Samuel Chamberlain

Sentiments similar to the above were expressed by a majority of our members who responded to the preliminary notice of an impending "Twenty Year After" reunion. And a surprising number believe it would be possible for them to go to France this coming summer.

However, for reasons which we shall presently set forth, the 1935 reunion will be held in New York City, in the late summer or early fall, the plans for the gathering in France going over to 1936.

As soon as this Bulletin is in the mails, a Reunion Committee will be formed, and the details which this Committee works out will be sent to our members at the earliest possible date.

We urge those members who have not yet expressed themselves as to the form such a reunion should take, to let us know at this time whether they prefer a one day reunion, or a week-end, and to give us any other preferences or suggestions they may have.

Whether or not we have already heard from you, we should be glad to have to turn over to the Reunion Committee, your suggestion as to a date for the Reunion some time in the late summer or early fall.

The response to the preliminary notice was splendid. We wish we could quote from several hundred of the letters that came pouring in from all over the country, and from across several seas. Enough for the moment to quote from one:

" . . . . Gosh! It was only yesterday that I wandered into the headquarters in Passy with 'Speed' Walker, quite bewildered by the lovely chateau, the boys in uniform on leave from the front, and the mysterious functioning of the bureau that somehow got us outfitted and out to Verdun in four days. Sure, let's have a reunion! I'm for the reunion in France, too. Personally, I would like to think of our fannions as residing always in the Invalides as a mark of our friendship for those we tried to serve . How can I jot down the thoughts that have come to me during the reading of your letter? How they crowd around me! Each one as clear as if I were living it through again! Passy headquarters,---the driving test,---out to Bar le Duc and Rampont with Kent, Kelly, 'Speed' and others, -a quiet Sunday---the first trip, with a man whose legs had been blown off,---Monday night and Hell,---Esnes,---272---304,---Marre,---Verdun,---the Argonne,---Sept Fontaines.---the coldest winter France has had in a hundred years (you're telling me!)

SIDNEY S. COOK, S. S. U. 2.

"To provide an enduring memorial for the one hundred and twenty-seven Field Service men who gave their lives in the great war," the American Field Service Fellowships for French Universities, upon which we shall report later in this bulletin, has been functioning without interruption for nearly fifteen years.

To provide a permanent resting place for our Field Service trophies and records, that they may long bear witness to the high purpose and achievement of the men, now living or dead, who served with the French Armies in the American Field Service, is our present hope and task.

No suitable or appealing place seems to exist in our own country. In France there are several. Colonel Andrew and Major Galatti have recently discussed with Mrs William K. Vanderbilt and Miss Anne Morgan the possibility of our having a room in the Franco-American Museum which they have organized at Blerancourt and turned over to the French Government. Always good friends of the Field Service, they would welcome us with enthusiasm. There is, however, no room available. But this means merely a postponement of our plans, for it is possible for a room to be added to the Museum for our use, and this will be done. It will not be possible, however, to complete the building of the room and install our trophies in appropriate fashion in time for dedication ceremonies to he held in 1935. This dedication will, then, be put over until 1936.

Field Service men living in France, however, or going over this coming summer, may be able to attend the laying of the corner stone on the last Sunday in June. On this date every year many prominent people, French and American, go to Blerancourt for the annual meeting of the trustees and friends of the Museum, and it was thought appropriate to add to the occasion the laying of our corner stone.

Aside from the particular appeal for our purpose of this "Musée de la Coopération Franco-Américaine," we shall have no cost of upkeep, for it is one of the National Museums of France.

In a bulletin preceding the 1936 dedication ceremonies, we expect to give you more details and photographs of the museum at Blerancourt. We believe Field Service men will be intrigued by the two photographs we reproduce herein, and by the following extract from a letter received from John M. Grierson (S. S. U. 13), from his home in Compiègne:

"I was delighted to get the little paper entitled 'Twenty Years After’ and to learn that all ‘that' is not forgotten among some of us. Bravo for the idea of a reunion in 1935, and without further ado and unashamedly I move to have same in France. Only thus should we recapture that 'poignant world of memory.'

"Another good idea is to combine with the reunion the idea of dedicating the final resting place for the Section fannions, etc. As to Blerancourt, I think you would find it perfect for the purpose. I know the place well, as it is only twenty-five minutes away by the Ford (new), and the whole thing there is most delightfully arranged and looked after. Also, it has a peculiarly Franco-American atmosphere of the best 'pendant la Guerre' kind, which some of the bigger musées lack. One could easily arrange to have a reunion dinner at the chateau itself (I have already dined there with friends on two or three summer evenings), and it is perfectly, situated as a jumping off place for visits to the old front."

For the Field Service room at Blerancourt we are planning to take back to France the ambulance that was sent over here during the war, to serve as a model for the ambulances for the U.S.A.A.S., and that Edward Seccombe (S. S. U. 2) has been taking care of for us up in Connecticut.

The colorful section fannions will of course be placed there and we plan to call upon a number of our artist members to use their talents to help tell our story more graphically than it can perhaps be told in print. A mural for the walls is a possibility, we have at least one mural artist of distinction.

The Ambulance insignia, the cap and uniform will be included, and any similar mementos that we have or can obtain.

The three volume History of the Field Service, with the Memorial Volume, and copies of all other books about the Field Service, written by our own members or others, will form an important part of our exhibit.

In the third volume of our History is included a list of all the ambulances donated to the Field Service. This list, with the names of the donors, gives an imposing picture of the widespread interest and support that our Service had. To impress this fact, however, upon the casual visitor (the museum is open all the year, and is visited by a constantly increasing number of Americans and French), we should like to collect as many as possible of the old ambulance plates, more particularly those bearing the names of cities, organizations, college classes, schools, clubs, etc. There were, for instance, whole sections given by various cities,---we recall Boston, Cleveland, St. Louis, Portland, Oregon, and others; the New York Stock Exchange and the New York Cotton Exchange gave sections, as did various classes of Columbia, Harvard, etc. Many cities and many organizations gave several cars each contributed by their citizens or members.

At the close of the war, many of these plates were brought back to this country and given to the donors of the ambulances. In many instances, we have no doubt, the drivers kept the plates from the ambulances they drove. You can be of very real help, if you have such a plate, by offering it for our room at Blerancourt,---or by obtaining from any school, club, or other organization a plate. that may be put away somewhere. We would not want, however, to ask for these back in cases where they are already on display.

It may be that some of you have the decorated ambulance panels. These would be interesting and appropriate, we believe.

We would also like you to look over your old war photographs and see if you have any that are especially descriptive of the activities of the Field Service. or of your section in particular. We plan to have a collection of such photographs enlarged and placed on racks.

If you have anything to offer along the above lines, or anything else you think would be suitable, we would appreciate your writing and letting us know just what you have that you are willing to turn over for this purpose. We suggest that you do not send any actual plates, photographs, etc., at the present time, but merely a statement of what you have, so that we may call upon you for them when they are needed.

To the men of the American Field Service who were privileged to know personally Mr. Henry Davis Sleeper, this announcement of his passing, in September of last year, will bring a pang of sorrow and regret. There is little need for us to say what Mr. Sleeper meant to the Field Service, but our members will like to read the following fine tribute paid to him by Colonel A. Piatt Andrew, and printed in the Boston Transcript at the time of his death

"Henry Davis Sleeper, whose life ended last Saturday, was a man of versatile talent and varied achievement. His expert knowledge of the development of art and decoration had made him a consultant of collectors and museums throughout the country and led inevitably to his selection as trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and his choice by Mrs. Gardner for trustee of Fenway Court and the remarkable art collection which she bequeathed to Boston. His fund of technical information, together with his impeccable taste, and his ingenuity in color and design which was distinctly creative, brought him a nation-wide reputation as an interior decorator, the evidences of whose skill remain today in many important houses built in recent years from Maine to California.

"The greatest achievement of Mr. Sleeper's life, however, and that from which he drew the most enduring satisfaction, and for which he will be long and tenderly remembered, lay in quite a different field. For the same passion and energy which he devoted throughout his life to the peaceful arts were enlisted unsparingly in humane service during the tragic period of the war with a perfection of accomplishment no less complete.

"The vision which illumined the world in those days has paled in the light of commonplace day. What we of the war generation felt, and what stirred and exalted us then, are largely forgotten. Later generations can but vaguely conceive of it. But there was much that was great and beautiful, the memory of which ought to be kept fresh, when men rose to heights of which few are capable now.

"Among the inspiring figures in America during the years before our country's entrance in the war was Henry Sleeper. the American representative of the group of volunteer ambulance drivers serving with the French troops in France, known as the American Field Service. Frail of body and without any experience as an organizer, he undertook, almost singlehanded at first, in a country that was officially neutral and still largely indifferent to the issues of the war, the work of collecting funds and enlisting volunteers for this organization throughout the length and breadth of the country. As early as 1915 he began to open offices in the larger cities, to organize committees in schools and colleges, in clubs and churches, in business houses and trade organizations. What he lacked in experience was more than compensated by his crusading spirit, his ingenious mind and his tireless energy. He pursued this arduous effort with such unflagging faith that before America had reached the great decision of 1917, nearly $5,000,000 had been collected and about 2500 young men had joined the American Field Service in France. This was indeed a glorious and memorable achievement, which made possible the saving of countless thousands of lives.

