'Bye, Bye, Pv. Leonhardt'

The message below is on the back of a June 1917 postcard written by a soldier riding on a troop train headed for a ship waiting in the port of New York City. The card was given to him by the Santa Fe Railroad as the train stopped in Topeka, Kan.—the railroad’s corporate offices. It was sent to Mrs. Alice E. Whittetsey, of Hoyt, Kan., and reads:

“My new address is Pvt. F.W. Leonhardt, 314 Eng. Corps DW 89, Co.D American Expeditionary Forces. On the train and on my way. I don’t know where.
I am the soldier you met at Topeka that cranked Your car. So bye bye for this time only. -Frank Leonhardt”

These were the plaintive words of a young soldier going off to a war halfway across the world who was trying to leave something behind anchored in the place and people where his heart remained, even as his body and soul headed into mortal peril. The second card was issued to U.S. soldiers by the armed forces and depicts American infantrymen, referred to as “doughboys,” in combat in France during World War I.
World War I was truly the first “world” war for it embroiled most of the European nations, as well as Japan and the vestige of the Ottoman Empire. In total more than 70 million persons were mobilized of which 16 million died and 21 million were wounded. The war had been underway three years before the U.S. entered in April 1917. Quickly, the U.S. mobilized more than four million men and women of whom 7.5 percent were either killed or wounded. The figures are imprecise because some were poisoned by gas and lingered for years before dying. The father of a girl in my neighborhood died from gas in 1943—a quarter century after the war ended. One in 14 U.S. soldiers became casualties.
Yanked off his Kansas farm to serve his country in a faraway land, young Leonhardt could not have imagined the horror and danger awaiting him as the train pulled out of Topeka that summer night headed for a troop ship in the port of New York. Nonetheless, as he was going to face man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, he didn’t forget his own basic goodness and stepped off the train to help a women in distress. He wrote that he didn’t know where he was going. I hope that Leonhardt made it back, but if he didn’t, I think I know where he went.