What Your Great-Grandfather's War Was Like — A Doughboy in 1918

By The Origentum Team

He was twenty-two years old when the letter arrived. It told him to report in three weeks for a physical examination. He had two months left in his life as a farmer, a clerk, a baker, a son. Then he would belong to the Army. By Christmas, he would be in France. By the following autumn, he would be a different man, or no man at all. This is what his war actually looked like.

The Letter and the Camp

Between 1917 and 1918, the United States drafted nearly 2.8 million men. Another 2 million volunteered. By the war's end, more than 4.7 million Americans had served in some capacity. If your great-grandfather was a young man in those years, the odds he was touched by the war were high. The draft notice was a small printed card. It was matter-of-fact and final. He had a few weeks to put his affairs in order, say goodbye, and report to a railway station with the clothes on his back and a small bag.

The camps were thrown together at extraordinary speed. Camp Meade in Maryland, Camp Lewis in Washington, Camp Funston in Kansas, Camp Devens in Massachusetts — sixteen of them, each meant to hold forty thousand men. Wood barracks were built in weeks, often unfinished when the first soldiers arrived. The bunks were pine boards stacked four high. The mess halls fed thousands at a time on bean soup, hardtack, weak coffee, and stew of indeterminate meat. The mud was famous. So was the cold. Many of these young men had never been more than fifty miles from where they were born.

Training lasted somewhere between four and eight weeks, depending on when he enlisted and how badly he was needed at the front. He learned to shoot a Springfield 1903 rifle, to dig a trench, to wear a gas mask, to fix a bayonet. He learned to march in formation and to take orders without questioning them. The training was rushed. Officers admitted, privately, that the men were not ready. The men knew it themselves. They were sent to France anyway.

The Crossing

The Atlantic crossing took ten to fourteen days. The ships were converted ocean liners and freighters, painted in dazzle camouflage to confuse German U-boats. Each transport carried five thousand men or more, packed into bunks four and five high in the lower decks. The air was foul. The food was worse than camp food. Most men were seasick the entire journey.

The U-boat threat was constant and real. Convoys traveled in zigzag patterns, escorted by destroyers. Lifeboat drills were daily and serious. Men slept in their clothes with their life preservers next to them. By 1918, the convoy system had reduced losses dramatically, but stories of torpedoed troopships circulated and everyone knew them. The first sight of land — usually the coast of France near Brest or Saint-Nazaire — produced cheers that the older sailors said they had never heard from any other passengers.

What France Looked Like

For a young man from Iowa or Tennessee or Pennsylvania, France in 1918 was a kind of dream that turned, slowly, into something else. The villages were old in a way America was not. Stone houses, slate roofs, narrow lanes. Cathedrals that had stood for eight centuries. Wine, which most American soldiers had never tasted, was cheaper than water. The women of the villages, exhausted by four years of war, watched the Americans with a mix of relief and exhaustion. The men of the villages were largely absent — dead, wounded, or still at the front.

Behind the lines, soldiers were billeted in barns, schoolhouses, and any structure that could be requisitioned. They drilled, marched, and waited. Mail from home took six to eight weeks. Many men did not write much, because they did not know what to say, or because the censors would cut whatever they wrote about the war. Letters home tended to be brief and reassuring. The soldiers' real lives were in the silence between the lines.

The Trenches

The trenches American soldiers entered were not the deep, organized British trenches of the early war years. By 1918 the war was fluid again — the Germans had broken through in the spring, the Allies had pushed back in the summer, and the trenches were often improvised, shallow, and waterlogged. Your great-grandfather would have spent days at a time standing in mud that came up to his knees. His feet would have been wet for weeks. Trench foot, a slow rotting of the skin from constant moisture, was a leading cause of medical evacuation. Many men lost toes. Some lost feet.

The trench was a narrow ditch, perhaps six feet deep and three feet wide, reinforced with planks or sandbags where there was time and material. He slept on a board laid into the trench wall, called a fire step. He ate cold food from a tin can — bully beef, hardtack, condensed milk. He rarely undressed. Lice were universal. Rats the size of cats moved through the trench at night, fed on the unburied dead in no man's land between the lines. The smell, soldiers said for the rest of their lives, never left them. It was the smell of mud and excrement and decomposition and unwashed bodies and chemical residue from artillery.

The Daily Routine

His day was structured around two periods of heightened danger and many hours of waiting. Stand-to was at dawn — every soldier on the fire step, rifle ready, watching the German lines for an attack. Dawn was the most likely hour for an offensive, and so the most dangerous. After stand-to, breakfast, such as it was. Then the day's work: repairing the trench walls, draining water, hauling supplies up from the rear, sometimes burying the dead. Sniper fire was constant. To raise your head above the parapet was to risk a bullet through the skull.

Stand-to again at dusk. Then, after dark, the work parties went out into no man's land — repairing wire, listening for German movements, recovering bodies, sometimes raiding the enemy trench for prisoners. These night patrols were where many men died quietly, in small numbers, for reasons their families would never fully understand. The official telegram simply said killed in action.

