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After the Armistice I At eight in the morning of the 11th, we were told that the Armistice would take effect at eleven.1 The relief was wonderful. Everyone relaxed. There were no demonstrations.2 At night camp fires made their appearance, a thing not to be thought of before. French Algerian troops marched through for Sedan, flags flying and bands playing. On the 12th we set out for the rear. We had reached St. Pierremont, where orders came to march forward again and take up a position north of the Meuse. So we moved up across the river and spent four days at Autreville. We lived in houses and made ourselves comfortable. Many Italians and Russians who had been prisoners and had been used by the Germans for heavy labor came through our lines. Their condition was pitiable, but their troubles were now behind them. Our division was to spend the winter near Chaumont, in eastern France. We commenced our march back to this area, travelling back over the same ground we had fought over since September 26th. The first night we reached Bar, the next Fléville, and the next Les Islettes. II Leaves were given to officers at Les Islettes, the first opportunity of the kind we had had since our arrival in France. I left with Bull. We boarded a train that dropped us in Paris the next morning. It was my first sight of the French capital. We spent a day there and then went to Nice. As we were getting off the train at Nice, I met Willoughby Middleton.3 We had a great reunion. Bull and I spent a week at the Hotel Negresco. We had plenty of money in our pockets, since for months we had not spent anything. There was a trip to Monte Carlo, Mentone, and over the Italian frontier. On our way back we spent another day in Paris. We rejoined the battalion in winter quarters early in December. Major Bennett, who had formerly had E Company, commanded the battalion, and I resumed command of F Company. E, F, and 76 The World War I Memoirs of Robert P. Patterson H were billeted in Sexfontaines. G Company was in Meures two miles away. We remained here until the middle of February 1919 and had a very comfortable time. Sexfontaines was a typical French village of thirty or forty houses, with a church, a school and one or two little stores. The people were peasants who walked out to work their little farms. For years they never left the neighborhood . Everything was primitive. The only lights were candles. They had no stoves, only open fireplaces for heating and cooking. They had no water system, not even a pump; all the water was hauled up from wells by hand. Needless to say, there were no automobiles. Yet the people were contented and comfortable. The day of the soldier was spent in this fashion: there would be reveille formation at seven o’clock; then there would be breakfast and a long morning of drilling in a large field above the village.4 In the afternoon the men would play cards, loaf about, and so forth. Most of them were billeted in barns that were open to the winds and were very cold in severe weather; yet they thrived on the life and there was practically no sickness. I was billeted in a little house occupied by an old couple named Ruelle. The old man was quite cheerful and talkative. The old lady was a little queer in the head. Their only son had been killed early in the war, and grief over his loss unsettled her. She would walk around, muttering “pauvre René, pauvre René.” The house had only two rooms that were used. I had one; the other served as a kitchen, dining-room, living-room, and bedroom for the old people. III The company grew in numbers. Many of our original men who had been wounded returned from hospitals, Carroll among them.5 First Sergeant George West, Corporal Charles Donnelly, Corporal Franklin Williams, and Bugler Marcy Weinberg came to us from Headquarters Company, transferred on their request. Then one day in January fifteen men of the old 1st platoon who had been captured marched in. Sergeant William Hennessy was with them. It seems that he had been captured while on his way back wounded to Mont Notre Dame. A German patrol took him on the south side of the Vesle...

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