"Wars are always lost causes. They never solve anything," said Marsh, a receiver of the Distinguished Service Medal, Purple Heart and two French Croix du Guerres. "Maybe for a while they help, but as soon as a country gets over being licked they start building. Wars seem a way of nature."

Fred Niemeier and about 30 other Freeport area doughboys, were thousands of miles away from the scarred trenches of France. The armistice was learned of in a dreary Siberian city of Khabarovsk on the Amur River. There the 27th Infantry Division had settled down to winter quarters as part of the Allied Siberian Expeditionary Forces. In a grand design about 8,000 American troops had been dispatched by sea to Vladivostok, Russia in 1918 to drive overland across the length of Siberia with Japanese soldiers, defeat the Bolsheviks and re-establish the Eastern Front against Germany. "I remember we got word of the armistice at retreat," Niemeier said. "The sergeant had given the command to fall out, when the company clerk came running out to 'hold it.' THen we learned. It must have been on November 12 or 13. A wild celebration? You couldn't hold the bunch back." Niemeier was to remain in Siberia on occupational duties until December 1919 when he sailed for home from Vladivostok.

The welcome message of an armistice came to Ben Dunning in a hospital bed at Nevera, France. "There's not much of a celebration in a hospital," Dunning said. " Men lying around with legs and arms off or faces shot up take it pretty quiet." Dunning had fallen victim to a mustard gas attack the day after his division had gone on the lines in October 1918 and spent the remainder of the war in hospitals. He was released in the early part of 1919. "I couldn't talk or see well for a while because of the gassing, but I'm lucky that the only permanent thing was a very tender throat," said Dunning, now a retired Freeport mail carrier. "We lost an awful lot of young men and it didn't do any good."

Skepticism greeted the armistice news when it reached the USS Utah on convoy duty in the easter Atlantic, according to Jack Lewis. Lewis was a teen-aged seaman on the battleship back in 1918 after he signed his mother's name on an affidavit to get into the Navy. "We knew about the war's end immediately," Lewis said. "But there was no celebration because no one believed it."

Earl Manning traces Armistice Day back to a bustling airfield in France where he and other soldiers in the fledgling Army Air Service had created the first U. S. flying base in Europe. "We had just got going real good when the armistice was signed. They sent over the old Liberty bombers and we assembled them at the airfield." Manning, 71, recalls the armistice message came after supper. First it was not believed, but was then followed by some noise making with pans and parading around. "After is was all over everyone thought there would be no more wars. The cycle seems to run every 20 years that there has to be a big war. My son was in Korea and now my grandson in Vietnam."

Royal "Pete" Wheat, now 74, arrived in France just before the war ended. He was awaiting transfer at the American Expeditionary Force headquarters at LeMans when fighting ceased. "The French soldiers there were running around kissing the Americans," Wheat exclaimed.