10
WHO IS A WORLD WAR I veteran? It’s a simple enough question, I guess; the answer, though, at least in some cases, is not quite so simple. Take Harold Gardner.
In August, 2005, I drove up to Choconut, Pennsylvania (it sounds like it should be a subdivision of Hershey, but actually it’s just over the border from Binghamton, New York), to see him, having read about him in a newspaper article. He was 106 years and eight months old at the time, quite sharp and self-sufficient, still living alone in his own house, a slight fellow in wire-rim glasses, red plaid shirt, high gray trousers, and wide suspenders. Before and after we talked he scurried around the house, showing me this and that from his long life. There was a good-sized barn connected to the place, and he had it filled with lots and lots of large and elaborate machinery. He kept it all in fine working order, clean as the day it was manufactured; he was very proud of it, took the time to tell me what each and every machine or engine was and did. Or, I should say, he tried to. I didn’t understand a word.
He had grown up in Binghamton, started tinkering with things when he was eight or nine years old, and dropped out of high school in his senior year to go to work as a toolmaker and machinist; “dollars and cents was more important to me than that diploma,” he explained, though he quickly added that he regretted never having graduated. Then the country got into the war, and he ended up being drafted into the Army. He was supposed to be sent down to Camp Humphreys, in Virginia, for basic training, but his departure was delayed due to the influenza epidemic; “just shut the place down till they got straightened out with the flu, you know,” he explained.
Months passed. Then, one day, he got the call to report for duty at the armory, on Washington Street in Binghamton. “It was over thirty of us, I would say,” he recalled. “They gave us a blanket and socks and one thing or another and got us ready to go up. When we got up we got on the train, I had blankets and socks and all that stuff with me. Hadn’t gotten a uniform yet.”
The train, full of anxious and excited new doughboys, sat in the station for a while. “There were three or four coaches,” Harold Gardner recalled. And then, “at, I guess, about half past nine,” he said, “one of the Army officers came on the train” with an announcement: “You boys can go home now. The armistice has been signed.”
That was it.
Except that, at first, nobody moved. “We couldn’t understand it at all,” he told me. They thought it could be a practical joke, that they might find themselves in trouble if they really did try to go home. “We found out the next day that the war was over,” he remembered.
“Did you keep your blanket and your socks?” I asked him.
“I still have the blanket,” he said.
And lest you think that was all the Army gave him for his troubles, they also sent him a check for his service. “One dollar,” he announced. “I never cashed it.” He still had it, too. Even showed it to me, proudly. From time to time, he said, the government would send him a letter asking him why he hadn’t deposited it yet, but he just ignored them; said he’d rather have a souvenir of his service in World War I than the dollar. I guess his attitude about money had changed since high school.
So: Was Harold Gardner a veteran of World War I? Are the blanket and socks and that check for one dollar enough? Or does none of it count because he hadn’t been issued his uniform yet?
In the course of tracking down, meeting, and interviewing World War I veterans—a process that occupied me for the better part of a decade—I gathered quite a few unusual stories. Many of them involve people whose service is not easily defined, or even categorized.
Take, for example, Henry Roy Tucker, whom I found off the French List. Mr. Tucker—he went by Roy—lived in Toccoa, a small town in northeastern Georgia that I knew, from my childhood obsession with the Guinness Book of World Records, as the home of Paul Edward Anderson, who was the world’s strongest man through much of the 1970s. (It’s also the birthplace of DeForest Kelley, of Star Trek fame, but since he wasn’t in the Guinness book, I didn’t know that back then.) Roy Tucker had been born in Alapaha, Georgia, on May 9, 1897, left school after the fifth grade, went to work on his father’s farm, married at twenty, and was drafted at twenty-one. The Army assigned him to Company F of the 28th Infantry, 1st Division, which was already in France, having been one of the first divisions to go across in 1917; he was to be a replacement, a stand-in for someone who had been shot or gassed or blown up. He went through basic training in Atlanta, got terribly seasick while going across on the Leviathan—“about three days I’d like to have died,” he told me—and was greeted, when he arrived, by the worst sight of his life: “The first thing I saw when we got off,” he recalled, “there were dead horses and dead men littered around there. Dead to beat the band . . . I don’t remember how many. There was a lot of them there, though. They had been fighting all that morning, when I got there.”
I visited with him in September, 2003; he was a small man in a brown cardigan sweater and red plaid shirt, large glasses, fine white hair. He had a very gentle, peaceful air about him; he and his daughter, Cassie, bore a striking resemblance to one another. She prodded him along, pointed him in the direction of the stories she had heard growing up, repeated my questions loudly as necessary. She helped him remember the name of the minister who had officiated at his wedding in 1917—it was Stallings—then helped him remember that Reverend Stallings’s son had served with Roy Tucker until the younger Stallings came down with influenza. It was implied, though never confirmed, that it had killed him.
One of his favorite stories involved the night that he had been on guard duty when a motorcycle and sidecar came roaring up. He paused, smiled. Who was it? I asked him.
“Pershing,” he replied. “Came out of his sidecar, rolled up there, talked to us all a good while.”
“What did you say?”
“I don’t remember now, it’s been so long . . . Nice old man though, he sure was.” Pershing had been fifty-eight years old at the time—nearly fifty years younger than the man now telling me that story.
Mr. Tucker had liked the Germans, too, at least those he’d met when he was there as part of the Army of Occupation. “They were just as nice as anybody you’d ever seen in your life,” he recalled. “When we camped in this little town here, maybe a week or ten days, and then they’d transfer us to another town, and another town, and there’s people that were there, from over there, that would invite us back over to have dinner with them.”
I suppose he never put together in his mind those fine dinners and all those dead soldiers and horses he’d seen that first day, though both were, of course, the work of Germans. Maybe he was disinclined to bear a grudge, since he was spared the fate of those corpses. He attributed his good fortune to God, but timing deserves some of the credit, too: As it happened, he arrived in France on November 11, 1918. “The armistice was signed that morning,” he explained.
I wonder if Henry Roy Tucker, having just gotten there that very day, understood, entirely, what that meant. We know now, of course; we regard November 11, 1918, as the day the Great War ended, even though, technically, the peace treaty was not signed until the following summer. Few people know the month and date the Treaty of Versailles was effected, much less the time, but everyone knows the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. I expect, as years went on, that date grew to mean a great deal to him. And even though he arrived, technically, after the armistice took effect, eighty years later, the government of France decided to give him a pass when they evaluated his Legion of Honor application. He was in uniform on French soil as of November 11, 1918: That was good enough for them. No matter that, unlike all those dead men and dead horses that greeted him, he never stood a chance of becoming a casualty of war.
