100 years ago in The Record

Thursday, Dec. 13, 1917

A Troy physician serving in a British ambulance corps recounts some of his battlefield experiences in a letter to his four-year old son.

Dr. Harold Paine Sawyer’s letter home appears in today’s Record. Sawyer is recovering from a German poison-gas attack and was wounded in the thigh by a shell fragment earlier this year. He serves in the 22nd Field Ambulance Corps of the British Expeditionary Force.

“Father has just come out of the line, as we say when we have been up where the real fighting is,” Sawyer writes to George Franklin Sawyer 2nd. He “was hidden in a deep hole in the ground more than twenty feet below the surface and a quarter of a mile long.

“You see, they dig a long tunnel into the earth way down deep, and make other little tunnels, branching off this long one…. As you can see, our long tunnel was like a letter S, and father was eating and sleeping in one of the short tunnels leading out from it.

“He was helping the poor sick soldiers up above ground in what they call elephant dugouts. They are made of thick iron, with concrete and sandbags, so that the shells won’t come in and hurt us.

“Father was up there for three weeks and had a pretty hard time of it, for the naughty Germans kept shooting all over and around the place, and for two days we couldn’t get anything to eat at all, except water…. By and by our poor tired soldiers were taken back to a safe place and father went with them; glad to go.”

A particularly naughty German was one J. Woolf. Sawyer is shipping Woolf’s helmet to Troy along with a box of war souvenirs. In his letter, he explains how he got the helmet.

“Well named he was,” Sawyer writes of Woolf, “This man was badly wounded, and after one of our stretcher bearers had put a field dressing on him he shot our poor man in the back and killed him. Wasn’t that a horrible thing to do?

“Well, our men recognized him later on, and somewhere between our aid post and the main dressing station this rotten boche disappeared, and there has been no attempt to find out what has become of him.”

Sawyer follows that heartwarming tale with an inventory of war trophies heading young George’s way. These include a rocket pistol, the nose cap from a German shell, uniform buttons and cartridge clips.

“They are very interesting relics, but you must give them to mother to keep or you might lose them,” Sawyer writes.