15

Wasn't a Lot of Help

Three stories.

I.

ON JULY 20, 2004, I left Yakima and drove two hundred miles to Spokane to visit with a man who was, I already knew, different from any other veteran I had interviewed, or planned to. His name was John Babcock, and he had served in the CEF: the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

Now, like many Americans, you may regard Canada as a very large fifty-first state, or perhaps America Lite. Block out the weird spelling (“humour,” “centre,” “grey”), odd nomenclature (z = “zed”; bathroom = “washroom”; macaroni & cheese = “Kraft Dinner”), funny-looking currency, clean city streets, bilingual highway signs, excellent public transportation, ubiquitous Tim Hortons doughnut shops, and even more ubiquitous national symbols—I once bought a dozen eggs and found a tiny maple leaf stamped on each one—and you might not be able to tell the difference. But make no mistake: Canada is not the United States of America. Its entire identity, it often seems to me, is based upon this fact.

Canada’s so-very-not-American-ness goes all the way back to the American Revolution. Before that little disagreement, the big chunk of North America up yonder was overwhelmingly French, at least ethnically; Britain had seized New France from old France some years earlier, but there still weren’t all that many Britons living up there. After the Revolution, the 20 percent of the population of the Thirteen Colo- nies who had harbored Loyalist sympathies during the rebellion found themselves in a rather awkward position vis-à-vis the other 80 percent. Many Loyalists, who had been among the more affluent American colonists, now found themselves, shall we say, relieved of their property. Others were harassed and menaced by Yankee Doodle ruffians.

Canada—still British—beckoned.

It is estimated that around one hundred thousand Loyalists fled across the new northern border after American independence was secured. This is why, today, Anglophone Canadians sound much more like Americans than Englishmen. It is also why being not-American is still terribly important to Canadians. And, most important to this story, why Canada remained a part of the British Empire well into the twentieth century. What that meant in 1914 was this: When England declared war on Germany at 11:00 p.m. on August 4 of that year, Canada necessarily went to war, too. If there was a lot of opposition to that state of affairs, I don’t know of it. Canada, after all, was the good child, the one who didn’t rebel.

They didn’t have much of an army on August 4, 1914; the entire country had fewer than eight million people in it at that point, and hadn’t faced a serious threat in a century. By the end of the war, though, more than half a million Canadians had served in uniform. The great majority of them were volunteers; Canada didn’t even have a draft until 1918.

Canada’s war got off to a rough start. Newfoundland’s lone regiment—Newfoundland wasn’t technically part of Canada until 1949, but it was close enough—was sent to Gallipoli, a notorious meat grinder; and CEF troops were present at Ypres (which Canadians, like the British, still pronounce “Wipers”) in the spring of 1915 when the Germans unleashed their first large-scale chlorine gas attack. The Canadians got hit particularly hard, taking thousands of casualties at Wipers; a couple thousand of them died there.

Nevertheless, the following winter, back in Ontario, John Henry Foster Babcock made a spontaneous decision, one evening, to enlist.

He was fifteen years old.

All of the veterans I interviewed looked younger than their actual age, but none of them looked younger than John Babcock; he looked like he was about seventy. And a youthful seventy, at that. He resembled Mr. Tate on the TV show Bewitched: thick white hair brushed straight back, trim mustache, bulbous nose. On the day I stopped by, he was wearing an off-white polo shirt over a bright white T-shirt, and dark pants. While we talked, he sat in a dark red armchair; his wife, Dorothy, hovered nearby and offered up a detail or two when he was slow to recall them, which was rare. They had an easy, playful rapport, the kind you hope you’ll have with your spouse at that age, or any age. I was surprised to learn that Dorothy was actually his second wife; they had met in 1976, when she’d cared for his first wife, Elsie, in the hospital as Elsie lay dying. John had been married to Elsie for forty-four years.

John Babcock was born on July 23, 1900, he told me, “twenty miles north of Kingston, in Ontario”; his service records list the specific town as Holleford, which is actually a bit farther away. Kingston, a picturesque old city that is home to both the Royal Military College of Canada and what seems like every prison in the country, sits at the spot where Lake Ontario empties into the St. Lawrence River. It was originally settled by Loyalist refugees, who named it for George III. Later, it became the capital of the Province of Canada, which eventually grew to become just Canada. John Babcock’s mother, Anne, was born in Ottawa, the current national capital; his father, James T. Babcock, grew up in the same area as his son John, who was born on the family farm. “What kind of farm was it?” I asked him.

“There was three hundred and fifty acres,” he recalled, “and there was about a hundred acres that was farm. It was patches and all. And most of it had timber on it. There was a small lake on it.” His father, he said, “had this farm, and he had a sawmill on it. He was doing very well.” Then one day, he explained, “he was getting out timber, and they were felling a tree, and he took the young man’s place at the saw, and”—he raised his hand and then swatted it down—“tree fell, and it hit a cedar tree, a dead cedar tree that was leaning diagonally across the path of that tree they were felling, and it broke off and come down and hit my father on the shoulder.” He touched his own right shoulder. “And he lived for two hours. They brought him in on a sleigh, one of the sleighs and a horse blanket. He lived for two hours,” he repeated, staring straight ahead and starting to rock in his chair. “He died.”

James Babcock was forty-three years old. His son John, not yet six, was the eighth of ten children left behind; his father’s first wife had died in childbirth, one of those things that, like deadly farm accidents, happened a lot back then. James’s death was a real hardship to his second wife, Anne. “The in-laws didn’t like my mother, because she had a high school education, and very few people had that much of an education at the time,” her son explained. “And the half brother and sisters, they drifted away. And finally just we five of the second family was on the farm. So my mother milked thirteen cows, night and morning.” Eventually she put the farm up for sale. “And my half brother bought it for twenty-one hundred dollars.” John continued to live there for about a year, until, one night—well, I’ll let him tell it.

“I was in a little town called Perth Road,” he recalled. “And there was a lieutenant and a sergeant came. And we were having a kind of a dance in the upstairs of the house, and they were trying to get people to enlist. And they asked me if I wouldn’t like to.” He laughed, an unusual variation on “Ha!” that started silently but then suddenly burst forth with great volume, like a sonic boom. “And I, of course, said, ‘Why, yes!’”

“At fifteen and a half!” his wife declared.

“And they—you didn’t lie about your age?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“They didn’t ask your age?” I asked.

“Yeah, they did,” he replied. But it seemed they didn’t care; Canada needed soldiers, and recruiters have quotas. “They were hard up for men,” he told me. “Very hard up.” He laughed again. “They had to be, to [take me],” he explained. For him, though, it seemed like a good deal: He had dropped out years earlier—“I didn’t care about school,” he explained—and was working as a laborer on the farm that now belonged to his brother. He didn’t particularly enjoy the work; the war seemed like an adventure. Why not go?

According to his attestation paper—the Canadian version of an enlistment form—young Mr. Babcock joined up on February 1, 1916, and did, indeed, offer his real birth date. (Interesting: At that time, the standard Canadian attestation paper did not record the enlistee’s weight, though it did note two chest measurements—“girth when fully expanded” and “range of expansion.”) After he enlisted, he recalled, “I went to Sydenham the next following Monday morning. It was about fifteen miles; I walked.” He was assigned to the 146th Over-Seas Battalion, and sent to Kingston. “We drilled there for a few weeks,” he said, “and then they sent us to Sydenham and we spent the winter there. And men kept enlisting—we had about thirty-five or forty men there.” Come spring, they were sent to Valcartier, Quebec, where the Canadian Army had just built a large training camp. And it was there, as the 146th was preparing to ship across, that John Babcock’s youth first emerged as an issue.

“Before they went overseas,” he recalled, “everyone got a physical. And I was turned down. ‘A-4.’ I was physically fit but underage.”

He had never, to that point, tried to fudge the matter; and yet, the Army had had no problem enlisting him, training him, clothing and feeding him, and moving him around as it suited them. At one point, his mother, unhappy that John had enlisted, even wrote his colonel asking that her son be discharged on account of his age; but John demurred, and the colonel dropped the matter. Again: “They were pretty damn hard up for men, let me tell you,” as he put it. So I don’t know why, suddenly, his age became a problem for the CEF. Perhaps there was a change in policy, or personnel; perhaps the wrong person just happened to get a look at his records at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, he was pulled from the corps. Resourceful fellow that he was, though, he quickly found a loophole, of sorts. “For some reason or other, my name wasn’t published with the guys that were turned down,” he explained. “So I put my pack on, and got on the train and went to Halifax. And the company commander knew my status, so when I went to get on the boat, he made me step aside, and sent me up to Wellington Barracks. That was a peacetime barracks, in Halifax. And they put me on a truck, wrassling freight there, and I didn’t care for that.”

He bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to make a move; and one soon presented itself. “They called for a draft of thirty or forty men to go to the RCRs,” he told me. “That was the Royal Canadian Reserves, that was peacetime reserves. I volunteered. They asked me how old I was, and I said, ‘Eighteen.’ And went—got to England, went over on the old California. That’s a cattle boat; they converted it.” He confessed, “I did a lot of vomiting.” Still, he was relatively fortunate: A year later, the German U-22 torpedoed the California, sank it.

John Babcock finally got across in October of 1916, which by then was looking like an even worse year for Canadians in that war than 1915 had been. On July 1, the Newfoundland Regiment had suffered a casualty rate of 90 percent in the first few hours of the Battle of the Somme. If you think that’s bad, then I won’t tell you that their officer corps suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent. But it did. The Canadian Expeditionary Force, which entered the battle a few months later, would take more than twenty thousand casualties at the Somme that fall. It’s enough to make you wonder why young John Babcock kept trying so hard to get into it all. I asked him: “Were you eager to get overseas?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I wanted to go over there.”

“You were eager to go fight?”

He laughed. “Well, I didn’t want to get killed.”

“But you wanted to get into the action.”

