In our family, Eric Skjlbred was just a shadow. A vague memory. A rumor.
All that’s left of him are a couple of souvenir hankies he’d sent home soon after arriving in Europe in 1918 and a memorial marker under a tree planted in his memory at the Village Cemetery.
By 1958 or so — when we kids were finally old enough to understand basic adult ideas — we learned that Eric had been our grandmother’s beau. In fact, the two had planned to marry. But that was before World War I intervened.
Ill-fated romance
Around the same time the Great War started in 1914, Eric Skjlbred (pronounced SKILL-bred), a teenaged youth of Norwegian descent who lived in Liverpool, began courting Christine Christensen, a Danish immigrant who lived with her parents on Vine Street Road, next to the railroad tracks.
In the only photograph I ever saw of him, he wore a sporty driver’s cap over a head of fair hair, and his oval face was punctuated by bright and expressive eyes.
My grandmother was also quite the looker as a teen, with a wavy auburn coif, softly rounded cheeks, a shy smile and delicate hands.
The couple’s shared Scandanavian backgrounds provided a foundation for their betrothal. In April 1917, their dreams were put on hold, however, when the United States declared war on Germany and Eric joined the U.S. Army.
‘Never forget me’
That August, he was activated into service at Camp Dix, New Jersey, as a private in Company F, 311th Infantry Regiment, 156th Infantry Brigade, 78th Division. The following spring, Eric and his fellow Doughboys boarded a troop ship to France. Within three months, the 78th would see significant action, but first Eric purchased and posted several colorful souvenir handkerchiefs to my Grandma. Stitched into one of them were the words, “Never forget me.”
Then he started marching.
From Sept. 12 to 15, under the leadership of Georgia-born Gen. James McRae, the 78th Division supported Gen. John Pershing’s attack on Saint-Mihiel, a battle that left 7,000 Allied soldiers and 2,000 Germans killed in action. Pershing’s forces, however, took more than 15,000 Germans prisoner to essentially win the four-day confrontation.
Eric likely had his courage tested at St. Mihiel, because in a letter received some weeks later he reported that he had “gone over the top” but remained unwounded. The next time the 78th charged out of its deeply dug trenches, he wouldn’t be so lucky.
Meuse-Argonne Offensive
A month later, from Oct. 14 to 17, McRae’s troops fought the battle of Montfaucon, part of the crucial Meuse-Argonne Offensive where the 78th was positioned at the “point of the wedge” of the final Allied offensive. To the American left stood the ominous Argonne Forest, a gloomy woodland dotted by ravines and hills and crumbling roads, and in front of them stood the fortified heights and woods of the Kriemhilde Stellung, part of the infamous Hindenburg Line.
On the march north, American soldiers passed by blasted machine-gun nests and artillery emplacements and dead animals and dead Germans killed by allied bombardment. As the weather worsened on Oct. 16, the Doughboys tried to keep their ammunition dry as they slogged through knee-deep mud and water while the Huns peppered them with high explosives, shrapnel and gas shells.
Machine-gun barrage
On the misty morning of Thursday, Oct. 17, Eric’s sleep-deprived 311th Infantry, under command of Colonel Marcus Stokes, got into position to attack at 6:30 a.m., according to author Thomas Meehan’s “History of the 78th Division.” The infantry advanced “without any definite knowledge as to exact location of the enemy’s line. The 2nd Battalion took some prisoners in the town of Chevieres and continued the advance to the Aire River at the north and west of the town. Troops pushed across the stream at this point under heavy enemy machine gun fire and gained a foothold there…”
That incessant automatic fire may well have killed Eric on that morning. Or he may have lived until early-afternoon as the battle raged on “at the heights the north of the town [Bois des Loges] and into the southern edge of the Bois de Bourgogne,” wrote Meehan. “Attacks were made by the 312th Infantry, acting with the 311th on their right. The 311th gained possession of the Ferme des Loges and the ridge to its west, but the 312th, on their left, was held up in Grandpre and the Ferme had to be given up.”
If Eric wasn’t shot at Montfaucon, he may have died capturing or defending the Ferme. In any case, he lost his life on Oct. 17, 1918 on a muddy battlefield in Northern France. Three weeks later, the Armistice was signed, officially ending the Great War.
‘Boche bullet’
Eric was among 12 soldiers from the 78th killed Oct. 17, while 49 others were wounded and 49 more were gassed. It was one of the deadliest days of the month for the 78th Division. Over the course of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive an estimated 27,000 American soldiers died, and Eric was one of them.
The news of the Army’s advances and lists of its losses reached the States a month later. The Nov. 19 issue of the Syracuse Herald published a small, poorly-reproduced photograph of Eric Skjlbred on page 3.
“His last letter, received in the village a month ago, told how he had gone over the top and came out without a scratch,” the brief news story stated. “It is believed the second time he went over, that a boche bullet killed him.” Boche was a common pejorative nickname for the German enemy.
Four decades after Eric’s violent death, my Grandma still spoke longingly of him. My sister, Laurie Meegan, remembers, “She never forgot him, just like the hankie said. She just was always sad he died so soon after getting there and just because he died.”
Unlike the war widows in Europe, Grandma’s post-war life brightened considerably after she’d fallen in love with another soldier, my grandfather, Matt Egloff, with whom she raised five children on Vine Street Road.
In France, however, some 630,000 war widows were counted, and many tens of thousands of single women would never marry.
Eric Skjlbred is buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, France, but a small monument placed beneath a maple tree on the Fifth Street side of the Village Cemetery attests to his sacrifice.
Last word
“The Meuse-Argonne offensive was the greatest battle American soldiers fought in the First World War – the greatest battle the American Army had ever fought up to that time.” – Historian Bruce Catton
The columnist thanks his cousins, Ed and Matt Egloff, for their help in researching this subject.
