My grandfather with (at left) William Bainbridge Frothingham (1898-1967) during the summer of 1918.
My paternal grandfather kept scrapbooks all his adult life, beginning with volumes chronicling his time at school in Arizona a century ago. He started at Harvard in 1917, and during the summer of 1918 – traveling with some college friends – he drove ambulances in Italy. His album of that summer indicates that these Harvard boys had time to go to the beach and in other ways amuse themselves, but he was – and they were – also on the front lines, and almost as soon as they arrived.
A newspaper clipping, probably from his hometown newspaper in Goshen, New York, quotes from a letter he sent home to his mother:[1]
Thursday, 27 June 1918: The first day six of us stayed at our post until the Austrians were only 200 yards away. Shells were bursting all around and you could hear rifle and machine gun bullets whistling through the trees. A couple of fellows were shot on the road right next to our house. Let me say I was good and scared. We would never have stayed that long had we known how near the enemy was. We could not tell till the Bersagliere [sic][2] fixed their bayonets and charged right from the house. Then we cleared out fast… Several [shells] burst close to us and I had one land right in front of me, and had to go through the smoke of it…
Major Lowell,[3] who runs the R[ed] C[ross] in Italy, was here the other day, and said we had been cited, and were going to be decorated, but I think that is a little bit too good to be true. I know we don’t deserve it anyway, as we only did what we were supposed to do.[4]
With Ivy
An Italian lieutenant took me out on the battlefield the other day, before the dead had been cleared off or anything moved. It certainly was an awful sight. I think the Italians did wonderfully. They not only stopped the Austrians, but advanced themselves in some places…
We certainly walked right into a hot job here. All the old fellows who drove in France say this beats anything they ever had there.
At center, with friends at the beach.
We have seen hundreds of prisoners walking past. The Italians seem to treat them very well, especially the wounded ones. The Austrians are mostly either very young or very old, all pretty thin, and most of them seem happy to be captured; one boy said he was only fifteen.
I have received quite a few letters from you all. They certainly are wonderful to get. Last night I got six letters all at once, have not been so happy in days.
At the end of the summer, my grandfather returned to Cambridge; he graduated from Harvard in 1921. He remained close to many of the friends he made in Arizona, in Italy, and in Boston, and I think he viewed his short war service as simply something “we were supposed to do.”
Notes
[1] Gilbert Livingston Steward (1898–1991) to Margaret Atherton (Beeckman) Steward (1861–1951).
[2] The Italian term for marksmen; the plural is bersaglieri.
[3] The architect Guy Lowell (1870–1927).
[4] According to The Red Cross Bulletin of 12 August 1918, 14, G. Steward of Section 2 was indeed awarded the Italian War Cross of Merit “for splendid work during the recent fighting on the Piave.”