“Yeah, I did,” he said. When he first arrived in Liverpool, though, he was given a six-day leave, which he spent in London. It was full of soldiers, he told me—not just British, but Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians on leave. There was a lot of rivalry among them, too. “Everybody thought they were the best,” he told me. “The Canadians and Australians thought they were the best. And the English knew they were the best,” he said, laughing. “The English people have great self-confidence.” He saw that in their civilians, too, who, he recalled, simply “went on with their work,” undisturbed by the war, except for the occasional zeppelin. “Seemed to me,” he recalled, “they had an air raid while I was there. And I think we went into these places, you know . . . these air-raid shelters.” There would be a lot more of that sort of thing there the next time around. Young Babcock spent much of his time in the city at a train depot; “They had a free lunch in the Victoria Station. That’s where I did most of my eating,” he said with a laugh. “I only had two pounds. That was equivalent to ten dollars. When I got back to camp I had two shillings in the pocket; that was equivalent to fifty cents.”

Later, to his surprise, he discovered that he had family in the area. “My half brother had gone with the outfit,” he told me. “With the 146th Battalion. And he was stationed just a few miles from where I was.”

“In England,” Dorothy clarified.

“England,” he agreed. “I went down to see him, and he asked how the hell I ever got over there.” Later, Mr. Babcock said, his brother—Albert Manly Babcock, eight years John’s senior—transferred to the engineers, where he was made a sapper: “The people [who] would tunnel under the enemy lines, and put a lot of explosives there and blow them up,” he explained. One time, he told me, his brother “dug into a German sap where some people got—the tunnel had been blown in behind them. They were just sitting there; they were dead.” Sapping was a dirty job in every sense; it wore on his brother terribly. “He had a nervous breakdown,” John Babcock recalled. “He got buried one time up to his waist. They were putting a narrow-gauge railroad across a shell hole, and they were driving the wooden piling down to support this railroad. And they’d just hit a couple of licks and the Heinies zeroed in on that, so they’d hit a couple of licks and have to get back and hide because those three-inch shells—whizz-bangs, they called them—would come over there.” One of these whizz-bangs landed close enough to Albert Manly Babcock to bury him up to his midsection in earth. He was lucky: Plenty of soldiers in France were buried alive entirely by artillery blasts. One day, during the Battle of Verdun, an entire French company disappeared in an instant. They were discovered shortly after the armistice when their bayonets, still fixed to their rifles, poked up through the earth. The bodies were never exhumed, but rather left where they sat, still awaiting orders to go over the top; today the Tranchée des Baionettes is something of a shrine at Verdun.

Being half-buried was quite enough for Albert Manly Babcock. “He had a nervous breakdown,” his brother reiterated. “They discharged him, sent him back to Canada. And his church got ahold of him, and they sent him to Montreal, to McGill University, a few months after that. And he became a minister.”

He was lucky.

John Babcock was lucky, too, in a way, and he knew it. “We lost a lot of fellows that was in the little detachment that I was in, in Sydenham,” he told me. “Quite a few of them got killed.”

Though they had gone over too late for the carnage of 1916, there was still ample opportunity for Canadians to die in France in 1917. In April of that year, the CEF—all four Canadian divisions, united for the first time in one Canadian Corps—was assigned to take a strate- gic high point at the northern flank of a British offensive that would come to be known as the Battle of Arras, in order to protect nearby British troops from that pesky German enfilade fire. It was a tough assignment; the Germans, aware of the position’s importance, were well fortified. Nevertheless, the Canadians delivered, taking some ten thousand casualties but capturing all of their objectives in four days—including that high ground, which was named for a nearby town: Vimy Ridge.

Now, here’s another difference between Canada and the United States: If you’re American, it’s likely you’ve never heard of Vimy Ridge. If you’re Canadian, though? Not a chance. Vimy Ridge is to the nation of Canada what Belleau Wood is to the United States Marine Corps. The address of Canada’s very fine national War Museum in Ottawa is 1 Vimy Place. The British general who commanded the Canadian Corps at Vimy, Julian Byng, was appointed governor-general of Canada after the war—a largely ceremonial but high-profile position that comes with lots and lots of juicy perks. The British also made Byng First Viscount of Vimy.

Canadians who fought at Vimy (which is pronounced “Vimmie”) could dine off that fact back home for the rest of their lives. John Babcock, though, had to remain satisfied with the free lunch at Victoria Station, because he never got out of England. While the CEF was fighting at Vimy—and, later, at Passchendaele, and Amiens, and Cambrai—he was unable to get into the action. The issue, once again, was his youth. At some point before the RCRs were sent on to France, he told me, “my service record came through . . . and they found out I was sixteen.” So he was plucked out of the RCRs and reassigned to the 26th Reserve. Many of the men in the 26th—all Canadians, as he recalled—had already seen action in France, and were recovering from wounds, physical or psychological or both. “Did you get to talk to a lot of them about what they had done and seen?” I asked him.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Yeah.”

“And what kind of stories did you hear?”

“All kinds of stories . . . I remember, one thing that struck me as rather cruel. When the Canadians would take a bunch of German prisoners, somebody would be detailed to take them back. To the prison area. Most fellows didn’t want to be bothered taking them back, [so] they’d take them into the reserve trenches and they’d shoot them. I thought,” he said, shaking his head, “I thought that was terrible.” He cast his eyes downward. “I think of that to this day. But when you get in the Army and fighting, you get pretty damn callous, I guess. And shooting somebody”—he looked back up at me—“of course, the Germans, they were just as cruel as our guys were.”

“You think that was pretty common?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

There were a great many stories told, he added, that he didn’t get to hear. “We had what was called a ‘wet canteen’ in the area. And the men would go there and drink beer at night. And some of them would drink as many as eight or nine of those imperial pints of beer, and they would talk about their experiences.”

“What else would they talk about?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t go to the wet canteen.”

“You didn’t?”

“I didn’t care for beer.” Very unusual for a Canadian, in my experience. Even an expatriate.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy other pursuits. “I got acquainted with one of the WAACs when I was in Edinburgh, in Scotland,” he said—the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, founded in Britain in 1917. He was drawn to one in particular, a Scottish sixteen-year-old with the unusual name of, as he recalled it, Isabel Hailstones. He met her, he told me, “one evening on Prince’s Street, in Edinburgh.”

“Did she show you around?” I asked.

“Oh . . . not really,” he said.

And then Dorothy said to her husband: “Tell him the story.”

“What story?” he asked her. She offered just a bit of guidance; “Oh!” he exclaimed, and looked incredulously at his wife, then let loose that sonic boom of a laugh and turned to me. “We were going to have sex,” he said. “And I had, I was in this little cul-de-sac, and I had my overcoat down [on the ground] and she was on it, and we were going to have sexual intercourse. And a policeman walked in. And that kind of stopped that.” He laughed again; we all did. “So I came home a virgin,” he said, in summary.

“I thought you told me,” Dorothy prodded him, “she was the one that had the bloomers on, and you couldn’t get her bloomers down or something?”

“Oh, they had bloomers and long johns,” he said. “And I got her bloomers down around her ankles—I couldn’t get her legs apart. So I came home a virgin.” He laughed again, and so did Dorothy and I, though I will confess to you now that I’m pretty sure my laugh was a good bit more awkward than theirs.

Things improved on that front once he came home to Canada after the war and returned to school. “The girls that I had gone to school with, they learned about the birds and the bees,” he explained. “So I got taken care of then.”

I once had a Canadian woman—a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as it happens—tell me that Canadians are much more sexually liberated than Americans. At the time, I thought she was just coming on to me.

After six months in the 26th Reserve, Mr. Babcock told me, “they rounded up everybody in the Canadian Army that was underage and put us in one outfit. There were thirteen hundred of us. And we were at Bexhill-on-Sea; that was in Sussex. And they drilled us eight hours a day. And when you became nineteen, you went into D Company, and you went from there to France.” This new unit, he recalled, was known as a Young Soldiers Battalion, and its formation was a curious byproduct of the war. The British, it seems, did not discharge an underage soldier from their army (or from the armies of their dominions) once his true age became known; rather, they transferred him to one of these Young Soldiers Battalions and kept him there, in the service, until he came of age, at which point he would be sent to some front-line unit as a replacement. If it were discovered that you were, in fact, underage in the Army, you would be plucked out of your unit and transferred to a Young Soldiers Battalion immediately—no matter where you happened to be at the time, even if that should be a fire trench in Flanders.

In his battalion, John Babcock told me, “about a third of them had [already] been to France . . . We had one kid who had won the DCM—the Distinguished Conduct Medal,” a British decoration for extreme bravery, second in prestige only to the Victoria Cross. The brave boy soldier’s name was Kinley; he was sixteen years old and, according to John Babcock, “wilder than a March hare.” There was also, he recalled, “an Iroquois Indian that had been to France, and he came back—they took him out of the trenches and sent him to this Young Soldiers Battalion when I was there. His brother got killed. And his father, who was also in the Canadian Army, he got wounded.”

John Babcock had hoped he would get sent across; “I wanted to ‘do my bit,’ as they called it,” he told me. And he got pretty close: When the boys in his Young Soldiers Battalion “were six months from being nineteen, they put them in D Company, and they trained them,” he explained. And then, as soon as they turned nineteen, “they shipped them back to France.” When the war ended, John Babcock was about ten weeks away from being sent to D Company.

While he never made it to France, he did manage to get some fighting in, thanks to his highly decorated friend, Kinley. One time after the armistice, he said, “when we were in Kimmel Park Camp in North Wales and some of our guys got thrown out of a dancehall by the British, he says, Kinley says, ‘You know, we should go up there and clean them bastards.’ And so up we went, thirteen hundred strong.” A heated discussion ensued, and then “somebody picked up a bench and threw it through a window,” he recalled. “That’s when the old sergeant came out and said, ‘Don’t hit me, I’m an old man!’ Then he was socking everybody he could.” I laughed, picturing the scene with that music from The Benny Hill Show playing in the background. “This big sergeant major,” he continued, “a soldier like that”—he spread his arms wide to indicate a man of some size—“said, ‘Don’t you hit that old man.’ Someone hit him with a one-by-four alongside the jaw, crack!” He chuckled. “And I thought, ‘Well, this is no place for me.’ And I just kind of faded away and went back to camp. One of our guys had a bayonet thrust through his thigh. And they had us—in less than two weeks they had us on a boat back to Canada.” It seems Britain tired of that particular group of Young Soldiers. And I suspect it was mutual; when I asked Mr. Babcock if everyone onboard the RMS Aquitania with him seemed to be glad to be going home, he replied, simply: “Oh, hell, yes.”

