14

A Wicked Gun, That Machine Gun

IN SEPTEMBER, 2003, having returned from a swing through the South and a trip to Wisconsin, I began planning a visit to the Pacific Northwest. I wanted to get to Portland to meet Howard Ramsey—formerly of the 302nd Water Tank Train—and had a few more prospects lined up, mostly in the Seattle area. Still, I felt that I needed more; I suspected that some of those prospects might not pan out. I was correct: The 107-year-old who’d served with the 1st Engineers and now lived near Tacoma—he had been gassed in France, I’d heard, but had fully recovered—turned out to be unable to answer any questions beyond his name and date of birth; and the 104-year-old cavalry veteran at the Soldiers Home in Orting, Washington—he’d served in the Panama Canal Zone—told me I was an idiot for imagining that he might remember anything at all about his youth or military service, and that the secret to his longevity was nobody else’s damned business. I may have mentioned him before.

Fortunately, before I headed west I went through the French List and tracked down every prospect listed as living in Washington and Oregon. Unfortunately, they were all dead.

The day before I departed for Seattle, though, I went through the list again, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anyone. I’d called everyone recorded as living in those two states, with one exception: one William J. Lake, of Yakima, Washington. I hadn’t even bothered with Mr. Lake, since his date of birth was listed as October 30, 1885, which would have made him 117 years and eleven months old. No man, I knew, had ever lived to that age. But as I looked over his application one last time, it occurred to me that he would have been 113 years old when he’d been awarded the Legion of Honor, at which point he would have already been one of the oldest men who’d ever lived. Yet I had never heard of Mr. Lake, had never seen his name on any of the lists of the world’s oldest people, which lists I had been studying quite frequently of late. I wondered: Was 1885 a typo?

I confirmed as much after I called his last listed place of residence, a retirement manor in Yakima, and learned, to my delight, that he was still alive and healthy and clearheaded and would be equally delighted, I was told, to visit with me. Some group, in fact—the Boy Scouts, maybe, or the American Legion, something like that—had not too long before come and presented him with something or other, and everyone had had just a fine time. I got there as quickly as I could.

Yakima is not what most people envision when they think of Washington. That image—green, mountainous, rain-soaked—is accurate, but only in the western part of the state. When you head east, you hit a certain point—I’d peg it just past Cle Elum, a nice little town about eighty miles southeast of Seattle that boasts a telephone museum and a gas station convenience store that sells every kind of jerky one can imagine—where that Washington disappears pretty quickly, leaving you in a Washington that is a lot flatter and strongly beige, a desert without cacti. Yakima, which sits in a valley surrounded by ridges about sixty miles beyond Cle Elum, is the largest city in this particular Washington, but it’s actually a fairly compact place, one of those settlements in the middle of a whole lot of nothing that begins suddenly and ends just as quickly. Don’t let all that beige fool you, though—they grow a lot of apples there. Hops, too, I am told.

The retirement home in which William J. Lake lived was, like Yakima, earth-toned and compact, but it was a pleasant place. His particular room, right up front, was large and bright; I don’t know if he got it just because he was nearly 108 years old and a World War I veteran, but I like to think so. A friendly attendant led me to it when I showed up, and even knocked on his door for me. Mr. Lake opened it himself, as I remember, grinned charmingly, and shook my hand. He had a great smile, understated and just a bit wry, and wore a pair of almost-comically-oversized aviator eyeglasses that seemed to accentuate his baldness somehow. And he was a small man, five feet six and a half inches tall in 1919, according to his discharge papers; the succeeding eighty-four years, and a stoop he had developed at some point in there, had shaved off a few more inches. Someone had told him I’d be coming, because he was dressed sharply, in a plaid cotton dress shirt and chinos with a solid crease. He had his citations all laid out for me, too: the grand, impressive Légion d’Honneur certificate; a Certificate of Congratulations from the Veterans of Foreign Wars; the large medal that the Boy Scouts or American Legion or whoever had presented to him; and a handful of smaller medallions. He seemed excited to talk to me; I got the impression that, despite all of those awards and honors, no one had actually asked him about his service in a long time. It was October 20, 2003.

I had to concentrate pretty hard just to hear Mr. Lake, since he spoke softly and had, besides, another one of those old-timey accents that are all but extinct now. In his case, it was a gravelly-old-prospector type of voice—he sounded a bit like the elderly Jack Crabb as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Little Big Man. It was, at first, a jarring contradiction to his clean-shaven and ironed appearance. Adding to the dissonance of the atmosphere was his large recliner, also beige; it utterly dwarfed him, made him look like a child, sitting in it as he did slouched over to one side. Still, I stopped noticing all of it just as soon as we started talking.

“When were you born?” I asked him.

“October the thirtieth, eighteen ninety-five.” And there it was.

“And where were you born?” I asked.

“Missouri,” he said. Or, more accurately: “Missoura.”

“What part of Missouri?”

“Hannibal. Mark Twain’s old town.” On October 30, 1895, Mark Twain was in the midst of a worldwide lecture tour.

Actually, Mr. Lake added quickly by way of clarification: “Well, I was in New London, which is only ten miles from Hannibal.”

“What were your parents’ names?” I asked him.

“My dad’s name was . . .” He pursed his lips and looked off to one side for a moment. “My dad!” he said suddenly, seeming startled at the mention of the man, or, perhaps, the fact that he could no longer remember his name. I looked away for a moment, not wanting to embarrass him—or, if I’m being really honest, to catch a glimpse of what it must feel like to discover that you have forgotten such a thing.

“You know,” he continued, undeterred, “he died when he was very young. He went to Oklahoma and opened that Indian Territory for homesteading. And he got pneumonia and was home just a week when he died. Left my mom—a wife and seven kids.”

“And were you the youngest?”

“No, there was two younger than I, and then one brother and three sisters older than I was.” He was the last of them left, he said—not surprising, since his youngest brother, Graydon, had been born in 1899.

“What did your father do for a living?” I asked him.

“He had a ranch there in . . . Missouri, but he went to Oklahoma. That’s when they opened up that Indian Territory for land,” he said. His father, he explained, had gone on ahead to Oklahoma on his own to stake a homesteading claim, but had fallen ill there and hurried back to Missouri just in time to expire. “He just—he died,” his son recalled more than a century later. “And so we had a pretty rough time.” He was six years old then.

His mother, Emma, was left alone with seven children under the age of twelve; the youngest was still a baby. So she did what people did in those days, if they could: she farmed her children out to kin. “I stayed with my uncle and aunt for a while,” Mr. Lake told me. “Some of our relations took at least one of us, because our mother couldn’t do it. Our granddad [also named William J.], my mother’s folks, they built us a house—they had a big son, they built us a house, and then we lived there. But then, soon as I got big enough to work, I had to go to work quick. There was nothing else to do.”

“How old were you when you went to work?” I asked him.

“I think I was about eight years old when I started working,” he replied.

“What kind of work did you do, at first?”

