Sidney D. Light's WWI Diary, Postcards & Letters, 329th Battery Book Accounts

My dear Alberta,

Your welcome letters of Oct. 23rd and 24th were received yesterday and I certainly was glad to hear from, it being the first letters for fully a month and it seemed a year. I was awfully sorry to hear that you had not received the many letters that I had mailed to you and I sincerely hope that you won’t think that I have forgotten you. You know what I told you when I left and I’m certainly going to live up to it. Nearly every letter I wrote to you I sent through the Base Censor and I’m afraid that some of them may have gone astray.

Well, the war is evidently over and we are quartered in a little town up near Switzerland awaiting orders. This town has been almost entirely destroyed by shell fire and aerial bombs. When the armistice was signed we were living in a little town which was shelled by the Huns nearly every night and we never dared leave our gas mask in the billets.

This is a very interesting little town and we can see soldiers from every Allied nation here. Most of them are prisoners from Germany. They started to pass through here about three days ago and they are still passing through, British, French, Italian, Belgian and Americans. They certainly tell some awful tales. We talked with one Englishman that was taken prisoner the first day of the war. There is a regiment of Italian Chaussers quartered in a large building right across the street from us. They are a snappy looking bunch. Yours truly is busy getting the boys fitted up with new clothes and I am looking forward to plenty of hard work in the future before I am mustered out.....

....I’ve got quite a few little souvenirs but wish I had a lot more. The main trouble is that our carrying space is so limited and the C.C. is so strict about sending anything home. I had my sister buy me some French needlework some time ago which she claims she mailed to me, but to date, I haven’t received it. When I do I’ll try to get permission to sent it on to you.

I could have had a Boche helmet rifle and other trophies but they are so bulky to carry about and we haven’t had a chance to mail anything, being on the move so much. We were in action just 11 days and changed our position twice. Our battery only had two casualties and they weren’t bad. Two of the boys were injured by shell fire.

The morning the armistice was signed, a 30 piece band came marching though the village playing for all they were worth and maybe it did seem good to hear music once more. I don’t believe I’ll ever forget that morning.

We expect to leave here sometime this week and hike for somewhere (I haven’t been able to find out) and it’s going to be with full packs too, so I hope it isn’t far. Goodness knows that we hiked 15 miles the day we landed here. That was the most interesting trip we made since we landed.

We passed through towns that were leveled by shellfire and across no man’s land where for miles the ground was covered with barbed wire and gouged with ugly shell craters, undermined with dugouts, and dug up with trenches. I never could realize what a poor doughboy had to go through until I saw this and I’ll tell the world that the same doughboy is the man that was "there" and did the actual fighting. We passed many graves where our boys were buried. A simple wooden cross with one identification tag nailed to it at the head and his rusty bayonet sticking up at the foot. There were also many German graves and a good sight more Huns than Yanks.

One of those huge tanks that you have read about was blown up right in the center of no man’s land and aeroplane wreckage lay here and there. At one point, the front line trenches passed right through a small town but one could never tell what had been there because of the havoc wrought by the big shells. It certainly was an awful sight and one that will never be forgotten......