His family, though, was not spared. Roy Tucker’s brother, Quincy, was too young to be drafted, but his sister, Lillie, was married to a fellow who went off to France. He returned just fine; or so it seemed at the time. Turns out, Cassie said, he “brought her a disease back from overseas, from the First World War. That’s what killed her.” The way she said the word “disease” left no doubt as to what, exactly, she meant.
“She was a beautiful woman,” her niece mourned. “Oh, she was pretty.”
In November, 2005, I went to Smith Center, Kansas—so-named because it sits just a few miles away from the geographic center of the continental United States—to meet 106-year-old Albert “Jud” Wagner, who had served in the Marines in World War I. Mr. Wagner’s son, Junior, was also a Marine Corps veteran, in his case from the Second World War; when we spoke on the phone, Junior told me I was welcome to come see his father, though he wasn’t sure the interview would prove fruitful for me. Undaunted, I traveled to (literally) the middle of the country, confident that I could get a good interview out of Jud Wagner. I couldn’t. He was able to give me the basic facts of his youth—when and where he was born, his parents’ names, his siblings’ names, where he went to school, what year he graduated—but very little beyond that. He was working on the family farm when he decided to enlist; “everyone else was,” he explained. He chose the Marines because “it was a good outfit,” went through basic training in Quantico, Virginia, and then shipped out. According to his discharge papers, which his son sent me later, he arrived in France on October 21, 1918, three weeks before the armistice, but never saw combat. He did, however, serve in Germany from December 12, 1918, until August 6, 1919, as part of the Army of Occupation, though he could give me absolutely no details about that—or anything else.
Homer Anderson, of Pompano Beach, Florida, probably could have answered questions all day long, if only I’d had them. I’d heard that Mr. Anderson, who was 107 when we met in January of 2005, had served in the Balloon Corps, and I really, really wanted to meet someone who’d had something to do with aviation in that war. The United States Balloon Corps wasn’t exactly the Lafayette Escadrille, but they did make it aloft. Actually, the Balloon Corps is a quirky little footnote of the war: Balloons, typically filled with hydrogen, were used by both sides for observational purposes on the Western Front pretty much from the war’s start; you can see a lot more from a balloon, even one that’s only fifty or a hundred feet up, than you can from a trench. The problem was that balloons were essentially defenseless—the only thing an observer could do in the name of self-preservation was frantically attempt to lower the balloon quickly, or, failing that, jump—and they soon became a favorite target of enemy planes, not only because they were strategically important and easy to destroy, but because all that hydrogen burned rapidly and looked beautiful doing so. I imagine shooting one down must have been pretty satisfying for a pilot, and guilt-free, too, since most observers wore parachutes.
Homer Anderson—who was wearing a blue plaid shirt on the day I visited him—had grown up in Du Bois, Pennsylvania, in the central part of that state, and was interested in balloons and aeroplanes, so when he enlisted he asked for that kind of post; oddly, though, he wasn’t looking for any action. “To tell you the truth,” he told me, “I was more interested in questions and answers, in problems, than I was in carrying a rifle around.” So even though he had asked to serve in the Balloon Corps, he spent most of his time there doing office work, and only went up in a balloon a half-dozen times, by his recollection. And all of them were in Pennsylvania. And none of them were at all unusual. “We had certain areas that we went out in balloons,” he explained, “and more or less inspected the area that the different corps were parked in, and we just checked the area to see if there was any change or anything, anything moving in or out that wasn’t already scheduled. We knew what was scheduled. It was just more or less a review.” Nevertheless, he said, “it was thrilling for me.”
At least, that is, until the Army decided there was no future in balloon surveillance, due to the aforementioned issues, at which point they converted his unit to infantry.
They never made it to France.
While I never got to meet anyone who flew a plane Over There—or, for that matter, Over Here—I did get to meet some veterans who worked with trucks. Sure, trucks aren’t particularly dashing or romantic; I doubt anyone ever wore goggles and a long scarf while driving one. But those old rigs looked pretty cool, with their enormous square grilles and absence of headlights. And it’s a matter of fact that they were tremendously important in keeping the boys in the trenches well supplied, a task not devoid of danger, since they sometimes got quite close to the front, and almost always had to lumber long distances on roads that had been rough even before they’d sustained three years’ worth of shelling. Reuben Law worked on those trucks, trained soldiers to drive them, even drove them himself. Yet, as far as I’m concerned, that fact is actually among the less interesting things he told me when I visited him. And I love trucks.
It was July 1, 2004; Mr. Law was six weeks shy of his 106th birthday, living in the dry hills of Carson City, Nevada, with his son and daughter-in-law. Like almost every World War I veteran I interviewed, he looked much younger than he was, although to me he also looked distinctly old-timey; with his firm chin, perfectly trimmed brush mustache, steely gaze, and white hair combed back straight from his forehead, his countenance seemed like it had been lifted whole from another era, one that predated color photography. Then again, I guess it had. He wore a deep red cardigan sweater over a brown shirt, and khakis with banker’s cuffs and a crease so sharp it could have cut a crusty loaf of bread. His voice, clipped and gravelly, was the spearhead of a powerful dignity; there was no mistaking it. He was alone at home when I first got there, and seemed, at first, unsure of why anyone would want to interview him. He graciously answered my questions anyway.
He was born in Northfield, Minnesota, on August 14, 1898. His father, Walter Tweedy Law, a Scottish immigrant, worked for the William Pearson Land Company, running trains up to Canada to sell wheat lands; he died of stomach cancer when his son, Reuben, was just starting high school. His mother, born Victoria Augusta Bowler, was the daughter of James Madison Bowler, a native of northern Maine who had moved to Minnesota in 1858. When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, J. M. Bowler joined Company F of the 3rd Minnesota and was quickly made a corporal; by the time Victoria, his first child, was born—on September 16, 1863, to be specific—he had been commissioned a captain in the 3rd Minnesota, and then a Major in the 11th United States Colored Regiment. As a baby, Reuben Law’s mother “was taken into a Civil War camp by her father,” he told me. “A Civil War camp of colored troops. And some people thought it was awful for him to do that. But they took real good care of the baby while it was there. And the family has always been black-oriented, to do the same for a person that is black and a person that is white.” Pretty unusual for 1863, when much of the country still regarded black men and women as property.
“So your grandfather was a very progressive man,” I said.
“Very progressive,” he agreed. “I was grown up when he died, and I spent a lot of time with my grandfather.”
