36. First Winchester Soldier Home From World War 1

Blog Post #36.
Posted on August 29, 2018.

First Winchester Soldier Home From World War 1 

Winchester Journal
January 22, 1919.

Photo location: Winchester, IN.
Photo is owned by RCHS, Inc and is part of the Chase Cook slide collection.
The Reyman building is currently the business known as Haines Hallmark store in 2018.

  Ed Armstrong, husband of the former Miss Maude Ryan, is the first Winchester man who was in France, to return home. He was wounded twice and gassed twice while in action. He was taken to a hospital there where he was treated until strong enough for the trip home.
  He enlisted at Muncie, October 1, 1917 and was sent to Fort Thomas Kentucky, where he remained for three weeks when he was transferred to Washington Barracks, Washington, D.C. He went overseas with the Sixth Engineers in December, 1917. His company was attached to the British army and they were engaged in the building and repairing of roads until March when the Somme offensive began.
  On March 28, 1918 he suffered three broken ribs from shrapnel and was gassed while laying wounded on the field in the same fight. His cartridge belt was struck by a piece of shrapnel which possibly saved his life. He has the fragment of the shell which struck him, the piece weighing about six ounces. After recuperating from his wounds and the effect of the gas, he entered active service again on the Somme front. Within two weeks his engineering corps was sent to Chateau-Thierry and attached to the 3rd Division of the American Expeditionary Force or the AEF.
  Here on July 15, 1918, the Boche started their great drive to Paris with seven days' rations on their backs. It was in this drive that Armstrong received the wound that put him out of business for the balance of the war, when near Cantigny he received a machine gun bullet, wounding the left wrist which cut the muscles and rendered his left hand useless for some months, but by skillful surgery he has regained partial use of the thumb and first two fingers. At the time he was wounded he was also gassed again by both chlorine and mustard gas. When wounded he used his first aid kit and then walked nine miles to a field evacuation hospital.
  He sailed for home from Brest, France on the steamer La France and arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, December 24, having been in France just one year.
  He ranks as a First Class Private and wears a silver star on his left sleeve showing that he is an enlisted man, he also wears two gold triangular bars on his left sleeve showing that he was twice wounded and two gold bars on his right sleeve showing one year's service abroad. He has three citations due him, two from the French and one from the British, from the French for bravery on the Chateau-Thierry front for driving the Huns back and aiding the wounded and one from the British for holding the Huns and building bridges in the face of machine fire on the Somme front.
  He will return to Camp Sherman where he will undergo further treatment for his  wounds before receiving his discharge.