From Maine to France and Somehow Back Again: World War I Experiences of John M. Longley and the 26th Yankee Division

By Mark D. LeBlanc and John M. LeBlanc

John M. Longley was a farm boy from rural Maine who went to France as a teenager to fight in The Great War. Somehow, he survived that hell and returned to Maine, but it was only after his wife died that he opened up at some length to his grandson, Mark D. LeBlanc, about his time in the war. This well-researched book highlights the two years that Longley spent with the 103rd Infantry of the 26th “Yankee” Division. The book includes war documents and maps from the National Archives, local newspaper accounts, links to audio clips of Longley talking about the war, and photographs and tips of locations to visit in France. With a focus on the common soldier, From Maine to France and Somehow Back Again is a lively, evocative account of one man’s fight to survive and his unlikely return home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483476834

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LeBlanc

Copyright © 2018 Mark D. LeBlanc and John M. LeBlanc

http://cs.wheatoncollege.edu/mleblanc

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the authors, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7684-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7683-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916557

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 3/23/2018

Dedication

This work is dedicated to all those on John M. Longley’s family tree: to those who came before John, to the family who knew and loved him, and to all those who are to come.

Preface

John M. Longley was a farm boy from rural Maine who journeyed to France as a teenager, fought in what we now call ‘The Great War’, somehow survived that hell, and returned to Maine where he lived his entire life. The account here encompasses just two years in his long life of 97, experiences of which he personally almost never mentioned.

This book project started in the early 1990s when I interviewed my maternal grandfather John, or Gramp as we called him, after the death of his life-long partner Goldie Mae (Porter) Longley. It was only after Grammie had died that he would pause during a game of cribbage and tell a brief story about the war. On one visit, I asked Gramp if I could ask him some questions about the war. He peered hard at me and nodded, but first he wanted to know where those women are, refusing to speak of such things in the company of women. Convinced they were all in the far room, I pulled out a cassette recorder and set it up. Gramp wanted to know what that was and I convinced him it would help me take notes. He reluctantly agreed, I pressed Record-and-Play, and captured what was to be a most memorable 28 minutes of first person accounting of his experiences.

I lost sight of the project until after Gramp’s death, in fact misplacing the cassette tape for years, it having fallen down behind a bookshelf (thanks for finding it, Kath). Upon finding the tape, I began a decade long search for more information about these New England men who formed the 26th Yankee Division. The research led to the production of a CD-ROM with his voice merged with photos to multiple trips to the National Archives in Washington D.C. and historical societies where I found his name in print in official records and local newspaper entries. My brother and co-author, John (named after Gramp), jumpstarted the research by overlaying my research onto maps of the precise locations of the men in the 26th Division and in particular, the 103rd Infantry of which Gramp was a part. A rough draft of a manuscript emerged. Upon sharing the draft (and new tears) with my parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, and cousins, their collective encouragement led me to devote a portion of a yearlong sabbatical to the project. A trip to France in 2014, where I stood in a cave where Gramp and those men had hidden from German shelling during the day, convinced me that I must publish the work in time for the 100-year anniversary of the end of the war.

A line in a hymn we sing each year at the college where I work says it well:

One hundred years pass like a dream …

To John Longley and the men and women who sacrificed so much, we say in these pages: We remember. Thank you.

mdl

Acknowledgments

For perseverance

To Kathleen LeBlanc for words of support, especially during our four-month faculty residence in Key West where the book finally came together. To my brother and co-author John LeBlanc for resurrecting the project by adding intricate details as to the locations and movements of troops throughout France.

For guidance

To my friend and Wheaton College (Norton, MA) alumna Gretchen Anne Ellis who served as my translator during my initial visit to France, hosted me in Paris, and provided excellent suggestions and edits while serving as a first reader. To the men of France in the American Expeditionary Forces Collections for their time, insight, and genuine passion for the involvement of U.S. troops in France during WWI, especially Etienne, Fabien, and Franck for personal tours and wonderful discussions at battle sites. To my colleagues at Wheaton College, especially my friend and historian Professor Anni (Baker) Cecil who first encouraged me to visit the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and to my former Provost Linda Eisenmann who encouraged this WWI writing project to be part of my five-year Meneely Chair.

For inspiration

To my parents Robert and Patricia LeBlanc for their financial support and encouragement throughout the project and to my sons, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins who knew and loved John Longley and were loved by him. Our time together on this growing family tree inspires me.

For assistance with portions of the technical issues

Thanks to Richard Neal who advised me to just port it to the iPad and experiment with active maps. Thanks to Jonathan Dedus LeBlanc and Joshua Michael LeBlanc for their hours of work digitally editing audio and video files. And thanks to the brilliant minds who wrote the software behind the tools that enable us to build a new generation of book.

