[Manuscript/Ephemera] Combat Engineer's Diary in World War One, 1918. Daniel Zilker of Mahoney City, Penn., enlisted in 1917 at the age of 22 and served in the 7 th Engineer Battalion, part of the famed 5thDivision (“The Red Devils”). His diary chronicles his service from training in Kansas through heavy action at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel under Gen. Pershing.After training at Leavenworth, Kansas, Zilker took the Celtic to Europe in March, 1918. His convey was escorted thru “the danger zone” by nine British destroyers. ‘It was amazing how these small boatscould skin over the waves, maneuvering and ever on the alert,” he writes. From Liverpool, he crossed the Channel (“nerve racking…we were crowded like cattle”) and landed at Havre where he saw his first German prisoners – “some of them wore happy looks on their faces.” Zilker’s duties included building narrow gauge railroads to move supplies to the front. At work, he “saw a propeller break on an airplane, after which he came down and collided with a stone house. Machine wrecked, aviator unhurt – lucky.” More dangerous work was repairing barbed wire entanglements where he was close enough to see “the German sentries walking their posts through a pair of field glasses.”At the battle of Saint-Mihiel, he had “never seen so many soldiers moving to toward the front – tanks, machine guns, and all kinds of supplies. Saw a Boche [German] shell strike a gun caisson and kill 2 men and a horse. The Germans started to shell our positions at 10 PM, the most violent of barrages in the history of the war was thrown onto the French position.”“Mines were discovered in places where one would least expect them,” he wrote, “under steps, trips wires, stove pipes, latrines, and for 1 kilometer across the field every 12 ft. apart were tank traps. I saw many German dead along the highway where they had taken up a position but could not hold it…. Fritz [Germans] had located us and started to shell us and for a short time I thought my time had come. Capt. Keller killed… Saw bones unearth by recent shell fire.” Continues with excellent content.One volume (5.5” x 7”) in limp cloth covers in a 1918 Wanamaker diary with extensive ads for Philadelphia businesses. 105 pp. of text in ink or pencil text.

Moderate rubbing and staining to boards.