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FREDERICK W. KURTH* November, 1918

It is not difficult to see that it was not these trips alone that made our training period at Chavigny almost a vacation. We had the best of officers. The two French lieutenants could not have been kinder to us or more interested in what we did.

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FREDERICK W. KURTH* November, 1918

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  1. It is not difficult to see that it was not these trips alone that made our training period at Chavigny almost a vacation. We had the best of officers. The two French lieutenants could not have been kinder to us or more interested in what we did.

  2. We had the quiet, pretty little farm where we lived ---there was a piano in the farmhouse, and the gardener's daughter entertained us evenings. We had Longpont with its eleventh-century gateway and the romantic ruins of its twelfth-century abbey.

  3. I wish that I could carry with me forever a picture of Chavigny as I have described it; but the God of War decreed that that was not to be. As the months advanced he shook his huge hulk, stepped forth, planted his foot on Chavigny, and in a twinkling the tranquil little spot was changed.

  4. Gone are the stables, with nothing but an elongated pile of stones to mark their previous existence. Where the animals were kept there remains but a boggy expanse of shell-holes, smashed helmets, and litter of war.

  5. One piece of wall of the château still stands; the rest is but a mass of crumpled masonry and broken beams. The branches are hacked from the trees as though a dull axe had been wielded against them. The trunks and stumps remaining are pierced or peppered by deadly machine-gun bullets.

  6. The field is a swamp, and, on almost the exact spot where once I lay and ruminated on the new-found beauty, stands a tank, leaning giddily, its side torn open, its ripped interior exposed.

  7. There is naught here but desolation. A cold, dank mist hovers over the spot from morn till night: and the crows flying back and forth seem to deride with their strident voices the work of man.

  8. FREDERICK W. KURTH*November, 1918 *Of Roxbury, Massachusetts; Harvard, '18; T.M.U. 537; subsequently Sergeant, First Class, U.S. Motor Transport Corps.

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