Walking in the Footsteps of the President
I am currently reading this book on my Kindle Fire. I have read quite a bit about Harry Truman but in this book, David recounts Trumans' time serving in the Army Artillery during WWI. I did not know that Harry was a battery commander. He, and his men, were engaged in the final mass artillery barrage on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Upon firing the last round he, and the men under his command, celebrated the cease fire and the end of the conflict.
And, I quote directly from this book, "For the 129th Field Artillery the war had been the Meuse-Argonne offensive and it had cost the regiment 129 battlefield casualties. Battery D (Harry Trumans) suffered only three men wounded, one of whom later died. "We were just - well part of it was luck and part of it was good leadership," said Private Vere Leigh. "Some ot the other batteries didn't have that kind of leadership."
Two weeks and two days after the Armistice, Captain Harry Truman was on leave in Paris dining at Maxim's.
and....much more.
"He saw Notre Dame and Napoleon"s Tomb. At the Arc de Triomphe, his trench coat belted tight against the November air, he posed for a snapshot beside a captured German cannon. He rode a taxi the length of the Champs-Elysees, up the Rue Royale, down the Madeleine, back up the Rue de Rivoli, over the Seine by the ornate Alexander III Bridge. He visited the Luxembourg Palace, the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre, strolled the Boulevard de l'Opera, "and a lot of side streets besides." All in twenty-four hours.
When I read that page, I smiled, I laughed and... I cried.