“Well, I would drive and shoe the horses . . . I drove—well, the most horses I ever drove was eight, eight horses at one time. Plowing and just doing things like that. In Montana.” And here’s where the chronology gets fuzzy for a bit, because at some point—1915 or 1916, as he recalled—the family moved from Missouri to Montana. “Some of our relations was out there,” he explained, “and they was talking about the difference in the two states.” Apparently, the relations convinced them to make the move, which they did when Bill was nineteen or twenty years old. That doesn’t mean that he really didn’t start working at the age of eight, but I suspect he didn’t leave school then, because the 1910 census records fourteen-year-old William J. Lake’s occupation as “None.” The family was living in Saverton, Missouri, then, a little town on the Mississippi just eight miles downriver from Hannibal; they are listed as working a home farm. I’m sure young Bill had to do a lot of work around that farm, and quite possibly more elsewhere. I don’t doubt he started doing so at eight years old.

And I imagine it was a hard life for all of them, too, since they did eventually move all the way to Montana, no small undertaking, and “leased a farm out there,” as Mr. Lake remembered nearly nine decades later. “Hay and grain,” he explained. “A small one. No corn, too cold for corn. The season was too short for corn.” He added: “That’s where I was when I went into the Army.”

“When did you end up joining the Army?” I asked him.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I wanted to join the Army, but Mother said don’t do it. She said maybe it’ll blow over, so I went to work. But then I was drafted.” This, he told me, was in the fall of 1917, about six months after the United States entered the war. Almost exactly, as it happens: His service record shows he was inducted into the Army at Livingston, Montana, on October 4 of that year. “Yeah,” he said, “my mom—I wanted to enlist, but she talked me out of it . . . She said, ‘Well, maybe the war will be over soon, and maybe you won’t have to go.’ But—there was four of us boys, and I’m the only one that went.” He explained: “My oldest brother, apparently he had, he was farming and he had a daughter. And my other two brothers—they, of course, I mean they was drafted, but neither one of them passed. I was the only one that did.”

“Is that right?” I asked. “They didn’t pass the physical?”

“I don’t know why,” he said, still sounding genuinely perplexed. “But neither one did.”

The Army put Bill Lake on a train in Livingston and sent him west, to Pierce County, Washington. There, about ten miles from Tacoma, they were building a new training base for sixty thousand soldiers: Camp Lewis, named for explorer Meriwether Lewis, whose Corps of Discovery had passed through the general vicinity on its way to the Pacific Ocean more than a century earlier. Today, Fort Lewis is the largest military installation in the Pacific Northwest; it is said to be the most requested posting in the United States Army.

In the fall of 1917, men from eight states—Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming—and the territory of Alaska streamed into Camp Lewis to be gathered into a new division, the 91st, nicknamed from its conception the “Wild West Division.” Its symbol was a pine tree. The 91st was the highest-numbered white division in the Army at the time. The two colored divisions were the 92nd and 93rd. The Army used a system of ordinal numbering that had some logic to it, but not much. Single-digit divisions were Regular Army; 26 through 42 were regional National Guard, starting in New England and moving, as the digits rose, south and west—at least until the high 30s, when they spiraled hither and yon, culminating in the 42nd, which comprised National Guard troops from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia; and the last stretch, 76 through 91, being draftees, once again starting east and moving west, ending at Camp Lewis with the 91st. There were a lot of unused numbers; I don’t know why. I have heard it speculated that these were “ghost divisions,” used to intimidate and mislead the enemy. Perhaps.

But back to Camp Lewis, still under construction when a farm hand from Montana showed up, just days before his twenty-second birthday. “It’s the most beautiful place on earth,” Mr. Lake opined eighty-five years hence. “When we was there, it was all wooden barracks. We had to sleep in tents for a few days till they got our barracks finished. Now it’s all brick buildings.” He was put in the 362nd Infantry Regiment—composed entirely of Montana men—and assigned to the Machine Gun Company.

The term “Machine Gun Company” brings to mind the image of a trench full of doughboys firing Tommy guns at the Hun, and in fact the Thompson submachine gun—that icon of gangland Chicago and the FBI’s Most Wanted list, with its distinctive drum magazine and wooden stock and grip, which became notorious after the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929—was developed for use in World War I by a retired Army colonel named John T. Thompson (his middle name, Taliaferro, was the same as Booker T. Washington’s), who had served in the Spanish-American War with a young lieutenant named John Henry Parker, a man whose supreme faith in that weapon ultimately earned him the nickname Machine Gun. If the name “Machine Gun Parker” sounds familiar, it’s probably because twenty years later, as a colonel, Parker would be commanding the Army’s 102nd Infantry Regiment when they came under attack by German Stosstruppen at a French village called Seicheprey. It really was a small world.

Colonel Thompson’s weapon—its original nickname was the “trench broom”—came along a bit too late to be used in the war, but it’s interesting to think about what it might have done had the armistice not preempted its career in the military. It was truly revolutionary: relatively small and light, it could be fired by one man from a standing position, and reloaded in mere seconds. The machine guns of the war—Vickers and Hotchkiss and Browning and Maschinengewehr and all the rest—were large and heavy and, whether cooled by water or air, prone to overheating and jamming. Cumbersome affairs, they were mounted on tripods or sledges, and thus could be fired only from a prone position. They were belt-fed and required entire crews to operate and maintain; the nature and demands of the weapon rendered those crews less mobile than regular infantry, which is why machine guns were often corralled into their own companies or battalions, which were distributed strategically. Unable to relocate as easily as regular infantry, they had to dig in, construct defenses, and camouflage themselves as best they could, which often was not very well at all. In one of those odd little quirks of war, operating a terribly intimidating weapon left you terribly vulnerable, too.

This was Private William J. Lake’s assignment.

“How did you end up in a machine gun company?” I asked him in 2003.

“Well, that’s where they put me!” he said. “So that’s where I was.”

“Did you have any experience with guns before?”

“Well, just rifles and shotguns, is all. There, of course, we had to practice. Do a lot of shooting with the rifles at different distances, and the machine gun. They had, there at Camp Lewis—well, now they call it Fort Lewis—they had a Colt, which is a very light machine gun, but I was shooting and I forget how many yards I was shooting, but I got forty-five out of fifty shots out there at I think it was three hundred yards, I think is what it was if I remember right. And then we had the Browning, which was a water-cooled gun. And that was fast—three hundred shots a minute.”

“Did you prefer that to the Colt?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You liked it better?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “A lot better. It was a heavier, a bigger machine. And it was faster; I think it was three hundred shots a minute, or something like that. Terrible.” The Browning sat on a tripod and was belt-fed; “they had targets,” he recalled, “which I had to practice on all the time—rifle and machine gun both. And I done pretty good.” Once he got to France, though, he was assigned not to fire the gun, but to run back and forth from the nest to a depot behind the lines to fetch ammunition for it, which was quite possibly the most dangerous job in the crew. But I’ll get to that a bit later, because first there’s the story of the thing that happened to Bill Lake even before he made it to France, the thing that seemed pretty awful to him at the time but which might just have saved his life.

Private Lake and the rest of the Wild West Division trained at Camp Lewis, he told me, for nine months before they boarded trains for Camp Merritt, New Jersey, whence they would head up to New York and ship out for France. According to the unnamed author of The Story of the 91st Division, published in 1919, the land portion of the trek took about six days. It was early summer; they traveled through a lot of areas that were probably quite hot at the time, and I doubt there were showers on those trains. Nevertheless, it was a spirited journey:

On their trip across the continent, the soldiers from the Far West had an excellent opportunity to acquaint themselves with the patriotic unity which ultimately was to bring about the defeat of Germany. After witnessing demonstrations from coast to coast, the men of the 91st felt that they were backed by an undivided nation. The motherly gray-haired old woman standing in front of her little cottage on the broad prairie of Montana, alternately waving a flag and brushing away the tears she could not restrain, contributed as much to this feeling as did the impromptu receptions tendered the men in the great cities through which they passed.

