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

Along in June came a new bunch of men and from these recruits our battery was filled to war strength. The process of assimilation was most easy and rapid by this time and the new men were regular soldiers by the middle of July. On the 16th we lined up in front of old 1291 for the last time, slung packs and hiked off down the muddy road. Naturally it was raining. We entrained down below the remount station and just before noon slid silently out of the camp which had come to be such a home to us. (We didn’t realize how much of a home it had been until we hit France.)

This was an excellent trip in spite of the three-to-a-seat regulation. The Red Cross brightened up our trip at several stops and people along the line waved good luck and good-bye. We reached Jersey City the next afternoon, ferried down the river and piled off at Long Island City about supper time. Had it not been for the Red Cross there we would have gone hungry that night. We reached Camp Mills rather late and were promptly assigned to our tents. No one can tell how glad we were to ditch those packs and flop on the cot springs.

Our "quarters" were a bunch of mess tables, fifteen feet long and set perpendicular to the side of the ship and not over a foot apart. Sixteen men to a table–packs had to go wherever we could land them. "Reckon we just mess here," said one buck. "Nope," said another, "look at the flock of hooks up above." Flock was good. The rafters which were new and strong, by necessity it turned out, entertained a literal forest of hooks. They were set facing alternating directions. You get a canvas hammock as we presently discovered and suspend it between two alternate hooks. Everyone else does the same and pretty soon you’re sardined in like Ring Lardner’s traveling rookie. You wonder how you’re ever going to sleep with your head up and your feet ditto, pairs of feet or bodies bumping into you but you do and don’t mind it after a day or so.

That first night out was a wild one. First thing we knew everyone was "doing it," as Lieut. Curtiss said when he did his bit for the fry. Down below, up on deck, everywhere–soldiers and officers with a large misery in their stomachs and a huge desire to die. The British cooking was hard for us to swallow even after we lost the MAL-DE-MER but the bread and New Zealand jam was wonderful and we made out on that.

Max Corrigan started to "drill" his actors on this trip who afterwards toured certain parts of France. The show he and some of his comrades put on {on} the boat was much enjoyed by all. But the thing we enjoyed most of all on the trip was the sight of those old torpedo boat destroyers coming out to meet us. When we awoke on the morning of August 11th it was so foggy we could not see but we could distinctly hear the clanging of fog bells. Glory be! We were in the harbor safe and sound just below Liverpool. Finally the fog lifted and we got under way again for the last stretch up to the dock. An English boy band played snappy Yank tunes while we unloaded.

We hiked across Liverpool to the Central Station and piled into dinky English coaches. That was the first look most of us had had at compartment cars. England’s garden-like landscape was a distinct novelty to us also as we flew over the ground to Southampton. We reached that city about midnight and immediately set out for the British rest camp near there. We needed rest when we arrived there all right but didn’t get much. At 2:00 o’clock the next afternoon we were under way again for our trip across the English Channel. All along the way women and children came out to shake hands with us and wish us God-speed.