The world can get to know James Madison Bowler a bit through his and his wife’s many letters to each other, written during the Civil War and since published. He must have passed the epistolary gene on to his grandson, Reuben, who, while in the Army—at least during the nine months before he got shipped over to France—wrote several letters a day to various friends and family back in Minnesota. I know this because he also kept a diary, writing in it every single day, from:
12/19/1917: Visited Chicago Art Museum and walked the dirty city streets. Reported at First Illinois Armory at 1:00 p.m. Left for Florida by special train at 7:00 p.m. on Illinois Central R.R.
to:
11/11/1918: Le guerre finis. All flags & colors raised at noon; whistles blown, bells rung & rifles of all guards fired at 4:00 p.m. Men on crutches carried them on their shoulders.
And a bit beyond.
The diary is curt and businesslike but also a fascinating glimpse of his service, which can be said to have begun on June 6, 1917, when he was still in high school. “There was a soldier came to visit us at the school looking for recruits,” he explained to me. “And I was in a technical course, and he was kind of impressed with what I’d been doing in school . . . I enlisted there, when he was there, in the Army Reserve. And it was agreed, when I enlisted, that they wouldn’t—my graduation, my high school was coming up in a few months, in a month or two—that they wouldn’t call me to active duty before my graduation.” They actually called him up in December; he’d spent the interim working on a Ford assembly line in Minneapolis, making Model Ts. “I was putting boards together in the little trunk area in the back with screws,” he recalled. “It was good work at the time. I think they paid five dollars a day. Anyway, the other automobile companies that were at the time, said Ford would go broke paying that kind of money. And his answer was, if I don’t pay them that kind of money, they won’t have money to buy my cars.”
Reuben Law acquired his diary on December 18, 1917, when he boarded a train from Minneapolis and left for Chicago, and started writing in it the next day. As I said, he never missed a day. Some were more eventful than others. On December 21, he wrote:
In train all day. Took one hour hike at Albany, Georgia. Arrived at Jacksonville 8:30 p.m. Friday, took side track to camp and slept on Pullman that night. Had no supper. Wrote to: Hester, Marion & Deac.
On December 22:
Went into Camp [Joseph E.] Johnston at 8:30 a.m. and ate very light breakfast. Cleaned around barracks and loafed rest of day. Received 1 blanket, 1 comforter and 1 mattress to be filled with hay. Sang at night with Chicago bunch who were gathered around the barracks. Camp fire accompanied by three string instruments. 300 more hungry men came from Fort Thomas, Kentucky. Wrote to: Edith M., & Mother.
And December 28:
Morning cold, but bright. Wrote to: Mother, Jim, & H. Street. Uniforms issued. Spent several hours trading uniforms in order to get a somewhat better fit.
Clothes issued: 1 O.D. [olive drab] coat; 1 O.D. trousers, 2 khaki trousers; 1 khaki coat; 1 pair shoes; 1 pair puttees; 2 shirts; 1 overcoat; 1 poncho; 1 overalls; 1 jacket; 1 hat; 2 suits summer and 2 suits winter underwear; 6 pair sox; 1 belt.
By New Year’s Eve, the temperature in Jacksonville—Florida—was down to 10 degrees. “Wish my skates were here,” he wrote. “Drilled. Had inspection!! Wrote to: Hester & Mother.”
January 1, 1918:
Cloudy, 15 degrees. New Years day; no frill and had no detail duties. Went to Jacksonville to do some errands for myself and the boys. Tried to look up Mr. C. E. Hillyer; got note at his office. Took pictures along the roadway while hiked to town.
January 2:
Cloudy, 23 degrees. Had a fine morning of drill which loosened up our colds a great deal. Had seven hours of drill today. They are livening things up now and working us harder. Received two very welcome letters from Lois today, the first mail since arrival at camp. Wrote to: Mother & Lois.
He lived in Block G and was assigned to the Motor Transport Corps. All in all, it seems to have been a relatively easy post: A typical day may have included an hour or two of drilling, and maybe some cleanup or patrol. There was a lot of time for visiting family friends in the area, touring around Jacksonville and St. Augustine, and, most of all—except for writing letters—hiking. Reuben Law did a lot of hiking in Florida, so much, in fact, that I wondered if perhaps that was the secret to his longevity. Until, that is, I came across his entry for February 10, 1918: “Six of us hired a Maxwell and drove them to St. Augustine . . . Drank from Fountain of Youth.” (Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that his mother, who lived to be 109, probably had something to do with it, too.)
The next day, he wrote: “Rifles were issued to company this afternoon. I now have Springfield 30-30 #739744.” He didn’t get much chance to train with it, though; the day after that, he was assigned to his truck, a two-ton Pierce-Arrow. His job, he told me, was “training soldiers to drive and drive at night without any lights, and drive by the feel of the edges of the road so that they’re on the road but not quite.” The trucks “were all Pierce-Arrows and Cadillacs,” and were so well made, he recalled, that “we could oftentimes leave the truck overnight and start it in the morning with that little tickler and it’d hit the right cylinder.” I have no idea what that means, in case you’re wondering.
After about nine months of that—during which time he probably trained hundreds of drivers—Reuben Law was sent to France. Eighty-six years later, he still didn’t quite know why. “I imagine they figured they’d trained as many [truck drivers] as they could use,” he speculated, but it seems the Army might not have known why they shipped Private First Class Law Over There, either, because when he arrived at Brest, he recalled, “they seemed to not know where to fit us. I went from a receiving company in France, to an electrical company.” But the electrical company didn’t have anything for him to do, so eventually they put him back in the Motor Transport Corps and sent him east, to the town of Allerey. On the way, he passed through Reims, the ancient city to which French kings had traveled for centuries to be crowned; the Germans had damaged or destroyed much of the city by the time he got to see it.
In Allerey, PFC Law was quickly promoted to sergeant and put in charge of the motor pool of Base Hospital 26, a large facility comprising three smaller hospitals. “We were sent there to take charge of transportation of all kinds: ambulances, staff cars, motorcycles—the works,” he explained. “We had a mobile repair shop that was moved right into a big garage, and we repaired any vehicles that came our way that needed repair—mostly motorcycles. And we gave the dispatch rider a motorcycle that had been repaired and we took his in for repair, ready for the next guy.” He was assigned a motorcycle, too—a British model that he didn’t much care for. One day, though, a Harley-Davidson came in for repair, and he snagged it.
