mother all written a week apart. It seemed great to get some news but as the newest one was nearly a month old, it took some of the glamour away. I hope my letters are not as long in getting to America but I rather imagine they are as everything from out here is gone over with a fine tooth comb.

You should see the place we are in now. I think you have been near it, but I can’t tell you where it is. It is a hillside village piled up like a Maxfield Parrish picture and only slightly ruined. We are billeted in the top of a barn, a place that I doubt very much if we would think good enough for the dogs and yet consider ourselves very lucky. It has rained the last two days and outside is a complete sea of mud. Moreover French mud is like no other that I ever saw, much worse even than the Auburn variety which I am frank to admit is going some. One redeeming feature tho is the food which is wonderful. Much better in fact than you can get in Paris by paying for it. They seem to send everything possible to the armies and Mr. Harjes himself does quite a lot for this section. The water tho is not drinkable and I don’t believe that anyone has had a drink of plain water for weeks. A red wine called Pinard is issued to everyone in vast quantities and between that and coffee we manage to keep fairly well flooded.

I am actually growing fat and have never felt better in my life. I have no hollows in my cheeks and with the embryonic mustache which I am attempting have a distinctly stuffy and well fed look that I never remember before having noticed.

Mother tells me in all her letters to cable her. It can’t be done, but if anything happens to me the authorities will cable, so assure her that as long as she doesn’t hear from me by that source I am doing fine. Any kind of correspondence except writing is absolutely forbidden out here and even in Paris you have to get a special permit to send a cable. They are, you see, very afraid that any news should get out which would be at all undesirable to have loose and more so now than ever as America has entered the war. Some of the articles in papers from America that I have seen are positively funny they are so far off the actual facts.

I have just heard that we are going into action again on Tuesday a little farther north than before. I am very glad as this “repos” had gotten to be a fearful bore and although quiet and restful gets rather on one’s nerves. Moreover the sector to which we are going is reported to be very lively so I imagine there will be plenty to do. There isn’t a great deal more to tell you now unless I go into details about the surrounding country which you probably know by heart as it is typical of this part of France. Good bye With love Paul

Letter dated June 16, 1917

2008-03-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

FIRST LETTER TO HIS FATHER, WILLIAM HILLS

Dear Father-: This is what you might call an original unabridged edition. Things that I
couldn’t quite write to mother for fear that she might worry but things which I think you would be interested in and like to hear about.

We are just today finished with what you might call a very active two weeks and have gone on “repos” for two days to get rested and fix things up a little. As I told you, you remember we are attached now to the oldest of the sections and one which sees probably as much life as is going on. During the past two weeks our division, that is the division whose wounded we take care of was holding a particularly hot sector of the trenches and we consequently had our work cut out. Two of the men in the section were wounded and nine of the cars hit and there is some mention made of decorating the whole section for bravery. Just a few words as to what it was all like:

Our forward relief post at which there are the ten cars being used that day was in a little town which was a couple of miles behind the lines but which the Bosches seemed to take a particular delight in “strafing” with large shells at irregular intervals during the day and night. This however was comparatively tame as you could always hear them coming in time to get below ground . Usually, however, there was vastly more danger from four or five people trying to get thru the narrow door of the abri or dugout at one time than there could possibly be from the effect of the largest shell in existence.

Then our posts of secours, as they call the places to which the men are carried for us to come and get. There were three of them practically in the trenches, little or big underground caves into which we scuttled after leaving our cars behind a nearby bank or wall. All the roads leading to these posts were under fire pretty continuously and getting thru was a game the thrills in which you can’t imagine. One of them the Bosche could see perfectly and the other two he just kept shooting at for fun and very well, naturally since he had just left that part of the country two weeks before. By the end of the time we were so blasé to shells that unless they were particularly near no one even noticed them.

