Prologue: No Man’s Land

BEFORE THE NEW AGE and the New Frontier and the New Deal, before Roy Rogers and John Wayne and Tom Mix, before Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, before the TVA and TV and radio and the Radio Flyer, before The Grapes of Wrath and Gone with the Wind and The Jazz Singer, before the CIA and the FBI and the WPA, before airlines and airmail and air conditioning, before LBJ and JFK and FDR, before the Space Shuttle and Sputnik and the Hindenburg and the Spirit of St. Louis, before the Greed Decade and the Me Decade and the Summer of Love and the Great Depression and Prohibition, before Yuppies and Hippies and Okies and Flappers, before Saigon and Inchon and Nuremberg and Pearl Harbor and Weimar, before Ho and Mao and Chiang, before MP3s and CDs and LPs, before Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson, before the pill and Pampers and penicillin, before GI surgery and GI Joe and the GI Bill, before AFDC and HUD and Welfare and Medicare and Social Security, before Super Glue and titanium and Lucite, before the Sears Tower and the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, before the In Crowd and the A Train and the Lost Generation, before the Blue Angels and Rhythm & Blues and Rhapsody in Blue, before Tupperware and the refrigerator and the automatic transmission and the aerosol can and the Band-Aid and nylon and the ballpoint pen and sliced bread, before the Iraq War and the Gulf War and the Cold War and the Vietnam War and the Korean War and the Second World War, there was the First World War, World War I, the Great War, the War to End All Wars.

It wasn’t the biggest Veterans Day parade in New England, or in Massachusetts, or even on Cape Cod, for that matter. In fact, it was rather modest: a handful or two of old soldiers and sailors in uniform, a half-dozen large flags, a few cars, a couple of cops on motorcycles, and a fife-and-drum corps comprising two or three dozen area schoolchildren dressed like Continental soldiers and playing Revolutionary War–era tunes. There were short speeches at the war memorial, salutes at the Civil War monument, and hot dogs at the American Legion Hall. All told, this celebration of Veterans Day, 2003—a holiday that was first established by Congress in 1926 as Armistice Day, an observance of the truce that ended World War I at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918—lasted about an hour.

But the procession, modest as it was, had something else that made it unique among Veterans Day parades throughout the United States that year: Corporal Jesse Laurence Moffitt, a bona fide World War I veteran, a man who was then 106 years, eight months, and five days old. He had joined the Connecticut National Guard in February, 1917; when America entered the war, two months later, his unit became the 102nd Infantry Regiment, which was in turn part of the 26th Division, the “Yankee Division,” so called because it was composed entirely of regiments from New England. That summer, he shipped out for France, where he would, eventually, fight in one terrible battle after another—until, on November 11, 1918, as he recalled, “all firing stopped. Complete silence—there wasn’t a sound at eleven o’clock. And we were able to go out of our dugouts and trenches without our helmets or gas masks, which was the first time we’d been able to do that since we first went to the front.”

Exactly eighty-five years later, he rode in a parade in the picturesque seaside town of Orleans, Massachusetts, to mark the anniversary of that day, just as he did every year. Afterward, I asked him why, at his age, he made a point of doing so.

“People like to see a World War I exhibit,” he replied. “I would assume that it means something to people to see a World War I veteran, because there’s not many of us around, as you know. Just to be able to say that you have seen a 106-year-old is satisfying to some people. After all, it’s not an everyday event for most people.”

I couldn’t argue with that; if anything, it was a serious understatement. It had taken me several months of intensive searching to find just such a man, and several more before I found myself here, witnessing this historic occasion. And yet, as remarkable as all this was to me, I would not grasp the occasion’s true significance for some time to come. None of us who lined the road that morning could have known that what we were actually witnessing there in Orleans was the last small-town Veterans Day parade anywhere to feature a living American veteran of World War I.

I write these words on the island of Manhattan, the center of a city older than Boston and Philadelphia, a city that is richer in history than perhaps any other in America. That this is so often comes as a surprise to people, because New York is and always has been about what is new, not what is old; about what will be rather than what was. But just a few blocks from where I sit, mounted on the front of a small, vest-pocket Presbyterian church, there is a very large plaque listing the names of 136 members of that congregation who went off to fight in the First World War, including five who never returned. Three blocks away, inside a large Catholic church, another plaque lists the names of thirty-eight men from the parish who were killed in the same war. Across the park, almost to the East River, is York Avenue; most New Yorkers assume it is named, as is their city, for the Duke of York, but it is actually an homage to Sergeant Alvin C. York, a pacifist from the mountains of eastern Tennessee who was drafted and sent off to France, where, on the night of October 8, 1918, he single-handedly killed seventeen German soldiers and captured 132 more, a feat for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the French Légion d’Honneur, and several other high honors. Farther uptown, at the spot where Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue converge, you will find a large bronze statue of doughboys struggling on a battlefield, mounted atop a granite monument to neighborhood boys who did the same. And up at the tip of the island, in the neighborhood known as Inwood, there are streets named for local sons who never returned from the trenches. Their last names, and the war they served in, are all that is remembered of them today.