The journey also gave many citizens, especially in the East, a better conception of the high quality of manhood the West was contributing to the United States Army.

If it sounds like the men of the 91st had a grand old time crossing the country by rail, Private William J. Lake, at least, did not. He was sick the whole way across; was sick even before he left Camp Lewis.

“I got the measles,” he explained.

Eight and a half decades later, that continued to mystify him: “I don’t know where I got them,” he told me. “Still don’t know where I got them!” No one else seemed to have them; there was no word of measles in the camp, or on the train. Not even from him: Bill Lake traveled six days on a hot, crowded troop train, from Washington to New Jersey, sick with measles—and never told anyone. “I didn’t say anything until we got on the boat,” he confessed. “I was out on the water.” The boat, he recalled, was the Empress of Russia, a British/Canadian mail ship that was used as a troop transport during the war.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked him.

“Because I know if I did,” he said, “and it leaked that I did have something, I might be out of the company or something, and I didn’t want that, so I didn’t say nothing.” He smiled, and then laughed.

Eventually, out at sea, he told his captain. “I was laying down,” he recalled. “He came around, he says, ‘What’s the matter?’ I says, ‘I don’t feel good.’ He sent the doctor down there, told me I had the measles. Still don’t know today where I got them.”

“Nobody else had them?”

“Nobody else had them far as I know. So they put me in the hospital on the boat, hospital room . . . and then they got over there”—that is, Liverpool, where the 91st disembarked before shuttling across the Channel to France—“and they left me [in a hospital] over there for six weeks. Wanted to be sure I was all good before I went back to the company.”

“Six weeks?”

“Yeah. And they’d been in two battles before I got there.”

That last bit is not quite accurate: The 91st Division—minus Private Lake—arrived in France in late July, 1918, and proceeded directly to “its training area in the Department of Haute Marne,” the divisional history reports, where “the nature of the terrain could not be surpassed for training troops in the open warfare in which they were to participate later. . . . The entire month of August was passed in this area while the Division received its final training. Incessant drilling, long marches and frequent exercises were the schedule for the entire Division.” In early September they moved over to Saint-Mihiel, but were held in reserve until that offensive ended, at which point they moved again, to Meuse-Argonne, where they were assigned to a central place in the line, between the 35th and 37th Divisions, near the village of Cheppy. And it was from there that they were sent forward at 5:25 a.m. on September 26, 1918, the start of the offensive. Private Lake arrived at the front on September 29. He missed out on a lot of training that might have proven useful to him at some point; but he also missed out on his division’s first three days of battle, and, though he probably didn’t feel this way at the time, the historical record shows that those were good days to miss.

“The 91st had never been in any except a practice trench, or heard a bullet or shell fired in battle, when it went into position for the attack,” Frederick Palmer writes in his 1919 account of the Meuse-Argonne, Our Greatest Battle. Palmer had heard many bullets and shells fired by that time; an American war correspondent—like many reporters of the time, he jumped papers pretty frequently, as it suited him—he had seen a good bit of the war by the time the United States entered it, and managed to write and publish three books about it while it was still happening. In the last of these, 1918’s America in France, he predicts that a fight must take place in the Meuse-Argonne, and that an Allied victory there would be essential to an ultimate triumph over Germany. “The German must resist our advance or endanger his line of communications to Champagne and Picardy,” he explains. “The area from Verdun to Holland formed the mouth of a pocket, although a broad one, for all the German army on the soil of northern France. Steady pounding from Verdun to the Argonne must be a part of any great plan which sought, whether in the hope of swift results or in the deliberate expectation of slow results, to force the German army back to German soil, or to draw reinforcements from the Rheims-Flanders line under its threat.”

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies, envisioned a “Grand Offensive” against Germany’s fearsome Hindenburg Line, its back-against-the-wall defensive position. It would take the shape of a trident, its three points being Ypres, in Belgium, where the Belgians, British, and French would attack; northern France, where mostly British and Australian troops would strike, abetted by two American divisions; and the section of Lorraine, northwest of Verdun, that encompassed the Argonne Forest and a stretch of the Meuse River, where ten American divisions (plus the 368th Infantry Regiment of the 92nd Division) and two French armies (including two regiments of black American troops, the 371st and 372nd) would attack. Ypres had been the site of four previous battles during the war, while northern France had been overrun by the Germans during their great offensive that spring; both were largely flat, and had been blasted clear in the course of four years of war. The Argonne Forest, though, was largely intact and quite dense, and the entire area was full of hills and valleys, with sharp heights above the Meuse. The landscape alone made the place a difficult one in which to launch an assault; the Germans had taken it in the opening weeks of the war, and had promptly augmented nature’s defenses with bunkers and trenchworks, barbed wire and machine-gun nests, tunnels and electric lines and narrow-gauge railroads and lots and lots of concrete. A great many French and Germans had died there in the succeeding four years—sniping and shelling, dropping bombs from aeroplanes or detonating them in subterranean chambers—but France hadn’t launched a major offensive there since 1914. The Germans’ defenses, natural and manmade, were just too formidable.

Now, though, with Germany weakened from its losses during the summer, the Americans would try it. Despite the fact that German defenses there were still very strong, perhaps even as tough as ever, Pershing wanted the Meuse-Argonne for his troops, and had fought hard for it; he’d even agreed to rush his men up there from Saint-Mihiel as soon as that battle was won, though this meant transporting hundreds of thousands of troops in the dark of night—surprise was seen as an essential element of the new offensive’s success—along with guns, tanks, ordnance, and all manner of supplies, all of it (and them) on just three muddy roads. That it somehow managed to succeed, without tipping off the Germans, says a lot about Colonel George Marshall, who planned the operation, and about the men he was moving around. As Frederick Palmer writes in Our Greatest Battle:

Officers who had hoped for a little sleep once the Saint-Mihiel offensive was under way received “travel orders,” with instructions to reach the Argonne area by hopping a motor-truck or in any way they could. Soldiers, after marching all night, might seek sleep in the villages if there were room in houses, barns or haylofts. Blocks of traffic were frequent when some big gun or truck slewed into a slough in the darkness.

Somehow, though, they all made it into place in time, including the Wild West Division, which hadn’t been put into the fight at Saint-Mihiel but was now installed in an important position in the line. Palmer held them in high regard from the first:

The Pacific Coast men had traveled far, clear across the Continent and across the Atlantic. Traveling was in their line. If distance had kept them from reaching the front as soon as some of the eastern divisions, noticeably those praised New Yorkers of the 77th, they would show that they could move fast and stick in the war to the end. The pioneer heritage was theirs; they were neighbors to Alaska, who looked toward Asia across the Pacific: big men who thought big and were used to doing big things. Their people depended upon them for great deeds worthy of their homes beyond the Great Divide. . . .

They had the stamina which their climate breeds. They were under no apprehension that their inexperience in battle would not enable them to take care of the Germans they met, once they were through the trenches and in the open. As men of the distances, they had imagination which applied all their training to the situations which they would have to encounter. No veterans ever went into action with more confidence than these draft men. The roar of the surf on Pacific beaches, of the car-wheels from the Coast to New York, of the steamship propellers across the Atlantic, was the song of their gathered energy suddenly released in a charge.