As you can well imagine, tho, there were a great many very disagreeable features as well as the thrills and the fun of driving. Sitting practically alone in a very wet cellar just before dawn with the smell of the old dead not buried and the new blood of the freshly killed and wounded nearly suffocating you isn’t particularly pleasant. Add to that a noise so loud, of both the shells coming in and going out, that you have to shout to be heard across the room, and you have the idea of the way we spent a good deal of the time. Other times were once in a while quite the opposite but these were short, when there was nothing to do and things were quiet for a while. Then we sat around on top of the dugout and watched aeroplanes fight or walked around in the wreckage hunting for relics. I have found a couple of good ones that I hope to bring home some day. I forgot to tell you that the first place we tried to camp the German avions chased us out of having raided that locality two evenings in succession and made it decidedly unpleasant.

Now we have moved back as I said before for a slight rest. As far as I can see, it is going to be a fearful bore. Nothing doing but to but to sit around all day and fix automobiles and write and talk. I drive a large Packard and as yet have had no trouble.

This is all now. Nannoo (Paul’s grandmother) would probably be interested in this letter and mother, if you think she would not worry. I am a little afraid but use your judgment. Love to everybody and best wishes to Day’s birthday. Paul

Letter dated June 14, 1917

2008-03-21T11:54:00.000-07:00

POSTCARD

We are practically finished a rather strenuous two weeks and may go back any day for a rest as our division has already started to leave the trenches. Feeling fine and having wonderful time. Paul

Letter dated June 9, 1917

2008-03-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother -: I am by now becoming quite accustomed to a new mode of life which for utter strangeness has anything you ever dreamed of quite lashed to the mast. To begin with the meals – Breakfast at 9, lunch at 12 and dinner at 6:30 p.m. usually – All very good. Then we work driving for 24 hours. Then,10 hours to clean up the car, ourselves, etc., and sleep the rest of the time. At home we live in the rose garden of a chateau –very fine. Out, on duty, our posts are in a cellar in what is left of a little town of which there is no whole house and most of them mere piles of wreckage. The whole is pervaded by the odor of very hastily buried Germans. This is not so fine. Another post is in a cave in a hillside. The cave might be the setting of a war play. It is very comfortable but very noisy. The third is another cave. I am just now in the base post about a mile back waiting for a call to go and relieve the cars at the three front posts. They have moved a battery of heavy guns in across the street and I jump a foot every time they shoot. A few moments ago a Bosche avion sailed over and was chased out by shrapnel. It was a beautiful piece of work on the B’s part and he may have seen the battery. If so, we will retire to the cellar and the battery will move out. I have gotten so that I can sleep perfectly with a noise going on that would absolutely wake the dead. It is so loud sometimes that candle flames jump and flicker in the cellar. You have no idea what a weird sound shells going overhead make. It is something between a hiss, a shriek and a siren. Very interesting sometimes but at dawn the most mournful thing you ever listened to. I have just gotten the news of the English success at Ypres and everybody is very excited. There is going to be an attack here soon I am sure for the preparation being made is tremendous.

I forgot to tell you that Bill McCarthy (from Auburn, NY – Ed.) is in the section. We found him here when we arrived. Strange, out of 25 sections, isn’t it? Give Day (his younger sister –Ed) my best wishes for her birthday and tell her I have something for her. This is all now.Will write more soon. With love, Paul

Letter dated June 5, 1917

2008-03-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother- You must be surprised to be having all these letters from me but just now I am in a very tiresome wait and must do something. We-the other boy on the car (ambulance)- and I are waiting in an “abri” (shelter) for “blesses” (wounded) One has come in but in the last hour all the others brought along have been dead and hence there is nothing to do but wait in this hole in the ground. Shells are going over from both sides and making a huge riot but as you can imagine crowded into a hole with a dozen “brancardiers” (stretcher bearers) on a very hot day isn’t thrilling. It doesn’t seem real at all to that this is war. The dead are so very dead – The shells sort of impersonal and everything happens so quick. This post is in a ruined town like the pictures in the papers but more ruined than any I ever saw in those and beside that becoming worse all the time. Will write you more later. The blesse (wounded) has not arrived but I am going to search food. Love, Paul