He told a lot of stories about France, many of which I had heard before in some form or other—of roaming around the countryside looking for supplies, bargaining with farmers for eggs (“the French aristocracy are kind of stiff-necked people, but the peasants are real down-to-earth people and friendly”), celebrating the armistice (“we joined the hubbub in town, and every girl that came by gave you a kiss”). He admired the French, was impressed by what he’d seen Over There; by the time he’d arrived, he told me, France was “a worn-out nation, a worn-out people. They’d been at it so long and there was so much I’ll go over and kill you, you come back and kill me, and you kept repeating that over and over until eventually both are likely to lose.” He said he thought the two nations had forged a bond during that war; “By and large, I think we’ve had a pretty decent relationship with France,” he offered, then added: “Up until just recently, [when] they’ve disagreed with our activities in Iraq.” Two more years would pass before the congressional commissary would stop serving Freedom Fries.
In the months following the armistice, the French and Americans gradually broke down that huge hospital in Allerey and its motor pool, until one day, Reuben Law was the only soul still there. “I was the last man scrubbing,” he recalled. “And there was an engineer that had charge of the electrical generating system for the camp and he said, ‘I’m gonna leave that on and when you’re through and leave here, pull this switch and that’s the only thing you have to do.’” The last one to leave, he turned out the lights. Eventually he made his way to the coast and sailed back home, a journey that must have inspired in him some ambivalence—not only because of his fondness for the French, but because the trip to France, the previous fall, had very nearly killed him.
It wasn’t seasickness, either, or the U-boat that forced the convoy to separate into two columns shortly after it set sail. He had boarded the HMS Corona in New York on September 29, 1918, and sailed off the next day. “Left the harbor this afternoon,” reads his diary entry for September 30, 1918. “Lots of sea.” Two days later, though: “Sick as the devil this morning.”
“I remember they assigned me to duty at a doorway that goes to the lower deck,” he told me, “and an officer came along and I failed to salute. And he checked me out, and I made some vague remark that didn’t make any sense to him. And he knew right away that I had the flu and he hospitalized me.” Hence his entry for October 3, 1918: “Was taken to the hospital this morning with Spanish Influenza.”
Spanish influenza: the great flu pandemic of 1918. It started at Fort Riley, Kansas, in March of 1918, or so it is believed. Unlike other strains of the virus, the 1918 flu preyed mostly upon hearty adults. In eighteen months, it killed off 3 percent of the world’s population, around fifty million people; some estimates double that figure. It was so terrifying that just about every country engaged in the war, Allies and Entente alike, censored news of the disease’s spread. The Spanish, though—they were neutral—shared their own news of the flu, including that it had nearly killed their king, Alfonso XIII. They were rewarded for their openness by having the disease—one of the deadliest pandemics in all of history—named for them.
The flu spread quickly, tearing through the Corona in just a couple of days. “They converted the big, fancy dining room of the ship to a hospital,” Reuben Law explained. “And so we slept, we stayed on tables. They put two tables together and there’d be two of us, and I, my head was next to the feet of the guy next to me . . . We had little pads, but they didn’t amount to much. I was awfully sick.” Conditions in that makeshift infirmary didn’t help, either. “I remember the brother of a sergeant that was in our unit was behind me,” he said. “And his feet would come to my head. And he kept kicking me in the head. He was just out of it, you know. He couldn’t help it, he was just trying to survive. And he finally died.” Fortunately for Reuben Law, his bunkmate’s replacement “was more gentle with my head.”
Things got grim pretty quickly on a ship that wasn’t designed to handle a deadly epidemic. “They started putting the bodies along the outside deck,” he explained, “but it got to be too many and they reverted to burying them at sea.” By the time they arrived at Brest on October 13, ninety-one men on the Corona had died. Reuben Law was not among them, although he was still so sick that, as he told me, he had to sleep with “a sergeant on either side of me to keep me warm at night.” Even so, he—and everyone else onboard—had to help unload the ship. With their reduced numbers, it took four days.
And through all of it—the delirium, the fever and kicks to the head, sleeping between two sergeants, unloading the ship, and everything that followed—Reuben Law never once failed to write a daily entry in his journal:
10/4/1918: Sick.
10/5/1918: Sick.
10/6/1918: Got my mind streightened [sic] out this afternoon. Had been delerious [sic] for four days.
10/7/1918: Sick.
10/8/1918: Sick.
10/9/1918: Sick.
10/10/1918: Sick.
10/11/1918: Carried out of the hospital this morning. Weak as the deuce.
Even if you’ve never been weak as the deuce, or anything “as the deuce,” you’ve got to appreciate that kind of archaic slang. I picked up a fair bit of it in the course of interviewing a lot of men and women whose vocabularies were three generations older than mine, but perhaps the strangest little bit of argot I collected was one I encountered in a letter that Corporal Howard Verne Ramsey of Company C of the 302nd Water Tank Train wrote to his mother from France on November 3, 1918. In its penultimate paragraph, he bemoans his lack of stationery:
I’ve sure got to Hooverize on paper as we are unable to get any at the Y.M.C.A. I brought this sheet from the states with me.
Yes, I know, these days we remember Herbert Clark Hoover as the thirty-first American president, a man whose ineffectual dithering in the face of the Great Depression set the stage for the advent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. But a decade or so before all that, during World War I, Hoover became famous, and universally admired, as the man who saved Europe from starvation.
War, you see, is not good for farming. Land tends to get ruined once people have been fighting over it for a while, especially if those people are digging trenches and firing off hundreds or thousands of artillery shells a day. And the men who would ordinarily work that land are off somewhere in uniform, hunkered down in a trench on someone else’s farmland. Oh, and the enemy has probably captured a lot of it, too, so you couldn’t even get to it if you somehow managed to escape that trench. All of which added up to a severe food shortage in Europe.
Enter Mr. Hoover, a man of humble origins who had initially attained wealth and prominence as a mining engineer. Working as both an independent consultant and a lecturer, he had already earned a reputation as a man possessed of excellent organizational skills by the time war broke out in Europe, whereupon he was asked to help coordinate the safe return of more than one hundred thousand Americans who were then trapped across the Atlantic. I guess that project gave him a taste for large-scale humanitarian efforts, because as soon as he finished it he started an organization called the Committee for Relief in Belgium. Belgium, of course, had been occupied by Germany since the very beginning of the war; before the invasion, the small, highly urbanized country had only been able to produce about 25 percent of the food it consumed, importing the rest from neighboring countries. The Germans cut off those imports, and confiscated most of Belgium’s homegrown food for its own consumption, which left the Belgians pretty hungry. Hoover and the CRB successfully imported nearly six million tons of food into Belgium, feeding more than nine million Belgian civilians—no simple task, considering that the Germans were deeply suspicious of the organization’s motives, and the British feared that improving conditions in occupied Belgium, and thus easing tensions there, only helped the Germans in the end. Any man who could manage to appease both of them simultaneously must have been tremendously talented. And perhaps masochistic.