If I’d known that simply hailing from the West infused one with such a romantic persona, I would have arranged to have been born out there instead of in the land of the 77th. It’s a good thing that the men of the 91st didn’t read Palmer’s paean to them before they started forward on the morning of September 26, 1918; such effusive advanced press can be intimidating.

As it was, they got off to a slow start that morning, having to contend with uncut tangles of German wire, but they benefited from a massive artillery barrage the night before, “so vast, so stunning,” the divisional history records, “and the noise was so overwhelming that no one could grasp the whole. The German trenches were marked in the darkness by a line of leaping fire, punctuated now and then by the higher bursts of some particularly heavy shell.” Hundreds of those shells contained phosgene and mustard gas; yes, America used them, too. By the time the men of the Wild West Division came upon those German front-line trenches, the next morning, they were empty.

Beyond them, though, the 91st ran into stiff resistance, first in the dense Bois de Cheppy (or Cheppy Woods), and then while crossing an open ravine raked by German machine-gun fire. Still, they advanced, knocking out machine-gun nests one by one, taking prisoners along the way. They took a lot of casualties, too, yet they advanced more rapidly than the 35th Division, on their left, and the 37th on their right. Fastest of all was Private Lake’s regiment, the 362nd, which advanced some five miles that day, and by late afternoon had reached the strongly defended village of Épinonville, an act that won them the praise of the regiment’s new commander, Colonel John Henry “Machine Gun” Parker, formerly of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, who had, in the space of four days that summer, been awarded two more Distinguished Service Crosses to supplement the one he’d earned at Seicheprey.

The Montana men now under Parker’s command had done well for themselves on the first day of the offensive. Unfortunately, they did so well that the troops on their flanks—the Wild West Division’s 361st and 363rd Infantry Regiments to their left, the 37th Division to their right—couldn’t keep up. The 362nd had thus created a salient in the German lines that proved difficult to defend; the Germans counterattacked, drove them back out of Épinonville, and promptly set about reinforcing their defensive positions all around the village. The next day, the Montanans tried to take the village again. And again. “Three separate assaults on Épinonville were made, but each was repulsed,” the divisional history reports. “When the attack moved forward it met an enemy reinforced and strongly located in a multitude of machine gun nests, supported also by a well-directed and cruel artillery fire that grew in intensity throughout the day.” Under different circumstances they might have tried something less dangerous, instead, but they were ordered to push forward as hard and as far as they could in the hope of drawing German firepower away from two American divisions to their right, which were trying desperately to take Montfaucon, having failed in their attempt the day before. At eleven hundred feet, Montfaucon—its name translates to “Falcon Mountain”—was the high point in the sector; it commanded views of the entire area. Like everything else they held in the vicinity, the Germans had taken it in 1914, and had fought off determined French assaults in the months and years that followed. It was essential ground; Kronprinz Wilhelm used it as his personal lookout station, and the Americans knew they couldn’t move forward without it. They took it that second day. Today there is an American monument there, a stout column some two hundred feet high.

The 362nd spent the night of September 27 in the same spot as they had the night of the 26th, south of Épinonville. There were fewer of them this time. The following morning, the rest of the division joined the assault, extending itself out almost into other sectors in an effort to flank the village, which they finally took, and held. The 362nd was then given the unenviable task of keeping the Germans from encircling the Wild West Division’s other three regiments, the 361st, 363rd, and 364th. The farther they all advanced, the farther their salient stretched, leaving them increasingly exposed to German attacks, which in turn became more and more fierce as the Americans advanced, first into the Bois de Cierges—woods filled with barbed wire and machine-gun nests—and then the open fields approaching the village of Gesnes. “The [German] artillery fire had become much more severe from morning on; it continued throughout the night,” the divisional history recalls. “A heavy rain had also come on and increased as darkness closed in. The men had been fighting steadily for three days, had had no blankets to protect them from the cold September nights, and because of their rapid advance it had been impossible to serve them any hot food since before the jump-off.”

Those were the three days that the measles had spared Private William J. Lake.

He arrived at the front on the fourth day, September 29, 1918. His six weeks in that hospital in Liverpool had given him a view of the war that no one else in the Wild West Division had experienced, yet. As the lone American among ailing Tommies, he told me, “it was like a different universe. They talked different. And they told me, they didn’t seem to have any money; they was always asking me for money. Well, I didn’t have any money to give them guys. That’s the way it was—they was just left behind and broke.”

“Were a lot of them wounded?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I saw several of them with their arms and legs off.”

When he was deemed well enough to fight, he was put on a train for Southampton, then a transport for Le Havre, and then, he said, “I had to walk a day to get to the unit,” carrying a fifty-pound pack all the while. When he arrived, the first person to greet him was his captain, a man he and the rest of the Machine Gun Company held in very high esteem. Instinctively, he went to salute, but the captain caught his arm and stopped him; shook his hand, instead. Private Lake was perplexed. “He said, ‘Don’t salute me,’ he says. ‘You don’t know who’s looking.’ And so I didn’t. That’s true—you didn’t know,” he told me.

And then he added, softly: “And he was killed that night.”

“He was killed that night?” I repeated, a bit stunned. “How? By a sniper, or . . .”

“I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is he got killed.” He shook his head. “Well, that hurt me. He was a good guy. He was easy to get along with, but he wanted you to do what [he told you to do] . . . He was one of them guys who wasn’t afraid of nothing.” He added: “He wouldn’t ask you to do anything that he didn’t.”

“Do you remember his name?” I asked.

He was quiet for a moment, pursed his lips. “No,” he said softly. “I cannot remember his name.” It seemed to pain him as much as not being able to remember his father’s.

“So what was it like when you got to the front?” I asked him. “What did it look like?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said as he closed his eyes and shook his head again. “Bullets zipping around you all the time. You just never knew when you was going to get hit. But I was lucky . . .”

He was. The corps commander’s orders for the 91st Division on September 29, the day Private Lake arrived at the front, were to advance and advance, “pushing the attack with utmost vigor and regardless of cost.” For the 362nd, that meant leaving the cover of the Bois de Cierges, crossing a mile or so of open fields, and taking Gesnes. Since the American divisions on their left and right were still way behind them, those fields would be subject to German fire—artillery, machine gun, rifle, mortar, poison gas—from three sides. Machine Gun Parker, who is said to have strongly questioned the wisdom of the orders, nevertheless led the attack himself.

He didn’t make it to Gesnes.

Colonel Parker displayed great gallantry and fearlessness in leading and directing his front line with utter disregard for personal safety and urged his men forward by his personal example, all under heavy machine-gun, high-explosive, gas-shell, and shrapnel fire. He was abreast of his front line until he fell, twice wounded, but thereafter remained in active command for a period of five hours, when he was relieved by the lieutenant colonel of his regiment.

So reads the citation for his fourth Distinguished Service Cross (a record for that war, by the way); it was not awarded posthumously, which implication makes him more fortunate than many of the men under his command that day, who died somewhere in that mile between the woods and the village. More fell in and around Gesnes itself. “This attack was very costly to the 362nd Infantry,” the divisional history offers, with typical understatement. “Colonel Parker and Major Bradbury of the 362nd were wounded, a number of valuable officers were killed, the total loss of regiment in killed and wounded being at least five hundred.”