Letter dated June 3, 1917

2008-03-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother – Your letter telling me to cable came tome here and I am very sorry but I might as well try for the moon as to try to send you any word quicker than a letter. We came out to the front lately and have certainly had a lively time since. The first place they sent us to the section had left and it took two days to find it. Then when we did it was in the midst of very lively action and still is. We traveled over most of France looking for it which was very interesting. We have already moved once since the Bosche avions (German aircraft –Ed) chased us from our first site. Our job is now to live a mile or two behind the lines and to up each, each of us, for a day (24 hours) at a time to evacuate the wounded to a hospital. It is certainly thrilling work and all that I hoped for. I go out again in the morning. We are now living at the place I am going to live when I become a millionaire – Remind me to tell you of it some other time. This is not very much of a letter but all I can say now.

Love to every body and the dogs. Paul

Letter dated May 22, 1917

2008-03-20T12:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-:

Have just gotten word that we may start out any day now so I may as well start and write you as intelligently as possible for a time for once out I understand you can say very little of what isn’t and nothing that is.

My uniform isn’t quite ready yet but will probably be so tomorrow or the next day and I am waiting for it in all expectation for in civilian clothes one certainly feels out of things. The streets are perfectly wonderful – a great mixture of all the costumes of the armies of the allies in all the colors of the rainbow – the French horizon blue and the English khaki prevailing. It would be a study in itself to know just to what everyone belongs and what all this insignia and decorations stand for.

I suppose you would like to know what Paris is like and tho I don’t know whether this will get by I will make a try. All the lights go out and everything closes at 9:30 and after that it is so dark that getting lost is easier than anything you can imagine for there are no street lights and all the curtains of the houses must be down so that no light shows.

The only kind of bread that it is possible to get is the regular war variety- brown, tough, quite good and eatable but not delicate. In the evening, that is after six o’clock, it is impossible or rather against the law to get any meat and the result is that dinner is rather a frugal meal of eggs, fish or vegetables. At noon all the stores close for two hours to let everybody have a chance to get fed up once for all. The prices of things vary tremendously. Some are still ridiculously low and some higher than your wildest dreams. Cream in a restaurant comes at about 2 francs a thimble full and shoes are about 100 a pair which disgusted me tremendously as I had to buy a pair of light ones to wear about town. On the other hand lodgings, carriages and wine and tobacco are ridiculously cheap.

There are a number of boys here from St. Paul’s, college, etc., that I have known at other times and it is quite like being in a city where I have lived before in that way, as you are continually meeting them wherever you go.

We have been to the theatre quite a good deal and I have seen a few sights, tho alone as Hunt has seen them all before and Stanley quite refuses to improve his aesthetic sensibility with churches and such. My French, however, isn’t getting all the practice that it might for nearly everyone makes some attempt at speaking English and refuses to let you talk French as soon as he discovers that you are not too proficient at it. Nevertheless it may be different at the front and I am hoping for the best. The current speech here is a strange mixture of English and French and others, odd but quite comprehensible.

The weather here is perfectly fearful but whether it is because of the cannonade at the front or simply natural I don’t know. It rains every single day for some little time, not hard but just drips then stops, the sun shines for a minute and then it starts over again.

The boys who have come back on leave from the front say it is perfectly wonderful. Something interesting going on all the time and enough to do to keep you busy without wearing you to a complete frazzle.