When America entered the fight, President Wilson recalled Hoover from London, where he’d been living since before the war, and put him in charge of the newly created United States Food Administration. The United States was larger in area than all of the European combatants (except for Russia) combined, and had plenty of fertile farmland that was unsullied by trenches and shell holes. Surely, America could feed Europe, or at least its allies, until the war was over and they could start planting again. There were only two challenges: seeing to it that Americans were OK with shipping their wheat overseas so someone else could eat it; and making sure that nobody on either end of the transaction got gouged in the process.
That second objective was relatively easy; the USFA just instituted price controls across the board. Asking Americans to sign off on shipping their own food overseas—effectively, to take food off their own plates—would prove more complicated. For one thing, it had never been done before; sure, Americans had curtailed their food consumption during the Civil War and the Revolution—but not voluntarily. The memories of those experiences were far from pleasant. And this war wasn’t even being fought on American soil; it’s one thing to cut back because your farm has been burned by the British, but quite another to do so on behalf of foreign civilians you can’t even see. Sure, conserving would benefit soldiers, too, even American doughboys. But there is a natural human tendency, in anxious and uncertain times, to hold fast to what you have. Overcoming that, Hoover understood, would take some doing.
And so he launched one of the greatest public affairs campaigns in American history, designed not only to make Americans less uneasy about parting with their edible bounty—and, just to be clear, eating less so others might have something—but to make them actually feel good about it, and righteous, and proud to be doing so. They commissioned America’s most renowned artists and illustrators, and produced dozens of posters attacking the issue from every angle. “Don’t waste food while others starve!” implored one poster featuring an illustration of a gaunt mother cradling a baby as two emaciated children clutch at her skirts, all against a backdrop of a destroyed cathedral. Another pictured a corpulent plutocrat sitting at a table, smoking a fat cigar while harried servants carry off trays of half-eaten entrées; “Sir,” it implored, “don’t waste while your wife saves. Adopt the doctrine of the clean plate.” “Eat less, and let us be thankful that we have enough to share with those who fight for freedom,” advised a poster set in a brimming storehouse; an identical backdrop was employed for the message: “This is what GOD gives us. What are you giving so that others may live? Eat less wheat, meat, fats, sugar. Send more to Europe, or they will starve.” That was direct.
“Eat more corn, oats and rye products—fish and poultry—fruits, vegetables and potatoes, baked, boiled and broiled foods,” declared another poster, in what sounds like a pretty good diet plan; it almost makes you wonder if the USFA was doing the right thing in sending American wheat, meat, sugar, and fats Over There. One poster showed a bunch of lean doughboys—obviously not too much sugar or fats in their diet—charging over the top, bayonets fixed. “They are giving all,” it proclaimed. “Will you send them wheat?” Posters urged households to observe “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays,” women to plant “War Gardens,” children to cultivate “US School Gardens,” and immigrants to do their bit, too. “Food Will Win the War,” proclaimed one poster, under a scene of new arrivals crowding on deck to catch their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty (under a rainbow, no less). “You came here seeking freedom. You must now help to preserve it. Wheat is needed for the allies—Waste nothing.” And just to make sure that even recent immigrants got the message, versions were printed up in Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Lithuanian, too.
“Hunger breeds madness,” Woodrow Wilson once said, and that quote emblazoned a number of posters; so did offerings from General Pershing, Belgian Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, the late President Lincoln, and eighteenth-century Polish generals Kosciuszko and Pulaski. The most effective entreaties, though, were neither subtle nor high-minded. “Blood or Bread” declared one poster, featuring an illustration of a shirtless doughboy cradling a wounded comrade in his arms. “Others are giving their blood. You will shorten the war—save life if you eat only what you need and waste nothing.” As corporations have taken to saying these days: Do more with less.
Hooverize.
It worked. Americans ate more fish, more corn, more potatoes, more fruit; less meat, less wheat, less sugar and fats. They grew their own vegetables, put less on their plates, ate leftovers more often. And Herbert Hoover and the USFA sent $7 billion worth of food across the ocean. Yes, a dozen years later, many Americans would be reduced to living in Hoovervilles. But in 1917 and 1918, they were eager, and honored, to Hooverize. I don’t know that Howard Ramsey was among them, but he did it nonetheless.
Mr. Ramsey had been born on April 2, 1898, in Rico, Colorado, a mining town in the western part of that state. Rico scarcely exists anymore, but in 1898 it was a thriving concern, big and lively enough to support Charles Allen Ramsey’s dental practice. Charles had been born in Iowa (or, as his son Howard pronounced it, “Ioway”), his wife, Eva, in Kansas (pronounced the regular way). “They came to Colorado in the covered-wagon days,” Howard Ramsey told me when I first met him, on October 19, 2003. We were at his daughter Coral’s house in Portland, Oregon. Mr. Ramsey lived nearby, in a private home that the owners had converted into a very small assisted-living facility. I was surprised to learn that; he looked about seventy-five, thirty years younger than he was, and seemed quite robust to me. Certainly, talking to Howard Ramsey was no different than talking to any adult, except that, like every other centenarian I met, he was a bit hard of hearing. He had a very high forehead, and full, puffy white hair behind it; wore eyeglasses so large they could have served as safety goggles, and a white, short-sleeved shirt with two pockets on the chest. Our entire conversation that first day—more than two hours of it—took place at Coral’s kitchen table. Her father sat up straight, spoke easily and in a deep voice. His discharge papers said he stood five feet ten and a half inches tall, but he seemed taller than that to me.
“They used to take the kids close,” he said of that covered-wagon trip. “The kids who could walk, they would let them walk . . . they’d make them walk close to the covered wagons on account of the Indians. They wouldn’t let the kids wander anyplace.” Mr. Ramsey wasn’t sure why, exactly, his parents’ families had migrated to Colorado, but apparently they weren’t interested in working in the mines. His father, he told me, “went to barber college after he had four kids. Then he was a barber for a while, and then he went to dental school. He went to dental school for four years when he had four kids. So he became a dentist, and he was a dentist ever after.” Howard grew up the third of four children—the oldest was his sister, Hazel, then his brother Erle, and a younger brother named Charlie—in a big house right in town. “’Course, the town wasn’t much of a town,” he said with a chuckle. “It had one main street, and that’s about it. It had a hotel at one time, but the hotel burned down. That took care of that.” After his first year of school, the family moved to nearby Telluride, which was then just another mining town, if a somewhat larger one. (In 1889, Butch Cassidy had robbed the bank there, so at least it could boast that much.) At fifteen he moved with his family to Portland; after he graduated from high school, in 1916, they all moved again, to Salt Lake City, where Howard went to work driving a taxi.