Still, by day’s end, the 362nd had, somehow, found a way to attain their objective, slowly advancing against terrible resistance to take Gesnes. By nightfall, though, their position was deemed indefensible, and they were ordered to retreat. At least they could get a hot meal, since a few rolling kitchens had finally caught up with them, though they had to be set up in the cover of the Bois de Cierges, and even there could only operate at night. “It was impossible to use these kitchens in the daytime without exposing the vicinity to heavy shell fire,” the history explains. “Some of the men serving the kitchens were killed and wounded, and some men going to the kitchens for hot coffee were wounded.”

The history ends its account of September 29, 1918: “In four days the Division had lost 8 field and 125 company officers and 3,000 men.” Two days later, the figure was 150 officers and 4,000 men. And they would be there nearly another two weeks beyond that.

As he said time and again eighty-five years later, Bill Lake was lucky. He was not among those thousands of casualties. The Germans sure did try to include him, though. Like artillery, machine guns were high-priority targets for the enemy because of the damage they did. (“That machine gun was a wicked gun, that machine gun,” Private Lake recalled. “Oh, man.”) But there are only a few ways to silence a machine gun, since you can’t really assault them directly without exposing yourself to their terrible fire. One is to hit them with artillery; for that you have to know exactly where they are, and you have to be able to hit them quickly enough that they can’t just scuttle away once they figure out what you’re up to. Another way is to crawl up on their flanks undetected—and already you’re getting into a high level of difficulty, as machine-gun nests were often well-protected—and blow them up with grenades. Or, finally, you could kill the guys who run back and forth between the machine gun and its supply depot, fetching ammunition.

Private Lake was one of those guys.

“That’s what they were after,” he told me, “they” being the Germans. “After the guys hauling the machine-gun ammunition.”

“They wanted to keep you from—”

“Getting ammunition in there.”

“So what would you do?” I asked. “You would have to ride back and forth between the front line and the ammunition depot?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But we did that at night. We didn’t do it during the daytime.” Too dangerous.

He was given the job, I imagine, because of his experience driving teams of horses. “They didn’t have this mechanized stuff at that time at all,” he explained.

“So when you would go back and forth between the front and the ammunition depot, you were driving a horse cart?” I asked.

“Mule,” he said.

“What were the mules like with the artillery? Did they get spooked?”

“They would get killed once in a while.”

“How did you find your way?”

“Well,” he said, “we knew about where our front line was. And we’d haul it up there so far, and they’d come and get it and carry it in by hand. Because it came in belts.”

“How many belts would you bring back at a time?”

“Oh, maybe four or five.”

“And how many bullets on each belt?”

“A hundred and fifty, I think it was.”

A machine gun can go through 600 or 750 rounds pretty quickly in the heat of battle. Private Lake had to make quite a few runs every night, and flashlights—and lighters, and matches, and anything else that might help illuminate the way—were, of course, forbidden. “Was that difficult?” I asked him.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Sometimes it was, ’cause that’s some pretty rough country to go over.”

I asked him if he got used to it at some point. “Well, you kind of get used to it,” he told me, “but it’s pretty scary, I’ll tell you, because you don’t know when you’re going to get it.”

“How did you cope with that?”

“Well, it kind of bothered me at first, but I got used to it—well, as near used to it as I’d ever get, because you’d hear bullets hitting off, zipping all around . . .”

“What would you do when bullets were zipping around? Would you hit the ground, or would you just keep on your way?”

“No,” he said, “I just kept going.”

“So you really just had to be very lucky?” I posited.

“That’s right,” he said. “Very lucky, that’s true.” One night, he told me, “a piece of shrapnel just missed my left arm,” while another one tore through his coattail, he said, “about two inches from my back.” If it had hit him, he reckoned, “I’d have been gone . . . that’s how close I come to getting it.” The following night—“I was just standing there,” he explained, “waiting for something, I guess, I don’t remember what it was”—he had a close encounter with a German bullet. “It was either machine gun or rifle,” he told me. “Whichever it was, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. But it hit the heel on my shoe.” And tore it off. He got off a few shots himself—some at a low-flying German aeroplane, others at an enemy gunner—but he didn’t believe he’d hit either.

Another time, he recalled, “I got a little gas”—that is, mustard gas, not the kind we all get from time to time. “Not enough to do any harm, really,” he told me.

“What kind of effect did it have on you?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “it makes you sick. It makes you feel terrible.”

“You threw up?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Did you lose your voice?” I asked, thinking of Laurence Moffitt.

“No,” he said, “we had gas masks, so we wore them all the time.” Everyone in his company was exposed to gas at some time or other. “Some of them got it pretty bad,” he said. “But I didn’t . . . It could have killed me, but I didn’t get that much.”

I asked him what it was like at the front when there wasn’t any shooting going on. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t very often. Up at the front there was shooting all the Goddamned night.”

“How did you handle the stress?” I inquired at one point.

“Well,” he replied, “I took it the best way I could. I just—I know it was going to happen, so what could you do?” Just two options, really: adapt somehow, or break. Plenty of men, sadly, broke.

“They called us one day,” he remembered, “a couple of us, and they had what they called a paddy wagon. Some guy lost his mind, and they had to take him to—I forget where it was they took him to. And they said, ‘You don’t know what he’s going to do.’ One of us had a loaded rifle, the other didn’t. And they said, ‘If he gets out of hand, kill him.’”

“Really?” I said.

“Thank God we didn’t have to do it.”

“He just cracked?”

“Yeah, that’s right. They put him in a padded cell. I never did hear any more from him. But boy, I was glad I didn’t—one of us had a loaded rifle, the other one didn’t, and we just . . .”

“You didn’t know which one had it?”

“No.”

“They told you both to shoot him?”

“Yeah.”

“Was he shell-shocked?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said. “I think that’s what did it.” He said he knew of several cases, but that this was the only one he’d encountered personally.

“Shell shock” is just a phrase, of course; “battle fatigue” may be more accurate. There were any number of things that might make a man crack after being at the front for a while. Some of them, like bullets, were utterly random; shells, at least, gave you a little bit of notice. “You could tell by the way, the sound of the artillery, you could tell pretty close to where it was going to land,” Mr. Lake explained. Still, he recalled, “you just never knew when you was going to get hit. But I was lucky, as I said,” he mused. “Now, another guy and I were sitting on a bank.” He paused, lowered his chin, pursed his lips; his voice dropped. “And a sniper shot him instead of me.”

I looked at him for a moment. “You were sitting next to each other?”

“Yeah. No more than two feet apart. And he picked him instead of me. He killed him, of course.” They had been sitting on a little dirt rise, near a trench. And this, I’m pretty sure, is the reason Bill Lake kept saying he was lucky. “They picked him instead of me. I was lucky, that’s all . . . we were sitting there side by side and he picked him instead of me.”

We were quiet for a moment. “They got him,” he assured me. “They found him, they found the sniper.”

“Oh?” I said. “They killed him?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “They didn’t take him prisoner, not a sniper, no. He was up in a tree when they found him, and they let him have it. And he fell out of the tree, dead. And that’s all there was to it.”

He said it with aplomb; the passage of eighty-five years had not dulled his sense of righteous outrage. There was a very hard feeling about snipers then, even though everybody used them. “They didn’t take a sniper prisoner,” he explained. “They was dirty. They would shoot you in the back as soon as they would in the face, you know. They didn’t care as long as they got you. But they got him, of course.” He told this story several times over the course of our two-hour conversation, and though he never had anything new to add, he kept returning to it: They picked him instead of me.

