The William Shepp Diaries: Combat and Danger in World War I

"Disappointments," wrote Private William Shepp, "are common in the army." At the time, Shepp, an aspiring teacher from a small community in West Virginia, was pondering the seemingly unrewarding and unending work that he and the men of his engineering company were doing in support of the American Army then arriving by the thousands near Paris. He had himself arrived in France in the first week of April 1918 just as the German spring offensive, commonly known as the Ludendorff Offensive after its chief architect, had begun to threaten Paris. Shepp, however, seems to have been only vaguely aware of what was happening. Most of his news of the war came from old copies of the New York Herald or Stars and Stripes that he found along the way. To him, the date of his arrival meant nothing except for the coincidence of it landing on the first anniversary of America’s declaration of war.

Although he was generally in the dark about the great events around him, Shepp was no doubt fully aware of how much he, and the world, had changed in that year. Only eighteen years old, he looked back on the first anniversary of his own graduation from high school with a sense of awe. "A year ago today I was a schoolboy taking or ready to take the examinations. At commencement today I am a soldier in France almost three months and ready to go to the front when the call comes. What a change!" The Army took care of the next stage of his education, substituting for the college he might otherwise have attended. The Army fed him, clothed him, taught him a variety of skills from shooting to swimming, and gave him his first inoculations. As military service had done to generations of males before him, it had ended William Shepp’s boyhood and begun his manhood.

Like the soldiers of time immemorial, Shepp understood himself to be a small cog in a giant machine moving where and when its leaders directed it to do so. Shepp was a thoughtful and intelligent young man who took time out of a grueling schedule of marches and military duties to read the Bible, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. He paid out of his own pocket to take French lessons from local teachers. He was also aware of the immensity of the world around him, as when he reflected on the beauty of the eleventh-century cathedral he had recently visited. "If these walls could talk," he recorded, "what a history they would disclose!"

Shepp’s diary reveals his homesickness, his desire to make a good show for himself and his unit, as well as the essential boredom of much of military service. He spent endless hours at YMCA canteens, seeking food, companionship, and a chance to help his fellow soldiers through their own hardships. Shepp spent six months in relatively dull office duty, proving the old adage that 95% of military service consists of waiting for the other 5% to happen. When at long last he left office duty to rejoin his unit as a regular infantryman, he hoped that the transition might augur the action for which he had long waited. "Soon we’ll be in real work," he noted with a good deal more hope than fear.

Shepp recorded the friendliness of French civilians and noted the exquisite beauty of the French countryside. He observed, however, "the absence of able-bodied men" in the towns as well as the sadness and even desperation among the women of France, so many of whom had recently become widowed or lost their sons. By the start of June, he seems to have realized both that the German attack toward Paris represented a real threat to the French capital and that the United States Army might mean the ultimate margin of difference between success and failure.

This realization only made him work harder. Thereafter, his diary took on a new tone, as the young recruit learning the basics of military service had become a dedicated soldier ready to lay down his life if necessary for the cause he had joined. Signs of impending battle increased, from the issuance of gas masks to the sight of more and more airplanes in the sky. He and his comrades learned to throw grenades, presumably in the lobbing motion that the French had perfected instead of the baseball-type throw that the Americans usually used until they learned that baseball throws tended to skip over the enemy trench and explode harmlessly behind the line while the lobs tended to land more often inside the enemy trench.

By the end of June, Shepp’s company had been attached to the Fifth Division and had begun a series of exhausting night marches to put them in position near the relatively inactive Vosges mountain sector. Shepp could not have known it, but the movement had two goals: to free up veteran French units to go to more active zones and to give the Americans a chance to learn about the war from those French soldiers who remained in the sector. Like the other members of the Fifth Division, Shepp began to learn about the real war in the Vosges. He saw the destruction of nature wrought by artillery as well as the first graves of fallen American soldiers. He also learned to sleep through the noise of artillery barrages.

In July and early August, the newspapers he found continued to suggest that the war was going well for the Allies, a reflection of the Allied victory at what would soon be known as the Second Battle of the Marne and especially at the critical turning point of Château-Thierry on the Marne River itself. Still, Shepp knew how much more combat and danger lay ahead. On August 4, a relatively calm day, he wrote, "This morning on the front ‘there is nothing to report.’ But I wonder how many graves have been dug in the hill near by."

Shepp watched with pride as the men of his unit became an effective fighting force, going days without rest or food but fighting well all the same. They took casualties and buried a few of their own, but Shepp could see how they were becoming part of the system that would deliver victory against the Germans who had invaded and destroyed large parts of France. On September 6, he wrote, "the great advance still continues and will until they [the Allies] stop of their own accord. The German machine needs oiling and repairs and they are not available so we’ll just continue to wear it out and tear it to pieces." In this one perceptive sentence, Shepp had revealed the essence of the Allied strategy of attrition.

The Fifth Division got its chance to join in this attrition in mid-September at the Battle of St. Mihiel. He saw enough danger to note sardonically that "the only rest camp in France is a cemetery," but he nevertheless noted as well that "No one can tell how proud I am to have been in the first drive of Pershing’s First Army." When the armistice came two months later, Pershing’s Army had more than done its share, but the homesick men of the Fifth did not get to go home to what Shepp called "God’s country - America." They went instead to dull, uninteresting occupation duty in Germany. Indeed, disappointments were common in the Army.

Michael S. Neiberg is the inaugural Chair of War Studies at the US Army War College. His many publications on the two world wars include Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011), named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books ever written on World War I; The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 (Basic Books, 2012); and Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe (Basic Books, 2015).