90 years later, honoring the dead

Amidst a hail of artillery shells exploding in clouds of poison gas in a tiny French village 90 years ago, American troops got their first real taste of the horrors of World War I’s trench warfare.

“A hellish rain of steel” fell on the 26^th “Yankee” Division of raw soldiers from New England holding the line at Seicheprey, according to German newspapers at the time.

The bodies of the dead, including eight men from Bristol, were so thick that they barricaded the way for the advancing enemy “who had to drive the Americans from houses, gardens and cellars,” a Berlin newspaper reported.

“But even then Americans continued to fight so tenaciously that they were nearly all killed,” the paper said.

“Brave troops were annihilated almost to the last,” the Cologne Gazette reported.

One of the units that took the brunt of the April 20, 1918 fighting was Bristol’s Company D of the 102^nd Infantry, a National Guard outfit that hadn’t been on the lines in France long before elite German units targeted the 1.5-mile long, American-held sector of the front at Seichepry.

Aiming to teach the Americans a lesson, and perhaps send them scurrying back across the ocean, the Germans advanced through the shattered landscape, but counterattacks quickly pushed them back.

It was, in the big picture, just another meaningless bloodbath in one of history’s most gruesome wars – “the war to end all wars,” as President Woodrow Wilson once proclaimed.

Though accounts vary, it appears that at least 81 Americans were killed in the two-day battle, 401 were wounded and 187 went missing or were captured. The Germans lost even more.

It proved the most deadly battle for Bristol troops in the city’s history, claiming eight men who hailed from this small manufacturing town, then home to about 20,000 people, a terrible toll by any measure.

Today, Seicheprey is “a tiny rural village, a farming community, very pretty and very quiet on a Sunday morning,” according to Farmington resident Jill Knight Weinberger, who visited the town recently while touring the battlefields where her grandfather fought.

Set among the rolling hills of northern France, about 20 miles from the birthplace of Joan of Arc, there’s not much to indicate why men poured death onto one another to possess it.

But its name still conjures up the ghosts of heroes.

The American Legion post on Hooker Court is known formally as the Seicheprey Post #2 to honor those who fell in defense of their country at that awful battle.

There is a marker in the village, Weinberger said in a recent note to city veterans, that the state of Connecticut sent in 1923 to commemorate the fighting “in the firm belief that the friendship of Frenchmen and Americans sealed in this place in battle shall serve the cause of peace among all nations.”

Though peace remains all too elusive, the hope for a better world that sent Theon Davis, J. Driscoll, Eric G. Hedquist, Damase J. LaFlame, William Lagasse, Elmer G. Linden, Joseph V. Pratt and William J. Schaeffer to die at Seicheprey also remains.

Perhaps someday, through the tangled web of memory and shifting tides of history, their sacrifices will, finally, help to bring the peace they died to achieve.

In the meantime, an hour-long ceremony is planned for 11 a.m., Saturday, April 19 at the World War I monument on Memorial Boulevard to mark the anniversary of the battle. In case of rain, the ceremony will be held at the Legion post at 22 Hooker Court.

The Bristol men who died at Seichepry were:

Theon Davis
Timothy J. Driscoll
Eric G. Hedquist
Damase J. LaFlame
William Lagasse
Elmer G. Linden
Joseph V. Pratt
William J. Schaefer

This is a drawing of the trenches at Seicheprey in 1918 by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge, a soldier who published the pictures he drew after the war.

PS: If you click on the pictures, you can see larger versions of them.

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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com