He was formally discharged on January 11, 1919. He returned to Holleford, enrolled at the same school he had left as a child, but dropped out again after a few months; “I decided I wasn’t going to make it through the entrance [exams] into high school,” he explained, quickly adding: “I graduated from high school when I was ninety-five years old. I’m considering now taking a college course.” Back in 1919, though, having left school again, he went to work “in the Adirondack Mountains in a lumber camp. And they gave Canadians a vocational training.” That training enabled him to get a job in Sydenham, “running a light plant . . . I’d read the meters.” After a while he moved west, to Saskatchewan, to work the harvest; and then in 1921, he told me, “I enlisted in the American Army, and came to Camp Lewis, Washington.” The same place where Bill Lake had gone through boot camp a few years earlier.

“Why did you do it?” I asked him.

“Well, hell,” he said. “I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t have a trade.”

But with his three years in the CEF, he told me, army life came easily to him. “In a month I was a corporal,” he recalled. “And in another month I was a sergeant.” He liked America, decided to stay; after moving around the Northwest a few times, he landed in Spokane in 1932. Eventually he became an American citizen, which, at the time, meant he automatically forfeited his Canadian citizenship. I’m not sure how much thought he ever gave that fact.

We visited for a few hours that day in Spokane; I never saw him or talked to him again, but I did keep an eye out for his obituary. Years passed, until, in May of 2007, I came across a different death notice, for a fellow named Percy Dwight Wilson, which stated that Mr. Wilson’s passing left exactly one living Canadian veteran of the First World War, a man named John Henry Foster Babcock.

And here’s another difference between the United States and Canada: Just as soon as John Babcock achieved that status, he became quite famous throughout the land of his birth. Canadian journalists—newspaper, television, magazine, radio—descended upon Spokane, Washington, to interview him, and sometimes just to meet him. The government decided that, upon his death, he would be given a state funeral; he declined that honor, though he was happy to have his Canadian citizenship restored. Government officials, including at least one member of Parliament, visited him at his home. He received birthday greetings from the prime minister, the governor-general, and Eliza- beth II (who still retains the title of Queen of Canada for some reason). The honors continued to accumulate for several years, until he died in February, 2010, at the age of 109.

Sometime during the first week of November, 2008, I was on a train riding from Montreal to Cornwall, Ontario, when I observed a couple of well-dressed, distinguished-looking older gentlemen sitting across the aisle; both had large red plastic flowers affixed to their lapels. I had seen quite a few such flowers while visiting Montreal, and wondered what was up, so I asked these two gentlemen about it. They were poppies, they explained, sold to raise money for veterans’ causes every year in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day: November 11. Veterans Day. Armistice Day.

They were veterans themselves; I noticed one had some sort of military decoration pinned to his jacket near the poppy. We talked a bit more, and then for some reason I told them that I was American, and that I had once met John Babcock. They—these proud, dignified, accomplished old men—suddenly looked at me with awe, then admiration, and started talking effusively, something I couldn’t have imagined (much less expected) from two Canadians of such bearing. One of them told me he had served in Mr. Babcock’s unit, by which I think he meant the 146th Over-Seas Battalion; when I rose to leave the train a few moments later, he removed the poppy from his coat and pinned it on mine.

II.

My visit with 102-year-old Warren Hileman on June 10, 2004, was another singular experience. Like most of my interview subjects, he was quite hard of hearing; unlike the rest, though, he refused to wear his hearing aids. After a few minutes of shouting questions at him (with his caregiver repeating them, even louder and right in his ear), I came to understand that I was going to have to write them down on my legal pad and just hand that to him, instead. It made for an interesting conversation.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you, because that conversation almost didn’t happen at all. When I learned of Warren Hileman’s existence, from an article in a small-town newspaper, I called up the Il- linois Veterans’ Home in Anna, Illinois, where the article had said he lived, and asked if he was capable of giving me an interview. He was certainly capable, I was told, but also disinclined; several television crews had shown up at the home with similar intentions, only to be turned away. Nevertheless, they said, if I happened to be in the area, I’d be welcome to come by and try for myself. I wasn’t anywhere near the area—Anna is in extreme southern Illinois, so far downstate that it’s only about a three-hour drive from Memphis—but I decided I’d take a chance, because Warren Hileman had a story that I knew no other living veteran could tell me. So I flew to Memphis and made the drive.

I’m not sure why he decided to see me. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure he actually did. When I showed up at the Veterans’ Home I was directed to a sort of conference room and told to wait; a few minutes later, he was wheeled in. It seems possible to me that he wasn’t told what was going on until we were in each other’s presence, at which point it might have proven a tad awkward for him to just leave without talking to me. However it happened, I’m grateful that it did; and he didn’t seem to mind much, either.

He was born, he said, on September 29, 1901. When I asked him where, exactly, he replied: “Well, as far as I can recall, I was born on one of Grandpa’s daughter’s farms . . . out about eight miles east of Anna.” He spoke quite deliberately, taking plump pauses here and there, often in the middle of a sentence. His voice was deep; you couldn’t tell, just by his accent, what part of the country he’d grown up in, but you could tell that it was rural. His discharge papers listed his height as five feet seven, but he seemed much taller than that, sitting down though he was. His facial features and torso created the impression that he had been stretched out at some point. It suited his voice, and vice versa. And that voice lent itself to rambling. Often, when I posed a question to him in writing, he would answer it and then just continue on talking, unraveling a string of anecdotes and details that were no less interesting for being, at times, not entirely relevant. For instance, after telling me where he was born, he continued:

And there was a little country store out there where it used to be . . . And Dad rented it one time. And as you don’t know, though, back then in an old country store, wasn’t a lot of help. And transportation then wasn’t what it is now. The car back then was a curiosity. There was the old dirt road—you could tell when cars were coming right down a country road, you could see a big trail of dust. And in the wintertime, that’d become mud. And people would—first big rain all year, they’d put the car in the garage or someplace. Then they’d take the tires off the car and put them upstairs.

When I asked him, out loud, what his father’s name had been, he stared at me for a moment and then said, with a chuckle, “We’re not communicating at all.” That was when I decided to start using the legal pad. I wrote the question down and slid it across to him; he read it, took another pause, and said: “Aaron.” He didn’t have many memories of the man, though: His father, who worked on a farm, was killed in an accident when Warren was very young. “His brother run over him with a thrash machine,” he explained. “The engine didn’t run over him, just the separator. Right on the rear wheel, run across his chest.”

“How old was he?” I asked.

“He was thirty-five years old.”

“And how old were you?”

“I was three years old. And my sister was five. And I think the baby was eleven months.” A month later, I would hear a somewhat similar story from John Babcock; that world, in a lot of ways, was a more dangerous place than ours is today. Mr. Hileman made this same point rather colorfully a minute or so later, while telling me about his grandfather’s farm. “Grandpa bought land for twenty-five cents an acre,” he recalled. “The old barn is still standing—it’s got hand-built walls. And it’s been there over a hundred years, but dry rot is getting into them walls.” At one time on that farm, he recalled, “there was five buildings, and all built out of hand-hewn logs. You ever see what they call a broadaxe?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You ever tried using one?”

“No.”

“You had to be a little careful with one,” he said. “If you didn’t watch what you were doing, you’d chop your foot off. And Uncle John, he had a guy that’d give him railroad ties . . . and he was hewing away! And he just set his broadaxe down beside the log, sat down on it, took his shoe off, took his sock off, shake it like that . . .” He mimicked the motion of shaking out a sock; a wry grin spread over his face and then dissolved in a laugh. “Three white toes fell out,” he said.

After his father died, Warren Hileman told me nearly a century later, his mother, Alvena, “got married again before too long.” She had moved in with her late husband’s father and was working as a farm hand; and her father-in-law had a single son at home. “She married a Hileman the second time,” her son recalled, a practice so old it’s actually mandated in chapter 25 of Deuteronomy; they call it Levirate marriage. “And she’s buried at Mission Chapel,” he continued. “That’s down there—you know where St. John’s Church is?”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“I thought everybody knows where St. John’s was,” he said. He was a funny fellow and had a lot of funny stories—like the time, when he was three years old and ran excitedly to see his first cow, and the cow hooked one of its horns under his suspenders, lifted him off the ground, and thrashed him about. He was even funny, sometimes, in talking about his military service, although, knowing a bit beforehand about where he had served and when, humorous anecdotes were not what I had expected to hear that day. You see, Warren Hileman enlisted at the age of seventeen and was assigned to the 27th Infantry Regiment, one of two Army regiments in the American Expeditionary Forces that were given a special assignment. They fought overseas—but not in France. Or Europe.

“I’m a World War I veteran,” he said, when I first asked him about his service. “And I served in a place that a lot of people . . .” He paused for a moment, perhaps contemplating how he might finish that sentence.

He never did. Instead, he just said: “Siberia.”

