A reminiscence based on the personal diary of a year old in the last gorgeous summer of in France. In the spring of my father could see the War coming and realized that the coming summer would be the last opportunity for him and my mother to see their European friends—of twenty years—before the end of peace. He had not taken a real vacation for ten years or so and arranged for an entire summer of vacation.
My father had served with the AEF in France in the summer and fall of as a Lieutenant of engineers rd Engineer Train, 78th Division where he commanded a corps of one-hundred mules and fifty motor trucks seeing action near St.
Menehould in the Argonne Forest building pontoon bridges under fire at night to permit river crossings by the AEF. My father became attached to the family and especially to the small boy Fernand Chapeau to whom he later sent assistance for his schooling. The old uncle Fleureau in residence had lived through two Prussian invasions of France and as yet unforeseen, was to witness and to survive a third.
My mother had gone, in December of , under the auspices of the YMCA, to do canteen work in France at Bay-sur-Aube for the soldiers who remained in France long after the Armistice—for lack of available shipping. There she came to know another Y-girl, Juliet Whiton. In my mother and father who had grown up together in Ithaca, NY met again by chance in the New York subway and were married in Ithaca on August 18th, They spent the rest of that summer on their honeymoon in France during which time they visited the friends they had come to know in This summer of would be their last foreseeable opportunity to revisit them.
I was fourteen just leaving eighth grade and my sister Holley was thirteen. Much of this account is pretty mundane. Pay more attention to the annotations in italics and later parts as the War clouds gathered. June 6th, Tue. Found our lodgings and went to the Fair. We saw the Federal Bldg. Tomorrow will see all the countries. We wore our feet out walking and went to bed. So worried had been my father about getting away on this trip that for several days in the preceding weeks he had forbidden us to go to school where mumps were for a while prevalent, and forbade us to go to at least one party or social function which seemed to us at the time as desperately unfair.
