By The International Herald Tribune
(SPECIAL TELEGRAM TO THE HERALD.) From BURR PRICE. WITH THE AMERICAN ARMIES — Two Italians dropped into a shellhole in which several Americans were sleeping at daybreak yesterday and cried to the startled occupants in perfectly good Chicago steelworkers’ English: “Don’t shoot! We’ve just escaped from the German lines!”
They were captured near Rheims on July 15 and recaptured early in September after an attempt to escape, for which they were confined for 15 days on bread and water. Recently, after four nights’ labor, they tunneled through the wall of the building in which they slept and got into the Argonne Forest. Then began five days of terrific hardship. Raw potatoes that they dug furnished the only food, and these gave out after two days. So for three days they pushed slowly forward without a meal, and much of the time in the face of shellfire. After pushing by the Hun outposts they found themselves confronted by American machine guns, but finally they crawled into the shellhole.
“The Americans laughed at us,” said one of the Italians today, “but they gave us food, which was what we wanted.” One of the Italians had worked in steel plants in Covington, Ky., and Jamesville, Ala., and the other for 10 years had been railroading in the Far West. They had been in the Italian Army 28 months before their division moved to the French front. After being captured, they were used for lumber work in Germany, treated roughly and given very bad food.
— The New York Herald, European Edition, October 24, 1918 —
Source : Nytimes