"A valiant soul left this world when Henry Sleeper's life ebbed out the other day.

A. P. A."

Many members of the Field Service who did not come in personal contact with Mr. Sleeper during the years he was American Representative, came to know him during the months just before and after the Armistice, when he was Director of the Paris Headquarters. Going to France in the summer of 1918, his task in America completed with the militarization of the Service, he was free, as the heads of the Service in France were not, to give all of his time, energy, and fertile imagination into making of 21 rue Raynouard a home. How well he succeeded we all know. Who of us will forget those midnight spreads. . . .

In the words of Joel Harris Newell (S. S. U. 13):

"As one who worked in the Paris office after our Section left for the States, it was my privilege to he closely associated with the man who was responsible for making '21' the only place we could call home in all of France . . . a man of rare understanding, sympathetic and helpful to all who came under his influence, and one of unusual charm and possessed of a radiant personality that made us enjoy being with him. He had a keen mind that was constantly searching for ways to make us happier and more contented, and was the only man I have ever known who had to act in the double role of mother and father to hundreds of boys three thousand miles from home ........"

At Mr. Sleeper's funeral, the following Field Service men were present in a body: A. Piatt Andrew, W. de Ford Bigelow (S. S. U. 4), John A. Boit (S. S. U. 2), A. Graham Carey (S. S. U. 3), Charles R. Codman (S. S. U. 3), Mayo Darling (R. M.), Roger Griswold (S. S. U. 2), George R. Harding (S. S. U. 4), Richard Lawrence (S. S. U. 2), Austin B. Mason (S. S. U. 8), Durant Rice (S. S. U. 3), and Harold Willis (S. S. U. 2).

A beautiful laurel wreath, hearing on its ribbon of tricolor and the buff of the A. F. S., the inscription "From his Associates of the American Field Service," was given a place of honor directly in front of and leaning against the casket. "There were quantities of flowers," came word from Boston, "and they were beautifully arranged,---just as if he had done it all himself!"

From Mr. Bigelow we received the following account of the part played by those we may think of as our representatives in this final farewell to a very good friend:

"A small group of old Field Service men, rather hastily gathered together in Boston, attended the funeral of Henry Sleeper in Lindsey Chapel . . . and at the request of the family formed a little guard of honor. At the conclusion of the church services, they formed in line behind the family, and M. Flamand, the French Consul, walked between them and the coffin. Outside the church they formed a double row on the sidewalk as the coffin was passed between them and placed on the hearse. All of them said afterwards how glad they had been of the opportunity to pay even this little tribute to Harry Sleeper . . . "

Mr. Sleeper is buried in the family lot in Mount Auburn Cemetery. But somehow we believe he knows of our sorrow at his going, and our lasting affection for him.

In the years since the war, death has taken many other comrades from us. And may we not with reason count as one of our comrades the Comtesse de la Villestreux, Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur, who died in Paris, at the age of seventy in December, 1931. An acknowledgment of our debt to her as one of the loyal friends of the Field Service appears in our History (Vol. II, P. 519). We wish here only to recall that it was the Comtesse de la Villestreux and the members of her family who placed at our disposal, from July of 1916 until the summer of 1919, the chateau at 21 Rue Raynouard.

We have at hand a copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, with a full column tribute to Joseph Rudd Greenwood (S. S. U. 8 & V. D.). We of the Field Service subscribe to this estimate by his classmates:

"We all remember Joe as an effective worker, happy in his personality and relations with his fellow men, genial, considerate, serious-minded and yet with a fine sense of humor, courageous and well balanced. His courage and gallantry were never more splendid than in his last fight for health. As the result of severe illnesses of pleurisy followed by pneumonia during the last two years, a condition developed in one of his lungs which required its removal. These illnesses and this condition were due undoubtedly to exposure to gas in heavily bombarded areas in which Joe served, especially at Verdun. Undaunted and fully appreciating the seriousness of the situation, Joe calmly faced what was before him in the same gallant way he faced death so many times during the war,---full of fight, confidence, and faith."

A complete list follows of the men of whose deaths since the war we have record:

At the 1935 Reunion we hope to have a full and free discussion as to just how the membership as a whole would like to have our reborn Association carry on. In the meantime, those of us who are starting the wheels going by publishing this Bulletin and sponsoring the Reunion, suggest the following plan:

Annual Dues, $1.00 for the current year, to be increased to $2.00 for 1936 and subsequent years.

Annual Bulletin

Annual Section Lists, printed or mimeographed, to include changes in address and personal data about members, each member of the Association to receive the list pertaining to his section, these lists, brought up-to-date, to be combined into a general directory to be issued once every few years.

The election of Section Secretaries to act as liaison between members of each section and headquarters in the assembling of personal data, material for Bulletins, etc.

The formation of local committees to keep in contact with the members in their respective sections of the country, and possibly arrange for annual regional meetings.

Annual dues are necessary to the existence of our Association. In the past, when the publication of Bulletins and Directories has been sporadic, we have asked for contributions to cover the printing of each individual issue We feel it is preferable, however, to ask for annual dues, so that we may know in advance of the printing of a Bulletin how many copies are needed for our actual membership, and what funds are available for the publication expense.

WE ENCLOSE A MEMBERSHIP CARD. SEND IT IN WITH YOUR DUES FOR 1935.

The questions of Section secretaries, local committees, material for bulletins, etc., will be taken up at the Reunion.

A great many of you, in responding to the queries in the leaflet sent out last September, stated that you particularly would like to see in the Bulletin information as to what other members were doing. We urged you all to send in personal data about yourselves for this very purpose. Alas, the information supplied, plus that we dug up, would fill an issue of the Bulletin

It is for this reason that we have suggested getting out annual section lists, containing such personal data in as much detail as possible, with a general list, in condensed form, issued to our entire membership every few years.

We cannot refrain, however, from mentioning in this issue some of the outstanding accomplishments of Field Service men, with notes picked at random to indicate in what widely diversified fields we are engaged.

In the political field, we have the head of our Service, Colonel A. Piatt Andrew, with a fine record. We quote from a 1932 Princeton Alumni Bulletin:

"A. Piatt Andrew, Congressman from the Sixth District of Massachusetts, was reelected on November 4 by a majority of more than 35,000 votes, the largest majority that he has ever received. In July, although Andrew's district was the only one in Massachusetts which had voted against the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment on the, referendum of 1928, Andrew came out flatfootedly for repeal and became immediately the object of ardent and determined opposition. Nevertheless, in the September primaries, Andrew carried every ward in every one of the twenty-three towns and cities of his district, and the same remarkable tribute was paid him in the November election.

"The New York Herald Tribune of November 5 carried an editorial very complimentary to Colonel Andrew. It was entitled, 'A Congressman Who Dared,' and said in part:

"Hesitating congressmen throughout the United States might do well to examine the case of Congressman Andrew, who declared himself on the prohibition question when there was no selfish reason for so doing and when the State party organization stayed firmly on the fence. Private citizens may consider him when disgust with current polities creeps over them. Massachusetts Republicans---if the outsider may be permitted to say so---might also do far worse than to look to Piatt Andrew the next time they are in search of a leader."

In the more recent 1934 elections, Congressman Andrew was in the unique position of not only having no Republican opponent in the primaries, but no Democratic or other opponent in the election. We doubt if there were many Republicans running for re-election in the year 1934, with no Democrats attempting to oppose them.

Also in Washington are a number of other Field Service men. We happen to know of Bruce McClure (SSU 10-33-16), who is Secretary of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Walter White (SSU 4) who is one of the assistants of the National Recovery Administration, and George Dock (SSU 2) with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.

William G. Rice, Jr., (SSU 1-66) was in Washington from January to September, 1934, serving on the legal staff of the National Labor Board and National Labor Relations Board, having been general counsel to the latter. He has recently been appointed United States Labor Commissioner to be stationed in Geneva as representative of the United States in dealing with the International Labor Organization. These duties he will take up in March, remaining abroad a year or more.

Allyn R. Jennings (SSU 3) is landscape architect for the Department of Parks, City of New York, in charge of the Division of Maintenance and Operation. His office is in the Arsenal in Central Park, "at which formidable address," he writes, "I will give an éclat of welcome to any of my friends of 1915-16."

Up until the 1934 elections, when the "straight Democratic ticket" was the rule, we had Roy C. Wilcox (TM 397) making a splendid record up in Connecticut as Lieutenant Governor. Wilcox began his public career in 1919, advancing steadily from city alderman to the lieutenant governorship to which he was elected as a Republican under a Democratic governor.