And that’s why I went all the way to Anna, Illinois, on the off chance that he would grant me an interview: Warren Hileman was the last surviving veteran of the AEF Siberia, a chapter in American history as strange as it is now obscure.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in March, 1918, took Russia out of the war against Germany; but Russia was still quite far from peaceful at that point. The Bolsheviki, who had made that peace with the Germans several months after seizing power in the October Revolution, had allied themselves with various leftist, pro-revolutionary, and anti-czarist groups, collectively calling themselves the Workers and Peasants Red Army, more often known as the Red Army or, simply, the Reds. But the Reds didn’t yet have control over the vast expanse that was (and is) Russia; there were still a great many groups, organizations and individuals, united by little more than their hatred of the Reds, fighting together in a loose confederation known as the White Army—or the White Guard, or just the Whites. The Reds and the Whites fought each other in a savage civil war that raged for years and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The Reds executed many innocent civilians as “enemies of the people”; the Whites slaughtered many innocent civilians, too, including lots of Jews—to whom some Whites, being steeped in centuries of good old-fashioned Russian anti-Semitism, assigned blame for the whole revolution—in some of the worst pogroms the country had ever seen, which is saying quite a lot. The Whites played on the West’s fear of the Reds (not hard to do) and the Allies’ desire to reopen the Eastern Front and draw German troops away from France and Belgium (also not hard to do), and quickly lined up French, Italian, and especially British support. The British, in turn, were quite keen to draw the Americans into the effort. President Wilson and Secretary of War Baker, though, weren’t particularly interested at first; while they weren’t terribly fond of the Bolsheviki—who had, after all, made a separate peace with the Germans—they didn’t see Russia as their fight. Nevertheless, the British kept trying, and in the summer of 1918, they conjured just the right combination of incentives.

The first was essentially financial. When America entered the conflict in the spring of 1917, it started shipping war materiel—everything from guns and shells to locomotives and boxcars—to its new ally, Russia; by the time Russia left the war the following spring, nearly a billion dollars’ worth of American materiel was sitting in two Russian ports: Arkhangelsk, above the Arctic Circle in the north-central part of the country, and Vladivostok, in the extreme far east, near Japan. The British presented a simple case: Go in with us and help make sure the Bolsheviki—or, worse, the Germans—don’t get their hands on your stuff. Pretty straightforward. And persuasive.

The second argument, though, was more emotional, and it might just have been the one that really swayed President Wilson. It involved a curious band of men—I’ve seen estimates of their numbers ranging from forty thousand to seventy thousand—who captured imaginations and won admiration throughout the West in 1918: the Czech Legion.

In 1914, the areas that are now known as the Czech Republic and Slovakia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As ethnic minorities, though, many Czechs and Slovaks had no great love for the empire. Some fled east rather than be conscripted into the emperor’s army; others, who had already been conscripted, deserted. Still others were captured by the Russians in battle. At some point, someone hit upon the idea of forming a military unit, composed largely of these displaced Czechs, that would fight alongside the Russians in the east, against the Germans and Austrians. And it did—at least until Russia signed that treaty and left the war. The Bolshevik government couldn’t allow the Czech Legion to continue the fight on their own, at least not in the east, but it did permit them to leave. The problem was that they couldn’t head west—the Germans were there. The only way out of the country was through the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok. Five thousand miles to the east.

At first, things seemed to be going somewhat smoothly. For a while, the Czechs were able to ride east on the Trans-Siberian Railway—the only way to get to Vladivostok from Europe—more or less unmolested. But then some Bolsheviki decided they should try to disarm the Czechs. This did not go well. Soon the Czechs found themselves thoroughly embattled, mixing it up with Reds and German POWs and various bands of brigands. Nevertheless, they were astonishingly successful, plowing east in armored trains, defeating the Reds at almost every turn, and liberating towns and villages. They also established and ran a bank, built a theater and mounted productions, and secured a printing press that they used to publish books and a regular newspaper—none of which are easy to do even if you’re not on a moving train that is constantly coming under attack. They were celebrated internationally as heroes, but the battles took a great toll on them; they needed help. The British made the case for intervention to President Wilson who, though he may not have believed in racial equality, did believe passionately in the right of self-determination, at least for white men. He agreed to send troops to Russia, even adding a directive that, in addition to securing American war materiel and aiding the Czech Legion, American troops should offer support to “any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.” Which Russians, exactly, was never clear, and even if it had been, the doughboys couldn’t have done much about it; they had quite enough to do already in pursuit of the other two, less vague, directives.

There were actually two AEF actions in Russia. The first was in Arkhangelsk, where there were no Czechs, but lots of American war materiel. And Reds. American troops—some five thousand of them, mostly from Michigan—arrived there in early September, 1918, and almost immediately discovered that the Bolsheviks had already moved the American arms out of the city; the AEFNR (American Expeditionary Force North Russia) went after it. They also went after the Reds, especially along the railroads. But Russia is a very large place, and it soon became apparent to the AEFNR that they were overstretched, at which point they stopped advancing and tried to hold what they had already taken. But Russia is also a very cold place, and the men of the AEFNR didn’t know how to fight in a Russian winter nearly as well as the Russians did. After the Bolsheviks went on the attack, driving the Americans back, pressure from family in America to bring the men of the AEFNR home started to build; the men themselves—cold, besieged, and unsure of their objectives—started grumbling. Fear of mutinies arose. In February, 1919, President Wilson decided to start shutting the mission down. By summer, they were gone. The Bolsheviks had killed more than a hundred of them; disease had killed scores more.

You’d think the experience would have ended America’s adventurism in Russia. It didn’t. Even as the last of the five-thousand-man AEFNR was sailing out of Arkhangelsk, there were between seven thousand and ten thousand American troops of the AEFS—the American Expeditionary Force Siberia—still on Russian soil way out east. They had been sent across the Pacific, to the port of Vladivostok, with the same objectives as the AEFNR: secure American war materiel, and support the Czech Legion. But if North Russia had been a mess, Siberia was utter chaos. The acronym FUBAR, coined by American troops during the following war, would have fit the situation quite nicely.

To start with, no one really had control of Siberia at the time; different towns and villages were in different hands. And there were a lot of hands in Siberia: In addition to the Americans, there were Canadian, French, Italian, and even Polish forces there. The British sent a relatively small force, but nevertheless tried to take command of the situation as they had in North Russia (where they had dispatched a much greater number of men), and put a lot of pressure on the American commander, General William S. Graves, to seek out and attack Red forces. And then there were the Japanese, who sent more than seventy thousand troops to Siberia—ten times the number the Allies had requested—ostensibly to protect their borders. I often wonder why anyone bought that argument to begin with—isn’t Japan a series of islands?—but in any event, it soon became evident to Graves and others that Japan’s real objective was to grab up as much land in the area as possible. This meant that, contrary to its stated objective, it was actually in Japan’s interest to keep the state of affairs in Siberia as unstable as possible. The Japanese did this, primarily, by arming, abetting, and supporting a number of roving gangs—“armies” is too dignified a word—of Cossacks.

That’s right: The guys who had tried to kill young Irving Berlin were in Siberia, too, although, to be fair, they probably weren’t the same men (though you never know). While those earlier Cossacks had been organized mounted units serving (more or less) the czar, the Cossacks who were major players during the Russian Civil War were more akin to Attila’s Huns (with better technology), ranging about the lawless expanse of Siberia, hunting Reds when they felt like it but more often attacking lonely villages unfortunate enough to fall in their path. If such a band were to visit your town, you could expect to be robbed of all you had of value—including, almost always, your young daughters—and quite possibly killed in the bargain. Like the Czech Legion, they advanced on their own armored trains, although it must be said that the Czechs—who did not, as a rule, rape or plunder—had a much better record versus the Reds.

Add various itinerant elements of the Red Armies, which were not always hostile, and the White Armies, which were not always friendly, and, well: FUBAR. It’s hard not to feel bad for General Graves, an honest and honorable man who had hoped to be given a command in the trenches. Instead, Secretary Baker literally sent him to Siberia, and with little more than this advice: “Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite.” Not the sendoff he was hoping for, I imagine. Nevertheless, though it seems he regarded the mission as a mistake from the outset, he did his best, resisting British pressure to go after the Reds—there was nothing about that in his orders, he insisted—and trying to keep the Japanese in check. His best, though, wasn’t nearly good enough; nobody’s could have been. This was Siberia, and it was a terrible, awful, dangerous mess.

And freezing.

Private Warren V. Hileman arrived there on September 6, 1919. He was not quite eighteen years old.

“The only thing good I seen about it,” he told me when I first asked him about Siberia, “when it got cold, it stayed cold. And I mean cold. People around here complain: ‘Zero? Whoa, it’s so cold!’ I say, ‘Well, what would you do if it was thirty below?’” He cinched his arms and shook his head, mimicking someone shivering pathetically: “Ooh, wub-wub-wub-wub!”

He went on: “How do you think we did at thirty below zero? And it stayed thirty below zero. And we had from a foot to three and a half, four foot of snow.”

The cold was a subject he returned to again and again during our conversation, whether I asked about it or not; then again, if you’d been through something like that, I’m sure it would occupy a prominent place in your personal narrative, too. “I slept under nine blankets,” he told me at one point. “I wore nine pair of regular socks. I’d have wore more, but I couldn’t get them on. And over that we had lumberman’s socks, heavy wool, and they come up to below your knees, and had an elastic band, and you’d fasten that. Oh, and I could have wore wool underwear. Well, this, what they issued, it was good, it was good high-quality wool. Now, some wool itches you; this didn’t . . . [we] wore that next to our body. Of course then you add that, uh, wool trousers, and that wool underwear, a wool OD [olive drab] shirt . . . that went all over your body, your arms, over that. And then over your face, you had another wool helmet.” He gestured around his face, then drew a hand across his mouth. “And you had another piece that come across here. That buttoned. And when you walked guard duty, you was on it for two hours. Two hours, and off four.” After a shift on duty, he said, “you would have thought they’d have hot coffee.” He smiled faintly, shook his head. “Not a thing. You got into quarters, then, and start peeling all this stuff off.” He told me he slept in most of it, too.

Memories of the recent influenza pandemic, coupled with the extreme cold, led the Army to take special steps in an attempt to keep its Siberian doughboys healthy, though sometimes they had unintended consequences. “Every night just before bedtime, we’d spray our throats with some kind of an antiseptic,” Private Hileman recalled eighty-five years later, at the climate-controlled veterans’ home. It worked—sort of. “Nobody had a cold,” he told me, but “one guy, one night, they got their stuff mixed up and he sprayed his with fly spray.” I don’t think I laughed harder at any point in all of my interviews. “He felt a little uncomfortable,” he added, wonderfully deadpan. “But he survived.”