Yesterday Stanley and I went out thru the big hospital at Neuilly. It was perfectly marvelous the things they did. A man that had no face left was having one built and in a little while would look quite like an ordinary person again. All the men – and there were over six hundred with many like the one I have mentioned – looked healthy, very healthy and were all wonderfully happy and contented. The care they get must be something beyond imagination for even those who were about to die looked as healthy as you or I. This is no exaggeration and no one was more surprised than I was, expecting to see numbers of human wrecks and quantities of agony. If any one asks them if they suffer or are sorry they have lost an arm, leg, etc., they say simply “C’est la guerre” and appear glad to have been able to give anything they have had for the country. It is you will have to admit a wonderful spirit and I hope infectious to our troops who, I understand, will be coming here soon. If they do and we are taken over by the U.S. (Army) of which there is some chance, it rather looks as tho we (the ambulance) were in it for the war but that is only a possibility and a faint one. I will try to get off another letter before I leave but if not don’t be surprised at ambiguous or abbreviated correspondence.

With love, Paul

Letter dated May 17, 1917

2008-03-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

LETTER FROM PARIS, SILVIA HOTEL, RUE GODOT DE MAUROY

Dear Mother -

My letter from the steamer told you little or nothing but as a matter of fact that was typical of the voyage for little or nothing went on at all until the last two days. The trip was very smooth all the way for which I was duly thankful and the weather quite good tho not very bright. On next to the last day out, that is on Sunday we saw a convoy of food ships guarded by destroyers that rather gave everybody a little confidence considering the fact that we were then in the war zone and apt to be torpedoed. On Monday morning we got to the mouth of the river, however, without even having seen a submarine. We missed the tide in the river, however, and did not get to Bordeaux until early the next morning. My impressions of that city I don’t believe will go for a great deal since in the three hours we spent there before the train left, about all I saw was a vast amount of dogs of an unknown variety, a multitude of fat women riding behind tiny donkeys, and more cafes than I ever knew existed. There were also some German prisoners going thru which we got a very good look at and who I am frank to admit look big, healthy and happy.

The ride up (to Paris) was perfectly beautiful, the weather here being about like Auburn at the first of June. The country was wonderfully fresh looking and everything greener than I ever remember seeing before. The ride was thru the chateau country and although there weren’t very many of those architectural triumphs directly on the track we did get a fair enough view of a few.

The people who are running the ambulance affair didn’t seem to favor our staying with Hunt’s relatives as there is quite a little to do before we go out and that date is very indefinite. They have, however, put us up very comfortably. We live in the hotel about which you can read all over this paper and envelope, etc. and really as a matter of fact the location is wonderful. We eat at another hotel about a mile away up the “Cours de la reine” which is very fair indeed and where we get very good food, some things of course limited because of war but a great deal more than I expected. We got here about nine o’clock in the evening and the next day saw about our uniforms and signed millions of papers of every variety imaginable. I remember writing your maiden name on several of them and how many times I had been married, etc., etc.

Today we have seen about our baggage and done some more papers.

Just how long we will be in Paris is a question but it will probably be two weeks or so as it takes that long to organize the new section, get uniforms, etc. The uniforms, by the way, are the sportiest things you can imagine. They are English officers rigs all tailor made and wonderfully good looking. I am rather glad we are going to be here as long as we are for there is so much I want to see and do. Tomorrow I am going to buy a guide book and map and systematically start improving my mind in my leisure time. Today, I discovered too late, is a holiday.

With love,

Paul

Letter dated May 9, 1917

2008-03-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

LETTER HOME WRITTEN ABOARD FRENCH LINE SHIP DESTINED FOR BORDEAUX, FRANCE
RECEIVED MAY 30, 1917

Dear Mother-

This will I am afraid be but just a line since there is really nothing that goes on to write you about. As you know well enough we got off Saturday. That day and Sunday I was very sick. The wind blew like blazes and the old boat just jumped all over the place. On Monday, however, I took a new lease on life and since then have been doing more than justice to all the meals that are put forward. The crowd on board are not particularly interesting. The fact is they are quite the opposite. There are about 90 missionaries, nearly that many ambulance drivers (of whom P.W.H. was one –Ed.) and about a dozen uninteresting women. With one exception: the actress of the Theatre Francaise, who as luck would have it, is as yet the only one that I have not met. Hunt and Stanley (Hunt Talmage from Princeton and Stanley Metcalf, a lifelong friend from Auburn who had been a Yale undergraduate and had also joined the ambulance service.-Ed.) and I do practically nothing all day but attend meals and sit around on deck reading. The meals are very good but even at that do not furnish the necessary amusement. I shall be frankly glad when we arrive since as you can well imagine all this is not too thrilling.

