The 369th itself fought the Meuse-Argonne as a French-attached unit, as it had fought everything else. The regiment captured Séchault on September 29, three days into the offensive. It was one of the first allied units to reach the Aisne River on November 5, 1918, six days before the armistice.
The regiment’s presence in the Argonne from the spring of 1918 through the armistice makes it one of the formations with the longest continuous engagement in that specific theater — the soldiers who were there in May for Johnson’s stand were still there in November when the fighting ended. The accumulated experience of that time — the specific knowledge of the terrain, the positions, the German tactics in the forest — was paid for in the kind of continuous attrition that 191 days of front-line combat represents.
## The Albany Union Station: What He Returned To
When Johnson returned to Albany in 1919, the Union Station that had been his workplace before the war was still there — still busy, still requiring redcaps, still the kind of establishment that employed men like him.
The specific cruelty of the return was physical: the job was available, the building was there, the need for redcap labor was unchanged. What had changed was Johnson’s body. His left foot was shattered; his wounds, though treated, had not restored him to the physical capacity that the work required. The job was there but he could not do it.
The specific form of his exclusion from the workforce was therefore not primarily racial — not the kind of exclusion that said he could not apply, could not be hired, was not welcome. It was physical: the Army had broken his body and then refused to acknowledge that it had done so, and the specific economic consequence was the inability to do the specific work he had done.