Also in Hartford, Connecticut, we have Barclay Robinson (SSU 67) now serving as Corporation Counsel for the city for a two year term, having previously been Prosecuting Attorney, and before that President of the Board of Aldermen.

Robinson writes (to digress from politics for the moment) that the architects for his recently completed new home at Avon, Connecticut, were Talcott & Talcott, of New York City, of which Seth Talcott (SSU 66) is senior partner.

And then there is Perry Merrill (SSU 12) functioning as Mayor up in Montpelier, Vermont. Merrill is also Commissioner of Forestry for his State, having been connected with the Forestry Department of Vermont for the greater part of the past fifteen years, with a year's leave of absence studying at the Royal College of Forestry, at Stockholm, on a Scandinavian scholarship.

In the same State, in Arlington, John R. Fisher (SSU 2 & Hdqts.) has been active on the school board and in local politics.

Out in California, Ben V. Curler (SSU 10), City Attorney of Susanville since 1922, has assumed this year the duties of District Attorney of Lassen County.

Passing from politics to literature, we find a long list of Field Service men making names for themselves in this field.

Samuel G. A. Rogers (SSU 27 and formerly a holder of an American Field Service Fellowship) won the 1934 $10,000. prize awarded jointly by the Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown & Co. for his novel "Dusk at the Grove." Shortly thereafter, Rogers arranged for a leave of absence from the University of Wisconsin, where he is an associate professor, and departed for France with his family, there to work on a new novel.

Making his home in France is Julian Green (SSU 33), Virginia born, who writes highly successful novels in French which we read translated into English.

William Seabrook (SSU 8), who wrote the "Diary of Section VIII," is the author of several books which, according to "Vanity Fair" of February, 1935, "shocked their way into high sales and rightly: they are some of the best travel books in post-war America." To quote further from the same source:

". . . after serving in the war with the French Army, he embarked on a series of adventures which put even the great ghost of Gulliver in the shade. He lived with Druses (whom few have lived with and lived to tell of it) in the Arabian mountains, with whirling dervishes in a Tripoli monastery, with Zezidee devil worshippers in Kurdistan and Voodoo worshippers in the Haitian mounts: he was also once a member of an Arab Tribe . . ."

Among his books are "The Magic Island," "Adventures in Arabia," and the more recently published "The White Monk of Timbuctoo."

Off the press of the Naylor Company, San Antonio, in November, 1934, was a book by Harry B. Harter (SSU 70) called "East Texas Oil Parade," the first book to be published about the epochal oil discovery in East Texas. Harter was for five years in Constantinople for the Standard Oil of New York, and has been ever since in the oil business in Arkansas, and, since 1930, in Texas.

Malcolm Cowley (TM 526 and a former holder of a Field Service Fellowship), and an editor of "The New Republic," is author of "Exile's Return," which "tells the story of the lost generation which went into voluntary exile to France just after the war . . ."

Milton G. Nicola (TM 133) has to his credit a novel called "Tinkling Cymbals" about which we read: "In a recent Atlantic crossing a United States judge became so angry upon reading 'Tinkling Cymbals' that he threw the book in the ocean . If this isn't enough to make you want to read it, we quote further from a leaflet issued by the publishers: ". . .  includes school in Ohio, service in the French Army at the beginning of the World War, the ministry, and the stage . . (emphasis ours); and from a reviewer: "There is no doubt this bird can write like nobody's business . . . "

Other Field Service men who have drawn upon either their war experiences or residence in France for their novels, are:

Ramon Guthrie (SSU 9-3 and holder of a Field Service Fellowship) of whose "Parachute" Sinclair Lewis said: "'Parachute' seems to me the only novel touching on aviation in which the characters are completely real . . "

Paul M. Fulcher (SSU 13), and like Samuel Rogers a professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose "Guests of Summer," is described as "A Romance of America and France . . .  a first novel, distinguished for the compassionate quality of its prose, its sympathetic treatment of character, and its skillful handling of plot . . . "

Donald Moffatt (SSU 4), whose "A Villa in Brittany" is "a series of blithe and sympathetic impressions of a French watering place in summer as it presents itself to Americans . . . . . . . . ."

Leslie W. Quirk (TM), whose novel "Jimmy Goes to War." is, according to the author, "based upon my experiences with the Reserve Mallet . . . a book that purports to be pure fiction but that borrows liberally from biography and auto-biography of A.F.S. graduates."

With a naval career as a background, Melvin F. Talbot (SSU 3), Lieutenant Commander. U. S. Navy, and on the staff of the Naval War College at Newport, is the author of numerous articles, including "The East Through a Port Hole," (North American Review), "Thoughts on Leaving the Orient," and "Our Navy Under the London Treaty," (Atlantic Monthly), and "The Future of Sea Power-a Speculation," (Nineteenth Century, London), as well as a book entitled, "In the Wake of War."

Eustace L. Adams (SSU 3) has some two hundred short stories, serials and novelettes to his credit, with two novels, one book of travels, and fifteen boys' books for good measure. The short stories appear "fairly consistently in Cosmopolitan, American Magazine, Liberty, Argosy, and others." We attribute to this scarcity of rejection slips, if any, the fact that he winters in Florida and summers in Maine.

Daniel Sargent (SSU 3) has written several books of poetry including "The Door," "My Account of the Flood," and "The Song of the Three Children," and a considerable amount of prose, including "Thomas More," published in 1934, and "Four Independents," published in January of this year. Sargent tells us that in 1929 and 1930 he lived in France, where he "became the devoted friend of Leon Caonlin, who, it will interest some ambulance drivers to know, was in the French Army at Monastir while Section 3 was there, and has written three admirable books on his Macedonian experiences: 'Mon Baton de Berger,' 'La Danse Macabre,' and 'Les Treizes Paroles du Pauvre Job.'" The name of the author is subject to correction,---we have given it as it looked to us.

Charles Nordhoff (Vosges Detachment), living in Tahiti, collaborated with Norman Hall in those magnificent sailing stories, "Mutiny on the Bounty," "Pitcairn's Island," and "Men Against the Sea"; also in a history of the Lafayette Flying Corps, and has on his own account written a long list of boys' books.

Turning to the theatre, we think first of Sidney Howard (SSIJ 9-10), whose distinguished career as a playwright must be known to all of us. His long list of original plays and adaptations includes: "They Knew What They Wanted," a Pulitzer prize winner, "The Silver Cord," "Ned McCobb's Daughter," "Alien Corn," "The Late Christopher Bean," "Dodsworth," "Yellow Jack." and, season 1934-1935, "Ode to Liberty," starring Ina Claire, and "Gather Ye Rosebuds." This is not at all complete and does not include his work in Hollywood. It will serve to remind most of us, however, of pleasant evenings in the theatre, and be of interest to those who perhaps had not known that Sidney Howard was a member of the Field Service.

Also in the theatre, but behind the footlights, is Osgood Perkins (SSU 3). We say "is" because from all we read of him in the theatrical notes, he seems never to be without an important part. He has played Homer in "Beggar on Horseback," Joe Cobb in "Spread Eagle," Andy in "Loose Ankles," Walter Burns in "Front Page," Gillespie in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," Dr. Astroff in "Uncle Vanya," Kenneth Bixby in "Goodbye Again," and Syanrelle in "School for Husbands." He is the outstanding figure in Noel Coward's latest play, "Point Valaine." In the moving pictures, he has appeared in "Scarface" and "The President Vanishes."

Emory Pottle (SSU 2), has appeared frequently on stage and screen under the name of Gilbert Emory. We recall at the moment his part as an English officer in "Farewell to Arms," and as the judge in Galsworthy's "One More River."

We frequently see in print the name of Delos Chappell (SSU 70), theatrical producer, although at the moment we have no record of his productions other than "Camille" with Lillian Gish in the leading role.

Out in Hollywood, James W. D. Seymour (SSU 17), is an associate producer with Warner Bros. According to the newspapers, he has within the past month taken time off to get himself married to Miss Jocelyn Lee, film actress. (We saw the bridal photograph in the papers, Jim. It was fine!)

In the art world, we also find many Field Service men.

Samuel Chamberlain (SSU 14), who did especially for this Bulletin the lovely drawing of the old poste at Esnes, has made a fine reputation. We have before us a clipping perhaps several years old, from which we quote: "Etchings, lithographs and sketches by Samuel Chamberlain make up a most impressive show . . . This is extremely beautiful work by an artist at once sincere and original . . . . Mr. Chamberlain is going steadily ahead, and already should be numbered among our best makers of prints."

C. Le Roy Baldridge (TM 184), who did the sketch, from a recent photograph, of Mr. Sleeper, is one of the busiest of our artists. He has illustrated numerous books, including several written by his wife under her maiden name of Caroline Singer. Among these are "Turn to the East," and "White Africans and Black." Having spent a year in Persia, they now have ready for publication a book on that country.

