“The whole mad experience”

Baker entered the service of his country well-prepared. While at Cornell University, he drilled with the college unit that taught undergraduates the basics of military service.

After earning his degree in 1915, he followed his father, John T. Baker, into the family business — the elder Baker was one of the founders of J.T. Baker Chemical Co., a chemical manufacturing plant in Phillipsburg.

Snippets from newspaper stories and college publications describe Elbert Baker as a man of “cheery words” and “friendly smile.” He was a chemist, often working amiably alongside bluecollar employees at the family’s namesake plant, until he left for Army officers’ candidate training.

The letters to his mother, Isabelle, began in mid-April 1918 after an uneventful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean — not even a “glimpse of a glimpse of a submarine,” he wrote.

For the next few months, the censors and military rules that forbade him from telling his family where he was led to a series of letters about “ville #1” to “ville #9” as the regiment made its way across France to the front lines, what Baker called a “stupid existence” that left him with little interesting to tell the family.

As soldiers of every generation do, he groused about lack of sleep and bad food. A bright spot was a featherbed — “tho none too clean” — to sleep on.

The first excitement is a trip to Paris, where he visited the Louvre, the Tuileries Gardens, the Champs-Elysees and other landmarks along the Seine River.

“I never dreamed a city could be so artistically set out,” he wrote to his mother in early July 1918.

Throughout the letters, Baker sometimes wavers about the mission to defeat the Germans, occasionally with wistful homesickness, as in this letter he wrote about a short respite from the front for the regiment.

“The place we’re in is a village about like Raubsville with a beautiful little river flowing beside it, together with a canal,” he wrote Sept. 18.

And since the scrapbook contains none of his mother’s letters, it is difficult to know what she wrote to him. Sometimes in his responses, it’s revealed she took a trip to Sea Girt, N.J., or had work done to the family home on College Hill.

One of the best indications of her devotion to her son is the sheer volume of letters — she wrote more than 40 to her son, and he always let her know he received them.

And, of course, the hefty scrapbook itself — filled with letters from her son and others, news clippings and government correspondence — show she wanted to record every step of her son’s service.

In his letters, he never describes combat to his mother. The closest he comes is a letter from July 22, 1918, describing a scarred stretch of front with only “giant stumps” of trees remaining: “I don’t think you can find six square feet to level ground and everything is littered with every conceivable kind of rubbish including even human bodies…”

A note of despair surfaces in a letter dated Aug. 13, 1918: “The whole mad experience is the boredom.”

But the boredom ended Sept. 22, 1918. He wrote his mother that the regiment was on orders to be ready to march to the front on 15 minutes’ notice.

With a soldier’s cynicism for how the Army works, he added a postscript the next evening: “It’s 9:30 now, so I may take a chance at getting to sleep, although that’s the surest way to get marching orders.”

Perhaps feeling hurried, he signs off with a quick “Elb” instead of his usual salutation. It is his last letter in the scrapbook.