Wallingford men answered call to war
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Pvt. Paul Regimbald was one of 15 workers at American Fork & Hoe in Wallingford who enlisted in the Army on the same day in 1917. Photo courtesy of Pauline Munson |
Toolbox
By Bruce Edwards STAFF WRITER - Published: November 11, 2009
WALLINGFORD — He was one of 15 workers who answered the call 92 years ago.
Paul Regimbald was working at the American Fork & Hoe factory in this town on April 7, 1917 – one day after the United States entered World War I — when a co-worker announced that he was going into the Army.
"One of the men decided he wanted to go in the service so I think 14 or 15 went with him from that shop," his daughter, Pauline Munson, recalled.
The co-worker who spurred the mass enlistment was Robert Eddy.
"Eddy went to the shop that morning to say goodbye to his fellow workmen and tell them he was going to enlist. Fourteen others laid down their tools. "We're going too," they said, according to a story that appeared in the Rutland Herald on the 25th anniversary of their enlistment in 1942, during the darkest days of World War II.
Regimbald, a 26-year-old Mount Tabor native, recounted his wartime experience in letters back home to his family and friends – letters saved by his daughter.
As part of the First Vermont Regiment, Regimbald arrived in France in the fall of 1917. He spent the war as a blacksmith on an ammunition train, shoeing horses when the Army still had cavalry units, including horse-drawn artillery.
In a letter dated Jan. 24, 1918, from "somewhere in France," Regimbald writes his friend Bill about seeing "some fine-looking girls and they have to work now during the war and you can imagine what kind of work they are doing. I never had any idea what difference it made when a country is at war but I have found out now. I wish I could tell you in this letter but it is impossible for me to tell you. France has certainly had her share of war … ."
In another letter to his friend dated April 20, Regimbald wrote, "The big guns are roaring day and night" and related how he shoes horses every day "so the horses can haul ammunition to the boys in the trenches."
World War I was the first war that saw aerial combat.
"Last Sunday I saw my first German flying machine. It was brought to the ground by an American aviator. It was a large machine. It had two machine guns … attached to it."
In a letter to his brother, Victor, that appeared in the Rutland Herald in May 1918, he wrote of shoeing 212 horses in three weeks and the hardship of being away from home. "I have been now in the service over a year but it seems much longer. It is more lonesome here than in some of the towns we have been in, for the people are mostly gone away and all there is left of the buildings are full of bullet holes and many torn to the ground."
In the same letter, he wrote: "All the boys from Wallingford are about 20 minutes walk from this camp. I am going to see them soon, perhaps Sunday."
Munson, 82, recalled one conversation with her father when he spoke of going into the town of Verdun and being impressed. "But he never wrote about that," said Munson, the former Wallingford postmistress. "He wrote more about his daily stuff."
Regimbald returned from the war after Armistice Day, Nov, 11, 1918. He went back to work at American Fork & Hoe. He and his wife, Catherine, had another daughter, Mary, who lives in Clarendon.
A happy-go-lucky type but a hard worker, Munson said her father lived out the rest of his life enjoying sports, hunting and fishing. He also stayed close to his family. "I remember going down to my grandmother on Sunday," she said. "Of course, they'd all be speaking French, but they'd all be there."
Regimbald died in 1967 at age 76.
bruce.edwards@rutlandherald.com
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