Victor White (SSU 1), has executed many portrait commissions and painted rooms for prominent New Yorkers, and has in addition done considerable mural work, including the mirrors and mosaics in the roof garden of the Waldorf-Astoria, the mosaic entrance to the International Telephone and Telegraph building, and murals for the Dewitt Clinton Hotel in Albany. Victor some years ago painted on one of the walls in the home of William Woolverton (SSU 1) a map showing the history of Section 1. After several appeals, he finally let us have a photograph of this most interesting and really lovely map, but unfortunately it is not clear enough to reproduce satisfactorily.

Herman A. Webster (SSU 2), who makes his home permanently in France has an international reputation as an etcher. He received Honorable Mention for his drypoint, "Salamanca," at the 1934 Annual Exhibition of the Society of American Etchers.

W. W. Fahnestock (SSU 9), is an artist living and exhibiting in Vermont. We saw one of his paintings reproduced in the New York papers last summer, and clipped this comment at the time: ". . . I hardly know which is the more admirable, his little 'White Dunes,' so deft and so sparkling, or his 'Cascades,' in which he lets himself go on a larger scale and in a broader mood. In both paintings he affirms himself one of the pillars of the exhibition . . . ."

Harry De Maine (Paris Hdqts.), who in 1932 won the Samuel T. Shaw prize for water color at the Salmagundi Club in New York. has this past month been elected Secretary of the New York Water Color Club. A number of years ago he did a wall decoration for the Van Curler Hotel at Schenectady, and since then has executed similar commissions in private homes in or near New York.

Also in the art world we have Charles Law Watkins (SSU 3-8) Associate Director of the Phillips Memorial Gallery and Director of the Gallery School of Art, in Washington.

Charles Amsden (SSU 3-8), formerly curator, and now Secretary and Treasurer of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, finds time for research in the field of American prehistory. Amsden has written a book entitled "Navaho Weaving," and collaborated with Dr. A. V. Kidder on "The Pottery of Pecos."

In New York City, we have Herman D. More (SSU 12), on the staff of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Field Service men are well represented in architecture. With several lean years for architects just behind us, we have no detailed or accurate record of their accomplishments in past years, but hope to get this material together for a future issue of the Bulletin. There come to mind at the moment John R. Abbot (SSU 2), John W. Ames (SSU 2), John C. B. Moore (SSU 9-TM 526), Edmund R. Purves (SSU 4), A. Musgrave Hyde (SSU 16-26), Robert H. Scannell (SSU 13), Harold B. Willis (SSU 2), and Kerr Rainsford (SSU 3). The latter was the architect of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral on 74th Street, New York City, and the Public Library, at Katonah, N. Y.

In the ever growing industry of radio, we have information of the activities of several of our members. Up in Boston, Roger Wheeler (SSU 64), is connected with Station WEEI, turning out two programs a day there, and also writing for NBC, and teaching radio writing at the Bishop Lee School and Emerson College, both in Boston. Wheeler has offered to give notice of our Reunion to New England members on one of his daily Current Events programs. We hope it reaches the ears of some of our members who are missing on our records.

Also in Boston, William M. Barber (SSU 3), is Educational Director of the World Wide Broadcasting Corporation, "a non-commercial organization dedicated to enlightenment" and operating over W1XAL (short-wave). "The non-commercial character of the station," we quote from The Christian Science Monitor, "and its educational goal have not only attracted noted educators but have made possible having its studio in the University Club of Boston . . . . Behind it is a story of radio idealism."

Barber is also Business Manager of the Bureau of University Travel, and in this capacity took one hundred and ten people on an educational tour to Russia last summer.

Getting back to radio, and to New York, we find Walter Varney (SSU 14), with Columbia Broadcasting, at the moment managing the Cobina Wright program.

The list of Field Service men in education is long. We hope to have a complete record for a future Bulletin. We mention here, jumping from coast to coast, Keith Vosburg (SSU 15-32), Headmaster of The Catalina Island School for Boys, Catalina Island, California; Julian Lathrop (SSV 1), with his own school in Pennsylvania, the Solebury School for Boys, at New Hope, and E. C. Lawrence (SSU 13), at St. Marks in Southboro, Massachusetts.

In publishing we have A. James Putnam (SSU 19-70), Assistant to the President of The Macmillan Company; Russell W. Davenport (SSU 9), one of the editors of "Fortune"; Richard W. Weston (SSU 64), for the last ten years editor of "Nature Magazine"; Edward Lyman Bill (SSU 4), of the Bill Bros. Publishing Co. (trade magazines); Nelson H. Partridge, Jr. (SSU 1), on the staff of "California Arts and Architecture," and H. A. Inness-Brown (SSU 3). publisher of "The Gasoline Retailer."

Any number of our members have weathered the banking storms, although Tharratt G. Best (TM 526), President of the First National Bank of Boonville, N. Y., writes that "at times it has seemed like a second Aisne campaign. . Give me the perils of the 'Route Gardée' any day. . ."

Traveling westward we find Lewis C. Gilger (SSU 69), Senior Corporate Trust Officer of The National City Bank of Cleveland, George F. Spaulding (SSU 1), Vice President in charge, The Northern Trust Company, Chicago, and Walter E. Bruns, Trust Officer, Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association, Fresno, California.

Taking a quick look abroad, we see two Field Service men competing in the advertising field in London: Rae Smith (SSU 2), Chairman of J. Walter Thompson Company Limited, and Lloyd O. Coulter (SSU 27), General Manager for the H. K. McCann Company.

Over in France, we learn that Roswell Saunders (SSU 4),

"who was so terribly wounded during the War, has made a most marvelous recovery, although he still suffers a good deal of discomfort. The Field Service men will remember that he was given a permanent fellowship from the Fellowship Fund. He is living at Cagnes in the Alpes Maritimes, overlooking the Mediterranean. This old village perched on the top of a rock has a large artists' colony. Saunders has a little house there which he has repaired and fixed up himself. He has installed a bathroom, the only one in town, and two years after he got in the fixtures, after taking the matter up with the Mayor of the town and all people in local authority, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate and the President of France, he was able to get 'eau courant' piped to his fixtures. He would gladly welcome at Cagnes any Field Service members and would take them to the terrace restaurant, where they can meet many artists of all races and where they can get old 'Tante Rose' to give them a drink."

L. Brooke Edwards (SSU 1), is Branch Manager of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in India. He is also Secretary of the Lawn Tennis Association, and has three times won the men's doubles championship of India, the mixed doubles twice, and has reached the quarter finals of the singles.

At least one Field Service man has gone still farther afield, for Francis D. Coman (SSU 30), at the time assistant in surgery at Johns Hopkins Medical School and assistant resident surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, was medical officer for the first Byrd South Pole flight.

Coming back again to America, we find Field Service men engaged in almost every conceivable occupation. While W. H. Bentley (TM 526), is engaged up in Oregon in the packing of fruits, nuts, and berries, as President of the Dundee Drying Corporation, down in Florida Geo. Kenneth End (SSU l-3), believes he has "arrived in what is probably one of the most bizarre occupations of the entire roster," i.e., the canning of Genuine Diamondback Rattlesnakes. If you would like to become a Life Member of the Ancient Epicurean Order of Rattling Reptile Revelers, write him at Arcadia.

And while "down Maine," Thomas Means (526), as incumbent of the Joseph E. Merrill Professorship of the Greek Language and Literature, at Bowdoin, is, besides all else such a professorship implies, producing plays of Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Plautus,---out in California, near Bakersfield, George S. Coulston (TM 397), is gold milling.

At the recent "center of the world," in Flemington, N. J.. Albert D. Osborn (TM 526), listed in our 1931 directory as an "examiner of questioned documents," testified with his father as a handwriting expert on the Lindbergh ransom notes. (Osborn's brother, Paul (SSU 28), was killed in France while a member of the Field Service.)

Also at Flemington was Carl Randau (SSU 14-10), staff writer for the New York World-Telegram, whose signed articles appeared for many consecutive days on the front pages of that paper. Handau's prominence in the newspaper world has by no means been confined to the famous trial; we recall a series of special articles on munition makers, covering the revelations made before a Washington investigating committee, and we have at hand a newspaper-clipping touching upon one phase of his activities as President of the Newspaper Guild of New York.

Wallace Kellett (TM 133), who has been in the aviation business ever since the war, has for the past five years been developing the Autogiro, as president of the Kellett Autogiro Corporation.

Walter Wheeler (SSU 3), is lending a helping hand up in Connecticut, outside of business hours, as local representative for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and local administrator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. When his leisure begins to bore him, he tackles his duties as member of the Code Executive Committee for the Office Equipment Manufacturers Institute, Director of the Stamford Chamber of Commerce, and of the Y. M. C. A.

Enos Curtin (SSU 2), lets us know that he was the "biggest man ever to win the Meadow Brook (Long Island), point-to-point (1932.)" What he says nothing about, but what we know from other sources, is that he was one of the Commanders of the Crusaders, and as such had a part in the repeal of the prohibition amendment.

On the very eve of going to press, we come upon two Field Service men mentioned prominently in the same edition of a New York newspaper.

