This is the third in a series of excerpts from the letters of my grandfather, Garfield V Cox, that he wrote him from France during and immediately after the end of World War I. The letters begin in October 1918 and continue through the end of August 1919. In my attempt to diary them on their anniversary dates I started with the letter home to his wife, my grandmother, Jeanette [Wade] Cox, dated March 12, 1919 at Grange-le-Comte. The second was a letter written over several days, March 15-19, 1919 at Aubreville, France.
This letter was written to his parents, Milton and Martha “Matty” [Petty] Cox, on their farm in Fairmount, Indiana. Often in these letters he recounts the same events to parents (or sister) that he did to wife in a previous letter but equally as often there are interesting things written in one that are left out of another.
In any event these letters give a stark first person account of the aftermath of World War I and the efforts at reconstruction that he engaged in as a member of the American Friends Service Committee.
Aubreville, Meuse
March 20, 1919
Dear father & mother:
At last I have bo't some stamps. It is 8:30 P.M. I'll write you the best letter I can before early bed time. I have to get up early to get the breakfast. Here we take turns of one morning each, which is much better than the arrangement at Ornans....
At his previous location, Ornans, near the Swiss border, pairs of friends were assigned to work the kitchen for a week at a time doing clean-up, cooking, serving, fetching, preparation, etc while also maintaining their normal hours of construction work. It was clearly very difficult and exhausting.
Our equipe has doubled in numbers since I came. We now number 21. Today Philip Bailey, a younger brother of Moses Bailey, came to us. He is to be in the agricultural work.
We are very busy now unloading house sections from cars that are arriving from Ornans at the rate of two or three a day. Part of the lumber is to be used here and part of it hauled by truck to other villages. We built the ware house here for the whole district because this is its geographical center and because it is also the crossing of the main highways and is on the Verdun to Paris railway. That, incidentally is a reason why this spot is one of the worst destroyed places in the war zone.
The only mail that has reached me since March 8th was a letter from you. I got it Monday evening the 17th and you wrote it Feb. 25th. That is unusually quick time. I ought to be hearing from Jean soon. You speak about the difficulty of reclaiming the mined and shelled regions here. Yes, it will be difficult. Experts have decided that we can't do anything with some places this year. We keep our hands off of everything that looks suspicious. We don't trust “exploded” shells even, or “unloaded” guns. Experts are doing the exploding. They gather huge piles of shells and grenades with great caution, and from a distance set them off all at once. The concussion is terrific. It is like an earthquake and volcano combined. I don't think I personally am in very great danger. I am in the building department. It is the agriculture boys who run the big risk.
The agriculture department of our work had laid big plans for hatching chickens to distribute to the returning refugees. But the constant explosions have made it necessary to give up the poultry farm at Grange, and ship the incubators to a point distant from the war zone.
As is common to every war story the desire for mail arriving from home is a big and constant issue in these letters. As I remarked in an earlier diary the time issue is also quite noticeable to one living in our age of instant communications. A letter written Feb 25 and arriving March 17 is unusually quick. This letter in response started March 20 will likely arrive in Indiana sometime mid-April. The time lag when learning about dangers, illness, and injuries must have been terrible.
In another letter he tells of Friends (Quakers) being injured from unexploded shells while going about their work. Despite his insistence to his parents that he is not in danger the fact is that in other letters he talks regularly about coming across shells, guns and other left behind military equipment. In the previous letter in which he arrives in this area he talks of bedding down for the night in a shack full of such left over ordinance.
He goes on for a bit about interruptions and people rudely trying to engage him in conversation when he is obviously trying to write (I can see my peevishness at such things is genetic!). He then goes on to recount his hike with Captain Isbell into the Argonne Forest which I excerpted from his letter to my grandmother in my previous diary. But then he adds this interesting little tidbit...
Monday night the negro troops gave a minstrel in their entertainment hall, and they invited us and wanted to know ahead of time how many of us they could expect. We took a poll and reported 13, so when we went we found they had reserved 13 seats for us with the four white officers of the company. The show was pretty good. They had gone to elaborate pains in stage decoration and had shown pretty good taste, too. They closed by staging a scene of embarkation for America. They had built a ship on the stage and painted it and marched aboard singing. Then they came to the railing, waved goodbye, and sang “Carry me back to old Virginia.”
And then a description I might write of an attempt to get work done at my office...
It is 10 P.M. & I am growing cold. I've been three hours trying to write you this evening in a room full of fellows. I haven't gotten down much more than a sentence at a time, however. I've been interrupted constantly, sometimes by interesting narratives and other times by uninteresting questions directed at me.
You'll have to excuse me of I find such things amusing. His humanness shines through so clearly.
March 23rd (Sunday 3:30 P.M.)
I traded cooking jobs today with a fellow who should have been orderly but wanted to take a trip, so he'll take my place on April 13th and I'll be free that day. Cooking three Sunday meals for 22 men is no easy task to perform on a day of “rest.” I've been hurried every minute since I got up this morning till now and in half an hour I'll have to begin getting supper. The 22nd man arrived this morning.
And for genealogy buffs little gems like this can be found in such letters...
I recall that 31 years ago today an event of considerable importance happened in our home _ I say “our” figuratively for I didn't figure in family matters then. It is hard to realize that Eva is rapidly approaching middle age and that I shall soon be twenty-six!
Eva is one of his two older sisters, Eva Delight [Cox] Jenkins and Muriel Joy [Cox] Pearson. Among the letters I have are many he wrote to Eva over the years. Of the few I have of my grandmothers letters are ones she wrote to Eva. Thank you for saving them Great Aunt Eva... and Happy 123rd birthday.
From here he goes on to recount a hike he and some others took into the Alps just before he transferred out of Ornans. As that description is a story unto itself I'll write it in a separate diary and stop here for now with this one having given a bit of an idea of conditions they worked under, dangers they faced... you wouldn't automatically think of agricultural workers being in danger after a war is over but when you consider tilling soil strewn with shells... And those poor chickens too scared by explosions to lay eggs. And then the talk of the negro troops “minstrel” showing the racial segregation, the need to create entertainment, and the desire for home all packed into one short paragraph.
In regard to dangers faced, my grandfathers work was mostly behind the lines and after the war ended. He arrived just before the Armistice and only arrived at the front lines region during the March 1919 time frame of these letters, after the fighting had stopped but during the clean-up and specifically to do the reconstruction work.
However, this was not the case for many of the Friends and other conscientious objectors that served in non-fighting roles. Starting with the Friends Ambulance Unit and carrying on into the early work of the American Friends Service Committee conscientious objectors have often entered directly into the front lines of war to serve in relief roles. For more on this history please see the American Friends Service Committee Archives and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection website on Conscientious Objection in America.
“What if they gave a war... and nobody came.” - anonymous