His discharge papers actually list his occupation as “chauffeur,” a term a bit fancier than “taxi driver,” but I don’t think he would have minded either title. He’d always loved cars, ever since his father had bought one back in Rico. “We had the first and only car in that little town,” he told me.
“What kind of car was it?” I asked.
“A Winton Six,” he said. “It was like a . . . let me see, a Pierce-Arrow, the Winton, and the Packard. Those were the three major cars. The big cars.” The Winton, he explained, “was a five-passenger car, with two extra seats in the back they added, so that made it a seven-passenger car . . . And everybody in this little town at one time or another had a ride.” Eventually, Howard learned to drive on that car; and later, while driving a taxi in Salt Lake, he learned about the war. “We were right near Fort Douglas, you know,” he explained, “and so Fort Douglas was all war . . . and we used to pick up a lot of soldiers, you know. They’d be in town visiting a friend, and they’d take a taxi to get back to the fort.” On June 19, 1918, he and a friend from work, a fellow named Harry Cleveland, went to a recruiting station in town and enlisted. Or tried to, anyway. “We went up to sign up, and we was underweight,” Howard recalled with a smile. “They wouldn’t take us. So we went down into town, and we bought a bunch of bananas, and ate these bananas, and drank a lot of water.” He laughed. “Then we went back, we weighed in, and we waited.
“We passed,” he said.
Good thing, too; the Army needed men who knew how to drive. “Nobody drove in those days, like we do today,” Corporal Ramsey explained to me eighty-five years later. “You know, driving was an exception.” They were assigned to the 302nd Water Tank Train—Howard to Company C, Harry to Company D. “So after we get in the service, here were these, all these company guys, not hardly one of them could drive. We taught them how to drive, you know,” he said. “We taught whole units how to drive.”
The 302nd Water Tank Train is one of the most interestingly named outfits I have encountered. If you’re wondering what, exactly, a water-tank train is, so did Howard Ramsey’s mother; he took pains, in his letter of September 23, 1918, to explain it to her:
A Water Tank Train or motor supply train consists of 75 men and a Captain and a Lieut. 77 all-together. A train consists of 33 trucks making 33 drivers, each driver is a corporal. 33 assistant drivers who are 1st class privates. 1 truckmaster and one head mechanic who are 1st class Sergeants. 3 assistant truckmasters and 3 assistant mechanics who are all Sergeants. The extra man I think is what is called a signal man. This is about all I know about it.
They drove trucks—“white trucks”—fitted with enormous water tanks. “We carried water to the front,” Mr. Ramsey told me. But that was months later, after they got to France. In between, the Army sent them to Camp Holabird, in Baltimore, for more training, and then across the Atlantic on the Leviathan, where, unfortunately, his experience was not entirely unlike Reuben Law’s on the Corona. They even landed at the same port. “At Brest,” he recalled, “sits a high hill. And here’s everybody, half-sick from the flu—well . . . they were sick either from the flu or the seasickness—and they had to carry their packs and walk up this hill. And I’ll never forget that. A lot of guys, they didn’t make it. They just collapsed on that side of that hill. I’ll always remember that. I carried somebody’s pack for him so that he could still walk. We weren’t there too long. We had, all these—two, three hundred died on the ship, so they had to all be buried there.” Fortunately, Howard Ramsey had remained healthy through it all. “I didn’t even get seasick,” he said. “I got to wandering around one time, and I got to this part of the ship where these sick guys were, and they got me out of there.”
Surprisingly—or perhaps not—there was no hint of this in his first letter home from France, dated October 8, 1918:
We left in the afternoon. For the first few days we had a very quiet sea. Just like a lake. Very few got sick. The last days was very rough. The ships rolled and pitched. A few now got sick. But Harry and neither one felt a touch of it. Not even a headache. We got magazines and found a dandy place on deck and read out loud to each other and ate candy. . . . We were up on deck most of the time watching the flying fish and nothing but water everywhere. We sure had swell eats. I was on K.P. several times and believe me the sailors sure know how to cook. I ate enough pie to sink a ship. It was sure a swell kitchen. The trip was very uneventful as we didn’t see a thing.
Not a syllable about influenza. I’m not sure if the Army forbade it, or if he just didn’t wish to worry his family. He shared all kinds of other information—so much that some Army censor had to black out the date, time, and location of his arrival in France. They did, however, allow him to discuss the weather:
It was raining when we landed and we had to march here, to our temporary camps. It was dark and the cobblestone road was full of holes. We stumbled and slipped along wading in mud and stepping in water holes.
We didn’t get to see any of the town. The streets are narrow and the houses average three stories. But the lights were out and the shutters up. Occasionally we would see a gray haired woman in a window waving. . . .
Today I have just been laying around. There has been a few French girls and boys around selling nuts and grapes. They look human and we have been practicing our French on them. I have a sheet of French words I have been studying. Harry and I know about a dozen words and its fun to say Hello goodbye etc. But I think as a Frenchman I’d be a failure. I went to the canteen and got this paper and some American Bull Durham. I’ll soon have to be using centimes and francs instead of dollars and cents. But mother I think I’ll like it here. So I had better close for this time and I will write you as often as I find time. Give everyone my love.
If it sounds like Howard Ramsey’s war was pretty easy, perhaps it was, at least compared to some others’. According to his discharge papers, he didn’t arrive at the front until October 16, just twenty-five days before the armistice. He told me he drove a water-tank truck to the front lines exactly once; “then,” he said, “they took our tank off and put seats on there, so I carried officers after that.” But though, again, he rarely mentions it in his letters home (he begins that November 3 note with, “It is awful hard to write having nothing to write about”), he was, he told me, often in harm’s way during those twenty-five days. The 302nd Water Tank Train was stationed just to the rear of the trenches—there was only a “pile of dirt” separating them, he recalled—and billeted, he said, “in abandoned houses and things like that.” And “oh, yeah, they got shelled,” he added. “All the time, when we was on the front, these shells were landing all around us.”
“Did any of them ever get close to you?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, they did. Maybe in the next block, or across the—they were all over.”
“This was in daytime, or at night, or both?”
“Oh, all the time. Mostly at night.”
“And what would you do to take cover?”
He laughed. “Just roll up the blankets. That’s about all we could do, you know.”