One of these two items records the election of Neil Petree (SSU 10), who came to the Field Service from California, and has been for some time President of James McCreery & Co., to the presidency of the Retail Dry Goods Association of New York City.

The other item is headed "Mortgage Post Rumored Going to Cummings," and concerns Lawrence B. Cummings (SSU 3-4), Vice President of Douglas L. Elliman & Co., and President of the Real Estate Board of New York. "Mr. Cummings," the item reads, "it is reported will be asked by Governor Lehman to serve on the commission which will administer the Mortgage Authority . . . . Mr. Cummings is one of the most highly regarded men in New York real estate. His handling of the building service labor situation has won high praise for his enterprise and ability to soothe out strikes which at times threatened to tie up every large office building, loft structure, and apartment in the city. The trouble fell on his shoulders the first day he assumed the presidency of the board. His conduct of the early situation, which finally developed into an arbitration, won the confidence of labor besides building owners. . . Mr. Cummings was also chairman of the New York delegation which passed months at Washington working on an NRA code for real estate."

The following item might have been mentioned some pages back when we were writing about the Field Service museum, and appealing for trophies. We have decided, however to list it under these personal notes as an achievement. Dalton V. Garstin (SSU 67) writes from Yale University, where he is personal assistant to the General Manager of the Service Bureau: "You might be interested to know that I still have the Ford I built in France out of salvage parts,---the hood is held on by a German belt, with brancardier springs at each end for tension."

". . . Then on to Chalons. Suddenly I found myself in Jalons-les-Vignes, but alas a different Jalons from the mud-encased, gray one 1 knew. I could not find our cantonment or the cafe but I did locate the church where band concerts were given.

"Chalons was as always,---the sleepy Marne under the old grey bridge by the station, the canal and the parc and of course the Haute Mere Dieu in its sun-bathed square.

". . . We passed General Petain's headquarters and looked vainly up and down the barracks at Mourmelon for our old cantonment . . . . Through a rebuilt Mourmelon we sped to Baconnes and on past Spaniere (hardly recognizable) to Prosnes . A new Prosnes with a brand-new church greeted us, but with great joy I recognized the old concrete abri of evil memory (and pleasant, too). An unfortunate was living there, and he lit a bougi for us to see the dark interior. It looked forbidding, but it had the dank smell of other days; and the same dirty utensils and rough bed. . . 

"We turned back from Prosnes towards Sept-Saulx. The pine grove of La Plaine is gone although I could guess where it had been, and more distinctly, the poste opposite. Great was the shock to find the magnificent trees at Sept-Saulx cut. The canal looked naked and ashamed.

"Back to Prosnes and through it toward Constantine Farm, which is rebuilt and prosperous looking. The Monts looked scarred and forbidding as of old, but the Plain leading up them is gentle and plowed, with here and there a haystack.

"The Roman Road stretched straight and bare, --- and paved. Crumbling remnants of trench run beside it. In the fields one can mark the lines of trench by the whiter surface.

"The Ferme de Moscou (also rebuilt) was easily located but hardly recognized. Where are the rats of yesteryear? What are you thinking about, Petit Louis, who received your ticket here? . . .

"We climb back in our Citroen, and rush up to Rheims into the setting sun . . . . Here and there an untouched ruin remained to remind us of the fact that Stanley Hill and others were struck down in these busy streets. . . .

"Away at nine after a glimpse of the cathedral inside and out in daylight. One sees the scars and the sadness of it. . . Our first stop was the Fort de la Pompelle,---a national ruin. Here was the key to Rheims, and its fall in May or June, 1918, would have straightened the line out from Chateau-Thierry to Verdun instead of leaving the Germans in an uncomfortable pocket. How often in those days did we hear the mumbling roar in the direction of Rheims and see the informed shake their heads and jerk their thumbs meaningly. 'La Pompelle, tu sais! C'a doit etre dure la bas!' . . .

"We rode on and turned left on the way to Mauroy till we came to Mt. Cornillet. Here we got out again and spent an hour and a half clambering over shell holes and through zigzagged trenches to the crest of Cornillet. Here was country as I remembered it,---torn and seamed and white. Concrete machine gun shelters, dugouts, barbed wire, unexploded shells. We climbed down into the entrance to the famous tunnel and sniffed the damp, chill air. French boys on bicycles passed us, looking about with wide-open eyes. Let us hope great hopes of the Kellogg pact, signed only yesterday!"

JEROME PRESTON, S. S. U. 15.

1929

"Before leaving France in 1929 I motored through the battlefields with my wife. We dined and stopped the night at the 'Haute Mere Dieu' in Chalon-sur-Marne and rolled up and down the long white Roman Road to Rheims sentineled by its interminable rows of poplars, as I had rolled a hundred times. There was grain in the fields moving with the breeze. . . Vitry-la-Ville, Vitry-le-François. Mourmelon-le-Grand and Le Petit, Suippes, Bar-le-Duc, Soissons, and all the rest. Nowhere a trace of war except a few monuments and cemeteries and the snaking mound of what once had been a trench, verdant with grass. Only at Prosnes did I find a dugout still intact that we of SSU 27 knew well. It had a plate on the door to some later Division. Over the hill before Ferme de Moscou I followed a rutted cart track until it vanished in a caved-in trench at the foot of Mont le Casque. I picked up an old peasant woman and her husband for a lift and got an affectionate pack of fleas that it took me a week to out-wash."

LLOYD O. COULTER, S. S. U. 27.

1930

"I had the pleasure of motoring along quite a stretch of the old front in 1930, and only one who has gone back can appreciate what it means to re-visit the old haunts. I found myself experiencing a strange nostalgia that defied explanation, but that somehow or other meant a great deal to me."

LEROY L. HARDING, S. S. U. 67.

"William H. Wallace, Jr., (SSU 4 and 2g), and myself took a trip out to Rheims and Soissons in the summer of 1930. On the way we visited Longpont, where the Field Service will remember there was a beautiful chateau belonging to the Comte de Montesquieu, and there was also the chateau at Chavigny Farm where the training school from Meaux continued its training in the French Automobile Service. During the first officers' training school, the Comte and Comtesse de Montesquieu came to dinner with the American officers at Chavigny Farm.

"The chateau at Longpont was damaged by bullets in the war of 1870, but was unharmed in the first German drive of the World War, as it was occupied by German officers. When the Germans were driven back, the family moved in again, but in the latter part of the war, both the chateau at Longpont and that at Chavigny were shelled to the ground. The Chavigny chateau has never been rebuilt, but Wallace and I found to our great pleasure and surprise that the, chateau at Longpont has been completely rebuilt in exact duplication of tile old chateau. The old Count and Countess are dead, but the young Count is living there. We called and were sorry to find the Count away, but his butler showed us around the chateau and we left a letter for the Count, saying who we were, recalled the dinner that his father and mother had had with us at the old Chavigny chateau, and congratulated him on having rebuilt this beautiful building."

W. DEFORD BIGELOW, S. S. U. 4.

1932

"About the only achievements I can boast of are three all too short trips to France in 1924, 1927 (with the American Legion Convention), and 1932. I am willing to go on record as saying that my devotion to the French people has not changed. The same warm welcome as in war time has been the rule. On the last two trips I stayed with friends at Pierrefonds and had the strange experience of riding comfortably in a sedan over good roads around Soissons, a feat I had never dreamed of when bumping along on my camion in the same country in 1917."

NOYES H. REYNOLDS, T. M. 397.

1934

I have been in France three times since the "War and each time I have visited anywhere from two or three to a dozen or two of my wartime acquaintances among the French people. The cordiality of my reception has increased rather than diminished and I have never found anything but the utmost good feeling and gladness to see me coming back again.

"This past summer Mrs. Crosby and I were up in the Argonne and stopped one afternoon at Florent where I spent four months in 1918. We were received by a large part of the population of the village, taken to the main inn which was run by the husband of one of the old crowd among the villagers. Champagne and cakes were produced and a large number of people came in to toast the Americans and be toasted in return. They all posed for moving pictures and were more than cordial and friendly, and that is typical of the feelings they seem to have for us throughout the war territory, and wherever else our old war comrades are now located. I have visited many of them and count two or three families among my best friends. Furthermore I find the same cordiality to exist with French people in general whether they are old wartime acquaintances or not."

ARTHUR U. CROSBY, S. S. U. 13.

"The charming house at 21 rue Raynouard and the home of the Countess de la Villestreux and several houses beyond it have all been torn down. The lovely trees in the park have all been cut down. Streets have been built through, and apartment houses put up. It is enough to make one cry to see such a beautiful corner of old Paris vanish."

Thus was the passing of the old Passy headquarters recorded in a letter from an ex-ambulancier late in 1931. In "L'Illustration" for "25 Juin 1932" appeared an article entitled "Babylone à Passy," from which we quote:

". . . on peut se permettre de dire que Paris possède maintenant la plus belle réalisation immobilière de l'époque.

