“I can’t tell you about Less. He got badly hurt and they took him to the hospital. I heard once he died, but I don’t know if that was correct or not. I hope it wasn’t correct for I would like to went back to the states with him…”
In his eighteenth letter home since leaving for Camp Lee, and his third letter home from France, dated November 25, 1918, PFC Charles “Dutch” Riggle, a WWI soldier from Wheeling, WV, tells his brother James “Abe” Riggle he’s sorry he hasn’t written. He didn’t have much time to write while he was on the front, but now that the war is over, he has all kinds of time. He can’t wait to see the “good old states” again. Dutch had some narrow escapes on the front but came out without a scratch. A good many men from the 314th got hurt, but only four were killed. He has no news about Les. He was badly hurt and taken to the hospital. Dutch heard Les might have died. He hopes that isn’t true. He would like to go back to the states together. Les drove the rolling kitchen for Battery A. Dutch would like to be home for Thanksgiving and hunt rabbit. He and Tib Meriner had been hunting hogs. He’d like to get some good apples for winter. He doesn’t think there will be another war any time soon. They drove the “Dutch” 48 miles in 50 days.
Charles Riggle sent this letter a full two weeks after the armistice ending the Great War was signed in Paris. Elsewhere on that same day, Major General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck of Germany, known affectionately as “The Lion of Africa,” finally surrendered his forces in German East Africa. He had employed a guerrilla, bush-fighting style with his African Askari troops (he spoke fluent Swahili) to harass and confuse British forces, allowing him to exit from the war as the only undefeated military commander on either side. He later led a conservative opposition to Hitler and would have died in poverty but for a small pension organized by his former British and South African enemies.
Charles “Dutch” Riggle was drafted into the US Army in 1917 and trained at Camp Lee, Virginia, where so many Wheeling draftees and volunteers—including his sister-in-law Minnie Riggle’s brother, Lester Scott—were trained. Dutch Riggle was a Private First Class in Battery F of the 314th Field Artillery Supply Company, in France. Riggle was a farm boy with little formal education who grew up in the hills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He spelled many of his words phonetically. His letters have been transcribed exactly as they were written. This is his eighteenth letter home, dated 100 years ago today, November 25, 1918.
