A General Description of Life in the Bourmont Training Area

In Jan 1918 the Sixth Regiment, the 6th Machine Gun Battalion, and the remainder of the Fifth Regiment, employed until then on construction and police missions elsewhere in France and England, joined the Second Division in the Vosges, occupying the towns of Blevaincourt, Robecourt, Germainvillers, Championeulles, and Chaumont la Ville.

The billet villages of this new area were typically French. Almost every house had its steaming stack of manure piled high to the right or left of the front door. Surface drainage from these stacks moved thickly in shallow ditches, on both sides of the unpaved streets, to a creek running through the center of each village. Human excrement was disposed of in a soakage pits of the privy type except when homes bordered the town creek. Then the privy houses straddled the creek, and sported the "a.m.c." factor: running water. This was soapy water that flowed underneath and came from the public roadside laundry farther upstream. These factors gave the odor of home to the sheepherder but provided many basic hygienic and sanitary problems for the brigade medical department to solve in making the respective towns habitable for troops.

Native social activity centered around the potable water source where, not only human drinking water was obtained, but all animal life was watered from a trough built to catch the overflow from the human tank. This animal trough in turn emptied into the washing tank where the village laundry was pounded out by women of various ages.

Drinking water was obtained from small creeks. In its conservation for human and animal purposes, frequently odd engineering skill was seen in spreading the supply through a series of tanks and spillways, all concentrated in a surprisingly small space. To protect the washer-woman from the sun and weather, the washing pools of these water systems are sometimes covered with a crude circular and domed construction.

Billets for troops, usually in haylofts, were totally inadequate. To take care of this need, "Adrian" barracks were constructed in sufficient number to accommodate the men comfortably. Ice, snow, sleep, and thaw prevailed during most of the stay in this area. While here, everybody in the brigade "turned-to" in the serious business of training and shaking-down preparatory to entering the lines. ... Gas mask drills were carried out with the French mask and the British respirator. The drills involved exposure to chlorine in chambers and marching, running, carrying, and transmitting verbal orders with the masks in place...

Al Appenheimer's gas mask.
For enlargement, see
6th MGB Equipment.

"We know you don't want us here, and we don't want to be here either, but there's nothing any of us can do to change it, so we might as well make the best of it."

This, in so many words, is what Al Appenheimer says to the family in Germainvilliers with whom he and his fellow Marines are billeted.

The family evidently sees the sense in this, and trusts Al in particular, for the following arrangement is worked out: because they have a pretty young daughter, Al offers himself to them as a kind of "protector" against the unwelcome & often tactless advances of other, younger Marines. The family agrees to this both because Al, at 26, is older, and because he is married..

In turn, the peasant family invites Al into their home to take his meals with them, an arrangement which must benefit them as much as it does Al. During this winter of 1917-18, the French civilian population is experiencing severe food shortages, so much so that an order will be issued by Second Division headquarters in early February declaring that most foodstuffs can be sold by the French only to other French; and that the Americans, for the most part, will have to feed their troops with American food, shipped from overseas.

Yet strapped as the peasant is, he nonetheless has access to certain fresh foods unavailable to the Americans: such as chicken, eggs, milk & rabbit. The Yanks, on the other hand, can sometimes lay hands on flour, sugar and a whole list of staples which for the peasant are constantly in short supply. Al, whose regular job it is to deliver such supplies from the railhead in Damblain to the mess kitchens in Germainvilliers, is ideally situated to do a little selective pilfering and to add the occasional welcome offering to the larder of his hosts.

It is also quite possible that Al may contribute some fresh meat of his own to the family table, taken from the surrounding woods. Hunting is strictly against orders, but no more so than pilfering, or entering civilian houses, and Al, a lifelong hunter, is never one to let an opportunity pass.