To hear him tell it, the cold was always the Americans’ biggest concern; it was going to get you one way or another. One time, he said, after several shifts on guard duty as an MP, walking from 4:30 to midnight, “I got to where I couldn’t walk. My legs just quit.” That landed him in the hospital for a spell. And then there was the night he and three other men were on outpost duty. “It was snowing and sleeting . . . miserable,” he recalled. Finally, he said, “we got relieved, more or less, and we got in and they served us supper, in them old aluminum mess kits.” No sooner had they sat down to eat, though, than they were ordered to assemble outside at once. “And they mean at once,” he explained. “And we all lined up . . . Then they said, ‘We called you out just to let you know that somebody come in drunk, and don’t let it happen again. Dismissed.’ Course, I got back and that food was froze solid. I just took that old mess kit over to the garbage can.” He shook his head. “Of course some fool would have to pull a stunt like that.” When they found the guy, Warren Hileman assured me, “first thing they did, they worked him over. And good. He was more or less battered after that.” He seemed satisfied that justice had been done. “There’s always some fool,” he declared.

An army, as Napoleon (who had his own experience of Russian winter) is reputed to have said, travels on its stomach, and if the food in Siberia sometimes froze—and not just the food; coffee often froze in the cup before you could finish drinking it—at least Private Hileman found it interesting. “The old-timers didn’t like it . . . but I thought it was pretty good!” he told me. “They had cabbage soup, black bread, and vodka.” The Russians were resourceful; “they’d take ten or fifteen medium heads of cabbage and make a hundred gallons of soup,” he recalled. “That black bread . . . you’d smell it going by. It had an odor!” And if vodka wasn’t your thing, “they had another one,” he said, “an alcoholic drink called ‘spud juice,’ made out of a fermented horse potato.” He shook his head. “Boy, that’ll knock your hat off.” There were two brothers, he told me, assigned to the same company, who took it upon themselves to set up a still with a third man and cook up some moonshine. “They went out and they thought they was buying spirits,” he explained, “and they got wood alcohol, and loaded up with that. And one of them died before they could get him back to quarters, and the other two went to the hospital, got them pumped out.” A lot of people would make the same mistake back home a few years later, during Prohibition.

The alcohol served more as a source of warmth than as a social lubricant. “We didn’t fraternize too much,” he told me, with the Russians. “They didn’t encourage that fraternization.” By “they,” he meant the United States Army.

“Did you encounter any Japanese soldiers in Siberia?” I asked him.

“Well, plenty!” he replied. In one area, he explained, “the Russians were first in the head of the valley. Then the Japanese. Then us. The Russians had a cemetery up on their end of it. When they had a body, they’d take it up, to the Japanese. And then you stopped.” He jabbed an extended finger straight down, to signify how abruptly one would have to halt. “The Japs wouldn’t let ’em across.”

“Did you encounter any Bolsheviks in Siberia?” I asked him.

“Everybody was a Bolshevik,” he said with a grin. Apparently, they didn’t much trust the Russians, either; in truth, there wasn’t much of a Bolshevik presence in that part of Siberia at that time. General Graves later testified that there had been none at all, though that seems rather unlikely.

I asked Mr. Hileman what he had done in Siberia. “We was on that Trans-Siberian Railway,” he replied. “We was eighteen hundred miles in the northerly direction—we landed at Vladivostok, and then we went up to Lake Baikal. It was eighteen hundred miles from Vladivostok. We was on that Trans-Siberian.” Protecting American property and the Czech Legion meant protecting that railroad. It was the central artery of the entire region, and everyone was scheming, maneuvering, and often fighting to control it: Reds, Whites, Czechs, Allies, Cossacks. When the men of the AEFS ran into trouble, it usually involved the railroad somehow or other. And it usually involved not the Reds, or the Whites, nor even the Japanese; but the Cossacks. “The Cossacks,” Warren Hileman said, pronouncing the word “Coe-Sacks.” “They wasn’t supposed to be armed, but they had sabers—in addition to machine guns—about, oh, three to four and a half feet, about that broad”—he measured off a section of his hand about four inches wide—“and a cutting edge.”

“Did you encounter any Cossacks?” I asked him.

“Any Cossacks?” He laughed. “Plenty of them . . . The Cossacks machine-gunned that troop train when I was on it. But I didn’t get hit.” He was referring to a deadly encounter on January 20, 1920, between soldiers of the AEFS and Cossacks, the latter subservient to the notorious warlord (or ataman) Grigoriy Semyonov. That incident is known today in certain circles as the Battle of Posolskaya. Sometimes spelled Posol’skaya. Or, in the case of Mr. Hileman’s discharge papers, “Posloraya.”

In a time and place that saw more than its share of unsavory characters, Ataman Semyonov was one of the most unsavory of all. He was also one of the most powerful; the supreme commander of a heavily armed and violent horde, he knew just how to play the Whites and Japanese for maximum personal gain, which was his primary—perhaps only—concern. Semyonov’s Cossacks marauded through Siberia in a fleet of armored trains, at least one of which was said to contain an entire car full of girls they’d forcibly taken from their families for, well, personal use. They were known to shoot men in large groups and leave the bodies where they fell, to be consumed by wild animals. Semyonov was too brutal even for some of his own men, who were no sweethearts themselves. At one point, according to Lieutenant Colonel Charles H. Morrow, commander of the 27th Infantry Regiment, five hundred of the ataman’s Cossacks fled to Morrow’s camp, outside the city of Khabarovsk, seeking refuge and bearing tales. Among those Colonel Morrow shared with a committee of the United States Senate in 1922: “Sixteen Austrian musicians who were playing in the Chaska Chai [a teashop] were executed in the public gardens in full daylight and the remains left there for public show. These musicians had not committed any crime deserving such bestial treatment.” And: “By order of Ataman Kalmykov [Ivan Kalmykov, one of Semyonov’s top generals] some employees of the Swedish Red Cross, among them one lady, have been shot. Ataman Kalmykov wanted to rectify this murder by charging them with espionage, but the real reason was that he got a chance to get hold of 3,000,000 rubles and of a large stock of different goods.” And: “Prisoners of war who are detailed to work in town have been forced to deal the last death-bringing stroke to wounded citizens for Cossacks.”

What Semyonov wanted most of all was control of the railroad. Morrow’s men—among them, Private Hileman—were there to protect it. It was just a matter of time before something unpleasant happened between the two forces. Reports of intimidation and violence against railroad employees reached Colonel Morrow regularly; several tense encounters between the Americans and the Cossacks very nearly escalated to violence. Finally, the AEFS banned Semyonov’s armored trains—there were believed to be nine in all, with such endearing names as Terrible, Horrible, Merciless, and Destroyer—from its sectors entirely. Things calmed down a bit, at least until several armored trains requested permission to pass through the sector, and Colonel Morrow consented. One of these trains was the Destroyer, which, Colonel Morrow later testified, had fifty-seven men and officers aboard, ten machine guns, and four small artillery pieces; its cars were clad in steel armor reinforced with eighteen inches of concrete. On the evening of January 10, 1920, it pulled into the station at Verkhne-Udinsk, where Colonel Morrow happened to be stationed. The Cossacks, Morrow later testified, “arrested the station-master, robbing him all of his prop- erty, including all the clothing of his wife, broke up the furniture in his house, and took him aboard.” Someone sent word to Colonel Morrow, who boarded the Destroyer and confronted the general in charge, Nikolai Bogomolets. After “a rather heated argument,” Bogomolets released the stationmaster (he had at first told the colonel he planned to execute the man), and the general, humiliated and very angry, ordered the Destroyer to move on.

Sixty miles up the line, it pulled into the station at Posolskaya. Colonel Morrow’s testimony tells the next part of the story thus:

A lieutenant named Paul Kendall was posted at Posolskaya with a detachment of 38 men. They were sleeping in box cars. The armored train, Destroyer, moved into Posolskaya . . . moved back from the American box cars and opened fire. This was between 12 and 1 o’clock at night. It was about 40 or 50 degrees below zero and there was about 8 inches of snow on the ground.

Kendall and his men turned out with hand grenades and rifles and began the battle against the armored train. They threw a hand grenade into the engine, very seriously damaging it, so that it could only move down the track about five versts. Here Captain Ramsay closed in on it from the east and the armored train was captured in the morning.

During the fighting that occurred Sergeant Robins was killed, Private Montgomery died later of wounds, and Private Towney was knocked from the armored train when he attempted to board it, and his foot was cut off. . . .

General Bogomoletz [sic] and his officers and men were brought under guard and placed in the guardhouse by my command.

Shortly thereafter, though, Colonel Morrow was ordered to leave Siberia, at which point he had no choice but to free the man who had caused the deaths of two doughboys. By April 1, all of the Americans in Siberia, including Colonel Morrow, had left.

The Cossacks, though, didn’t have much time to revel in their absence. Less than two months after Posolskaya, with the Reds closing in on him, Kalmykov fled to China; the Chinese Army quickly arrested him and held him for six months, trying to figure out what to do with him, until he attempted to escape and they shot him. Ataman Semyonov fled Russia a year later—first to Korea, then Japan, and then to Shanghai, where a team of Bolshevik assassins tried to kill him. They failed, but Semyonov figured he’d better leave China, anyway, and landed in, of all places, the city of New York. He was not warmly received in Gotham; actually, he was arrested as soon as he stepped off the train. General Graves and Colonel Morrow testified at his deportation hearings. Not content to wait for the ruling, Semyonov jumped bail and fled, first to Canada and then the Far East. He eventually ended up in Manchuria, where the Soviets caught up with him at the end of the Second World War. Despite the passage of a quarter century, there were no bygones; they hanged him.

