Fifty years was a long time but the names of towns and cities such as Noyon, Sommepy and Ciney were still familar. His memory was sharp and he found several places where the roads and terrain had not changed that much and the memories came back easily of handling the horses pulling the battery's guns or the wagons over them under artillery fire from the other side.
And there were other recollections of those days long past.
Alarm: Bringing the horses forward in the dark at 3 AM under heavy enemy bombardment to the battery's position and fighting the mud to pull the guns to a new position further back to be ready for action before the expected enemy infantry attack in the morning.
Foraging: Taking a wagon down a long road into a valley under artillery fire into the remains of a town in temporary no-man's land to bring back food for the battery and the horses. And, with a stroke of luck, finding an undamaged supply of the region's French red wine intact in barrels at a winery and bringing a small supply back to the battery's position.
Under Fire: Seeing the horses, two riders and the wagon on a road a few meters ahead completely disappear due to a direct hit by a shell.
Wounded: Being wounded in the head and knocked from the horse by shrapnel from an exploding artillery shell. Recalling that event years later, he would always have a wry smile when noting the doctor in the hospital said he only lived, "because I had such a thick head."
He came from a small farming village in Wuerttemberg, Germany. In 1916, at the age of 18, he entered the German Army and trained in Ulm, Germany. Life on a farm had made him fairly expert at handling horses - the prime mover of armies in 1916. After training, he was assigned to the Wurttembergische Feldartillerie Regiment Nr. 49 and then spent almost three years with the regiment amid the mud, shell fire, gas, attacks, retreats, rain, snow, life and death that made up daily life of soldiers on both sides of the lines in France and Belgium.
Following the armistice, the 49th returned to Ulm, in southern Germany, by way of Luxemburg, then through Germany along the Mosel Valley, crossed the Rhine River near Bingen and marched southeast reaching Ulm on December 22, 1918. He still recalled the interesting logistics of the German Army's planning to accomplish the withdrawal of millions of troops from the old Western Front to east of the Rhine River required by the Armistice as divisions had to cross each others routes since some went home to northern Germany, others to southern Germany and others to the central part of the country. 
He was among the many Europeans that immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s after the Great War to build a new life in a new country. But those years and experiences on the Western Front were never forgotten and fifty years later he was able to fulfill a dream and visit some of those places again. This time in peacetime.
