Soaked to the skin, often unable to change clothes or even remove his shoes for days on end, Pippin became so accustomed to bursting shells that he ‘did not mind them at all.’ The sound of German machine-gun bullets hitting barbed wire, he wrote, was like bees humming or birds chirping. Poisonous gas was a constant threat,’so thick…that it all looked Blue….[The Germans] put so mutch gas in one place and…it were so thick that it looked like fog.’

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Pippin admired the fierce Algerian fighters who served alongside his unit for a time. They were ‘a bad lot,’ he wrote, and would charge German lines ‘like a pack of mad men,’ with 8-inch knives clenched in their teeth, ‘and they never have a prisoner but their knife would have fresh blood on it when he came back.’

Assigned to patrols in no man’s land, Pippin himself participated in brutal encounters. On one mission, three troops from his eight-man squad died in hand-to-hand battle, but they killed nine of the 10 attacking German soldiers.

On his fateful, final mission, Pippin was among the heavy casualties suffered by the regiment as it advanced to capture the town of Séchault on September 30, 1918. ‘I seen a machine gun,’ he wrote, ‘[and] I got him.’ But when he went after another machine-gunner, ‘he let me have it.’ Bullets shattered his right shoulder and arm, and he tumbled into a deep shell hole. Pinned down by sniper fire, he lost much blood and was unable to move.

A French soldier seeking to help was shot dead and fell on top of Pippin, who was unable to remove him. After spending hours in the rain, he was rescued, but he lay on a stretcher overnight, exposed to the elements, before being evacuated to a hospital. Following months of treatment, Pippin was shipped back to the States.

After the armistice on November 11, 1918, the 369th was the first American contingent to cross the Rhine into Germany as part of the French army of occupation. More than a million New Yorkers welcomed home the 369th as it led a victory parade up Fifth Avenue to Harlem in February 1919.

Discharged earlier that year with a steel plate in his shoulder and his right arm virtually paralyzed, Pippin returned to civilian life in West Chester — shattered both physically and psychologically. Pippin’s wartime experiences depresed and confused him because he believed, as the Bible said, that all men were brothers.

For years Pippin scraped by on his monthly disability pension of $22.50, income from odd jobs and his wife’s earnings from taking in laundry. (In 1920 he had married a twice-widowed woman who had a 6-year-old son.) A dignified, friendly but reticent man, Pippin organized a Boy Scout troop, umpired neighborhood ball games and was involved in the Elks and church activities. For several years he served as commander of Nathan Holmes Post No. 362, the local black American Legion organization. He also participated in local patriotic events and proudly wore his Purple Heart when it was belatedly awarded him in 1945.

To combat frequent ‘blue spells’ and rehabilitate his injured limb, Pippin gradually taught himself to paint, using his good left hand to support his crippled right arm at the wrist and guide his brush across the canvas. He did most of his painting in a ground-floor room of his small red-brick house, working mainly at night under a bare, 200-watt light bulb. Not surprisingly, Pippin’s first major effort, which required the application of 100 coats of paint and took three years to complete, grew out of his wartime experiences. The End of the War: Starting Home (c. 1930) shows German soldiers emerging from trenches to surrender to black American infantrymen. The grim impact of exploding shells, planes falling from the sky, menacing barbed-wire entanglements and the expressionless faces of troops on both sides is intensified by a series of helmets, hand grenades, rifles, bombs and tanks that Pippin carved into the elaborate surrounding frame.

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