Nearly two hundred Americans died during the AEFs’s nineteen months in Siberia. I have no idea when, where, or how they perished, other than Sergeant Robins and Private Montgomery, killed at Posolskaya on January 10, 1920. Private Warren Hileman, eighteen years old, was in one of those boxcars that night when Semyonov’s Cossacks opened fire on them. But aside from confirming that he’d been there and hadn’t been hit, he didn’t care to say much about it. At one point, he told me: “I wouldn’t take anything for the experience, but I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for it . . . I’m lucky. The only thing I got to show for it, I got a bad scar on my left shoulder here, covered with a tattoo. But now we’re getting too close for comfort.”

“How did you get the scar?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “No way,” was all he would say.

At one point, just after telling me about the night his dinner froze, he said, in response to nothing: “We had several that didn’t make it. They had a one-way trip.” But he wouldn’t elaborate on that statement. Instead, he talked about how the Army sent him to the Philippines and Hawaii after Siberia (he didn’t care for either—said they were too hot for him), how he went home afterward and took up farming, took a wife and finally had a daughter after twenty years of marriage. He told me that when it came time for them to leave Siberia—his papers mark the specific date as March 10, 1920—the ice in Vladivostok’s harbor was still so thick and solid that they had to blow it apart with hand grenades before the ship could move. As I was about to leave that day—seven months before I would come upon his obituary in the newspaper—I decided to try one more time.

“How did American soldiers in your unit die in Siberia?” I wrote on the yellow pad.

He took it from me, read the question, set the pad down. He was quiet for a moment. “Well, I’m going to cross that last one out. That’s zeroed-out information,” he said at last, smiling apologetically. And I must tell you: In all these interviews, hundreds of hours of conversation, that’s the only time anyone ever said anything like that to me. I don’t know what it was that he didn’t want to revisit after eighty-five years, but it must have been bad.

“Well,” he said, “that about covers it. That’s just hittin’ the high spots.” He folded his arms, and smiled.

And then added: “You ever try that Japanese beer, that sake?”

III.

She giggled at her own name. That was really something; if the sound of a 107-year-old woman giggling doesn’t stir your heart, then it’s time to reach for the defibrillator.

“Can you tell me your full name?” I’d asked her.

“My full name?” she replied. She paused for a second, then said: “Hildegarde Lillian Eugenia Anderson Schan.” And giggled.

“That’s quite a name!” I said, and she giggled again. I would have traveled a significant distance for that, but as it happened, I’d only had to go as far as an assisted-living facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was May 17, 2006; once again, I had traveled to hear a story that I imagined I wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere else. And once again, I was right: though Hildegarde Schan had not served in the armed forces in World War I, she was drafted into it nevertheless.

She’d been born, she told me, on January 13, 1899, in the Bronx—145th Street and Willis Avenue. Her parents, Carl and Charlotte, had both come from Sweden; according to census records, they immigrated to the United States in 1887, when they were in their midtwenties, and married in 1891. “My mother had two boyfriends,” Mrs. Schan explained. “And one of them did all of the talking, and the other was very quiet. So she didn’t know which one to marry. So she decided to marry the quiet one, because she liked to do the talking.” She giggled again, fluttering her wavy white hair and the string of pearls she wore over a dotted blouse.

“Why did they come to America?” I asked her.

“Because they were going to find gold on the streets,” she said, smiling. “Everyone said, you go to America, you’d find gold.” Instead they found each other, and started a family: three daughters and two sons. Her father, she told me, had been an inventor. “He invented the first shoe with a zipper in it,” she said. “Men’s shoes used to have buttons. And this was a zipper, and you pulled it up on the shoe. And then he painted on glass. He did a lot of painting on glass.”

“And he had the milk route,” her daughter, Joan, prompted.

“And then he had the milk business,” she agreed. “You know, with the old milk wagons and the horses. I remember I used to step on the back, and we all liked to ride on that.” The newspaper article that alerted me to her existence stated that Carl Anderson had had the very first milk route in the Bronx. Back then, the Bronx was relatively pastoral; when she was a child, Hildegarde Schan recalled, 145th Street “was a beautiful street, only three houses. But then they started to bring apartments and spoil the whole thing . . . We had a beautiful house. It was sixteen rooms.”

“Two sides,” Joan clarified.

“Eight rooms on each side,” her mother said. “So we lived in one end, and they rented out the other. Imagine—twenty-five dollars a month. For an eight-room house.” She laughed.

She attended PS 37, right up the street, but left school after the eighth grade and enrolled at Bird’s Business Institute, on 149th Street. “What did you study there?” I asked.

“Oh, everything,” she said. “Typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, everything for business.”

“Did you like it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And then what did you do?”

“Then I got a job with Funk & Wagnalls. They’re the ones that run the Literary Digest.” While it’s largely forgotten today, the Literary Digest was a tremendously popular and influential weekly magazine in its day, a combination of Time and Reader’s Digest with a circulation that exceeded one million at its peak. Funk & Wagnalls, the magazine’s publisher, was also known for its reference books, particularly its encyclopedia; working there, even as a secretary—as Hildegarde Anderson did—would have been a source of some prestige. She enjoyed the job, too. “I liked the typing,” she said. “And we had a very nice superintendent. She was lovely.” She was there for about a year, she said, and was earning $125 a month. This was in 1917.

“When the war came,” Mrs. Schan explained, “every company had to pick so many employees and send them to Washington. So I was picked to go to Washington.”

This is how she remembered it: At some point in the fall of 1917, she and four other women were told to go take a civil service examination. “Where was that?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “In a government building.” In New York. Of the five of them, she told me, “only the two of us passed the civil service.”

“Why do you think they picked you to take the test?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They must have thought I could do it.” The test proved them right; and then, shortly thereafter, the government sent for her. “We got the telegram at one o’clock in the morning,” she recalled, “for me to report on December seventeenth. The next morning, I called them in Washington, and asked if they could wait until after Christmas, you know. And no, they said I had to come right away.”

A knock on the door from Western Union at one o’clock in the morning was not the kind of thing anyone ever hoped to hear. I have to wonder why the government chose to do it that way: Was it cheaper to send a telegram in the middle of the night? Or were they—that is, whoever sent the telegram—trying to convey a sense of urgency, even crisis? Whatever their reasons, that knock reverberated throughout the house—or at least the eight rooms on the Andersons’ side. “They woke everybody up?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “And I got all excited—going away from home—and I was crying.”

“You were only eighteen, too,” Joan said to her mother.

“Did all of the companies have to send women down to Washington?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“They needed help.”

For years after that conversation, I asked all kinds of people, including quite a few historians, about this. I read everything I could find on the subject of women and the war, followed serpentine information trails, looked up footnotes, and worked every search engine I knew of to find a definitive answer to the question of what, exactly, had happened to Hildegarde Anderson in the fall of 1917.

I never found one. Over time, I came to understand that her belief—that, as she had put it, “every company had to pick so many employees and send them to Washington”—was mistaken. If such a program had ever existed on that scale, there would be some record of it. There is none. There were plenty of government agencies and bureaus and offices that were concerned, at least in part, with drawing women into the workforce for the war effort, whether at the War Department or munitions plants, but none of them were given the mission, or the authority, to actually conscript women for work. Still, Hildegarde Anderson had received that telegram at one o’clock in the morning. She reported to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan on the morning of December 17, 1917, and boarded a train for Washington, D.C. “Who decided that you should go to Washington?” I had asked her that day in Plymouth.

“My boss,” she said. “The woman at Funk & Wagnalls.”

To understand why, exactly, her employer might do such a thing to her, you need to know a few things. First, there was a severe labor shortage at that time in Washington; much of the government’s male clerical staff had either volunteered for, or were drafted into, the AEF. There weren’t nearly enough qualified women remaining in the city to fill all those jobs. There might well have been had President Wilson not, several years earlier, instituted a policy of racial segregation in federal offices; but he had. And now the government—particularly the War Department—was in trouble.

When America entered the war in April, 1917, some men, successful executives and the like who were too old or otherwise unfit for military service, chose instead to act upon their patriotism by taking leaves of absence from their jobs and offering their expertise to the war effort, in some form or other, for free. Actually, it wasn’t quite for free: The government typically paid their expenses—and, to sweeten the deal, a stipend of one dollar a year. They were known as Dollar-a-Year Men, and though they are largely forgotten today, they made an important contribution to the war effort. I cannot imagine that a company like Funk & Wagnalls, a high-profile member of what we would now call the mass media, would not have sent any Dollar-a-Year Men to Washington in 1917. Certainly, they would have understood that such a visible gesture could pay dividends in any number of ways after the war. Perhaps one of Funk & Wagnalls’ Dollar-a-Year Men worked at the Department of Labor (or at least knew someone who did) and, hearing that the War Department was having a difficult time finding good clerical help, thought to himself: Well, I know where there are lots of fine secretaries!

“I’ll never forget that train ride,” Mrs. Schan told me, eighty-nine years later. “We had a train, it was filled of soldiers. And they were singing, and they were so happy on the train, so nobody slept all night. We had to sit up all night on the train. Then we got to Washington, the Union Station, and they gave us a list of all the different places where we could go to see to live, and that morning we checked everything in Union Station and went out and took the trolley to look at the names of all these places they gave us, and it was snowing, and we were two people that had never been there. So we went from one place to another, and finally picked one place. I don’t remember the street now, but it was across the street from the German Embassy. Fourteen [th Street] Northwest.” The embassy, of course, was closed down at that point. “So it was a great big apartment house with an elevator, and there were three of us in one room. Another little French girl came from France. I don’t know why they brought her from France. And she was very homesick; she was crying all the time.”

“Was she very young?”

“She was about eighteen or nineteen. Marcelle Briere. She was a very nice girl, but she was so homesick.”

I asked her who was the other woman from Funk & Wagnalls. “Grace,” she said. “Grace Shea. And every time she would read in the paper that her husband’s battalion was here or there, then she’d start crying. It was a sad time and a happy time.” Grace, she said, had been about twenty-three years old then.

