There were parades in that glorious spring of 1919. In New York and Washington, D.C., in small towns and state capitals, ranks of soldiers, formed in companies and led by the army band, marched down Main Streets across the United States. In Topeka, the officers and men of the 137th Infantry “All-Kansas” Regiment stepped with heads high, through cheering crowds, flags waving.

But Private Potts was not among his comrades of Company M. After disembarking the Manchuria at Hoboken, April 23, the Thirty-Fifth Division entrained to Camp Upton, New York. In the last week of April, all replacement soldiers, of which B. F. Potts was one, were detached from the division.

While transcribing B. F. Potts’s discharge paper, I was curious about the dollar amount noted in pencil on the back: “89.05.” Potts got remaining pay and a $60 bonus, plus train fare for home. The army paid five cents a mile.

A private earned $30 per month. Prorated for the first twelve days of the month (discharged May 12), his pay was $12. Less that and the bonus leaves $17.05 in travel pay—or 341 miles.

But driving distance from Chattanooga (near Fort Oglethorpe) to Erin is only 200 miles. Either he didn’t get paid from the 1st of the month, or the rail distance to home was much farther.

I found a Louisville & Nashville Railroad map in the 1920 edition of Poor’s Manual of Railroads. The map also shows the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway, which by then was a L&N dependency.

While you might not get a passenger train today, you could take the highway from Chattanooga through Stevenson, AL, and Nashville, TN, to McKenzie (on the NC&St.L) and from McKenzie to Erin (on the L&N). The trip would take almost seven hours to drive the 337 miles.

Which is close enough for curiosity’s sake.

“Map of the Louisville & Nashville R. R. and Dependencies”
Henry V. Poor, Poor’s Manual of Railroads: Fifty-Third Annual Number, New York: Poor’s, 1920, facing 82.

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A Very Muddy Place
WAR STORIES

An intimate account of a soldier’s experience in World War I, A Very Muddy Place takes us on a journey from a young man’s rural American hometown onto one of the great battlefields of France. We follow Private B. F. Potts with the 137th US Infantry Regiment through the first days of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. We discover a personal story—touching, emotional, unforgettable.

In 1918, twenty-three-year-old Bennie Potts was drafted into the US Army to fight in the World War. He served with the American Expeditionary Force in France. At home after the war, he married and raised a family, and the war for his children and grandchildren became the anecdotes he told them.

A century later, a great grandson brings together his ancestor’s war stories and the historical record to follow Private Benjamin Franklin Potts from Tennessee to the Great War in France and back home again.

Available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

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