After a while, he said, they stopped putting on their gas masks; none of the shells, to his knowledge, had ever contained gas. Still, he recalled, “it was tough to get sleep. Because every so often it was ‘abandon ship!’ We’d have to get up and get going.” And in addition to that, he told me, “we used to get bombed every so often”—that is, by aeroplanes. It was an experience that, strangely, he appreciated. “About the only excitement we have is running for the cave or cellar when Jerry flys over,” he wrote in that November 3 letter. “We occasionally see an air battle for aeroplanes are quite common here. Of course the anti-aircraft guns always open up and drive back any enemy plane.”
Dramatic as that all is, the most memorable stories Howard Ramsey told me that day, and when I visited him again two years later, concerned things that happened between November 11, 1918, when the bombing and shelling stopped, and the following summer, when he left France aboard the USS Luckenbach (which, on a previous crossing, had carried Art Fiala home). One takes place just a few days after the armistice, when Private Ramsey was approached by a couple of officers who ordered him to drive them, in his former water-tank truck, to Germany. The reason was never clear; perhaps they were just curious to see the place. So they all drove to Germany. But soon, for whatever reason, the officers lost their nerve. “They decided that we were in too far,” he recalled, “so we had to turn around. So we turned around, went back, and we came to the country called Luxembourg.” And then, somewhere in Luxembourg—he didn’t recall where, exactly, but the entire country is smaller than Rhode Island, so any guess stands a fair chance of being right—the officers had Private Ramsey stop the car so they could get out, perhaps to take some snapshots. “So we parked—I don’t know whether we got pictures or not—but we parked along the curb,” he said. “And I was waiting for these two officers to come back. Well, while I was sitting there, a little girl come up, a little girl with little blond curls. She jumped on the side of the truck, and sat down beside of me. She talked perfect English. And I found out from her, and I later verified it, that pretty much everybody in Luxembourg spoke English.
“So this little blond girl,” he continued, “she sat there, and we visit back and forth. And finally she says, ‘Will you give me a souvenir? If you give me a souvenir, I will give you a souvenir.’” Perhaps she had never met an American before, and was hoping for something that might teach her just a little bit about that country across the ocean. Private Ramsey was flummoxed; “I don’t have any American souvenirs to give you,” he told the little girl. But then, he said, “I looked all through my pockets, and I had a penny.” It was the only thing he had to give, so he presented it to her; and she, in turn, pressed something into his hand. And then, he told me, “she jumped down off the truck and ran.” What she gave him, he explained, “was wrapped up, it was—like a little package, like this here.” He cupped his hands together tight. “So when I open it up, it was a lock of her hair. A lock about that long.” He held his two index fingers up, about three inches apart. “I still got it,” he said, and laughed. “Someplace, somewhere.”
After that, Private Ramsey—he would be promoted to corporal in January, 1919—took up souvenir-hunting himself back in France. His favorite trophies, he said, were German helmets; sometimes he’d lead parties of several friends and acquaintances out into the field to scavenge for them. They were plentiful, apparently, because he even managed to send quite a few home to friends and relatives. “Tell you what,” he wrote his mother in March, 1919, “a Fritz helmet makes a nice flower pot. You might try it. But don’t think it was gotten in the mix, for you used to find them everywhere.”
“I remember one time,” he told me, “I asked one of the other guys, ‘Come on, Joe,’ or whatever his name was, ‘Let’s go and get some helmets.’” So they went out and scavenged around; it turned out to be a productive afternoon. “Each of us got four, five, six German helmets,” he recalled. “And we came back, and one of our trucks came by. So we flagged him down, and we went around—the panel truck had a high tailgate, like this—we took these German helmets, and we threw them over the tailgate, and then climbed up to get in.” He paused, just a beat. “The truck was full of German war prisoners,” he said. “We never felt so damn foolish in our lives.”
He had a lot of funny stories, but of everyone I interviewed, Howard Ramsey also had the grimmest assignment after the armistice. While others were hunting deer in Germany, or relaxing at Aix-les-Bains, or being inspected by President Wilson, Corporal Ramsey and some unfortunate others were performing a duty that none of them would have requested. “We started a big cemetery in France,” he recalled. “We would take the bodies from the grave to this new cemetery.” He told me this very early in our first visit; in fact, it was one of the first things he said. Clearly, the experience had left quite an impression on him.
When he said “take the bodies from the grave to this new cemetery,” he meant: exhume bodies from what were meant to be temporary burial sites, usually at or very near the spot where the deceased fell, a place typically marked by a wooden stake or the like, and labeled in some manner—the best bet would be to fix one of the deceased’s two identification disks to the stake—so that, when a party would return in the future to reclaim the remains, they might know whose remains they were reclaiming. Of course, since lines shifted and artillery fell everywhere, a lot of remains were lost before anyone could reclaim them; and even if they were somehow found later, whatever was left to identify them might since have been blown somewhere else. War produces a lot of corpses but doesn’t give you much time to deal with them properly.
The “new cemetery” he referred to is now known as Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. It is the largest American cemetery in all of Europe, covering 130 acres; more than fourteen thousand Americans are buried there. That’s more people than lived in the town in which I grew up, in Westchester County, New York, which seemed like a pretty big place to me at the time. The cemetery is divided into eight sections, each of which are exactly the same size, perfect rectangles with perfect ninety-degree corners. Every row of markers—and you can imagine how many rows there are, with fourteen thousand graves present—is unfailingly straight and evenly spaced. The lawn is the most verdant and meticulously mowed I have ever trod upon; the cemetery is without a doubt one of the three most majestic human constructions I have ever beheld. Like the other two—Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building—its scale is difficult to imagine if you’ve never seen it, and difficult to grasp even if you have. I spent several long days walking through it—in that part of France, in late June, the sun sets at about 10:00 p.m.—and only managed to read a small fraction of the markers.
The site of the cemetery was selected on October 14, 1918, almost a month before the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the last great battle of the war, ended; needless to say, nothing else happened until after November 11. Howard Ramsey seemed to indicate that he and others started working on it just a few days later, and I know, from his letters, that he continued to do so until July, 1919. Very early photos of the cemetery show wooden crosses; the white marble markers were installed later. Somewhere I came upon a book of a dozen or so postcards from 1919, each one illustrated with either a different photograph of some aspect of the cemetery’s construction, or a shot of the wreckage of the nearby village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. The book is complete; not surprisingly, none of the postcards were ever used. I’m not sure whose idea it was to print up postcards featuring scenes of the building of a massive new cemetery and the destruction of a quaint old village, but I doubt he was able to land a job at Hallmark after the war.
