Talk of your cold! Through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.

The winter of 1917-18 was one of the coldest in the 20th century. There are references to the cold winds and heavy snows that blanketed the trenches in various WWI memoirs. Encamped in the old stone farmhouse on the Sandricourt estate, Grant Willard and the rest of the ambulance men endured the cold but at least would not have to worry about gun or shell fire until the spring.

Sunday, January 13, 1918:

Three weeks ago when I started to write in this book while in bed I was prevented by the cold. There was a good fire going in a stove at the foot of my bed, but it is impossible to heat the air at a greater radius than 3 ft. and then it passes out a hole in the roof.

They say that “history repeats itself.” A good deal of history has been repeated right here in this place and most of it seems like ancient history to us. There seems to be no more purpose and forethought to this camp than before. We are still doing the same odd jobs, talking about the same things and cursing our fate -- what fools we humans are!

Christmas was a dull day here. There was supposed to be no details, but the worst of them had to go on of course. There was the sanitary detail, guard and kitchen detail. I was assigned to K.P. to help give the boys as merry a Christmas as possible. There was nothing during the day which would mark it in any way from any other day and as I look back on it now it hardly seems possible that Christmas has come and gone. In the evening there was a stupid entertainment in the YMCA and afterward presents were passed out to every man in camp. There were the various individual gifts to the YMCA from the States to the men each with the name and address of the donor enclosed. Mine was from a Miss Clara N. Bartlett, 57 Baldwin St., Charlestown, Mass. Then the Red Cross gave little bags or comfort kits to all army men. These contained handkerchiefs, tooth brushes, tooth paste, smoking tobacco, candy, gum etc. and were very practical indeed and the boys were very grateful for them. The YMCA gifts were nice, but contained such a silly lot of trash such as toys, puzzles and rank chewing tobacco.

The Saint-Nazaire trip was miserable. Saint-Nazaire being on the coast gets the benefit (?) of the ocean breezes only instead of there being breezes during our stay there they had become heavy winds combined with rain, sleet and snow. We were there but one day during which time we all got thoroughly chilled a

nd soaked. We slept in barracks with no stoves. I was never so cold in my life, but was somewhat cheered up when I found that I drew a staff car to drive instead of one of the trucks. There were about eight staff cars, eight trucks had no shelter except one isinglass curtain while the other cars could be entirely closed in.

On Tuesday, December 17, we left Saint-Nazaire headed for Sandricourt, but instead of driving a nice staff car I was shivering in a light truck. Little Keever wasn’t feeling well so we traded cars. Thanks to my fur coat I came through without freezing anything. We spent our first night at Angers and the second night at Chartres. The cathedral at Chartres is supposed to be very wonderful, but we pulled in in the dark and left before we were entirely awake the next morning so we didn’t even see the cathedral. Sandricourt never looked so good before. All the cars came through whole with one exception and that was when Harris skidded into a tree and bent his rear-X (not his’n but the car’s, I mean).

On Wednesday, the day after Christmas, we took 24 ambulances up to Bar-le-Duc--that is we started to take them. Because there had been so much trouble on previous convoys with meals and sleeping quarters Major Chaudron was sent along with us. The ambulances were newly equipped American Field Service Fords. Its the neatest equipment I have seen on any ambulances in France. The bodies are wood instead of papier-mâché; The tool equipment is most complete; the driving seat is much more comfortable than those of the American Army issue. [The trip] will pass down as one of the worst trips Section 647 ever took. The weather couldn’t have been worse. The roads were slippery and the snow flew with a swift, cold wind right into our faces making it impossible to drive into at times. We made la Ferté-Gaucher for the first night. It was a shame that the weather was so poor because we passed through territory which really marked the battle of the Marne in ’14. We skirted Coulommiers which marks pretty closely the center of General Foch’s attack upon the advancing Boche and resulted in his outflanking them and forcing the whole German right wing to beat a hasty retreat from, you might say, the gates of Paris. The French corporal led the convoy and made most of his stops in villages thus giving us a chance to run into cafés for coffee. In these places we heard many interesting stories of the retreat at first hand.

Thursday broke cold, but clear not snowing until the afternoon. ’Twas a very interesting day. The roads were sheer ice and many was the car that turned around on the road while trying to stop. Just out of Sézanne, Pop Carry skidded into a curb and broke a rear wheel. A little further on Fraser skidded off the road and turned over. Fortunately he escaped without a scratch. The Boche retreat in this sector was so rapid and their stay so short that everything was left without much devastation. The graves in this district line the roads, the more elaborate French crosses contrasted with the plain Boche crosses. We spent the night comfortably in a school house at St. Dizier where I stood guard from 2:30 to 4:30 A.M. “Talk of your cold! Through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.” [This is a line from "The Cremation Of Sam McGee" by Robert Service.] From St. Dizier it was but a short run into Bar-le-Duc. Poor old Bar-le-Duc is a different place today than it was last September. Boche planes have

completely demolished certain sections of the city. Inhabitants are scarcer than ever before. They told us that the place hadn’t been bombed for three months and already the people were beginning to move back to the city. They are deathly afraid of bombs in Bar and one certainly can’t blame them.

We took the 5:50 train for Paris arriving there shortly after 10 P.M. Went right to bed very tired and I personally suffering from indigestion. We were given the day in Paris. Johnny and I called on Miss Mullen in her new quarters--Hotel Brighton. Returned to Sandricourt on the 7:10 very tired and glad to be back in our more or less comfortable barracks.