By Dan Shine
Voice Columnist
Yankee Division Encampment at Yale Field
By Loretta Bontempo Forte
I grew up in a house on Derby Avenue across the road from the Yale fields, so I was aware of football games and Yale sports events from an early age. My earliest memories of WWI start when I was told that my older brothers, Alexander and James, were living in tents over on Yale field! My brother Al had recently married and moved to Woodbridge, but prior to this my brother Jim had lived at home with us. Yale field was an Army camp, the Yankee Division Encampment and I recall seeing tents, tents and more tents, rows and rows of small tents. And among them, lots of men and lots of horses. The soldiers were preparing to leave the country, to go to Germany.
We were not at war yet, but it was inevitable, and my mother had such a worried expression most of the time. There were no radios, but the newspapers were filled with news about the war in Europe, and my father or my sister Mary would read aloud excerpts about the war to the family.
There were limited visiting hours at the field, we would cross the road and walk through our neighbor, Mrs. Redfield’s pastures, or go through Central Avenue. My brother Al had a horse, “White Socks’, which he rode out to greet our family. He was a beautiful tall horse that enjoyed being patted.
One night when I was very young, and playing on the living room floor with my doll, there was a light knock- a tapping noise at our back door. Into our kitchen came an odd looking ‘woman’, dressed in a make-shift outfit wearing a large hat with a veil that came down and almost covered her large nose. My mother had reluctantly opened the door, and then exclaimed, “Jim, is that you!!!”, as my father and brothers scrambled to the kitchen. My sister Mary took me aside and said, “That is a FRIEND of Jim’s”, but I was not allowed back into the kitchen. As the guest was leaving, there were hugs and a parting, nostalgic look around. “She” was also carrying a package of goodies as she went out the door. I asked a lot of questions, but no answers came from my teary-eyed parents, or siblings, everyone looked somber.
Soon after, the men were preparing to depart for Europe and the rules changed, no visits were allowed to the camp. Jim and Al would not be coming home any time soon, was all that I knew. The camp was preparing to break up. Even the roads along the camp were blocked, no one could approach.
One night, friends who had a car drove by to visit; there were hushed conversations as they gathered with my parents around the wood stove in the kitchen. The next day Pa did not go to work, he and Ma dressed in their ‘good clothes’. Their friend with the car picked them up and away they went, they were gone all day.
They had gotten word that my brothers’ division was departing from Niantic, so they were driving there to try to see them off.
Meanwhile, at home, darkness came and so did our bedtime, but our older sister Mary told us we could stay up until our parents returned. The night was unusually dark – oddly, the gas street lights remained unlit.
And then, we heard it, the muffled sound of many marching men, and the darkness filled with dust, as the dusty road filled with marching men and trotting horses.
My sister Mary put her arms around me; the neighbors, the Squires and the Redfields came to our porch as we heard the men approaching.
Lines of soldiers – horses – wagons passed for what seemed like hours to me. The neighbors were dismayed that our parents were not at
home, the whole neighborhood had been cognizant of the fact that the soldiers would be on the move any day. The neighbors had been told that our parents would try to see their sons off to war, and that they should keep an eye on us, but no one anticipated that they would leave directly from Yale field, marching to the West Haven Railway Station!
My brothers John and Ralph got as near to the passing soldiers as they could, while the younger children, Lou, Peter and I huddled with Mary on the porch. My brother Al’s wife, Gladys, had gone with my parents to Niantic.
As the marchers travelled by – hour after hour – and we waited there on the porch, I didn’t understand why, until we finally heard, in a subdued voice that carried over the noise of the tramping boots to our crowded porch, “Good bye Mary, goodbye kids”. And amidst our shouts and tears and the tears and well wishes of our gathered neighbors, my brothers Al and Jim went off to war. They boarded trains at the WH railroad station. If my parents had had better information, they would have stayed home and seen their sons pass by their own house.
My only recollection of the war’s end was the sound of bells ringing and neighbors shooting off guns, and we kids grabbed anything that would make noise, banging pans together, to add to the celebratory noise.
And my brothers returned safely, to us.
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