On this day in 1919, President and Mrs. Wilson toured the former front, taking in a gun emplacement that had been occupied by the Paris Gun.
As readers here will recall, the Germans were supposed to destroy the huge artillery pieces but instead they carted them off, where they disappeared into chaotic post war Germany.
Readers of the New York newspaper The Sun saw a photo of Princess Patricia of Connaught's wedding party.
The princess had a huge US and Canadian following, in part because she had travelled in Canada in her youth. Canada honored her by placing her image on a one dollar bank note in 1917 and then again in 1918 when Canada contributed Alexander Hamilton Gault's privately raised and equipped Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry to the Great War in 1918. The unit, in which she was an honorary colonel in chief, was the British Empire's last privately raised unit, and the fact that it was successfully raised when the Irish Canadian Rangers really weren't, even though both were raised from Montreal, says something in and of itself. In February 1919 she married Royal Navy Commander Alexander Ramsey, who was of royal blood. He would live until 1972, she until 1974. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Cap badge of the Princess Pat's. The unit still exists.
2 comments:
The photo of Woodrow Wilson surprised me, and sent me to Wikipedia. For some reason, I had thought that Wilson was incapacitated by this date in 1919. I now know that he had his stroke on Oct. 2, 1919.
Indeed it was his cross country tour in favor of the Versailles Treaty that basically did him in. He had a stroke after speaking in Cheyenne Wyoming.
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