I asked her where she had worked in Washington. “On Pennsylvania Avenue,” she said, then specified: “I was in the Engineering Department.” In fact, she worked as a clerk in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance; she saved a copy of the memorandum, dated April 29, 1918, informing her that, “having completed three months satisfactory service,” she was given a raise, from $1,100 to $1,200 per annum. Even after the raise, it was significantly less than she’d been making at Funk & Wagnalls; and she’d been living at home then, too.

That memo was just one of many slips of paper she kept in a scrapbook of her time in Washington. It was nine decades old when I saw it, yet still in good condition; she must have taken very good care of it over the years. She kept everything: certification of her smallpox vaccination; postcards and valentines from beaux in camp and overseas; photos of herself and a friend (Grace Shea?) posing in front of a monument; clippings of articles (“May Beat Germany by Christmas Time”; they did) and cartoons; snapshots of Charlie Chaplin at a Liberty Bond parade. Perhaps he made an impression on the young clerk, because her scrapbook also contained a subscription to the Fourth Liberty Loan, which took a dollar from each of her $55.00 paychecks. The Belgian Children’s Fund took another fifty cents.

“Was the work interesting?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes. Very hard though. Big words, we never knew. We had a lovely boss. The boss we had came from the same town [as] my girlfriend. So he got me to work in his department after we got down there. They came from New Jersey.”

I asked her what her hours were. “One month we worked days, and the next month we worked nights,” she said.

“When they sent you down to Washington,” I asked, “did they tell you how long they were sending you down there for?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “Until the end of the war.”

“And when they put you in that apartment, did they pay the rent, or did you have to pay the rent?”

“Oh, we had to pay the rent . . . we had to pay all of our own expenses.”

The War Department eventually solved its labor shortage and then some, it seems, because, as Mrs. Schan recalled, “they had built a lot of barracks on Pennsylvania Avenue, and that’s where we worked, in those barracks . . . big, open space,” room enough for a hundred women, maybe more. Some, like her friend Grace Shea, were married; and some were not. It wasn’t a bad time and place to be an unattached woman, because, despite the existence of a severe shortage of manpower to work clerical jobs in Washington, somehow there were always a lot of men in uniform around. She remembered with special fondness “the French soldiers, from France. They had the most beautiful outfits, and they were so polite. So we went out with them quite a bit . . . we’d go to nightclubs,” she said. “And they could all speak English.”

“What did their outfits look like?”

“Green pants and a white shirt.” Not what comes to mind when you think about French soldiers from that war, but maybe these were special troops; they were in Washington, after all.

They went out with American soldiers, too—“they were nice,” she said, leaving me with the distinct impression that she’d preferred the French—to nightclubs and restaurants and the like. And by “they,” I don’t just mean the single girls. “My girlfriend was married, you know,” she said, referring to Grace Shea. “She wouldn’t take off her wedding ring. So”—she giggled again—“when we’d go out on a date, she’d bandage her hand up to hide the wedding ring!”

Miss Anderson had had a boyfriend, she revealed (with yet another giggle), a Bronx boy named Theodore Ross who was also in the Army. “Did he go to France?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “He had the mustard gas and all of that.”

“Did he come back home after that?”

“Yes, he came back. And Grace’s husband came back.” Two happy endings. But, as you know, the name “Ross” did not figure anywhere into Mrs. Schan’s impressive monicker. “I liked this guy better,” she explained. This guy: the late Mr. Schan.

Miss Anderson had been told, at Funk & Wagnalls, that she was to go to Washington “until the end of the war.” And she was there on November 11, 1918, when word of the armistice reached the capital. “And we rushed out,” she said, “and everybody—an automobile would come, and everyone would get in, and then this big coal wagon—do you remember a coal wagon driven by horses?” I said I did, even though I didn’t; it seemed the polite thing to do. “And a big, high seat?” she continued. “Well, Grace and I got up on this big, high seat, you know, on the coal wagon, and this coal man, filthy dirty from the coal, and we got in the parade and drove up Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’d gone a little ways and this coal man saw a florist! So he got up and went into the florist, and he got each of us a great big chrysanthemum with the oak leaves. So, up we got on the wagon again, and here we’re sitting up on a big seat with a dirty coal man, and a big chrysanthemum on [do I even have to mention that she giggled yet again?], and driving up in the parade on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Sounds like it was an impromptu procession. And quite a celebration.

Miss Anderson understood that the war’s ending meant that she was free to return to her job at Funk & Wagnalls. But here’s the interesting thing: After she’d gotten settled in at the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, she found that, despite the cut in pay, she actually liked working for the government; preferred it, even. So she stayed with it, even though there was no longer any need for her in Washington. “They transferred me to New York,” she told me. “To the Veterans Bureau.”

The Veterans Bureau was the predecessor to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Created by Congress in 1921 to provide care, rehabilitation, and vocational training to several hundred thousand wounded veterans, many of whom were blind or disfigured or missing a limb or two, the Veterans Bureau was also charged with administering disabled veterans’ War Risk Insurance claims. The insurance had been strictly optional for doughboys, and though all were urged to purchase it—General Pershing personally issued several such pleas—many did not, meaning that after the war they got nothing at all in terms of an annuity, no matter how grievous their wounds. Unfortunately, many who did purchase the insurance also got nothing at all, because the man President Warren Harding appointed to head the new Veterans Bureau, a decorated veteran (and Harding crony) named Charles Forbes, was almost unthinkably corrupt (even by Harding administration standards), and fleeced the new agency voraciously, embezzling more than $200 million from it in just two years. This meant that planned facilities were never built, a lot of medical supplies and equipment “fell off trucks” (to use the technical term), and, worst of all, many thousands of legitimate benefits claims were unjustly denied. Eventually, Forbes—who also availed himself liberally of bribes, kick- backs, and an expense account that probably wouldn’t have passed an audit—was forced to resign and face prosecution. He ended up serving less than two years in Leavenworth, and paid a fine of $10,000. I don’t imagine he had trouble coming up with it.

Needless to say, the Veterans Bureau didn’t really get to do much good in those early years. Still, it tried, at least at the most personal level, which was where Hildegarde Schan had worked. Its offices in Manhattan were on West Thirty-fourth Street, right across the street from Pennsylvania Station, whence she had departed New York for Washington some years earlier. She was a benefits administrator, meaning that she handed out money to wounded and disabled veterans. That might sound like a very easy and satisfying job; it wasn’t.

“It was very sad,” she told me. “Because we paid them there, you know every month, and you’d see them coming in with one leg or one arm . . . It was awful to see them come in, you know, and borrow. They’d borrow on their check, and then they’d have to pay it back next month, and they wouldn’t have any money then. So the poor things, it was very sad to see how they were trying to get along. These nice, good-looking men with their arm off, their leg off. Ohh.”

“A lot of the veterans who came back, they had a very hard time?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “To get a job and all, they had a very hard time.”

I asked if a lot of the men she saw at the bureau hadn’t had enough money to live. “That’s right,” she said.

“So what did they do?” I asked

“Well, they had a lot of charity,” she said. “A lot of charity. And neighbors and them helped, you know.” But even that was rarely enough, and many of the men had to borrow against their small monthly benefits check, which always seemed to lead to worse hardship down the line. “They came in, and you know, if they owed money, we’d hold the check,” she recalled. “And then they’d have to come in and we’d take the money out of that check and give them what was left. And it was very sad to have to take money from them, you know, when they were giving up so much.”

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

“Oh, yes,” she said. “They’d tell us all of their sad stories. You know, how they were very sad. And they didn’t like the way the government was treating them, you know, just bring them home and let them go on their own . . . After they’d go, I’d sit there and cry and cry, you know. I felt so sorry for them.” Mrs. Schan—she would die later that year, a few weeks before Christmas—dropped her gaze to her lap, and I looked away, too. I don’t like seeing people get sad; especially 107-year-old women.

A lot of people were more than merely saddened by the situation; they were angered. It seems impossible to us now that hundreds of thousands of men who’d taken bullets or shrapnel or gas for their country, and who had yet to fully recover—who might never fully recover—could return to a country, full of people who wanted to help, that just couldn’t seem to manage it. And they weren’t the only ones who needed help: Hundreds of thousands more, maybe even millions, had lost their livelihoods while Over There. Farms had gone to rot; businesses had been shuttered or failed for lack of attention. Many had no homes left to which they might return, much less available avenues by which they might improve their lot. In his 1932 memoir I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, Robert E. Burns writes bitterly of his homecoming from the war:

I had dreamed those happy dreams all soldiers have when lying in the mud and muck of trenches, ducking “Fritzies,” “whiz-bangs,” and “potato mashers,” and machine gun bullets. But the promises of the Y.M.C.A. secretaries and all the other “fountain-pen soldiers” who promised us so much in the name of the nation and the Government just before we’d go into action turned out to be the bunk. Just a lot of plain applesauce! I found that being an ex-service man was no recommendation for a position—rather it was a handicap. Really an ex-soldier was looked upon as a sucker. The wise guys stayed home—landed the good jobs—or grew rich on war contracts. . . .

In trying to find a position in society and earn a decent, honest living, I found that ex-soldiers were a drug on the market. The position I left at $50 a week was filled. But I could get a job at $.40 per hour—$17.60 a week. I thought of a few of my buddies, dead, forgotten, pushing up poppies and with nothing but a little white cross to mark the spot somewhere in France, and thought, Is this how my country rewards its volunteers—the men who were ready and willing to sacrifice life itself that democracy might not perish?