For assistance with portions of the research

To the staff at the Madison Historical Society for pointing me to the Anson Side Happenings in the local Madison Bulletin newspaper where I first found John Longley’s name in print. To Ann Tumavicus and the staff at the Westfield Athenaeum in Westfield, MA for providing access to local accounts of the 26th Division during their stateside training before shipping off to France. To Wheaton College Archivist Zephorene Stickney Helmreich for sharing the wartime letters from Wheaton alumna Eleanor Kilham, M.D., class of 1876, and Leah Niederstadt, Assistant Professor of Museum Studies & Curator of the Permanent Collection, for revealing the WWI French recruiting posters that had been donated to the College years ago. To Bill Faxon for sharing his grandfather’s accounting of time as a physician in France during the war. Thanks to First Lieutenant Jonathan D. Bratten, Command Historian in the Maine Army National Guard, Camp Keyes, Augusta, Maine who provided valuable clarification on details about the 103rd Infantry.

Thanks to my many new friends and colleagues in France who hosted and guided me during the autumn 2014 trip to France: In Neufchâteau, to Sarah Ozolins, then Director of the Office of Tourism in the Vosges, Neufchâteau for connecting me with local history buffs, including Jean-Claude Nutz who shared a number or images and articles, including the Walt Disney cartoon, Gilles VanHoorde for his personal tour of Neufchâteau, and Michel and Geneviève Duvaux, son Julien and daughter Adeline for the wonderful postcard images of the Vosges at the time of the war. Thanks to Jutta and Hiroaki Izumo for hosting me in Florent en Argonne, Philippe and Thomas in Verdun, Pascal and Pascale in Sceaux, and again Gretchen in Paris and Les Ulis.

Introduction: eReaders Use and Methods

All audio clips are presently stored at the website vimeo.com. If your eReader has a browser (e.g., Safari on an iPad or Silk on a Kindle Fire) and your wireless is turned ON, clicking on a link to listen to John Longley’s voice will automatically take you to your browser and the associated website at vimeo.com; however, to return to the book, you have to manually return to your eReader app. Likewise, clicking within the frame of most maps will take you to your browser and present a modern-day Google Map of that location. Leaving the book and entering a map, even to the point of going street view, is part of a new definition of what it means to be a map in a book. We hope it offers a rich context well beyond that of a static, two-dimensional picture of a map and does encourage you, the reader, to explore areas in context such that you feel called to visit the locations later in person.

When transcribing the audio clips of John Longley talking of his experiences, I have occasionally used phonetic spelling (for example, spelling yah for yes) if it rang true with the sound of my grandfather’s cadence and voice.

Note that few mentions are made of the names of military officers and the military chain of command. This is a bias on our part toward the common soldier, who typically remains nameless in most cases. I leave those details to the many other good books (see References) that cover the roles of the Generals and their staffs during WWI.

CHAPTER 1

Anson, Maine

A new year, 1917, had started like so many before. Anson, Maine—a rural town near the forty-fifth parallel—was crusted in layers of snow that wouldn’t give up their grip until late April or early May. If we could listen in to conversations long forgotten, we might observe John M. Longley¹, a lean nineteen-year-old overhearing a heated conversation between two fellow laborers.

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Wipe ‘em out, I tell yah, bellowed one older man, perhaps fifty years old. Friggin’ Germans want to rule the world. First France, then England, then a hop, skip, and a jump ’cross the pond to us.

Don’t ’zaggerate, came the retort. Let Europe fight its own battles. We got all we can do to keep the Kennebec River from washing us down to Bath this spring.

For John Longley, who was happy to have some work that kept him busy and away from a home that really wasn’t a home, talk of German aggression seemed like a fable. Meanwhile, subtle propaganda fueled the invincible spirit of young men in an effort to tilt the American public toward war. For example, Arthur Empey’s book Over the Top boasted of first-hand experiences of fighting and being wounded with the British early in the war (Empey, 1917). Sure, Empey had shared some grim facts of life and death in the trenches, but could war really reach this far?

True, it was hard to ignore cover after cover of Collier’s National Weekly on the newsstands in town—a steady reminder of the siege going on in Europe—and sure, the few dramatic black-and-white photographs that John had seen seemed real enough.

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But weren’t those deaths as unlucky as falling through the ice as John had done in his own brush with death as a young boy? He chuckled quietly to himself as he thought of the frigid Maine morning when he had carelessly fallen into a hole in the river as he watched his father and other men cutting ice, only saved from being sucked under by the strong Kennebec current by a quick fetch from a man