“We are marking time until peace commissioners arrange terms, peace is signed and we are given the word to go home,” a weary James Perry of Rumford wrote his mother while stationed abroad.

Similar sentiments are expressed every day by servicemen in Iraq, but Perry was writing about another war and another peace.

Months after World War I had officially ended, American soldiers found themselves captives of the political process in war-torn Europe.

For Perry, his days spent marking time were in sharp contrast to his war experience. His machine gun company had fought grueling battles on the Marne River, going over the top of the trenches without gas masks or helmets.

They had captured three towns and more than 100 prisoners and driven the Germans back seven miles.

After the surrender, his company had spent more than a month hiking across a countryside ravaged by war, traveling more than 200 miles on foot to Germany before finally finding some rest.

“The troops are now comfortably quartered,” Perry from Kempenich. “Mess halls have been built and other improvements made.”

As in post-war Iraq, occupation presented a new set of challenges. According to Dr. M.J. O’Connor of Lewiston, who gave an interview to a reporter from the Lewiston Evening Journal when home on leave in April of 1919, the American troops in France had trouble getting along with their allies, let alone the enemy. The French charged their liberators inflated prices for everything from food to clothing to entertainment.

“They have a fixed policy of robbery,” said O’Connor. “And it is getting on the nerves of our boys.”

On the surface, relations with the former enemy seemed better than with the French. O’Connor reported that the Germans were treating the occupation forces very well. They were hospitable and friendly, he said, and charged American customers less than French merchants charged for the same items.

Though the Germans were actually easier to live with than the French, O’Connor was still skeptical of his former enemies’ motives. Their goodwill was a public relations effort, he theorized, and by being friendly, they hoped only to escape some of the retribution they deserved.

Two decades before the advent of Hitler, Nazis or concentration camps, O’Connor’s words were prophetic: “Despite all their outward friendliness,” he said, “a lot of the old spirit – the cruel desire to conquer and to wound – is in them still.”