Dominic Gabriele

"The History of Company K"

To understand why the war was, or had to be romanticized can be explained by the origins and motives of World War I itself. The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries saw the world powers building up their military strengths and forming alliances; they were almost waiting for any excuse to start a war. Once shots were fired, the world powers had to look for ways to get their men eager to fight, so they painted it in almost a fairy tale light, as we can see with this quote from the story of Company K. These men were encouraged to think that they were going to Europe to “rid the world forever of Kaiserism” but in reality the war was being drawn out in a stalemate on the Western Front by 1917. At that point and there was no need to risk those Pennsylvania boys’ lives. It makes me, someone reading this over a hundred years later, think about for the first time how little care these world powers had for the individual lives they were throwing away. Thousands of men like George and Fred Marshall who were fathers, brothers, sons, and members of their communities were dying by the day which is a piece that is overlooked too often when World War I is being taught about nowadays.

What sources like the Fred and George Marshall collection allow readers to do is put themselves in those men’s shoes and try to understand what these individuals were going through, which, from what was written in the article, was constant mobilization from camp to camp with battles in between, never knowing if you would survive to see the next day. So we as readers now can understand and empathize with how brutal life was for not only the men who served but also their families and friends back in their hometowns who had to deal with the loss of their family members, friends, and community members, and we can see how lucky we are to be born in an age where do not have to worry about such worldwide horrors and genocides.

Any loss of human life is a tragedy, but imagine coming back to your small hometown and having ninety-eight members of your community wiped out. This is what the people of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania were going through back in the early nineteen-twenties. Just like many other newspapers around the world, The Waynesburg Republican felt it right to honor their memory in a special edition. The conditions under which this article was written—the end of World War I and the death of the local men who had died fighting—make one shift one’s mindset to the effect a world war had on the homefront. Before reading this article, it never came to mind that each one of the millions of men, women, and children that passed had their own life and soul. Each person had emotions, people who they loved, and hobbies they enjoyed doing, which is something that gets glossed over when you read about the death toll in a history book.

My time viewing the many sources at the WVRHC was an extremely relaxing and eye opening experience. For starters, I never even knew WVU had an entire part of the library dedicated to historical archives, but the actual viewing was fascinating because the sources act as a time machine back to the nineteen twenties. I learned how careful you have to be when dealing with these pieces because many are on the verge of breaking, but my biggest takeaway was how crazy it is that a war fought across the Atlantic had such a profound impact on Morgantown and the surrounding area.