More than four million American soldiers, called doughboys, served during the First World War. Many of the soldiers kept diaries that described their day-to-day experiences as they faced the monotony and dangers of wartime life. These diaries have become very important documents for understanding what life was like for the doughboys on the Western front in 1917–18. The World War One Diary and Art of Doughboy Cpl. Harold W. Pierce: Duty, Terror and Survival, edited by William J. Welch, is a valuable account of the thoughts, emotions, camaraderie, and battle experiences of a nineteen-year-old soldier from Youngsville, Pennsylvania.Born in 1898, Harold Pierce saw many young men enlisting in the army after the American declaration of war in April 1917. “I don’t want war and I hate to go to it,” Pierce wrote in his first diary entry. “I am young and I do not want to sacrifice my life.” But he also did not want to be considered “a slacker” (1). As old Civil War veterans reminded young men that they too had been young when enlisting in the 1860s, Pierce joined what became the 28th Division of the 112th Infantry Regiment. After many months of rigorous training, Pierce and his older brother, Hugh, and the other members of “A” Company in the 28th Division were sent to Europe on what Pierce called “the Great Adventure” (7). By May 16, 1918, the 28th Division was in France, and by July 1 it held a reserve role under French orders for stopping the German offensive at the Marne River. As the 28th Division relieved the 26th Division during the last week of July, Pierce stated: “Such looking men as they were with that gleam of fear and horror in their eyes. We will soon look the same way; maybe I do already. I am frankly afraid. I hate to go where these boys have been and do what they were doing” (40).As the brutal and dangerous conditions continued week after week, Pierce declared that at the frontFor Pierce disciplinary actions no longer maintained order in the ranks; camaraderie and self-discipline, arising from shared values and personal honor, had replaced the prospect of punishment as the principal reasons for adherence to duty.During all the terror and destruction, Pierce took great comfort in religion. Throughout the war he carried a small Bible next to his diary in his shirt pocket. “There is nothing to rely on but God,” Pierce stated, “he is our only salvation” (72). Regarding his comrades in the 112th Regiment, he observed: “We are mostly a Protestant regiment but Catholics and Jews are there. No difference in opinion when we really are close to God. Dogmas and creeds are done away with” (82–83).After Germany’s offensives were stopped by late July, the Allies launched counter-offensives against the German forces, with the American Expeditionary Force, including the 28th Division, fighting in the Meuse-Argonne campaign that became the US Army’s largest and deadliest offensive of the war. Pierce’s “A” Company would suffer numerous casualties during the campaign, and command of the company would change four times as company commanders fell. On October 9 the depleted 28th Division, known to the Germans as the Bloody Bucket Division for the red keystone patch its soldiers wore, left the front for a quieter sector as the Meuse-Argonne offensive continued.A month later, on November 11, two days after Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication was announced and with the German army in a woeful state, word spread that an armistice was to go into effect, but Pierce wrote that initially nobody believed it would occur. “If there is an Armistice at eleven a.m.,” he asserted, “it seems so foolish to keep up the killing till the last minute. But the killing is the artillery way. He does not see the tortured, horrible looks of the slaughtered or feel the remorse the doughboy feels when he sees a man he has shot. I stay close to a hole filled with horror at the thought of being killed at the last minute” (187). And when the armistice became official, Pierce wrote: “There are no demonstrations, no cheering even. Men at the guns leave the pieces hot from the final barrage and sit down. Doughboys in dugouts and shell holes emerge cautiously, unbelievingly” (187–88). Harold and Hugh Pierce, along with the rest of the 28th Division, arrived back in the United States in May 1919. Harold soon earned his high school diploma, spent nearly twenty years as a police officer, served for almost three decades as supervisor of the Public Service Institute in Pennsylvania, and finally spent seventeen years in retirement before his death at age eighty-four.Pierce’s diary mixes mundane information with numerous gripping accounts of wartime terror. It is an extraordinary narrative of what a nineteen-year-old soldier endured in the service of his country. William Welch’s editing of the diary also includes five oil paintings and a pen-and-ink drawing that Pierce created after the war depicting wartime scenes that he had experienced. The works of art, demonstrating Pierce’s artistic abilities and offering another way of remembering his wartime experiences, complement his diary’s vivid and fascinating first-hand account of his involvement in the seminal event of the twentieth century.
Steven E. Siry (Thu,) studied this question.