This week I completed scanning the Cahill Collection and created the .csv metadata spreadsheet, which included a transcription of Cahill’s letter to his sister.
It was the letter that sparked the beginning of my planning for my online exhibit. Some of Cahill’s descriptions of the front are truly heartrending, and I couldn’t help thinking about Ambuehl and Ochs, and where their experiences paralleled and diverged. Ambuehl surely experienced some of the same sights and sounds and fears and annoyances as Cahill, but most of his letters home from his time in France were lost. Did he write some of the same things, or did he try to sugarcoat his experiences so his sister wouldn’t worry about him? And, unlike Cahill, Ambuehl didn’t make it home. He could have been one of the wounded that Cahill saw carried away from the trenches, the stretchers dripping with blood.
And Ochs, who often complained about not being stationed at the front but fought his own kind of war at the Stars and Stripes office–how would he have coped with the tragedies Cahill saw? One thing Cahill writes that really stuck with me was that the soldiers who complained at camp when things were easy were the most resilient on the front and encouraged the other men not to lose heart. While I tend to think of Ochs as an impulsive kid with a tendency to complain, maybe he would have held his own in the trenches after all.
What I’d like to do is focus on weaving together the stories of the three soldiers my internship has focused on so far (Ambuehl, Ochs, and Cahill) and show how the materials in WWPL’s collections reveal different aspects of soldiers’ experiences during WWI. The Ambuehl collection focuses on military training camps, as well as the death of a soldier, while the Cahill collection documents a soldier’s experience on the battlefield and the Ochs collection follows a soldier’s career away from the trenches.
I began a rough timeline of events in the solders’ lives as documented in the collections, and I’ll continue thinking about how to arrange the exhibit and what materials to include. Once I have a better outline for the exhibit, I’ll present it to Mark.