"C'est à Passy qu'elle existe, dans ce merveilleux, doux et paisible Passy qui mérite bien son nom de 'Jardin de Paris.' Sa partie supérieure porte les numéros 13, 15 et 17 de la pittoresque et tranquille rue Raynouard. Car ce groupe magnifique présente un aspect non pareil. Sa disposition évoque Babylone et ses prodigieuses suspensions de demeures et de parcs. De l'avenue Fremiet, perpendiculaire à la Seine et perpendiculaire aussi à la rue Dickens, l'oeil, étonné, saisi, découvre un clair immeuble à sept étages, orienté au midi, aux ouvertures harmonieusement percées, et au-dessus de sa masse, à la fois imposante et légère, des pergolas, un jardin vaste et clair que surmonte un admirable édifice élevé en amphithéâtre, d'une décoration somptueuse et discrète ou le ton moderne est heureusement teinte d'atmosphère classique, où tout est mélodique, où les éléments se fondent sans ce contrarier, sans qu'un seul crie, sans qu'un seul détonne. . ."

There follows a description of the advantages and conveniences of living in any one of the "cent quarante appartements que comprend cet ensemble monumental, grandiose et élégant, imposant et joli, plaisant!" But in spite of a full page of superlatives, the writer of the article still feels he has not done justice to his subject, for in closing, he states:

"Pareille description sommaire ne peut évidemment donner qu'une idée insuffisante de la nouveauté architecturale, de la qualité exclusive de cette oeuvre grandiose où s'inscrivent à leur maximum de puissance les conquêtes le plus récentes de la technique et les plus pures manifestations de l'art. Mais la plume, dans bien des cas, traduit peu et mal. Au moins peut-elle noter une observation générale! Il était difficile de concevoir aussi bien. Il était impossible de faire mieux."

Perhaps,---but we like it better the way we cherish it in memory, with all its imperfections.

"I went back to Verdun last June, and followed the old road from Ippécourt to Esnes.

"No trouble finding the site of the camp in the gulley just south of Ippécourt. We turned in, between the fence posts, and drove up over the firm, sloping ground; the grass was soft and green, bushes grew sparsely; we found wild strawberries and forget-me-nots. The pit from which the pump drew water for our radiators was dry with summer. Further up, we marked the place where André's workshop had stood, and we could almost see the temperamental André swearing over a sacré kingbolt, while his hands deftly did their work; and the site of the cook-shack with Pabiot peering over his mustaches round the door, his big brown eyes full of lewd memories and anticipations. Once, when the grenade practise was going on in the field above, André hurled a handful of nuts and bolts at the kitchen door: Pabiot trembled. ('Ecoutez, monsieur: Vous entendez les canons? Cela me fait peur.') Nothing now left of the row of huts along the north side of the gulley, where we slept: no scrap of wood, no rusty tins, no gravel that covered the terrace. The site of the terrace is marked by the slightest irregularity in the smooth slope of the hill, nothing else to show that man had ever been near the place. Below it we had lined up, one cold, gray day,---an unprecedented bit of soldiery---while Dell---or was it Allen?---was given his Croix de Guerre by the old fat general; and we hadn't known how to act while he read the citation. Afterwards we all saluted, a thin line of sheepish ragged salutes, and the general drove off chuckling to himself in a fatherly way . . . . The big hut, lined with black tar-paper, where we took our meals, De Turckheim and Delannoy and Perry at their little table, polite, a little cynical, a little bored. The rest of us singing, stuffing food from white enamel,---or was it blue enamel? Bigelow: 'Any more meat down there? Pass the salt.' Gooch: 'Impartial history will show.' Boiling: 'Before the war---'; but he meant the Civil War, of course. Tommy, full of chemistry, his mind only vaguely on the present, singing dreamily: 'When its obus falling time in Montzéville, I want to be in Ippécourt.' Cummings and his neatness, his charming pessimism; Wallace, the great lover of France, his hair coming out in patches; Joe Parrot, a sick man, but game, and knowing more about the war than all the rest of us; old Claf Davis, mighty at table, bulky, brave, dependable.

"We picked a few wild strawberries, and started out on the familiar road---winding along beside the little Cousance, then over the stone bridge at Ippécourt, with the duck-pool beside it: slow-moving peasants, a huge horse, harness thrown over his back, manure and straw and dirty-faced children, a woman lugging dirty clothes toward the stream,---was that our washer-woman, Pabiot's friend? Or her daughter Marie-Thérèse. More likely the daughter, grown old in youth. The low stone sills of an abandoned house in the village, knocked over by the war and never reclaimed, bushes filling the cellar. The street seems oddly silent and deserted. We miss the soldiers, the old chaps of the 64th, lounging in the doorways, scrubbing their clothes in the icy Cousance, doing nameless vague fatigues; mustaches, brown tired faces, uncomplaining, silent and patient. We come to the cross-roads, and mark the wall of the house that two of us, full of wine and idiocy, tried to climb one night because it seemed a good thing to do at the time. The vine we climbed is gone,---of course: it broke under our weight that night and we fell. But it didn't hurt. The sentry took it good-naturedly.

"We went on along the open valley, all under cultivation now, and came upon an old man beside the road, breaking rock with a long-handled hammer, seated, his legs stretched out before him; the same spot,---it might have been the same man: hat, ceinture, sabots, baggy trousers of brown corduroy. He didn't look up. Round the corner to the left and past the bluff where one of the pieds-gelés hospitals had stood, and the steep greasy pitch that none of the cars could ever make, so we'd pick-a-back the blessés up the hill; on into Julvécourt, and the blind left turn round the last house and up the hill and through the trees, with the plateau on our left where the hangars used to stand; and so down into Ville-sur-Cousance . . . Not a trace of the little colony of triage huts in the field beside the stream. The slippery bluff above it drivers bare, too, where the Villa Boiling perched and on-call drivers for the triage used to join the hospitable popote of a musician and a philosopher, and the bearded, quick little doctor full of argument and the smoke of a huge pipe. The road is little more than a country lane as it goes on to Jubécourt, still north; how was there ever room for that thick-crawling mass of men and wagons, mules, horses, guns and cars, grunting and slouching along in the cold misty darkness of a winter's night?

"The road still climbs slowly along the bluff on the right bank, then dips down through the long street of Jubécourt. An old woman lurches down the street with a bucket, bent and drab, wisps of white hair straggling; otherwise an empty village. This must be the house on the left where we stopped for the nightly cask of wine for the brancardiers at Esnes: ravitaillement. ('Un peu d'essence pour mon briquet, monsieur?') The foot of the hill, a bridge, a shallow pool below it; on the right, the popote de sous-offs: a long table, candles stuck in wine bottles, warmth, light, pinard and tobacco. Courteous, hairy men, shaking hands right and left; the cuistot with the great bowl of fried potatoes under one arm, a handful for each plate. ("Encore de pommes? Prenez,---prenez, monsieur; après vous.") Good food and friendliness.

"The last house on the right, lair of lanky, myopic Parot and old Pouf-Pouf and the gentlemanly medicinal Duclerget, and the pervading thin smell of disinfectants. Beside it the bare high room where we slept on stretchers, waiting for the call: a dim, fumbling shape leaning over us with a candle, a tug on the blanket and a whispered "C'est vous monsieur qui monte à Esnes?" and the chill dawn feeling its way into our bones while we pulled on boots and nervously fiddled with the laces, and our shadows danced huge against the dirty wall and the rats scuttled away to hiding. There's a pretty little garden behind the house now. It looks nice.

"Up the hill and across the dull flat mile to Brocourt, all the fields green and soft today, and a little soldiers' cemetery by the fork before the village: a few score crosses, three set apart under a tree,---the officers; all French, all anonymous now despite the flames on the wood. Down through the gray town, a right turn into the little ravine and up the other side to the hedge where the sentry shivered and we turned off lights; then right at the carrefour and clown the Côte Dombasle, still steep as we remembered it when the blessés helped push the cars up, but now a mere peasants' track down over the fields, the winter's mud caked on the surface and blowing away in thin spirals of dust. Dombasle is a new town of white cement and red tile roofs, with the great highway to Verdun cutting through it beside the rails and the chef de gare pushing a truck along the platform of the tidy new station. Then slowly up the long straight slant to the Bois de Bethlainville, the fields all empty where the low huts used to flank the road, through the woods at the top, young trees pushing vigorously up through the tangled brush, and the shattered stumps of the war already soft with rot.

"We came to the edge of the woods where the road dips for Montzéville, and felt the old fear prickle and tighten under our skins. At night it used to look like a black abyss of peril out there, ringed with a distant hemisphere of spark and fire and crushing sound, with the rustle of the départs whispering overhead. This day was bright with June and a haze lay over the hills of blood beyond. Stumps of the once great trees lined the descending road; but there were saplings planted between. At the foot of the hill, where Tommy once lay in the dark in a foot of mud and untangled a length of barbed wire from his rear axle, we turned sharp right again into Montzéville, rebuilt, raw in white and red, no sign of the tangled wreckage of 1916 to be seen. New little trees have been planted along the road to Esnes, and the fields on either side are bare and empty, their green surface gently dimpled as water dimples when you breathe on it: les obus. Is that all they did, those tearing, crashing monsters? We felt a contempt for war. Here was the low swampy place the génie never could seem to get mended: we used to fetch logs by the carload to make a corduroy, and they'd float away as soon as the wheels touched them. Once a wagon driver filled it in with rolls of barbed wire, and tires were punctured; ("Ah, les pauv' blessés!").

