The collection is comprised of letters, postcards, and telegrams exchanged by Walter and Clara Kaempf while Walter served as a private in the U.S. Army during World War I. The correspondence spans from c.22 December 1917 to 27 January 1919, with the bulk of the letters dating 1918. The letters are arranged chronologically.

The correspondence from December 1917 through May 1918 includes letters and cards only from Walter. He explained in his March 3rd letter that he discarded Clara’s letters once he replied to them. However, this practice changed after Walter reached Europe. Clara’s letters date between June 4 and October 11, 1918. The letters at the end of the collection, dating from October 1918 to January 1919, are only from Walter. The final item in the collection is a telegram from Walter, dated 27 January 1919, telling Clara that he will be home Tuesday morning.

Clara typed many of her letters while she was at work (Mitchell Auto Co., 3128 Locust), which is where Walter also addressed many of her letters. With the delay in overseas mail, Clara and Walter decided to number their letters so they each knew if they missed a letter. Beginning in July 1918, Clara wrote 47 letters and Walter wrote 27 letters, his last numbered letter is dated 3 December 1918. Walter did not receive Clara’s letter #1 dated July 15th until November 11th, and did not receive any letters dated after his June arrival in France until August. Five of Clara’s letters are missing from the collection: #21, #32, #44, #45, and #46.

Initially, Walter was at a detention camp about three miles from Fort Reilly, outside Camp Funston in Kansas. The men were sent here to ensure no one developed a sickness. They were also tested for meningitis and started receiving vaccinations, which they received periodically until they left Kansas in May. Walter described their gear, the daily schedules and training, and his occasional assistance in the kitchen. He asked Clara to send goggles to protect his eyes from dust and a pillow slip that he cold stuff with straw to use as a pillow. Walter also wrote about how the men spent their free time. For example, one night he took 15 eggs that one of the boys had received in the mail and boiled them in the kitchen. They had a late snack of boiled eggs and peanut butter with jelly (22 Mar 1918).

In his March 29th letter, Walter wrote that they were now in barracks at Camp Funston. However, this was also when an influenza outbreak hit the camp. By April 10th, their barracks was quarantined for three days. Walter reported there were about 60 sick men out of 220 in the company. He explained that the healthy men had to remain in the barracks, guard against anyone entering the barracks, clean thoroughly, sleep with the windows open, and were under doctors order not to drill. The doctors suspected hard drilling might have caused the illness. (B1/f.6)

Soon after the quarantine, rumors started circulating about when the company would leave for France. Walter started planning for Clara to visit on a weekend, when he was most likely to get a pass, so they could see one another before he left for Europe. On April 29th, he wrote: “I’ll not fight to keep from going across nor will I desert, but I will take an AWOL to see you.” Clara traveled to Kansas on May 4th.

Walter and Klara rarely identified mutual friends and family members by full names, often using only a first name. Walter saw a good friend, Clarence, whom he often wrote about, several times at Camp Funston despite being in different units. Clara mentioned Clarence’s wife, Eulalia, in several letters but neither provided a last name for the couple. In one of his last letters, Walter expressed sympathy for Eulalia that Clarence was not coming home (21 Jan 1919).

Walter mentioned running into Walter Runge just before Runge left for France (7 Mar 1918) and he also mentioned George Peters (16 May 1918). Clara mentioned Lt. Robert Avery, who had an article in the St. Louis Times on 23 August 1918. She also spoke of Addison Forgey (20 Sept 1918) and George Rohde (1 Aug 1918), who was in the Navy. Another friend about whom they both wrote was Adolph, who was in Washington D.C. Adolph sent Walter a Smileage Book, which was a coupon book issued by the War Department Commission on Training Activities (23 Apr 1918).

On May 23rd, Walter passed through northern Indiana on a train en route to New York. In his May 26th letter, Walter wrote of seeing his mother before he left, so the train must have stopped in St. Louis. While at sea, he wrote three letters, his first to be censored, in which he explained that he witnessed a burial at sea of an English seaman (17 June 1918). Once he reached France, Walter decided to use a simple code using the letter “o” to let Clara know if he was doing well (28 June 1918). The censors also did not allow soldiers to mail photographs or picture postcards of the French towns and villages that they visited.

Sending packages to the soldiers in Europe was a complicated undertaking. Clara shared the guidelines with Walter in her July 15th letter. Given the long delays in mail delivery, she arranged to send Walter a package through Vandervoort’s Soldier and Sailor shop in Paris.

In her letters, Clara told Walter about her daily activities, including work and leisure activities with friends and family. She remarked upon the labor shortage and the noticeable lack of young men in St. Louis. In several letters, Clara alluded to the state of the auto industry. She and her friends went to the theatre and saw patriotic performances such as “Fighting for Freedom” at the Municipal Opera (18 July 1918) and “Kicking the Germ out of Germany” at the New Grand Central theatre (22 Aug 1918).

Clara often discussed the war effort in St. Louis, her letters revealed how the war changed the city. The factories blew their whistles when news of a special victory reached St. Louis. A regiment of the Home Guard camped in Clayton (26 July 1918). She and her mother-in-law wore infantry service pins, describing the one she gave Walter’s mother (13 Aug 1918), and her sister, Martha, had a thrift garden. Clara sold stamps during the Thrift Stamp and War Savings Stamp week and talked of both the Salvation Army War Fund Drive and the War Stamp Drive in Missouri. She sometimes wrote of anti-German sentiment in support of the war, such as Germans in St. Louis named Kaiser and Huhn who might consider changing their names (18 July 1918).

In his August 18th letter, Walter wrote from the hospital telling Clara about the gas shell bombardment of his company’s position that lasted four hours. He received burns about his eyes and head, but no lung injury as he had his gas mask. He praised the work of the Red Cross and described his journey from the battlefield to the Base 50 Hospital, where he spent much of his time after his injury. By October 1918, Walter assisted hospital staff in dispensing medication and in dressing wounds, supplying brief descriptions of the types of wounds that he encountered.

Walter was at a convalescent camp near the hospital just after the war’s end where his eyes were tested for glasses (14 Nov 1918). Before leaving on the transport Finland, he was attached to the 406th Casualty Company while at a replacement camp. Between his arrival in the U.S., about January 10th, and his discharge on January 26th, Walter was at Camp Hill (New York), Newport News (Virginia), and Camp Dodge (Iowa). Traveling by train from Newport News to Camp Dodge, Walter visited with his family on a stop in St. Louis after he sent a telegram (c.16 Jan 1919) to Clara sharing the train’s schedule. By January 21st, Walter was in Camp Dodge and wrote about the shock to the family, presumably he had just learned about the murder of his father-in-law during his stop in St. Louis.