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

     It is tradition that public humorists are often private crabs.  Undertakers often make model husbands.  Ordinarily, by the same token, the man who passes out mail to palpitating thousands does it with a grouch and a sigh.  A yellow letter, torn and dim, a letter is to him—and nothing more.

       Our mail orderlies drew a different inspiration from their letter job., somehow; at least put a different spirit into it.  They liked to dive in and haul out mail for The Boys—and thereby hangs a tale.

       You know, this letter-writing and receiving proposition is one of the most remarkable servants of mankind.  It has grown to be more than that: it is a power and an all-pervading influence.  Far off in Longhorn, Texas, a gray-haired little lady works painfully on a letter to her son in France.  He’s somewhere Over There—he couldn’t say just where—but this will reach him and tell him that mother’s with him of course.  If only he’d write oftener himself!  But the letter he gets brings cheer and comfort.  His slow reply brings solace in spite of its bleak contents.  Up in Illinois a tobacco worker puts her address into the blunt O.D. reply.  Down in Mobile a colored lassie thrills at her Sambo’s account of capturing the kaiser.  Letters! Letters!  If the home folks knew how much theirs have meant to us!  If we knew how welcome “Soldiers’ Mail” was to them—well, just another digression before we get back to the boys who handled the 329th mail.

       A wreck of a town—4,000 miles from anywhere, as far as we’re concerned.  Billets in an old schoolhouse.  Night has fallen, leaving the place a black, shadow-ridden hull.  A door opens and slams in the silence.  “Mail!” comes the call that none can resist.  There is a rush and a scramble.  Hobnails hustle along hoary halls. Voices echo “Mail! Mail!”  A light appears.  Someone holds the lantern while we crowd around the man with the mail.  It is a never-to-be-forgotten picture.  The flickering light, the eager faces.  There is a hum of anticipation, a thrill of expectancy.  Then silence—a hush for the first name to be called.  “Here!” booms out the jubilant answer.  The crowd laughs, and the greatest of all army games is on.  Maybe you win that night; maybe you lose, but there’s always the consolation.  “Somewhere there’s beaucoup mail for me.”

        And now for the talle we left hanging.  Corporals George W. Cromer and H. J. Fillion have been our mail dispensers since Custer was a corn field.  By the 22nd of September, 1917, they were established in regular P.O. fashion, and since then have collected and distributed mail in everything from a depot to a damp abri.

       They set up in the rain at Fliery Woods.  A boche aviator fired on Cromer while he was bicycling our mail between Bouillionville and Pannes.  Fillion is said to have caught a German “dud” in a mail sack.

       In the course of our travels they sorted unlimited bundles; figured out countless impossible addresses; stamped an average of 3,500 outgoing letters a week in France; redirected and rehandled much transfer mail; grew gray hairs trying to find the right A.P.O. to draw mail form; and answered ten million different questions—or rather the same one ten million times, “Is there any mail for me?”—with nary a kick or grumble.

       Of course, said work was just their plain duty as we look at it in the army.  As soldiers, they wouldn’t want any bouquets for duty done and we don’t propose to hand them any on that score.  But we like the spirit they brought to their work.  They took cheer for others out of mail bags and made friends with their own steady cheerfulness.

       High, low, Jack and the General looked all alike to them when it came to courtesy.  You might haunt their office with no other purpose than to wish for mail.  But you were never met with a grouch or a clam.  You might bother them with distraction inquiring after that letter which hadn’t had time to come.  But if they felt any resentments they kept them to themselves.

       In other words, they kept smiling and made us all feel better for it.  Which in our opinion, is a real achievement on any job in the army, let alone on one that everyone considers his own particular business.