Like almost every other World War I veteran I interviewed, William J. Lake was stoic; if thoughts like those plagued him, he didn’t let on much, besides revisiting the incident again and again. But he saw plenty of people get it, as he said, and knew of many more. The buddy who had enlisted with him in Montana was killed in a railroad accident even before the division shipped out for France. Also with him in Camp Lewis, he recalled, were “three guys from Salt Lake City . . . they went home and got married [before shipping out].” His voice dropped again. “Every one of them got killed.”

“Every one of them?” I asked.

“Every one of them got killed,” he repeated, twice. “Well,” he continued, “I didn’t even have a girlfriend, but if I had, I never would have done that.”

“You wouldn’t have married her before you went?”

“No. I would not have married anybody. No way.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you think: too much pain. You didn’t know if you were going to get back or not.” He added: “Well, see, I didn’t even have a girlfriend, so that was all right.”

He told me that men in his company were killed just about every day; and he saw a lot of death on the other side, too. “We killed so many of them,” he said. “They had concrete bunkers in there . . . but we fixed that and just—I don’t know how many got killed, I was told but I don’t remember how many. Just completely wrecked it, demolished it.”

“With artillery?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “with artillery. We had six- and eight-inch artillery. They started in at, I think it was six o’clock in the evening, and kept it up all night. And that was it.”

“And that was it. They destroyed the bunker.”

“Just completely destroyed it. And I don’t know how many it killed. I was told, but I can’t remember how many it was, killed and wounded. I saw a lot of dead ones and a lot of wounded.” He shook his head and pursed his lips.

“A lot of dead and wounded Germans?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “And that’s what ended the war.”

I wish I could tell you that things got better for the Wild West Division after those awful first four days at the Meuse-Argonne. But they didn’t. The enfilade fire kept coming; the shells kept falling. New plagues started coming around, too. “Many men were suffering from diarrhea due to exposure . . . without warm food or overcoats and blankets,” the divisional history—which is supposed to be a positive recounting—reports. “Most officers and men had raincoats, and some had found German blankets in dugouts. The men built shelter from small-arms fire by excavating the northern edges of shell-holes. But they were observed by hostile planes and subjected to heavy fire (shrapnel and shell) from German artillery. . . . Although many casualties resulted, the morale was undisturbed.” I guess that last clause was the positive part.

The divisions on their flanks—the 35th on the left, 37th on the right—never could seem to catch up with the 91st, or even get within a couple of miles of them, so the Westerners continued to get hit—hard—from three sides. Often men would seek shelter in safe spots called splinter-proofs, only to learn, the hard way, that they were neither safe nor splinter-proof. The 362nd, the history records, “suffered heavy losses because of lack of overhead shelter.” The farther they advanced, the stronger the German defenses became. By October 4, the 91st had been battered so incessantly that they—as well as every other division in the First Army’s V Corps—were relieved and ordered into reserve. Their corps commander took pains to write to the 91st: “This relief results solely from a realization by higher command that your Division has done its full share in the recent success, and is entitled to a rest for reorganization.” Two days later, higher command, realizing it couldn’t spare the entire division after all, ordered half of it—the 181st Brigade, which included the 362nd Regiment—back in to fight alongside their replacements, the 1st Division.

It was apparent from the start that the Meuse-Argonne wasn’t going to be another Saint-Mihiel. The terrain alone would have made it a much more difficult fight, but that terrain was nothing compared to the heavy German fortifications. If the doughboys had hoped they might hit some weak point in the enemy’s defenses going forward, a critical soft point that would start the process of bringing the whole thing crashing down before them—well, they were disappointed. It seemed, in fact, that the farther they managed to advance, the fiercer the resistance they encountered. Every step they took forward brought them closer to the Germans’ ultimate line of defense; every step the Germans took backwards brought them closer to the point where they would no longer be able to take any more steps backwards. Rather than just give up in the face of that prospect, the Germans threw more and more reserve divisions into the fight, working feverishly by night to rebuild those defensive points that had been damaged or destroyed during the day’s fighting and to strengthen those that hadn’t. Doughboys would push off in the morning fog expecting to build on gains they had made—often at great expense—the day before, only to find themselves fighting to take the same ground all over again. Soon, a very hard feeling developed toward all German soldiers—not just snipers. “Everybody hated them,” Mr. Lake told me at one point; “that’s just the way it was.” I’ve read, here and there, reports of newly captured German prisoners at Meuse-Argonne being executed rather than sent back behind the lines. There were reasons the French hadn’t attempted a major offensive in the area in years.

On October 12, 1918, the 181st Brigade was pulled from the Meuse-Argonne for good. By then, the divisional history reports, the 91st had suffered 25 percent casualties. They had also advanced farther than just about any other division in that first phase of the offensive; liberated a number of villages and farms; and captured more than twenty-three hundred prisoners and, the divisional history notes, the following “hostile material”:

440 Machine Guns

24 Field Guns, caliber 77

1 Field Gun, caliber 105

6 Field Guns, caliber 150

5 Minnewerfers [sic; a Minenwerfer was a short-range mortar]

500 Rifles, Mauser

266 Rifles, Luger

46 Pairs Field Glasses

1,105,000 Rounds Rifle Ammunition

963,000 Rounds Machine Gun Ammunition, in belts

12,000 Rounds Field Gun Ammunition, Caliber 77

1 Tank

5,000 Hand Grenades

None of which the Germans could spare at that point.

The battle would continue, without the 91st, right up to the very minute the armistice took effect. The Americans never stopped pushing forward; it never got close to anything you might call easy. In the end, 26,277 doughboys would die there, including 1,019 from the Wild West Division. Another 95,786—including 3,916 men of the 91st—would be wounded. When Palmer called it “Our Greatest Battle,” he wasn’t merely employing hyperbole: More Americans died at the Meuse-Argonne than in any other battle in the country’s history, before or since.

The Germans, with their terrestrial advantages and extensive fortifications, gave up a lot of territory during the six weeks between the offensive’s beginning and the armistice. They lost about as many men as the Americans did, too, and they really couldn’t spare them. They were down to reserves by then, whereas the Americans had hundreds of thousands of unused troops on French soil, and another two million just waiting to cross the Atlantic. The great gamble the Germans had taken with their Spring Offensive had failed them, and then broken them. Many historians believe the Meuse-Argonne Offensive dealt Germany its coup de grâce. Private William J. Lake, who was there, certainly thought so. “At Argonne Forest,” he told me, “the Germans were on one side and the French were on the other, and they said they couldn’t drive the Germans out. And we drove them out.” He understood why the French had been unable to do it on their own: The German prisoners, he said, “the ones we had, was in pretty good shape”; but the French soldiers he saw, “they was pretty ragged. They’d been in pretty bad shape.” The difference, he must have believed, had to be the AEF. As he told me, more than once: “We ended the war. In fact, our division ended the war.”

I’m not sure how many historians would sign on to that statement; but with everything he saw and did Over There, you could certainly understand why Bill Lake might think such a thing.