And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head, for the top half of the island. There are statues, monuments, and plaques commemorating World War I all over this city that often doesn’t seem to care about history—in parks and squares and libraries, in the South Bronx and Times Square and the Lord & Taylor department store on Fifth Avenue. I’m not sure I could direct you to three World War II monuments within the five boroughs, and believe me, I pay attention to these sorts of things. But World War I is everywhere.

And not just in New York. In Memphis, where I lived in the early 1990s, the city’s most revered old park is dominated by a massive green statue of a doughboy charging up a hill, lips pursed in a grim scowl, bayonet thrust out to skewer the Hun. I can think of only two Civil War monuments in the entire city, which was occupied by the Yankees for three years before Appomattox.

Most of these statues, monuments, plaques, and memorials were commissioned, produced, and dedicated within about a decade of November 11, 1918. For ten years or so—maybe a bit longer in some cities or regions, a bit less in others—it seemed terribly important, at least to a certain type of person, that America remember that war and the people who fought it. Those who weren’t a certain type of person had already set out to forget the war years earlier, in some cases even before the troops had all returned home. They were traumatized or embittered veterans; or men and women who had lost a boy Over There, or were caring for one who was now an invalid; or those whose businesses or marriages hadn’t survived the experience; or just people, most of them good at heart, who’d had enough and didn’t want to hear or think about it anymore. And then the Great Depression came along, and then World War II, and between those two events, even a certain type of person had other, more pressing things to think about. And by the by, America just forgot about World War I—did it so thoroughly, in fact, that after a while it became difficult to conceive that it had ever remembered it in the first place, that there had once been a time when that war hadn’t seemed like very distant history.

Those statues and monuments and plaques and memorials commissioned back in the 1920s, though—they were big and elaborate, well made and well placed. They are still there, still everywhere, still striking and arresting and as legible as the day they were cast or chiseled. They still proclaim their stories as clearly as ever. And it’s not just them: There are murals in old buildings, markers in front of old trees, ships and highways and public spaces named for World War I generals or battles or heroes or casualties; they talk a bit more softly, perhaps, but if you’re attuned to them they can tell you a great deal. Go to any flea market in the continental United States and you will find reams of old World War I sheet music, and stacks of old World War I 78s, both selling for pocket change. They are as common as they are cheap. And of course, they speak, too.

And surprising as all of that may seem, you may be more surprised yet to learn that, well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, you could, if you were really determined, still track down a remnant of World War I capable of speaking to you more effectively and compellingly than all of the aforementioned put together: an actual veteran.

One day in the mid-1970s, when I was perhaps seven or eight years old, I was riding into the city with my mother when she pointed out the Bronx VA hospital, up on a hill, and told me that there were still in residence there veterans of World War I, including some who had never recovered from being gassed at the front.

I just stared at her. How could such a thing possibly be true? World War I! It felt so distant, relegated to an era of black-and-white and silence. Back then our allies were a King, a Crown Prince, and a Czar, our enemies a Kaiser, an Emperor, and a Sultan. How, I wondered, could warriors from such a remote past still be among us? It seemed unthinkable.

It seemed unthinkable because the Great War had already attained mythic status. It was an epic conflict, of course, by far the largest—in scope, casualties, and almost any other measure you can think of—the world had ever seen. The slaughter was terrific: In just one of the war’s hundreds of battles—the Somme—more than a million men were lost, among them some 14,000 British soldiers who fell in the first ten minutes of battle. And yet, so often the images of that war that come to mind are curiously romantic: dashing aviators in leather jackets and long white scarves, genially sharing a bottle of cognac with a recently downed enemy pilot; colorfully clad regiments majestically marching off to battle, singing songs written specially for the occasion; soldiers crouching in trenches, writing poetry (and really good poetry, at that) while ducking enemy fire; troops kicking out soccer balls as they went “over the top” to the sound of bagpipes. Countless men were killed by artillery fired from miles away, after fighting, hand to hand and month after month, over the same few yards of rotten ground. Armies still observed age-old codes of chivalrous conduct toward the enemy, yet also unleashed upon them awful new weapons, chemical and biological agents so horrible that after the war they were banned forever.

