Original Item: Only Available. The United States lacked industry that could build artillery and was only able to do so in collaboration with European manufacturers. With the outbreak of the war in 1914, this collaboration came to an end as European manufacturers focused on equipping their home countries. When the United States entered the war in 1917, it was clear that their artillery would not be sufficient, so the USA mostly used French and British artillery.

The French 75 mm field gun was a quick-firing field artillery piece adopted in March 1898. The French 75 was designed as an anti-personnel weapon system for delivering large volumes of time-fused shrapnel shells on enemy troops advancing in the open. At the opening of World War I, in 1914, the French Army had about 4,000 of these field guns in service. By the end of the war about 12,000 had been produced. It was also in service with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), which had been supplied with about 2,000 French 75 field guns. It is a common sight that many of the American made trench art pieces were made from French 75mm shell casings.

This shell casing stands at 13 ¾” tall with a 3 ⅜” wide base. The artwork, which is darker in appearance than the photos (due to lighting), is very patriotic in nature with an image of an American flag crossed with a French flag behind and American flag shield. At the very top is an image of the Federal Eagle with a scroll beneath it which says “World War” in the center of it. Beneath the flags is one of the most famous sayings attributed to the Great War and the Armistice : “11th Day, 11th Hour, 11th Month” in what appears to be a smoke cloud. At the very bottom, extremely faint, is “Verdun / Sector / 1918”. The ‘V” and the “S” of Verdun Sector are painted in red while the other letters appear to have been gold in color. In order to see Verdun Sector you have to be looking at it from an angle in good daylight, but we can assure you that it is still present.

This is a wonderful memento of a soldier’s hellacious time during this war and one that appears to have been displayed proudly for decades. Comes more than ready for display.

"You must know that we are at the environs of V[erdun] ... near hill 304 and M.H. [Mort Home] ... What carnage. It is horrible to see what we are seeing; we have been here now for 12 days and every day we have serious losses. I consider myself lucky to have escaped up to now. Let's hope that it continues like this until we are relieved, which should be any day now. I hope so, because what you see everyday is enough to break your heart. Moreover, we're not well because we have all caught dysentery. You can't eat and I assure you that we're not very strong here. In short, we hope that we'll be lucky enough to make it back! ... with this heat, this stench, and all these unburied corpses and rotting flesh we think that is what's making us ill...."

11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month
Captain Daniel W. Strickland, in his book Connecticut Fights: the Story of the 102nd Regiment noted that, on the night of November 10, 1918 “an unusually large amount of ammunition” was issued to all the artillery batteries supporting 102nd, which was then located east of the town of Beaumont, France. An infantry attack was planned for 9:30 on the morning of the 11th, and the extra ammunition would be expended in an “intense bombardment” of the German lines and a “rolling barrage” to cover the advancing infantrymen of the 102nd. Early on the morning of the 11th, “the batteries opened and worked to the maximum gun capacity.” But, at 9:00 “orders were received that the attack would not be made and that, at 11:00 all firing would cease from Belgium to the Swiss border because the armistice would then become effective. The artillery continued its heavy firing until the eleventh hour, when the great calm fell upon the whole area.”

At 10:43 on the morning of the 11th, Captain Michael A. Connor, a Hartford native and a Regimental Supply Officer assigned to the 102nd Infantry Regiment, received word that combat would end in 17 minutes. Connor received this momentous news via a handwritten U.S. Army Field Message, delivered by a runner, from Lt. Col. Evan E. Lewis, Commander of the 102nd Infantry. Lewis’ message, dictated at 10:24, stated: “Hostilities cease at Eleven o’clock. Notify all. Attack to continue until eleven. This is to confirm my verbal orders sent by 2 officers. LEWIS.”

Captain Connor’s reaction to receiving this news is unknown. Perhaps, as Captain Strickland remarked, Connor, like his 102nd comrades who had participated in many of the most significant battles of the war since their arrival in France, had slogged through knee-deep mud for months, and witnessed the horrors of trench warfare, was “too exhausted and too weary to display much exuberance.”

Yet Captain Connor did attach significance to Lt. Col. Lewis’ handwritten message that the war was over. He saved it, folded it and perhaps placed it for safekeeping in his uniform jacket pocket. Upon his return home in May 1919, after serving with the Army of Occupation in Germany, he had the message framed and hung it in his home in Hartford, where it served as a reminder of his role in the Great War for Civilization and of his comrades who had not survived to hear “the great calm” which followed the end of hostilities at “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918.