m a r k e r i c k s o n p a i n t i n g s Frank Severin Erickson Ernest Julius Erickson Andrew Anders Sebran Erickson American Expeditionary Force 1918 - 1919 Out West & North Dakota
|
Lost Battalion - Survivors from Minnesota and the Northwest
By Carl J. Peterson
As a runner, Frank braved many a day of machine gun and sniper fire, artillery shelling and mustard gassings. A telling quote stated by a fellow soldier, Pvt. Lee "Buck" McCollum from aboard the ship that was taking him home in 1919 to New York. It offers his feelings and maybe the thoughts of many of the survivors of the Lost Battalion.
"Laughingly we had first boarded these boats, youth bound for France, youth
looking for adventure, soldiers on parade. Now less than a year later we were
returning home no longer laughing, light-hearted boys in our teens and early
twenties, but men old beyond our years. Each of us was bringing home an
uninvited guest, a guest that would live with us through the rest of our days,
who would sit with us at our tables and would wake us from our earned night's
rest, to force us to walk step by step with him, over and over again, across the
battlefields of France." |
h o m e