“I lay down besides my mules on a sack of straw and went asleep and my darned jackasses turned around in the road and broke my [wagon] tongue out…I think the leaders must of scared at me snoring…”
In his thirtieth letter home from Camp Lee, Virginia, to his sister Minnie Riggle, US Army Wagoner (mule team driver) Lester Scott, a World War I soldier from Wheeling, West Virginia, writes that he was glad to get the money. His mules were so startled by his snoring they broke his rig while he and Charles Lewis were hunting cedar trees. He fell asleep on his post, an offense he could be court-martialed for, but he’s confident no one will tell. They were two miles behind the rifle range when bullets splashed water on the men and one nearly hit Charles. He hopes Charles Miliken gets drafts because he “has a yellow streak up his back.” But not Charles Gettings.
Elsewhere on the same day there was heavy fighting both north and south of the Somme, a British Calvary advance in the Middle East with Ottoman Turks defeated and prisoners taken, and at Doullens, France, the British and French agreed to appoint Ferdinand Foch as an Allied Supreme Commander on the Western Front.
Lester Scott was drafted in 1917 and trained at Camp Lee, where so many Wheeling soldiers were trained. And, like so many of his Ohio Valley comrades, he served in the 314th Field Artillery Supply Company, Battery “A,” 80th (Blue Ridge) Division in France. This is his thirtieth letter from Camp Lee, dated 100 years ago today, March 26, 1918.