Military Songs of War

Diary of Pvt. Charles Altman - Part 2

I saw two women of the peasant class waiting outside the Prefect’s office in Paris. The elder went in, returning presently with a set look on her worn face.

“Is it well with Jean? the younger woman asked eagerly.

“Yes, it is well.”

“And with Henri and Paul?”

“Yes, all is well with them… They are all with God.”

… “I am glad to have been their mother.”

— Pvt. Charles Altman

Diary of Pvt. Charles Altman

It was a group of American flyers, the Escadrille Lafayette, who saved Verdun. The attack on Verdun came so suddenly and so unexpectedly that for three or four days the French thought it a feint, designed to force the withdrawal of their men from about Ypres, so that the Germans might break through to Calais. When the French found that it was a genuine attack they faced, the Germans had already sent their airmen scudding over Verdun and its environs. Petain sent an urgent call for aviators to drive off the German flyers and to confound their artillery men by depriving them of their flying “spotters.”

And they sent him the Escadrille Lafayette, the American flyers who had already made a name for themselves by their daring and hardihood. The Americans went aloft over Verdun and gave battle to the Germans. They drove them back and kept them back so that no man might direct a gun against that road to Buey—”La Voie Sacr e, or the Sacred Road, as the French now call it. And over that road rolled the trains of motors bringing the munitions and supplies that made Verdun a turning point in the war. So much the Escadrille Lafayette accomplished.

— Pvt. Charles Altman

Diary of Pvt. Albert Young (cont’d…)

I got a bullet in the leg and my hand was torn with shrapnel, but that is only a small matter. The retreating Germans had flung out a rear guard in order to enable their main body to get away, and it was our duty to harry this rear guard as much as possible, and we did it, too. Then we were given the order to advance, and when we got to within about fifty feet of their lines we had to charge them with the bayonet. I gout four Germans with cold steel before I stopped a bullet. I got one German stuck on my bayonet, and could not get him off. Then I was shot. This was on Monday night and I lay all that night in the wood before I was found.

— Pvt. Albert Young