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Saturday, September 15, 2018

Letter from Lt. J.E. Johnston in France, 1918

 “From ‘Over There’” in the Roanoke News, September 16, 1918

An Interesting letter from Lieut. J.E. Johnston, Stationed Near Cantigney, France
June 17, 1918
Four officers from this regiment left for the States about a week ago, the next four haven’t been chosen yet. They may stop that now that there are so many coming over. Gee! Before long we will have a real army in the field and I say “God speed the day.” Germany had better do her worst or best right now for by the end of summer the Allies will be more than well fixed and next spring—well, all I’ve got so say is she had better look out. It won’t be Germany who’ll do the pushing then and there’ll be a good deal of pushing done. You ought to see how our soldiers fight—I mean our Infantry. They are wonderful, and My! What hardships they have to endure at times. I don’t mean that the Artillerymen are not good fighters, too, nor that they don’t have their hard times, for they do, but they are back in what seems a safe place at any rate. They have to shoot day and night, of course, and be ready to put down a barrage any time the infantry call for it, and so they undergo the shelling by the enemy, of course, but they have their safe dug outs and they don’t have to live in the trenches. The spirit among all the soldiers is unbeatable, and none of them mind going through anything to get a job done. When you know all that and also know that there are thousands of others just like them coming over, there can be not the slightest doubt that German militarism is doomed.
And the French! I don’t mind saying it at all—they are the best fighters in Europe, from the private on up to Foch. The longer you live among them, the more you know them and see and realize what they’ve undergone, the more you respect and admire them. They are great on strategy, great in their individual fighting, and the best artillerymen on earth. With the French in command, I don’t get at all scared when a report comes in that the Germans have taken some more territory. And all the papers and a majority of the people in the United States have entirely the wrong conception of France’s strength today—about her having bled to death and all that. Whenever some real threatening attack comes off it’s generally the French Reserves who stop it.
We had the funniest thing happen to us the other day, or rather it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so tragic. Late in the morning a plane with British markings flew over the town we are living in now and quite low. That caused no excitement or comment, as we knew the British were flying in our sector. Well, as everybody was watching him, he dropped something twice, what we supposed to be messages (nothing unusual about that, and it goes on all the time.) A second or two later we discovered that they were bombs. Then, of course, everything opened up on him and we were all enraged because of this new underhand and overhead trick the Boche had pulled. Well, nobody could hit him, though every machine gun and anti-aircraft around were popping away and he didn’t seem to care for he still flew very low and started using his machine gun. He’d go down a road and it wide open chasing a cannon or auto and wherever he saw a group of men he’d toss over a small bomb or two. He killed one Frenchman and wounded several American and still he kept it up. We all began to admire him very much for we’d never seen a Boche with so much nerve and he sure had everybody in the whole country under cover. Finally he was forced to land with a fractured shoulder and low and behold! He was no German at all but an American flying in a British plane, who had only been in France three weeks and had gotten his map mixed up, thinking a railroad behind us was one that is in the German lines. It would have been extremely funny but for the tragedy. They say when the poor fellow heard what he had done he broke down and cried like a baby. I hoope they don’t do anything to him but teach him how to read a map and send him in a plane to Germany, for he surely had his nerve and has I believe great possibilities as an aviator.
Things are very quiet here now after they tried some several unsuccessful attempts to take back the village we took from the Boche some time ago.


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