Such paradoxes could exist because the Great War occurred at, and in many ways created, a great crossroads in the history of man. It changed the Western world—and much of the rest of the world, too—more than any other war had, or has. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, which had dominated large chunks of Europe and Asia for centuries, ceased to exist. Russia lost the monarchy that had ruled it for nearly a thousand years. Germany lost its ruler and plunged into an era of unprecedented political chaos culminating in the horror of the Third Reich. Much of France was destroyed. England lost an entire generation of young men. The United States—which sat out the first two and a half years of the war—lost more than one hundred thousand men; and though, in the process of fighting the war, it rose to the top tier of powerful nations for the very first time, it was so traumatized by the experience that it withdrew into a reactionary, isolationist cocoon, deporting hundreds and closing the door to several generations of immigrants. On the field of American memory, World War I occupies the slim No Man’s Land between the archaic and the modern.

Other conflicts, though, hold much more prominent positions on that battleground. In the spring of 2003, I heard someone on the radio declare, in a tone of great urgency, that as many as a thousand World War II veterans were dying every day, and that we must harvest their stories now, while we still can; and, having always been a sucker for things—and people, and places, and facts, and stretches of history—overlooked and underappreciated, it occurred to me that no one was even bothering to seek out surviving veterans of World War I, since almost everyone assumed that anyone who fought in that earlier conflict was long dead. I did the math in my head, figuring that a man who was 21 at the war’s end would now be 106 years old. People did occasionally live to be that old, I knew, and even a bit older. I had no idea how I might find such a person; but I was able to find a webpage for the Department of Veterans Affairs featuring an actuarial table, compiled a couple of years earlier, which projected that there were still nearly fifteen hundred veterans of the First World War living in America. I set out to find some.

The VA, the source of that promising statistic, seemed a logical place to start looking; but no one there—at least, no one I spoke to that spring—seemed to have any idea at all who any of these fifteen hundred people were, much less where they might be. And try as I might, I couldn’t get any of them to look into the matter, either. Eventually, perhaps spurred on by a few months’ worth of my phone and email inquiries, they did do one thing: they revised their original projection down from fifteen hundred to “fewer than two hundred.”

I didn’t have any more luck with organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion, neither of which, I was told, kept centralized records; “Let us know if you find any!” was, typically, the last thing the people I spoke to at local chapters said by way of goodbye. VA hospitals, state veterans’ agencies, regional veterans’ homes, assisted-living facilities, nursing homes: No one had seen a World War I veteran in years, maybe decades. I started to wonder if that actuarial table might be the only place they still existed.

And then, hope—and help—came from an unexpected source.

In 1998, French president Jacques Chirac had announced that his country would grant its highest military award, the Légion d’Honneur, to any living American veteran who had served on French soil during World War I. There were a few other requirements—the most notable one being the lack of a criminal record—but overall the program was designed to make sure that as many American veterans as possible actually receive the award, and as quickly as possible: Another stipulation held that it could not be awarded posthumously.

The French government went to remarkable lengths to track down potential awardees, and always made a point, once it did so and had processed the necessary paperwork, of having some official representative of that government present the award—a handsome little medal, coupled with a large and ornate certificate—in a formal ceremony, whether before an auditorium full of spectators or a few family members crowded around a hospital bed. (On a few occasions, President Chirac presented the award personally.) As a result, the government of France typically knew much more about America’s surviving doughboys than Americans did.

On almost every occasion, the presentation ceremony merited an article in the local newspaper, which is how I first learned of the program. Unfortunately, in many cases I read about it only in the honored veteran’s obituary. Many of them, it seemed, did not long outlive the occasion. (One, I would later learn, died the very next day.) There were even a few reported cases of men who, sadly, died before the presenting officials could reach them. Nevertheless, one day I went to the French Embassy’s official website in search of more information about the program, and there got my first big break in the search: a complete list of the American men and women—more than five hundred—to whom France had presented the Legion of Honor in the past five years, complete with their hometowns. It came out to twenty-four pages. I carried it around with me for days, reading the names over and over again.

Now, the program was already five years old by the time I heard about it, and most of those Legions of Honor had been awarded in 1998 or 1999; perhaps one person in twenty on that list was still living in 2003. There was no way to locate that one in twenty that didn’t involve having nineteen at least slightly awkward telephone conversations. And some were more than just slightly. One woman, for example, responded to my query by asking me why I wanted to talk to the man in question. “I’d like to interview him about his experiences in the war,” I explained.

“Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree—he’s dead!” she replied, and slammed down the handset.

A bit shaken, I tried to rephrase my inquiry for the next name on the list, but dialed the number before I’d taken enough time to think the matter through. Inquiring after the veteran in question, I stammered, “Is he, uh, still around?”

“No,” the woman replied calmly. “He died a little over a year ago. And for future reference, you might just want to ask, ‘Is he still living?’”

Good advice. I adopted that phrasing for future calls, posing that question again and again and again; and one day, I got a yes. And then another. Eventually, I would find quite a few veterans off what I came to think of as the French List.

