James Willard Jim Haug

I wasn’t right in the war that long because I had- I don’t know what they’d done, why they’d done it or how they’d done it but they had us training or practicing or doing something in Canada quite a while before we got over there. Then we were shipped to England and I was only in England a short time and then they sent us over to France. I was with a gun outfit and that’s what I worked on, was just big guns. It was a 25-pounder was the gun that we were on. And it shot 25-pound shells; I guess that’s what it would have done, anyway. We were in communication with some officer or something from the front, close up to the front lines. He’d tell us when to fire and so’s we’d know when to fire and where to fire. And that’s I think the way it worked anyway. The one thing that we didn’t really care for too much was we had to dig a, I suppose twelve-by-sixteen round hole, we’d have to dig maybe, oh, two or three feet deep and then after we were done with that, we’d roll the gun into it. And so we had a nice job before we ever got going. We didn’t really appreciate that. You see, we all took our turns going up to where the cooks were to get our coffee or lunch or anything like that. And we all took our turns and it was my turn that time and I was coming back and I was getting closer to our guns, I didn’t realize maybe how close I was but anyway, they fired them and well, it was very easy to have lost everything I had on the ground, you know. But I managed to hang onto it all and never spilt anything. So we had it all and I got there with it. I don’t know, to me, it was, what would you call it, more like an adventure of some kind. It didn’t get to my nerves that bad or anything like that. It was just something that had to be done and we’d done it.