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Grandson of Mr. Joseph St. John Writes Interesting Letter Home: Gassed and in Hospital The following letter was received from Ben Trooper, a grandson of Jos eph St. John of Fowler. The young man has been in the thickest of the fight for some time and in the letter he tells of some of his experiences on the battle fields.. It will be noted that he was gassed and was in a hospital recuperating when he wrote the letter which was sent to his brother in Chi cago: “Tl thought I would answer your letter of the 5th of May; this is the first chance I have had to answer you as I have been on the move and on the front for so long. I have been up on the real battle front for 16 days and, beleive me, I have seen some hard fighting, but the Germans could not whip, or make us retreat. I am now in Base Hospital 17, but am not sev erely wounded, having been gassed pretty badly by mustard gas, the most poisonous gas the Dutch use. We were in that gas bombardment for 8 hours, my eyes and lungs are afflict ed pretty badly and I have a few bad burns on my body. Our whole Com pany was gassed and some of the boys are suffering severely. Well, Wesley, are you sull a civil ian or a soldier? I hope you are a soldier by this time, but then, Wes, it is hard footing nowadays. EH isn’t like Cleve, go down to the border and lie around—when you move to France you can say “here’s where I get them or they get me”, it’s one of the two. IT had a bayonet fight with one big, old, husky German and all he said was “ugh” he never had a chance to say any more. The Germans will not fight with their bayonets, or any other way in the open, they will give up as soon as you see them, but as long as they can hide in ambush they are good fighters. They sure did make the French retrean in their last drive, but when they met the Americans they stopped. I expect you have seen by the pap ers what the Marines have been doing. We are all proud to have been in the thickest of it. My Lieut. with 24 of us went into the town of B—— and drove out a machine gun Company. The machine gun bullets were flying as thick as Illinois hailstones, but some of these bullets were shot for nothing as they got only two men out of twenty-four, and we got a great deal more than that; altogether we counted 83 Germans dead, 12 wounded and we took a bunch of prisoners. These prisoners wanted to know what we were and when we told them we were Americans they would not be lieve us. They said we were not Am ericans,but Canadians in different un iforms.”
Newspaper Details
Fowler Benton Review
Fowler, Indiana, US
Thu, Aug 08, 1918
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Macey M.
USA 16 Jul 2026
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