Sergeant First Class Harold Foote Gosnell was just six months into his military service. He had entered the army the previous fall, answering a draft notice just days after earning his bachelor’s degree from his hometown campus, the University of Rochester. As soon as he earned a license as a radio operator, commercial second grade, which required him to type twenty words a minute, he wrote military officials with the news. Eager to be shipped out, he bragged that he had also mastered the flag-signaling languages known as wigwag and semaphore. But by the time Gosnell was called to report for duty with the 47th Service Company at Hancock in mid-September, there wasn’t much war left on the calendar for him. Six months later, as the duties for a signal officer were receding, the obligations of a widow’s son came to the fore. In February, Gosnell’s mother wrote him from upstate New York to report that she had been sent to the Clifton Springs Sanitarium on account of her heart trouble.
