“Sergeant Frank Spencer Fought in Champagne and Argonne With 369th Regiment --Piece of Shrapnel in Ankle Sent Him to Hospital. 

Regimental Sergeant Frank E. Spencer, jr., of the famous 369th Regiment, colored, which saw 14 months' service in France, was honorably discharged from the service on March 1 and is visiting his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Spencer of 19 East avenue. He was wounded in the Champagne sector and saw service also in the Argonne and Vosges. 

  "We left New York on December 3, 1917," said Sergeant Spencer this morning, "without any particular training except what we got from guarding bridges, etc., around New York. We got about all our training in France at Brest and St. Lazare, and then went to the Argonne front on April 1, 1918." 

  "That was before the woods had been all blown to pieces and the country was hilly with dense forests, and was supposed to be a quiet sector. The boys even shot foxes and wild boars from time to time.

  "On July 14 we were transferred to the Champagne where a German offensive was in progress, and were called upon to play a defensive game with quite a lot of hand to hand fighting and continual artillery bombardment from the Germans." 

  When asked about the Germans that were encountered in that sector he said that they all looked like young boys, and that some had only been in the army a few days and were mighty glad to be captured. 

  On the 27th of September, still in the Champagne, Sergeant Spencer was wounded in the ankle. He described the attack as follows: "Our barrage began at 11 o'clock at night and continued until 5:30 o'clock in the morning. Then we went over the top, and by 10 o'clock had taken all the first lines from the enemy who were on the run, and the fighting was mostly skirmishes and clearing out machine gun nests which were located by our airplanes and then blown up by the French 77s. 

  "I don't know exactly how I got wounded. We had just taken a little village called Repont, a former French town that bad been converted into a German divisional headquarters, when something burst over my head and I was hit in the ankle with a piece of the flying shrapnel. The wound would have been all right if it hadn't become infected with gas. I suppose our clothes were all saturated with the gas for they used it a lot in that sector, sending over six pounds in each shell.

  "I walked back to a dressing station, and the next day was sent on to an evacuation station and then to a Red Cross hospital in Paris, an American hospital it was and they treated us fine." 

  After a month in hospital Sergeant Spencer returned to the front with his battalion, this time in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace-Lorraine, where he said the trenches were remarkably dry because the water was drained off through the rocks. It was, he said, a dreary place, quite unlike the Argonne when he saw it, for the trees were all blown down and tangled up with barb wire, and the trenches were built mainly of rocks. 

  The 369th was the first complete regiment to reach the Rhine after the armistice was signed, and stayed there three weeks until they were relieved by the Army of Occupation. The regiment was attached to the French 161st Division of the Fourth Army Corps, and Sergeant Spencer wears the device of the French division, a black rattler on his left shoulder. He is also wearing a wound stripe and two service stripes.

  Henry Johnson of Albany, who has four Germans killed and 20 wounded to his credit belonged to the same battalion, Sergeant Spencer said."

"Ithacan with Crack Unit of Negro Troops," Ithaca Journal, March 5, 1919, 6.