President Harding, a Republican who had succeeded Woodrow Wilson in 1921, had promised a “return to normalcy,” and though a lot of people protested that “normalcy” wasn’t a real word, he won pretty handily nonetheless, and then brought in an administration so corrupt that it didn’t accomplish much beyond making a few old pals the richest men in the penitentiary. Harding might well have landed there, too, but for the fact that he died suddenly, in August, 1923; some whispered that his wife, who would not allow an autopsy, had poisoned the president to spare him the impending ugliness. During Harding’s time, various bills had arisen in Congress to address the sort of thing Hildegarde Anderson witnessed at her job every day by extending some form of compensation to veterans, but the president had thwarted them all, claiming such a plan would be fiscally irresponsible. (I guess he didn’t want to take money out of his friends’ pockets.) When he died, proponents of the idea, including the American Legion, were hopeful that Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, might feel differently. But Coolidge was a man who didn’t care for the notion of government doing much of anything at all, and who seems to have done his best to set an example in that regard, reportedly sleeping twelve hours a night. He didn’t much care what other people thought of him, either; and when, the following May, Congress presented him with a bill called the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, which would have granted onetime monetary “bonuses” to veterans of that war, Coolidge—who had never served in the military himself—vetoed it, declaring: “Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.”

Coolidge’s apparent callousness toward four million American World War I veterans, many of whom were in need, outraged many, including Fiorello La Guardia, who had returned from the Italian front with the rank of major and was quickly reelected to his seat in the House of Representatives. The Little Flower was (forgive me) no shrinking violet, and with characteristic vitriol he led the effort to override Coolidge’s veto. It succeeded. Veterans and millions of other Americans cheered its passage, even knowing as they did that there was a codicil to the law—first proposed by New York congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., who had served as a white officer with the Harlem Hellfighters—that postponed payments of the bonus until 1945. Fish, a Republican (as were La Guardia and Coolidge), had put it in there in the hope that it might preclude Coolidge from vetoing the bill, but it stayed in even after the veto.

That seemed fine, at the time; it had been hard enough to get anything passed in any form, after all. But by the end of the decade, with the country suddenly plunged into a terrible economic depression, and millions suddenly without work, many veterans came to the conclusion that they just couldn’t wait another fifteen years for the money the government had promised them. They needed it now. (Most so-called bonuses were calculated at the rate of $1.25 per day of service overseas and $1.00 per day of service in the United States, minus the $60 bonus everyone had already received upon discharge, plus 4 percent interest; with that interest, the average payout in 1945 would have been around $1,000, or so I have read.) The new president, Herbert Hoover—who, you may remember, had saved Europe from mass starvation during the war—refused them; a deal was a deal, he said, and besides, to make the payout now would require raising taxes, and the frail economy, he asserted, couldn’t support that.

Then, in the spring of 1932, another war veteran in Congress, Texas Democrat Wright Patman, put up a bill that would pay the veterans their “bonuses” immediately. At first its prospects didn’t look very good; Hoover was sure to veto it, and he seemed to have enough Republican supporters in Congress to prevent an override. But then something unusual happened: Around the country, groups of veterans started assembling to discuss Patman’s Veterans’ Bonus Bill and what they might do to help it pass. A group in Portland, Oregon, decided to ride boxcars all the way to Washington, D.C., and present themselves at the Capitol. They started calling themselves the BEF—the Bonus Expeditionary Force. As they rode across the country, they attracted notice, and other groups of veterans decided to follow their example. Politicians and crowds greeted them as heroes; people who were themselves suffering donated food, clothing, supplies. By June, a “Bonus Army”—estimates of its size range from ten thousand to twenty thousand veterans, plus their families—had converged upon the capital. They set up camps throughout the city; the largest was in Anacostia Flats, former swampland where the BEF laid out streets, established health facilities and sanitation infrastructure, and built huts from just about anything they could salvage. Eight decades before the Occupy movement, they occu- pied D.C. And they welcomed all honorably discharged veterans: In a thoroughly segregated city, the BEF’s camps were racially integrated.

The presence of twenty thousand or so unemployed veterans congregating outdoors in the heat of summer was bound to make some people nervous; among them was Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur—the man who had led his men into battle at the Meuse-Argonne wearing a cardigan sweater—who suspected that the Bonus Army was nothing more than a mob of communists and pacifists, although he didn’t take pains to distinguish the two in his own mind. He was mistaken on both counts, though no one could convince him of that. In fact, the BEF had only one issue—benefits for veterans. And they were far from a mob. They drilled daily, even in the sweltering heat, and observed strict rules: no drinking, no begging, no radical condemnation of the government. Despite MacArthur’s view of them—and he wasn’t alone in his thinking on the matter—the Bonus Army attracted many admirers, among them politicians, policemen, socialites, and high-ranking military men. Quite a few visited the camps to offer moral support; plenty donated food, clothing, sundries, and medical supplies. They got a lot of press. Many allowed themselves to believe that their cause might prevail.

And for a while, it seemed like it actually would. On June 15, 1932, the House of Representatives passed Congressman Patman’s Veterans’ Bonus Bill by a margin of 35 votes. Thousands of veterans thronged the Capitol and held a vigil on the lawn, in anticipation of the Senate’s vote on the bill. But the Senate lacked the courage to take that vote; instead, it voted, 44 to 26, to table the bill, taking it off the agenda for the rest of the year. Everyone expected the BEF, defeated, to pack up and go home.

It didn’t. Rather, the veterans vowed to stay where they were until the Senate actually voted on the bill. More veterans flocked to the capital. More donations and supplies poured in. Despite all the support, though, morale wasn’t always high; it can be hard to remain cheerful in Washington in the summer, even if you’re not out of work and living in a Hooverville. Lloyd Brown—you might remember him as the gentleman who had an eighty-six-year-old USS New Hampshire tattoo on his arm—was working as a fireman in the city at the time, and he saw Bonus Marchers every day. He told me he was sympathetic to their cause—“I’m a World War I veteran, myself,” he reminded me—but said they “looked like people in need . . . they looked pretty rough, some of them.” They looked, he often recalled, just like hound dogs.

This went on for six weeks: the BEF unsure of what, exactly, to do next; the government unsure of what, exactly, to do about the BEF. Tensions mounted. Finally, on July 28, Hoover’s attorney general, William D. Mitchell, ordered the eviction of Bonus Marchers wherever they could be found. Police fatally shot two men while clearing out a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Then General MacArthur literally called in the cavalry—and the infantry. As thousands of government employees watched, a phalanx of soldiers marched against the veterans, forcing them out of their camps at bayonet point. And just to make sure, tanks were deployed, too—under the command of Major George S. Patton—as well as gas. Yes, it’s true: Soldiers of the United States Army gassed veterans of World War I in the streets of the nation’s capital in the summer of 1932.

The veterans fled across the river to their largest camp, in the Anacostia Flats. President Hoover, starting to worry about, in more modern terminology, the “optics” of the situation, sent word to MacArthur not to pursue them any farther. MacArthur—and this was confirmed years later by one of his aides that day, a Major Dwight Eisenhower—just ignored the president and sent his men charging into the huge camp. Everyone was expelled; the camp was burned. Dozens of veterans were injured in the attack. Scores were arrested. A three-month-old infant, exposed to the gas, died.

One of the expelled veterans was an emaciated forty-three-year-old private first class from Camden, New Jersey, named Joseph T. Angelo. If that name sounds familiar, Angelo was the aide who, fourteen years earlier, had saved George Patton’s life at the Meuse-Argonne. Angelo had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism, but that didn’t spare him the ravages of the Great Depression. A year earlier, he had walked all the way from New Jersey to Washington to testify before Congress about veterans’ need to receive their bonuses immediately, and not fourteen years hence. Now, a day after the Battle of Anacostia Flats, Angelo convinced a sergeant in the 12th Infantry to take him to Patton, telling the man he was an old friend of the major’s. It’s not clear what Angelo hoped to say to Patton, because he never got the chance to speak with him; according to newspaper reports, when Patton spotted his former aide, he became enraged. “Sergeant, I do not know this man,” he spat. “Take him away, and under no circumstances permit him to return!”

And so the Bonus Army was scattered—and yet, not quite defeated. It had drawn attention to the plight of indigent veterans and the government’s indifference to them; Americans were very angry about it. And they stayed very angry: angry enough to vote President Hoover out of office three months later; angry enough to pass the GI Bill of Rights in 1944. To be fair, people had plenty of other reasons to be angry at Herbert Hoover in November, 1932, and to take a chance on New York Governor (and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy) Franklin Roosevelt. But it would also be fair to state that the GI Bill didn’t square things in a lot of people’s eyes, either, at least not right away. In the 1945 movie Pride of the Marines, there’s an eight-minute scene in which a group of men, wounded in the Pacific and convalescing at a hospital in San Diego, discuss what awaits them back home after the war is over. Many of them are afraid—as afraid as they were at Guadalcanal. One, a fellow with the clever nickname “Irish” who tells us he has “a silver plate in my head,” snarls to his buddies: “Twice in his life my old man got his name in the papers. The first time in 1917—he was the first to enlist in Milwaukee. The second time in 1930—he was the first vet to sell unemployed apples.”

Other wounded Marines take up the cause. One speculates: “So maybe we’ll even have prosperity for two years after the war while we catch up on things. Like making diaper pins and autos—things the poor civilians did without. But what happens after two years? Answer me that!”

Al Schmid—the hero of the film, a real-life Marine who was blinded by a Japanese grenade and is portrayed by the great actor John Garfield—offers: “A bonus march!”

“I’ll put a little handwriting on the wall for you,” Irish says. “We don’t want no apples. And whoever’s running the country better read it, too—no apples, no bonus marches!”

They did read it. The Bonus Army ultimately won their quixotic battle—maybe too late for themselves, but for their children, the Greatests, and beyond.

The First World War was doughboys in trenches and flyboys in aeroplanes, gas masks and machine guns, bayonets and barbed wire, kilts and soccer balls and poetry and mud. But it was also adolescent boys drilling on a green in Sussex until they were old enough to be shipped to the trenches, young women being summoned to the War Department in the middle of the night, men fighting off cold and Cossacks from inside a Siberian boxcar, passionate congressmen being outmaneuvered by indifferent presidents, middle-aged veterans and their families being gassed in a swamp in their nation’s capital. And much more, even, than all that. A world more.