William Edward Campbell was born in Mobile in 1893, left school at fourteen to work in a lumber mill, returned later to study law at the University of Alabama, and was working as a clerk at a law firm in Manhattan when America entered the war. He enlisted in the Marines, was sent to France, was shot and gassed at Belleau Wood, and returned to the front in time to see more battles before the war ended. He fought bravely: For valor he was awarded both the American Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Returning home, he went to work for a steamship company and, in short order, rose to become its vice president. But the war haunted him; he was plagued by depression and anxiety. Today we would recognize that as posttraumatic stress disorder; back then, to a proud and decorated ex-Marine, it was just a shameful, inexplicable weakness. But instead of turning to drink or some other form of self-medication, Campbell started to write. He wrote about the war, what he had seen and done, about those who had been killed and those whose lives had otherwise been destroyed. It came out in the form of a novel, the story of a fictional company of Marines, in which every man, living or dead, gets his own chapter to tell a story, short or long. He wrote under the pen name William March, and called his book Company K. When it was published, in 1933, it garnered tremendous critical acclaim; today it is as forgotten as the war itself.

The first Marine to speak in Company K is Private Joseph Delaney. The war has ended; he sits on his front porch with his wife, having just completed, he tells us, writing a book called Company K. “I have finished my book at last,” he says, “but I wonder if I have done what I set out to do?”

Then I think: “This book started out to be a record of my own company, but I do not want it to be that, now. I want it to be a record of every company in every army. If its cast and its overtones are American, that is only because the American scene is the one that I know. With different names and different settings, the men of whom I have written could, as easily, be French, German, English or Russian for that matter.”

I think: “I wish there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a huge wheel, each story hung on a different peg until the circle was completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until the things of which I have written took life and were re-created, and became part of the wheel, flowing toward each other, and into each other; blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending circle of pain. . . . That would be the picture of war. And the sound that wheel made, and the sound that the men themselves made as they laughed, cried, cursed or prayed, would be, against the falling of walls, the rushing of bullets, the exploding of shells, the sound that war, itself makes . . .”

Obscure as it is today, Company K is easily one of the best American war novels ever written, and one of the great war novels of modern times. Whenever I reread it I find, every few pages, something new and profound that stops me cold. And yet I always return, in the end, to Private Delaney’s wish to take the disparate stories of the men in his company and spin them together until they melt into a great collage that tells one tale of undeniable truth. And I wonder: Can I somehow do the same, all these many years later, with the detritus that remains in our midst?

When I discovered that actuarial table on the VA’s website I realized, to my astonishment, that I didn’t have just inanimate detritus to work with. I still had, in 2003, the same resource William March had had in 1933: the actual people who fought that war, lived through it, and returned home afterward to get on with the business of life as best they could. I didn’t know, at first, how many there still were, or what they might have to say; for a while, until I discovered the French List, their existence was, to me, nothing more than theoretical. But then, thanks to that resource and others, I did find one, and then another, and another. I had hoped, in the beginning, to find perhaps a half-dozen. Eventually I found several times that number. And every one of them had unique stories to tell, surprising, stunning, a few inconceivable, stories the likes of which I had never heard or read before, stories they hadn’t told in fifty, sixty years. Stories they’d never told. These men and women did more than pin things to a wheel; they built the wheel, and spun it, and showed me five or six different vantage points where I might stand and behold something entirely new in it. Like the individual Marines in Company K, each one told, at the last possible moment, a story that was complete in and of itself and yet also a part of some greater whole, composed of other stories and artifacts and observations accumulated almost at random. That greater whole is what you now hold in your hands: a mosaic that tells a story about the United States of America and the First World War.

I cannot claim that it is the complete truth; I doubt a complete history of that war has ever been written, or ever will be. It was too vast, and too strange, to be knowable in its entirety. And this is not a conventional history of it. This is a book about America’s experience of that war, at the front, behind the lines, and at home; how it infiltrated, influenced, shaped, and determined every last facet of life in the United States, no matter how small or seemingly removed; and how it continues to do so to this day, and perhaps always will, no matter how little evidence of that we think we can perceive, or how much we think we have forgotten. It is about the generation that fought that war—people who grew up without electricity or automobiles, who never left the county in which they’d been born until they were swept up in something that had previously existed for them only in the newspaper, something that carried them across an ocean to fight with and against soldiers from distant, exotic places, some of which they’d never even heard of; people who, having triumphed, came home and quietly set about trying to rebuild their lives. And were forgotten.

Most of all, it is about how much of that we can still find, and see, and hear, and touch, if we just open our eyes and understand where, and how, to look. Because it really is everywhere—even now that the last of the doughboys have left us.