"On to the fork and the swing left over the rising ground that so far had hidden the road from the invisible eyes we used to feel peering, searching for us from the top of the Mort-Homme beyond; instinctively we moved faster. The Mort-Homme seemed very close, much closer than it had ever looked under the star-shells, and not nearly so high. A sweep of dimpled green fields falling toward the valley bottom, dotted with men bending to their toil, then the answering upward sweep on the other side ending in white desolation,---the Mort-Homme and its flanking hills, bare today as they were in the war, no growth of green, no life; a small cone of death, topped by a stone monument. At Cummings Corner a bend to the left round the side of the hill where the Seventy-Fives used to crack over our heads, and we had our backs to the Mort-Homme, remembering how our spines used to tingle from the imagined impact of those hostile eyes, peering through the night. Here was Esnes ahead of us. We drove softly, speaking in whispers, still feeling the impulse to give her the gas and make a dash for the abris under the Château. But here was no need for whispering. We passed a young peasant slouching toward the village: he scarcely looked up. Esnes, too, was new built. They had put up a small cement church, bare and ugly, on the site of the old one. We drove into Hogan's Alley, beside it, and avoided the water-trough that has replaced the old.

"Of the Château, not a trace or sign. A high, ill-proportioned white farm house stands on its ground, and the peasant woman who lives in it was just coming out with feed for the hens that clustered round the door. May we look about, Madame, we were here during the war. She nodded listlessly, without interest, and said her husband was out back. We found him, a brown one-legged man, with a wooden stump, he was busy with a shovel, busy filling in a hole in the ground with rock and dirt. Nothing much left of the Château, we said, with dull, faint laughs. No: the stone went into the foundations of the new church. And where had it stood, actually? Right here, messieurs. This is the entrance to the abris, this hole. Yes, I occupy myself with the remplissage: so many Americans come back to see the place, and some of them even wish to descend into the abris,---figurez-vous! So I fill it in, lest there be an accident and I receive the blame. But messieurs would doubtless like to see the new cemetery, at Avocourt, of which I am caretaker,---a grand affair, filled with the compatriots of messieurs? No, thank you, not today, we guessed. We tipped him, and drove away.

"Through the village and up the hill beyond: Trois-Cent-Quatre. We gazed dully at the desert of still churned and poisoned earth, where nothing grows save a meager tangle of thin bushes like barbed wire, where the soil is rust and the contours of the hills melt into one another unbroken by any object big enough to give scale to the foreground. It didn't seem to matter any more: there had been war here; there was now peace, and a monument to prove it. We drove back to Esnes, after a few moments, then down along the shallow valley to skirt the foot of the Mort-Homme and into Marre, where Kelly was killed; and so along the shallow-gliding Meuse to Glorieux,---the casernes and the villas replaced by new ones just as mercilessly ugly,---and into Verdun: rebuilt, clean, prosperous, a war monument at every turn, the streets and hotels packed with lounging soldiers and busy, serious staff-officers.

"A great flight of stone steps, flanked by mighty granite bastions, has been cut in the east side of the citadel of Verdun. The steps lead up to a massive tomb barred with a bronze grille, and above the tomb stands the mighty figure of a soldier. The figure is erect, stern, brooding, the embodiment of strength. There is warning in his pose, but no menace: he is gazing over the hills of Vaux and Douamout to the east. His living miniatures wander about at his feet, climbing and descending the stairs, forming groups and breaking up again. They seem very young, very aimless; but they are not in Verdun for fun.

"They are there for a purpose.

"The war is over? Oh dear yes: that war is over."

S. S. U. 4

Despite diminished income on our endowment fund for the American Field Service Fellowships, and the fifty-nine cent dollar, we are still sending American students to France for advanced study at French universities and institutions of higher learning. The number for the past year and the current year was necessarily reduced to five. As soon as conditions have sufficiently improved so that our income on our present endowment is greater, the number of students will be of course increased accordingly.

It is always our hope, of course, to increase the endowment fund. This hope lies dormant for the time being. We take advantage, however, of this opportunity to point out that these Fellowships have for their purpose, besides providing a memorial for the members of our Service who lost their lives in the war, the fostering of international understanding. We believe that many people to whom such a purpose has a deep appeal, might well be made familiar with the American Field Service Fellowships for French Universities, and interested in contributing to our fund either during their lives or by bequests in their wills.

In 1933 the Institute of International Education, which administers these Fellowships, published a sixty-two page brochure, giving a record of former Fellows. We quote from the foreword:

"Since 1919, one hundred and thirty-seven graduates of American colleges have studied in France upon these fellowships for periods of one year or longer. Today they are located in all sections of the United States and in some foreign countries.

"In 1924 the Institution of International Education was requested by the Board of Trustees of the American Field Service to undertake the administration of these fellowships. The Institute believes that the friends of the Service will be glad to learn something of its present personnel, activities and influence. This pamphlet gives the latest available information concerning the addresses and occupations of all former Field Service Fellows, as well as a list of many of their published works. The lapse of years necessarily makes such a list incomplete, but every effort has been made to reach former Fellows.

"Excerpts from reports submitted by Field Service Fellows to the Institute of International Education and the Committee on Award have been included. These comments, chosen as typical from reports of the past ten years, are fragmentary and often of a personal nature, but they represent the frank reaction of carefully selected youth of this country after a year's study in France.

This brochure was compiled by Mr. Edward Murrow, the Assistant Director of the institute and is published by the Institute as a slight evidence that the faith of the men who established and financed the American Field Service Fellowships was fully justified and also in the hope that it may recall to former Fellows the profitable days they passed in France and the many friends they left on the other side of the Atlantic.

STEPHEN DUGGAN, Director.

From Colonel Andrew we received some time ago a quotation from a letter he had received from a constituent of his, whose daughter had married a French official in Indo China. The quotation follows:

"She is attending the Ecole des Beaux Arts there, and writes: 'The Director of the School. Tardieu by name, knows your Piatt Andrew. He, Monsieur Tardieu, is a lively gentleman of about sixty-three, which is old to be living in this country and climate. But he likes hot weather and the East, and he lives on garlic and raw onions, which he assures me is a preventative of cancer. He has managed to produce some Annamite pupils who do him much credit, and I should say he is a good teacher; anyway, I sweat three hours a day in his studio both on account of the temperature and my effort to learn."

To the above, Colonel Andrew adds:

"Members of Section One will be interested to read this as it refers to the Marechal de Logis Tardieu, who was attached to that section when it served on the Somme in 1916, and who painted a large picture of the section in action, in a shell stormed town."

The French officers formerly connected with the Field Service, who are still living and in France. we hope to have with us at our dedication ceremonies at Blerancourt in the summer of 1936. We should accordingly be glad to hear from any Field Service men who have kept in contact with any of the French officers, as has Earl D. Prudden (T. M. 397), who writes as follows:

"Ever since I left France in 1919, I have kept alive a friendship for Lt. Paul Vincent by the inter-exchange of an annual letter, usually at Christmas time. There are many of the old crowd who will remember the warm regard which the Little Colonel had for the American Field Service and would probably be glad to have his address so that they also could drop him a line of greeting. When I last heard from him, his address was still No. 10 Rue du Onze-Novembre, Saint Etienne, Loire, France."

Direct from Lieutenant Frederick R. Ostheimer, we received the following expression of interest in our plans:

"It was for me a great pleasure to hear that the American Field Service Association is planning some kind of celebration for next year.

"You may be assured that I will heartily take part in any such ceremonies which may take place over here for it would he a great pleasure to meet all the good friends of the S. S. U.'s."

1f we can accomplish our objective of an annual, or possibly semi-annual Bulletin, we expect to make future issues more reminiscent than is the present one. To this end your cooperation is needed.

We digress a moment to thank all those who contributed to this Bulletin, whether their contributions have been used, or have been held for future issues. We regret that the author of "The Road to Esnes" did not want his name to be used, but we send him our special thanks, as we do the artists, C Le Roy Baldridge, Samuel C. Chamberlain, George W. Hall, Harry De Maine, and Waldo Pierce.

We urge other Field Service men to send material for other bulletins. We particularly ask for excerpts from letters written home during the war days. As one man states it:

"I feel the letters we once wrote home would recall to us just how we felt in those days and no matter whose letter was read, it would be and say the same things we all did or experienced. We want to hear about what we once did and how we felt, and relive the old thrills .... Dig up the childish letters of the past and youthful boasting and exaggerations, and let us enjoy them . . ."