We seem from the map to be taking a rather southerly route, that is straight across instead of going any north(ward) and it certainly is an unfrequented one for as yet we have seen only three ships in the far distance, a whale and a school of porpoises. I got my inoculation Monday and will get the other before I get off the boat as the Doc says it is all right and none of them seem to have any visible effect. According to all the hot dope if we are not sunk we will land on Monday in time to catch the train for Paris that night. This is all the news and practically everything that as happened since we started so you can see that at its best it has been a very uneventful voyage up to the present. My French is improving wonderfully thru necessity tho it mostly consists of the sign language as none of the servants on board speaks a word of English.

This is about all now – if anything turns up I will write you some more but absolute placidity seems to characterize us all now more clearly than anything else.

With love,

Paul

Letter dated April 17, 1917

2008-03-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

FIRST LETTER, SPECIAL DELIVERY, ADDRESSED TO HIS MOTHER, FROM PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY, WHERE PAUL HILLS WAS A SENIOR AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. THE U.S. HAD FORMALLY DECLARED WAR WITH GERMANY ON APRIL, 1917.

Dear Mother -

I am as usual very sorry not to have written before but this time I have the excuse of really having been doing something worthwhile. In fact I have been playing a large game and seem to have won. You remember I perhaps have told you about Hunt Talmage, the possessor of two million in his own. He is going abroad to work in the Harjes Ambulance
and wants me to come along. I first went and saw the Dean who said much to my surprise that it was perfectly fine that I was going and of course I could have my diploma. Then I saw the military authorities at Governors Island who said that it was a good thing to go over especially to learn the ways of the country and I would be worth much more to my own country when the time came for us to send troops over there and incidentally could get a higher commission.

Moreover, the whole business is paid for with the exception of spending money. That is, passage over and back, subsistence while at work, board and room while on furlough in Paris, uniform, all these free. Added to these advantages Hunt’s aunt is a countess at whose chateau we are going to live before we begin work. The danger is absolutely nil as not one person has been killed in the history of this unit. The whole thing is endowed by J.P. Morgan and Harjes, his Paris agent who takes an active and personal interest in the work. (The Morgan bank, through its Paris office, Morgan Harjes, sponsored and financed a volunteer ambulance service serving the French Army in the period before the United States entered the war. Many young men from American colleges served in this and other similar ambulance services in the same period. –Ed.) This I know from Bill Armour who just came back and had the most wonderful time of his life. Mother, it is a chance that I will never get again and like which there will never be another and which, unless you are more averse than words can express, and will not help me at all, I am going to take.

Please don’t delay answering this immediately as I want to sail if possible with several more boys from here who are going to Salonika on May 5. That necessitates some quick work. The stay is for six months which will bring me home just before Christmas. Please, mother, don’t stand in the way on this as I am more keen about it than I ever have been about anything and you can manage it for me very easily by a few carefully chosen, rightly directed words. It will not be expensive at all (not nearly so much so as having me at home) and it is something that can’t be missed. Moreover, I don’t think I could stand staying here much longer. Bill Hump (Bill Humphreys, from Pittsburgh, was a close friend, college roommate and hockey teammate through school and college years.-Ed) has finally left to join the aviation corps and besides being alone in my house there are only three of us out of 22 at the club.

I am enclosing a form for a birth affidavit which I have to have as soon as possible to get my passport – fill it out and send it back quickly.

Good bye now.

Paul