And then there was the artillery. The artillery was the central horror of the First World War. Most men who died in that war were killed by shells, not by bullets. The shells came in waves — sometimes a brief barrage of an hour or two, sometimes a sustained bombardment that lasted for days without a break. There was no defense against artillery except to dig deeper into the earth and pray. Men went mad in artillery barrages. Shell shock — what we now recognize as combat trauma — entered the medical literature during this war, and the descriptions of it are devastating.

Going Over the Top

An attack — going over the top — happened perhaps a few times in any given soldier's experience, and it was the moment everything else had been training for. A whistle blew. The men climbed the ladders out of the trench. They walked, in long lines, across the open ground toward the enemy. Machine guns waited for them. Artillery had been pre-registered on the ground they were crossing. The casualty rates in major attacks were catastrophic. At Belleau Wood, in June 1918, the Marines suffered fifty percent casualties in three weeks. At the Meuse-Argonne, the largest American battle of the war, 26,000 men were killed and another 95,000 wounded in six weeks of fighting. If your great-grandfather lived through one of these attacks, he was lucky in a way he did not feel lucky.

The attacks were chaotic and disorienting. Smoke obscured everything. The noise was so loud that orders could not be heard. Men became separated from their units. Many of the dead were never identified — the artillery left nothing to identify. The wounded waited, sometimes for days, in shell craters in no man's land, hoping to be found by stretcher bearers. Many of them were not found.

The Wounded

If he was wounded, his survival depended on luck and on geography. Stretcher bearers carried him to a regimental aid post just behind the line. From there, by ambulance or by ambulance wagon, to a field hospital several miles to the rear. From the field hospital, by hospital train, to a base hospital in France. From the base hospital, sometimes, eventually, by ship back to the United States. The journey could take weeks. Infection was the most common cause of death. The medical advances of the war — primitive triage, the beginning of blood transfusion, early antiseptic surgery — saved many lives that earlier wars would have lost. They also failed to save many that we would save today.

A soldier who lost a limb was given a basic prosthetic and sent home. A soldier with shell shock was usually returned to his unit after a few days of rest, because the medical officers did not believe in it as a real condition. A soldier with a face wound — and there were thousands of these, because the helmets did not cover the face and most wounds came from above — might be given the new techniques of facial reconstruction at specialized hospitals in Britain. Many of these men spent the rest of their lives with masks over their faces, unable to look at themselves in mirrors.

The Influenza

And then, in the autumn of 1918, the influenza arrived. The pandemic killed more American soldiers than the war did. In some camps, the death rate from influenza in October 1918 was higher than the death rate from combat. The barracks became hospitals. The dead were stacked in rows because the burial parties could not keep up. Your great-grandfather was as likely to die of flu in a stateside camp as he was to die of artillery in France. The pandemic killed his friends and his bunkmates and sometimes his commanding officers. By the time the armistice came on November 11, 1918, the flu had carried off more than 45,000 American servicemen.

The Long Way Home

The armistice did not bring him home. American troops stayed in France through the winter and into 1919, occupying the Rhineland or simply waiting for transport ships. He continued to drill, to wait, to write letters. Some men, having survived the war, died in vehicle accidents or training accidents or from lingering wounds. The journey home was another two-week crossing. By the time he stepped off the ship in Hoboken or Newport News, more than a year had usually passed since he had seen his family.

Nobody met most of the men at the dock. They were sent to demobilization camps, given a brief medical exam, paid sixty dollars and a train ticket, and sent home. He arrived at the small-town railway station in his wool uniform with a duffel bag and the ribbons on his chest. Sometimes a brother or a father waited for him. Sometimes nobody did. Most of these men did not talk about the war for the rest of their lives. Their wives learned not to ask. Their children grew up knowing only that something had happened in France, that their father had medals in a drawer, that there were certain noises he could not stand.

Why It Matters Now

Your great-grandfather's war shaped everything that followed in your family. The man who came back from France was not the man who left. The way he raised his children, the way he treated his wife, the trades he chose, the silences in the family — all of it carried the weight of what he had seen and done. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren who never met him still live inside the long shadow of his year in the trenches. Understanding that year is understanding a piece of yourself.

The records exist. WWI draft registration cards, which nearly every American man between eighteen and forty-five filled out, are preserved and searchable. Service records, unit histories, casualty rolls, pension files, veterans' bureau files — millions of pages of them sit in the National Archives, waiting. So do the diaries and the photographs and the local newspaper articles announcing his enlistment, his promotion, his return. The man behind the silence is recoverable.

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Discover His War

Origentum's Military Chapter takes the records that exist for your veteran ancestor — draft cards, service records, pension files, unit histories — and weaves them together with the historical context of what his particular war was actually like, day by day. The result is not a service record. It is the story of his war, told in the detail that records alone cannot give you.

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