The Meuse-Argonne was not the end of the Wild West Division’s war. After they were pulled out of that sector, they were sent up to Belgium—a rare assignment for doughboys in that war—where they were given more than four thousand replacement troops and then put back into the field on October 31, alongside British, Belgian, and French units, and the American 37th Division, which had fought on their right flank at the Meuse-Argonne. I’m not sure how it came to pass that these two American divisions were sent up to Flanders—I’ve seen it speculated that Foch wanted a token American presence at that northernmost offensive, for some reason—but I imagine they found it a preferable site for fighting: it had been blasted all to hell over the course of four years, but at least it was flat and open. Private Lake certainly found it less exciting; the only thing he had to say about Belgium, eighty-five years later, was that that was where he was when he got word that the armistice had been signed. “We was on our way up to the front,” he recalled, “not talking, no smoking, no noise of any kind, and a guy come along and stopped us and said you could talk and you could smoke and do what you want to do. And he says there’ll be another runner along in about a half an hour, and he didn’t say what he was going to do. And this guy come along and told us the armistice has been signed, and that was it.”

In fact, in the last twelve days of the war, as part of the Ypres-Lys Offensive, they helped drive the Germans back across the Scheldt River, and liberated nine towns and villages, all of which cost them another 929 casualties, including 215 killed. Not an easy stretch by any measure—except, perhaps, compared to what they had been through earlier that fall.

It all stopped suddenly on that November morning when that runner came along and told them the armistice had been signed. “Oh, it was just like you had a fit, I’ll tell you for sure,” Bill Lake recalled, meaning that in the good way. “Everybody was so happy.” After that, he said, “we stayed in Belgium until I think it was the first of the year, and then we went back to France—doing nothing—but they kept us there. And they had the Army of Occupation, and we was supposed to be in that, and they changed it; otherwise I’d have been over there for another six months. But they had us doing nothing. . . . Just relaxing.” Not that he was complaining.

“They must have had you doing something during the day,” I said.

“Well,” he offered, “we drank a lot of wine.”

Someone high up must have decided that the 91st had had a really rough time of it, because they weren’t assigned any duty at all, not even the guarding of prisoners. The divisional history confirms Private Lake’s recollection that the 91st did time after the armistice in both Belgium and France; it reports lots of rain and uncomfortable billets, neither of which he mentioned. He did meet French women, he told me, but added: “I couldn’t understand their language, so . . .”

“Did you try to talk to any of them?” I asked him.

“I tried to,” he said, “but it didn’t get very far. We had a translator tell me what they said.”

“Were they friendly?”

“Yeah, most of them were, yeah.”

“Were they pretty?”

“Some of them. And some of them looked like old men. You see,” he explained, “the French drink a lot of wine, but they heat it. That takes alcohol out of it. And they drink so much of it that their dang teeth just all fall out.”

“Is that right?” I asked.

“That’s the way it was,” he asserted.

On one occasion, he told me, a Sunday morning, he and some buddies found themselves in a little town in France where, he said, “they wore wooden shoes—everybody wore wooden shoes.” That morning, he explained, they came upon the town’s church during Mass; all the wooden shoes were lined up outside. He grinned. “You know what we done?”

“What did you do?”

“Go up there and mixed them up,” he said, tumbling into a laugh. “Boy, you talk about jabbering!” He laughed harder.

I don’t know if that little stunt had anything to do with it, but the Wild West Division was shipped back home in March, 1919, earlier than most. Private William J. Lake was mustered out at Fort D. A. Rus- sell in Wyoming on May 5, and returned home to Montana. “How were you received there?” I asked him.

“Pretty good,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”

“Your mother was glad to see you?”

“Oh, you bet your life.”

“Were your brothers all there, and your sisters?”

“Yeah.” He confessed that he hadn’t written anybody very often when he’d been in the Army. “Boy, they got after me for that.”

“They were upset?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he replied. “They’d want to know where I was and what I was doing. And somebody wrote and told them—I don’t know who did—said I’d been wounded and I was in the hospital, and I wasn’t wounded and I wasn’t in the hospital. I don’t know why they did that.” He said he got a lot of letters when he was Over There, mostly from his mother and his sisters; he still remembered his address: APO 776, France.

He went back to work on the farm, got married, had a daughter, and moved the family to Puyallup, Washington, because he had fond memories of the area from Camp Lewis. His wife, though, missed Montana, moved back without him, and divorced him. He met another woman, to whom he was married for fifty-two years; they had a son and another daughter. He worked for a sash-and-door company in Tacoma, made doors and windows, but “I didn’t like it, so I come over to Yakima, and I’ve been here ever since.” That was in 1924. “First thing I done was pick apples,” he explained. Then he went to work somewhere firing a kiln to dry hops. He dug ditches for the government’s Reclamation Service. Worked on telephone lines and water gauges.

“What were you doing during the Depression?” I asked him.

“I wasn’t doing nothing,” he said.

“You weren’t working?”

“I did some, but not a heck of a lot . . . it was rough.”

At one point he ran into a fellow he knew who owned an apple orchard; he went to work for the man, harvesting apples, for five years. Later in life he worked in a warehouse, then drove a truck, hauling fruit. He finally retired at the age of seventy-five, and only then because he was in an accident and crushed two vertebrae in his back. When I met him, he’d been on disability for more than thirty years. His mother had died at age seventy-five; no one in his family, he told me, had lived to be much older than that. His longevity was a mystery to him. His only son died in his late forties or early fifties; his older daughter lived in Oregon. His younger daughter lived in Yakima, but he only saw her, he said, twice a year or so.

At one point he pushed himself out of his chair, walked over to a chest, opened a drawer, and pulled out his Légion d’Honneur. He smiled proudly, handed it to me: It is a very beautiful medal. He pointed out his stationary bicycle, said he rode it every day. He told me he walked, too, every day, to a certain street and back again. “If the weather’s bad I walk back and forth in the hall,” he said. He had visited, at their invitations, the governor of Washington and the commanding general at Fort Lewis; went out for breakfast or lunch every Saturday and Sunday, and occasionally during the week, too, with a couple of friends in Yakima, younger veterans. They didn’t necessarily stay in town, either. I could tell that was important to him. “Some of these people,” he said sadly, referring to his fellow residents, “never go out at all.” Not that he didn’t like the retirement manor, mind you. “They come in every morning and make your bed, and then they come in and vacuum the carpet and dust the furniture and clean the bathroom and everything and wash your clothes, and if you have to visit the doctor they take you to it, so what else can you ask for?”

If your father dies before your seventh birthday, you start working at the age of eight, get drafted into the deadliest war the world has ever seen, ride clear across the country on a train for six days with a case of the measles that you’re scared to tell anyone about, sail across an ocean with the same case of measles, spend weeks in an English hospital full of fellows who have lost an arm or a leg or a set of lungs or a face in that war you’re on your way to, arrive at the front just in time to see your beloved captain get killed, see lots of others get killed all around you, get so close to death yourself that it puts a hole in your coat and knocks the heel off your shoe and makes you vomit besides, see a buddy shot dead by a sniper while he’s sitting not a yard away from you, manage to return home somehow only to have to scratch and scrounge for work, marry a woman and have a child with her only to have her tell you she’s going home to Montana and then never return, marry another woman and have two more children one of whom dies young and well before you, have to continue to scratch and scrounge for work and often come up short throughout the Great Depression and still be working well into your seventies and only stop then because you have an accident and crush two of your vertebrae—really, what else could you ask for, ten days short of your 108th birthday?

