Soldier describes close calls with death in the trenches of WWI 

By Al Edenloff
via the Park Rapids Enterprise (MN) newspaper web site

Alvin Victor EdenloffIt’s hard to visualize what American soldiers went through while fighting in faraway lands most people will never see.

It’s impossible to imagine the horrors they saw, the sounds they heard as shrapnel fell or the feelings they had when their war buddies standing next to them were shot down by enemy fire.

Many of those in the battlefield didn’t live to tell the tale. Many of those who got through it closed that part of their life up, not sharing it with friends or family – living through it once was enough.

But in the last few months, I’ve been able to relive the experiences of my grandfather, Alvin Victor Edenloff, a private in World War I. While leafing through the delicate, yellowed pages of the Osakis Review from 100 years ago, history columnist Marcia Lips came across several letters my grandpa wrote to his folks back home in Osakis while he was serving in the infantry.

His writings were filled with razor-sharp details, wry observations and honest terror. Reading them — for me, anyway — was like taking a time machine back to the foxholes of France in the Great War. It was like I was right there with him, watching him joke with his fellow soldiers, listening to him talk about how badly he longed to come home when the war ended, and seeing him have more than a few close calls with death.

Grandpa, who died in 1971 when I was 11, didn’t talk much about the war. I remember digging around in his garage one time when I came across some of his military possessions — a gas mask, a bayonet, a medal. I asked about them but he didn’t offer details. He said something like, “That was a long time ago,” before he got back to playing cards with the adults in the family while sipping on his Grain Belt beer.

I never pictured him as a young soldier, laying his life on the line for his country, with just fluke luck or providence determining whether he’d return home in one piece or in a box.

He wrote his last letter two days before the armistice to end the war was signed. His division made a charge across the Meuse River in France. They captured one town that morning and advanced on another in the afternoon. Midway between their starting point and their objective — a copse of woods — was a graveyard.

Here, in my grandpa’s words, is what happened next:

Read the entire article on the Park Rapids Enterprise web site.

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