One of the reasons Meuse-Argonne, and the other American military cemeteries of that era, turned out so well is that their construction was personally supervised by General Pershing. In fact, he was onsite all the time; on Easter Sunday, 1919, Howard Ramsey wrote his mother that his camp had just been inspected by both Pershing and Secretary of War Newton Baker. “One time General Pershing came to interview us,” Corporal Ramsey told me eighty-four years later. “This convoy was bringing General Pershing to view this scene, he came up there. So we all lined up to the back. So here comes this person’s car, and another officer’s car, and another officer’s car, like that, four, five. And as Pershing went by, we were sending a salute. And Pershing was the only guy, the only officer in that whole convoy, that ever returned our salute.
“We always thought about that—how funny that was,” he continued. “Yeah, Pershing respected us twice. Another time, we went out to pick up the troops, I forget how many each truck picked up, then we carried them over to the cemetery and let them out, and we went back to the cemetery after the ceremony and picked them up, took them back to the camp . . . [Pershing] had a platform made out where he’d go to talk, and it was over a bunch of trenches, empty trenches. But the trenches had been, you know, dug, but not filled—you know, no bodies in it. So to make this look nice so Pershing could look out over nice bodies, they stuck up planks. They filled these graves, these trenches in again, they put up a flag or a name, you know, so he’d look out over this, and it’d look nice. Soon as he left they dug the trenches up again. Oh,” he said, laughing, “I never got over that.” General Pershing’s involvement with the cemetery was hardly ceremonial; he spent the last quarter century of his life as chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, which oversees all overseas American military cemeteries to this day, and personally made a great many decisions regarding World War I cemeteries’ design and maintenance. One of those decisions was that it would not suffice for every unknown American soldier buried in France to be commemorated with a cross. “He said, ‘We know that a certain percentage of the identified dead buried here are Jewish, so that same percentage should be represented as Jewish among the unknowns’” with a Star of David marker, explained Phil Rivers, who was superintendent of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery when I visited. “World War I was the only war for which this was done. If you go to a World War II cemetery, all the unknowns are marked with crosses.”
Like many beautiful things, the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery was the product of a hard, dirty, ugly process; in the beginning, Corporal Ramsey recalled, “there were no provisions made for going and coming. So I remember one night, it was cold, and we had no blankets, or nothing like that. We had to sleep—we slept in the cemetery, because we could sleep between the two graves, and keep the wind off of us, see?” Still, he was fortunate compared to some, and he knew it. The men of the 302nd Water Tank Train were chosen because they were truck drivers; “we hauled the bodies from the cemetery to the graveyard,” he said. And while the work was unpleasant—“these bodies had been buried, you know, not in coffins or anything like that, just in the ground,” he explained—there were others working there who had it far worse. “The colored people did all the work,” he confessed. “We didn’t have to handle the bodies or anything like that. They’d put them on a canvas, put the canvas in the box, and take the box and bury that.” All he and the rest of the 302nd Water Tank Train—every last one of whom were white—did was drive the bodies from one place to another.
Of course, that was unpleasant, too. “I am now hauling dead bodies,” Howard wrote his mother at one point. “We go out on the old battle fields and colored fellows dig them up and we haul them in here to the cemetery. This is an enormous job and no telling when we will be thru. 15,000 more to bring in and we bring in between 200 and 300 a day.” In his next letter, he elaborated somewhat:
During the war men were buried in small quickly made and rough cemeteries or out on the field. This was the best that these men could receive during the stress of battle. But now that the war is over these men are being put in a more fitting resting place. And this is partly our job. This is a large camp consisting of mostly truck companies and negro regiments. . . .
I won’t write anymore or go into detail about this work as it’s something a woman wouldn’t enjoy.
And as he wrote that sentence, he knew—having acknowledged it already in his last letter—that he and his buddies didn’t nearly have the worst of it. “I don’t know how we ever got the colored people to—” he said to me at some point, but never finished the sentence. He didn’t really need to.
But I’ll get to that part of the story a bit later, when the time is right.
Of all the men I’ve discussed in this chapter, Howard Ramsey was the only one who experienced what we typically envision when we say the word “war.” Reuben Law very nearly died of influenza on the trip across, but once he got to France he was far removed from the front lines. Jud Wagner got there just three weeks before it ended, too late, apparently, to make it to the front. Roy Tucker got there on the very day it ended. Homer Anderson never made it out of Pennsylvania. Harold Gardner didn’t get any closer than a seat on a train, a blanket, and some socks.
Even so, that war was very important to all of them. It was such a significant event in their lives, in fact, that they were all willing to take the time, eighty-five or so years later, when they must have known well that their remaining days were few, to discuss it with me. More than just willing; they were eager to share these old stories with someone one last time. Most of them hadn’t been told in fifty, sixty years. Some of them had never been told before. These men had lived entire lifetimes—long lifetimes—since the events they recounted to me had transpired; in some cases, the war had occupied very few days of their existence. And yet, something about it carved in them a furrow so deep that for the remaining eight or so decades of their lives, they needed, now and again, to run a finger of memory through that groove, to feel it again for a few minutes, an hour, two hours. You might suspect, in Howard Ramsey’s case, that it was about having been shelled and bombed from the air; but having visited him twice and spoken with him for several hours, I think for him it was more about building that cemetery, seeing thousands and thousands of corpses laid out, and moving them from the sites of their deaths to a burial ground of enormous scale. For Reuben Law it was, perhaps, about the wounded he saw at that hospital, and what he encountered every time he had to clean out an ambulance after transport or a truck that had come under fire, and those who had boarded the Corona with him but never disembarked. For Homer Anderson, I’d guess, it was about being up in those balloons and seeing, from that height, the great works of war spread out all around him: cantonments, camp sites, shooting ranges, trenchworks, maneuvers, other balloons. For Jud Wagner, I imagine, it was getting close enough to have a loaded rifle in his hands, a gas mask slung around his neck—close enough, maybe even, to hear the big guns—but not, at the last, sent into the fight. For Roy Tucker, I know, it was about those piles of people and horses that greeted him upon his arrival in France, all of them, as he said, dead to beat the band. And for Harold Gardner, I believe, it was about that feeling I imagine he experienced as he sat on the train that morning, that mix of fear and thrill and anxiety, not the same as but not altogether different from what you probably experience at that moment when the roller coaster car you’re sitting in pauses for just an instant at the apex of that first great rise, the one you’ve just spent three whole minutes ascending, passing every slat of track with a clack-clack-clack: Here we go.
I’d say that makes him a World War I veteran. That, and that $1.00 check.