And that would be a fine place to end the story of Private William J. Lake of Yakima, Washington, but for the fact that about six months later, I unexpectedly found myself back in the vicinity, and went to visit him again. Visit: not interview. Because I hadn’t planned to be there much in advance, I had not brought along my video camera. I did, however, have with me a copy of The Story of the 91st Division, the existence of which I had only discovered recently. Though this was not a regular practice for me, I asked him to sign it, and he did, in a very shaky hand:

Bill Lake

362 M G CO

He was 108 years old now, halfway to 109, and while he himself didn’t look all that much older, everything around him somehow seemed to have aged in the interim, especially his shirt, the same one he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, a sharp plaid which had impressed me as crisp in October but which now, in April, looked worn and a bit ragged. You don’t think the mere sight of a shirt can make you feel sad, but it can.

He seemed a bit more tired at first, too, than he had been before, but as we started talking he perked right up. We discussed all manner of things, past and present, touching on something new here and there but mostly revisiting ground we’d covered the previous fall. At one point, he told me once again about how his father had gone off to look for land in the Indian Territory and returned just in time to die of pneumonia; and for some reason, right then, I decided to try again. “What,” I asked him, “was his name?”

“Richard,” he answered immediately. “Just like yours.”

And then, a few minutes later, when Mr. Lake started telling me again about his captain—how he’d been the first man to greet him upon his arrival at the front after six weeks in an English hospital with the measles; how he’d caught Private Lake’s hand when he went to sa- lute and shook it instead, cautioning, “You never know who’s watching”; how, at Camp Lewis, he’d told his men time and again, “I don’t want any cowards in my company; I can’t stand a coward”—I asked him for the man’s name. And again, he answered without even a pause: “Worsham.” Some days, I guess, you just get really lucky.

That night, I picked up my copy of The Story of the 91st Division and turned to the section in the back titled “Those Who Have Fallen”; it’s thirty-eight pages long, if that gives you some idea of how many men of the Wild West Division did not return from France. The list includes one colonel, two majors, and eight captains, the last of whom is listed as: Worsham, Elijah W. I opened my laptop and googled Elijah W. Worsham. There weren’t many hits, but the top of that short list was a page on someone’s genealogical website that contained the transcript of a letter sent by Worsham’s replacement, Captain Ray W. Hays, to one William R. Heilman, a childhood friend of the late captain’s back in Evansville, Indiana, who had inquired after him. It is not dated, but Hays does specify that he is writing from “Oostletern, Belgium”—probably Oostvleteren—which would make it sometime around the end of the first week of November, 1918. Captain Hays writes:

While Captain Worsham was in command of the machine gun company, I was one of his officers. Since his death I have had the honor of commanding his company, and it is his company, known universally as Captain Worsham’s company, and not the machine gun company. Inspired by his ideals and teaching, I am trying to run the company as he did, but no one can take his place.

We first went over the top at Rendevous de Chasse and the first day advanced about ten kilometers. We met with stiff resistance at Ejenonville [Épinonville] the next morning, and it was largely due to the Captain’s courage, tactics and machine gun company that our division held out while divisions on our flank were forced back.

During the two days of fierce fighting we advanced some eight kilometers, until, on the 29th, we were held up. A small town, by the name Gesnes, seemed to be the point of resistance, and about 3 o’clock in the afternoon of September 29 the battalion to which we were attached was ordered to take the town. The magnificent manner in which it was charged and taken will never be forgotten by the surviving participants. Led by our Captain, we followed the assault wave, and, under his direction, mounted our guns on a ridge commanding the town, where we could use direct fire over the heads of our own troops.

We had some wonderful targets, but were subject to direct observed artillery fire, front and flank, the flank organizations having failed to gain their objective.

After getting my guns in action, I found the Captain firing a machine gun, the crew of which had become casualties. Under the cover of the gun he was firing and three others from my platoon, I removed the remainder of the guns forward to escape the heavy enemy barrage.

Then I rejoined the Captain. Shortly he gave the order to cease firing, our troops having advanced so far that it was dangerous to continue to fire over their heads.

We continued to observe, waiting for dusk to advance. I left the Captain to give orders to one of my gun crews. When I found him a few moments later he was dead, shot with a rifle bullet. He had started forward, field glass in one hand, rifle with fixed bayonet in the other.

We advanced with leaden hearts and heavy feet to help reorganize and consolidate the line for the night, because that is what he would have had us do. It was two or three days before the body was recovered and laid to rest in a grassy meadow in the Forest of Argonne, beside that of one of his Lieutenants, who gave his life the same day.

He was your dear friend, you say. To us he was more—peerless leader, boon companion, comrade, instructor and friend. We mourn his loss in a way that words cannot express. His men and officers loved him as he in his whole-hearted way loved them. The fateful German bullet cost the army a valiant leader and officer, a true soldier in every sense; robbed the government of a valuable citizen, and deprived all who were privileged to know him in the future society of a beloved friend and always cheerful companion.

Pardon me, sir, for so much detail about an action that I was in, but I loved and admired the “Old Skipper,” as he will always be to us, that it is a relief to talk to one who, likewise, knew and loved him. I dream of him by night and think of him by day, and always, in my plans for his company, I wonder if he would approve of my actions were he here. Most of my military education, all my machine gun experience, was received from him, and perhaps his invisible hand is still guiding me in my effort to take his company home as he would have taken it.

Even your high regard for Lige Worsham, the citizen, would have been increased had you known the Captain E. W. Worsham that I knew and served under. He understood men and by his own high ideals brought out the best in them. I truly sympathize with you in the loss of a friend,

Sincerely yours,

Capt. Ray W. Hays

M.G.Co., 362 Inf., A.E.F.

Elijah William Worsham had been captain of the football team at Purdue, and later moved to Seattle, where he’d started a brokerage firm. He was thirty-one years old when he died, and was buried at the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery. His marker there mistakenly records his date of death as September 26, 1918.

I left Bill Lake that afternoon in April, 2004, with a promise that I would come see him again in July, when I planned to be back in the area. I told myself that I would be sure to bring my video camera the next time. And I did.

But I didn’t get to interview him again; in June, he went into the hospital to have surgery for a perforated ulcer, contracted pneumonia post-op, and died. His obituary got his unit wrong, but it did mention the name of his daughter who lived in Yakima, something he never had. In July, passing through town as expected, I called her—her name was Pat—and asked if I could stop by.

She hadn’t known about my visits with him, and I got the sense, in talking with her briefly, that they weren’t exactly distant but weren’t exactly close, either. She showed me his original discharge papers, gave me an official copy someone had requested decades later, perhaps in support of a pension application. I told her in general terms about what we’d discussed; and then I mentioned how he couldn’t remember his father’s name the first time I’d visited him, but that the second time, when I’d asked again, he’d replied, without hesitating, “Richard, just like yours.”

She raised a hand to her mouth, stared at me for a moment. “I never knew his name,” she said. She was then seventy-three years old.

We took a moment to go through the names of her father’s mother and sisters and brothers, just to make sure I had gotten them all right. And then I asked her if she knew why her father’s two younger brothers—Downing, who was twenty years old in 1918, and Graydon, who was eighteen—had been turned away when they’d tried to enlist. She told me that she didn’t. But she did know, she said, that Downing had taken it very badly: He went home afterward and killed himself.