LATER TEEN AGE AND EARLY TWENTIES Part 9 - Armistice

Alfred is back in Burlington, Vermont after a rushed trip to see his grandmother.

"On arrival back at camp the Flu had invaded it.  They used our floor for an emergency hospital.  I saw several of my buddies die.  After about a week I took it too.  It got to be a problem to handle the sick.  I was taken to an emergency hospital set up in the basement of a Methodist Church.  Evidently we had good care there for all 24 of us survived.  The latter part of October we got orders to be shipped to the Signal Corpe Embarkation Camp – Camp Alfred Vail, Little Silver,  N.J. so we got our last look at Mount Mansfield and The Camels Hump already covered with snow,  at beautiful Lake Champlain and Plattsburg, N.J. direct across the lake and far to southwest, Fort Ticonderoga. 

Oct 23, 1918 at University of Vermont, Burlington, VT

 After we left Albany, N.Y. we took the New York Central into the City on what I think was one of the fastest rides on a train and what offered to be the busiest.  We sped along the Palisades of the Hudson River and at times there were 5 and 6 trains abreast.  Somewhere we stopped and changed the steam locomotive for an electric.  The next thing we went into the sub-way and it wasn’t long until we unloaded in Grand Central Station, New York City.  What a sight that was; thousands of people and above all the noise and confusion the “caller” calling out the arrivals and departure of trains.  How we kept together I’ll never know.  Of course we were a small detail, only 40 men.  We had a long march on cobblestone streets, through wholesale fruit and vegetable markets, along piers and finally to a ferry boat which took us to Hoboken.  There we boarded a Central of New Jersey train and soon were at Little Silver, N.J.

There are two little items I want to mention about Vermont; First the rail road was the Rutland R.R. and 2^nd a little incident that happened in camp.  We had very little time off.  Went to school at night until 9 pm 5 days a week – taps sounded at 10 o’clock – If our grades were passable we got Saturday afternoon and Sunday off.  I was on the 4^th floor of the dormitory and a fire escape had an exit from our room.  There was always some fellows who, after bed check, would use the escape and sneak out for a few hours.  Now this fire escape went by the Commandant's Office and on one particular night 16 of us went out on a spree and to our chagrin the Commandant detected us, had another bed check and we were caught.  The next morning all Army orders were thrown at us – A.W.O.L. – sentence 2 weeks hard labor.  We were to build a pistol range on a range of mountains opposite us.  We did a little digging per order the first day;  the second day they unloaded a truck load of ship lop boards, 10 ft. long on our side of the mountain.  We each carried one board at a time making 2 trips in the morning and one trip in the afternoon.  We had a “shave tail” (2^nd Lt. from Plattsburg) in charge.  The second morning when we were about half way up the mountain we took one of our many rests and raked up a bunch of pine needles and built a fire. In a short while the officer in charge was spotted, we kicked the fire around and took off.  We didn’t get the fire all put out and in a short while the thick mass of needles caught fire and started a forest fire.  They had the Burlington Fire Dept. and the whole camp out fighting the fire.  It was a “Lulu.”  Axes & saws were used to cut down trees ahead and I guess the Fire Dept. finally got it stopped.  That ended our hard labor and the Pistol Range never got finished while I was there.

Camp Alfred Vail, NJ, December 31, 1918
US Army Photo from http://cecom.army.mil/historian/photolist

 Arriving at Camp Alfred Vail we were assigned quarters which were tents.  This camp was located on what formerly was a rail road yard. Large piles of R.R. ties (pine) were stacked all around the camp.  I want to say that on the south edge of the camp was the famous 1 mile straight away track on which the equally famous pacing horse, Dan Patch, made his record (a worlds record – less than a 2 minute mile). The first thing we had to do at the camp after getting our regular issues was to saw & chop up ties in short lengths for the funnel shaped stove in our tent.  They had cross cut saws, buck saws, hand saws and axes & hatchets for this job, but the trouble was that only a few knew how to use them.  The first morning quite a few of our bunch were called for overseas duty.  I don’t know if I was lucky or unlucky but I wasn’t called until Nov. 10^th and when news of the armistice came we were on a pier at Hoboken.  Confusion would be putting it mild but we entrained again and came back to our old quarters and had to participate in a parade at Long Beach, N.J.  It was one of the wildest parades I had a part in.  I don’t know where all the “Spirits” came from but by midnight Army Trucks were picking up soldiers and piling them up like logs and hauling them back to camp.  Winter was soon on us and tents got miserably cold and in a hurry and pine chunks of wood soon burn up.  So we had to keep a good stock of fuel ready.  About a dozen of our original bunch were still intact and we were fortunate that the Top Sergeant and the sergeant of our company were in the group.  They sure favored us when it came to fatigue work.  Everybody was restless; the war was over and we wanted to get back home.

The Fort Wayne News, Nov. 7, 1918, page 1, Fort Wayne, IN, from newspaperarchives.com

 The flu epidemic of  1918 killed half a million people in the United States. Worldwide it killed many more people than died in World War I.  A vaccine was not discovered until the 1940's. It was spreading so quickly among military institutions that the government put a halt to calling up more men.

The gymnasium at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vt., was converted into an infirmary during the Spanish influenza epidemic, as seen in this photo released by the Bailey-Howe Library at the University of Vermont, from Washingtonpost.com

Did you catch the term "shaved tail" when Alfred was talking about having to build a pistol range? Well I had to look it up and according to the dictionary it is comes from the practice of shaving the tail of newly broken mules to distinguish them from seasoned ones. So I guess it was a novice lieutenant. 

Dan Patch from Wikipedia.com public domain

Dan Patch was the horse that set a speed record for a harness horse of 1 minute 55 seconds for a mile in 1906. This record stood for 32 years. 

How lucky can a man be.  Alfred had been called to overseas duty and on Nov 10, 1918 he was on the pier in preparation for that journey.  An then the news of the upcoming signing of the armistice for the next day resulted in his return to camp. The signing on November 11th officially ended the war and that date has ever since been a national holiday.  Today we call it Veteran's day to acknowledge the sacrifice of all veterans in all wars.

Armistice Day, 1918, Wall Street, New York City