Story Under a Stone - Cliff Black
While attending the recent Community Day event in Sheldon, I took pictures of the veteran photos attached to the wall in the community hall. There are many stories the faces on that wall could tell, but few of them left much information about their service in uniform. It so happened the granddaughter of one of them was sitting close at hand, so by the simple process I use for selecting the next subject for a “Story Under a Stone,” I chose her grandpa, Cliff Black. He, by the way, did leave a diary of his time serving in World War I, so we can draw in part on that.
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A book titled Ransom County’s Loyal Defenders lists all of our county’s World War I participants and includes Cliff Black. In it his brief biography tells us he ended his service as a private first class with Co. C, 303rd Field Signal Battalion, 78th Division, a unit that fought in St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. A signal battalion’s primary job was maintaining combat communications under direct fire. They ran telephone lines between headquarters and front-line trenches, or flew carrier pigeons with messages or sent human runners to maintain lines of communication with headquarters and the front lines.
Cliff demonstrated the ability to write well and left us an informative diary he composed while in active service. He enlisted in the army along with a few others in Lisbon on February 13th, 1918 and soon headed to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, then on to Camp Dix, New Jersey. Their trip continued to England landing in Liverpool, England; boarding crowded trains; crossing the English Channel on a large barge; and setting foot on European soil near Calais, France.
Company C was an “outpost company,” which meant this small group found themselves very near the action on the front lines where their job was to furnish information about the enemy to the commander. I found an interesting document on the internet, a service record booklet titled “The Journal of Exploits of Company C: 303rd Field Signal Battalion.” Curious as to whether Cliff’s name would appear, I found it at the end where all members of the company can be found. Cliff’s was home address - R.R.F.D. No. 2, Sheldon, N. D., entered service on 2-24-8, promoted to private first class 6-1-8, gassed 10-20-8. His name was alongside Leo J. Billing, Lisbon, N. D., listed as killed. Two other names in Company C with whom Cliff enlisted were Harvey Cole, Enderlin and Francis McCann of Verona.
Food was an issue, and apparently the food including the steaks prepared by the cooks tasted fine, that is until they discovered the steaks had been cut from the carcasses of the dead horses which covered the battlefields.
Returning to his diary entries, he wrote of an early incident that shook them. One man turned on a flashlight for a short time, an act for which their captain ordered them to get up and move out, immediately. And immediately did the German spotters direct artillery down on them. Next morning they noted that their campsite had been totally destroyed.
When the order came to attack on September 26th, the battlefield filled with its sights, sounds, and smells of death and destruction. His quote came through clearly, “There’s no use to try to tell you of the things that happened; it just couldn’t be done. The best writer or orator could never make it clear to you, dear reader.”
Another quote from his diary outlines what he and his fellow soldiers experienced: “Death and destruction had tramped through ruthlessly, leaving in their wake the muddy clay trenches, strewn with tangled barbed wire, mangled bodies of our buddies and those of the enemy, unused ammunition, guns, shattered dugouts and desolation, with shell holes everywhere.”
There’s no need to list everything from his several pages of diary since the reader can find the diary in its entirety in the history titled Sheldon, North Dakota: 1881-2006 - 125th Anniversary. We can only imagine what the soldiers went through on these battlefields, but the family and friends waiting back home for news suffered, too. The army sent this letter to Cliff’s parents - “Mrs. J. E. Black, Route 2, Sheldon, ND. Dear Madam it is with the deepest regret that we inform you of the ‘missing in action’ on the Argonne Front, of your son Clifford R. Black, Co ‘C’, …” It must have been a happy occasion when they found out he was alive and coming home. He went on to work 30 years for the Soo Line railroad out of Anselm.
A few facts of the war gathered from Edward Lengel’s book state that before the U. S. entered the war we were woefully unprepared with only 137,000 men in the regular army who carried out-dated weapons. The Meuse-Argonne “sucked in 1.2 million American soldiers, leaving 26,277 of them dead and 95,786 wounded. Almost all of these casualties came in a period of about three weeks of heavy fighting…”