Material may be sent either to Stephen Galatti, whose address you have on the membership card, or direct to Lucy MacDonald De Maine, 428 Lafayette Street, New York City.

A number of Field Service men have been having their Bulletins bound. Thomas Means, whose address is Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, has a complete set of both the French and American editions, with the exception of No. 3, American edition. Means plans to leave his bound sets to libraries, and is therefore particularly desirous of locating a copy of the missing issue. If any Field Service man has a copy he would be willing to part with, he may send it direct to Means at the above address.

Several other Field Service men are anxious to locate copies missing from their sets. If you have any extra copies, and will let us know their issue numbers, we will gladly act as the exchange medium in any instance where one man has a copy another man wants.

We cannot mention the French editions of the Field Service Bulletin without recalling Mrs. M. Isabella Howard, who used to call herself the "sub-sub-editor.''

Mrs. Howard, who lives at 101 Plymouth Road, Malden, Massachusetts, has been for many months flat on her back, but from that position guides her pen to write. "I am very well satisfied,---there is so much to read." We hope she will like to read this Bulletin, and we feel certain she would be most happy to hear from any of the Field Service men whom she used to welcome in the little Bulletin office, overlooking the chestnut trees.

Our last Bulletin, issued in the summer of 1930, carried an announcement of the reunion held in Boston on October 7th of that year. For those who did not attend, we quote from a report made at the time by W. De Ford Bigelow, President of the Association:

"We had a total attendance of 235, including invited guests, and every section was represented. The Reserve Mallett had 36, and the largest Section representation was by Section 17 who had 24, followed closely by Sections 2 and 4, with 20 and 18 respectively.

"General Gouraud dined with us and was our guest of honor. With him were two French lieutenants as his aides; also General Casenave, Military Attache at the French Embassy at Washington; and Commandant Thénault, who was formerly Captain of the Lafayette Escadrille when many of our boys were in it.

"Other guests were Monsieur Flammand, the French Consul in Boston; a Captain of the British Army who was a friend of Harold Willis of Section 2; Major Hannigan of the American Legion, who was in charge of the entertainment of Gen. Gouraud and his suite; the much decorated Fr. Flieger, who was the guest of Section 17, and had been aumonier in the French Division that Section 17 served.

"The dining room at the Brookline Country Club was decorated with the Section flags, as well as French and American flags. The orchestra played almost entirely the French military marches and French airs that were heard during the war. The dinner was a French dinner, beginning as usual with the hors d'oeuvres variés, and Burgundy and sauterne.

"I presided as Toastmaster. There were speeches by Gen. Gouraud, Commandant Thénault, Fr. Fleïger, Col. Andrew, and Harold Willis of Section 2 who appeared in his uniform of the Lafayette Escadrille, and whom Gen. Gouraud kissed on both cheeks iii token of appreciation of what he had clone for France.

"Much credit is due to Durant Rice of Section 3, who chose the music and managed the orchestra; also to Roger Griswold of Section 2, and to Donald Moffat of Section 4, of the Boston Committee, whose efforts in helping arrange the dinner went a long way towards making it a success.

"The first toast was a silent one to those of our Service who have gone West. Another toast was drunk to the Reserve Mallett, and a rising vote of thanks was given Messrs. Griswold and Moffat. Gen. Gouraud's speech was particularly fitting, and showed his great friendship for our old Service."

From Walter E. Bruns we have the following note:

"...spasmodically those of us living on the Pacific Coast, who were in the Balkans with Section 10, meet at Camille's in San Francisco for an 'Albanian Patriots Reunion.' The 'luncheons' generally last until midnight."

With the permission of The Macmillan Company, New York, we quote from the closing chapter of "Why Wars Must Cease," a chapter written by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (wife of John R. Fisher, S. S. U. 2 & Hdqts.).

"The next aspect of the matter to be taken up would be one often evaded and muffled by pacifists---the fact that war does give scope for certain fine older human virtues, qualities which are starved in what we euphemistically call our industrial 'civilization' --- such qualities as devoted comradeship, physical courage, physical endurance, dogged self-forgetting determination to overcome impossible obstacles and difficulties, devotion to a cause that will not advance one's personal fortunes, joy in a victory that is not one's own but that of a cause deemed right. Human hearts are eager for an ideal to which they may wholly dedicate themselves. Ordinary existence is barren of such ideals. No matter how completely familiar are the irrefutable arguments proving that what looks like the sacred bread of patriotic war for one's Fatherland is but a very muddy stone, governments can always be sure that a certain proportion of their citizens will snatch at it with hope---with a little hope, at least---that this time it may be what it resembles, what they so sorely need, a cause worth serving.

"When reminded of this element in the problem, anti-war writers usually point out that the opportunities in modern war for true comradeship, physical courage, devotion and so on are so meagre and poor that they are not to be counted at all as against the frightful moral squalor of army life in war times, against the frightful disillusions always ground into decent human souls who are naive enough to expect to find in war-conditions anything but unmitigated horror. Of course this is not---not literally---true, for men as they are in the mass. The various Associations of Veterans the world around may not be made up of sensitive idealists, but they are not brutes, either; they are a cross-section of masculine humanity, lacking the small proportion usually found in miscellaneous human groups, of a few very highly organized personalities. And one has only to watch a reunion of such veterans to see two things, that their longing for comradeship based on effort in common for a good cause, is poignant, and that their memories of their war-experiences are not all nightmares. Their experiences as soldiers did actually bring to many of those ordinary men something not ignoble which they had found nowhere else in their ordinary industrial-age lives passed between office, factory, farm and home. When, in uniforms, they marched off gloriously under flying flags, between rows of excited men and women loudly praising and honoring them, keeping step to the music of a brass band so summoning to vitality that it would bring cripples to their feet out of their wheel chairs, those plain private soldiers were under the impression that they were living through an hour more colorful, more stirring, more unforgettable than any other life had given them.

"And they were right.

"War-haters cry out, and truly, that for that one poor hour of imitation greatness, those private soldiers were to pay with years of misery and lowered vitality, with hideous dehumanizing memories, with shame, with drab hopelessness, far worse than anything they had known before.

"And they are right.

"But being right is not enough. We would do well to remember the by-gone days of shut-in, genteel, and slate-pencil-eating young ladies, and take to heart the fact that as long as their elders did no more than cry out that slate-pencils are ruinous to health but did not change the daily diet and routine of the house-bound victims of the habit, slate-pencils continued to be nibbled. It was only after girls were given some outdoor air and freedom in their daily lives, and in their diet certain vital minerals that had been lacking, that they turned away to wholesome normal food from the perverse poor imitation of what they needed. The sober, heart-breaking fact is that in many cases those marching men really did have, in that brief experience of what felt like dedicated impersonal greatness, the closest contact with dedicated greatness of all their lives. Dumbly, far beneath the dutiful attention they give to the presentation of unanswerable arguments against war, their nerve-centers remember that one great throb of epic emotion."

While agreeing with Mrs. Fisher that we should not have to go on having wars in order to bring out those "fine older human virtues" of which she writes, yet it is those virtues which we feel that our Service in France called forth to a marked degree, and the memory of which we hope in some degree to recapture in our reunions, and to make record of in our museum.

Sets of the three-volume History of the American Field Service are still available. If you do not have your set, they may now be obtained through Stephen Galatti at considerably less than the original publishers' price.

It is of course obvious that it is important to the continuance of the Association that we keep our address lists up-to-date. We add this brief paragraph merely as a reminder to all Field Service men to let us know whenever your address changes.

Also, we want to thank the many Field Service men who have been so helpful in acting as section secretaries, and in this way locating many men who were missing from our records. Particularly do we want to thank Hiram E. Sibley (T. M. 184), who obtained for us a gratuitous ad in the "Chicago Journal of Commerce," listing some seventy men throughout the Middle West for whom we had addresses that would no longer reach them. Through this ad, some thirty of the men were located.

As previously stated, your response to the preliminary notice of the 1935 Reunion was very fine. If your response to this Bulletin is equally good, the continuance of our Association seems assured. In this connection, we are happy to quote from a letter from A. M. Greene (S. S. U. 9) :

"In traveling about the country a great deal as I do, I am surprised to find how many old field service men I encounter and I can say with assurance that the spirit which was evidenced in our early reunion right after the war is still alive although possibly smoldering and only needs some such plan as yours to burst into full flame."

We urge that you send your membership card in before it gets misplaced. Don't do as one Field Service man did about the notice we sent out last September. He has ever since been busily brushing up on his French, getting ready for the reunion across the water. We have heard about it from a third party,---he didn't send us a word to show his interest!

"Our tradition," we quote from Harry W. Frantz (S. S. U. 10), "is one too valuable to be lost through apathy or non-acquaintance."

Don't keep your interest, much less your enthusiasm, hidden from us, and let us mistake it for apathy.

Membership card should be sent to Stephen Galatti, c/o Jackson & Curtis, 115 Broadway, New York, N. Y.