18

We Are All Missing You Very Much

WHEN WE LEFT 107-year-old Anthony Pierro, many pages ago, he was standing on his front steps, waving and calling out “Adios, amigos!” as I drove off, my head occupied at that moment by the solitary thought that I would probably never see him again.

But I did.

It was May 17, 2006, nearly three years later. He was 110 now, a supercentenarian, and I drove up to Swampscott, Massachusetts, from Greenville, Rhode Island, having just interviewed Samuel Goldberg (he of the exquisite diction), to see Mr. Pierro again. I had learned a lot since I’d first interviewed him in July of 2003—about the war, and the battles he’d fought in, and artillery, and the America of 1917 and 1918, and the immigrant experience, and how to interview the very, very old. I had many questions for him, and the confidence—bordering, perhaps, on delusional—that he’d be able to answer them all. I had not forgotten how difficult, in some ways, that first interview had been; but now, almost three years on, having conducted dozens of subsequent interviews, I mistakenly attributed the difficulties of that interview to my own inexperience at the time, and not to the frailties of a 107-year-old man’s memory and expressiveness. Of course, quite a few of the interviews I had done since July 19, 2003, had been even more difficult than that first one, but you don’t remember those quite as well in looking back as you do the ones that went much better than you expected, the instances where you could converse with a 106-year-old man as you might with anyone, the discussions where you heard a few fantastic stories, learned a couple of startling things. It was those memories, those boldest and most felicitous ones, that informed my expectations for my second visit with Anthony Pierro. Maybe, I hoped, he’ll even remember that story about the fellow who called him a greedy Wop on the mess line.

He didn’t. He didn’t remember much of anything, anymore, beyond the most basic information—his parents’ names, the country of his birth, things like that. His baby brother, Nicholas, who was then ninety-seven, was there, too, and tried his best to fill in the gaps. Among the things Nicholas told me that day was that several of his brothers—not just Anthony—had served in the AEF. The firstborn, Michael, four years older than Anthony, was badly gassed in France, and never recovered; the 1930 census lists Michael’s occupation as “Retired—Disabled in War.” He died in 1951, not yet sixty years old. (His parents both survived him, living into their nineties.) I’m not sure why Anthony Pierro didn’t choose to share any of that with me the first time we’d talked. Perhaps I just didn’t ask him the right question.

The second time we talked, he could no longer remember anything about the war, except for Madeleine. I’m kind of glad it worked out that way; if I had lived his life and could pick only one memory from that period of it to carry until I died, I might have chosen that one. Even so, I was disappointed: Not only did I not hear any new stories, I didn’t hear most of the old ones again, either. I know I shouldn’t have been surprised—at that age, three years is a long, long time—but I was. It bothered me that he might not have at 110 what he’d had at 107. I had come to think of him, and the rest of them, as supermen, and supermen don’t slow down, don’t deteriorate. They just live, right up until they die. In my defense, a lot of them did exactly that. Still, I shouldn’t have expected as much from him, or from any one of them. I shouldn’t have been disappointed. But I was.

In time, though, I would come to understand—I’d like to say it happened after just a few days, but in truth it was much later, probably sometime after he died, the following February, one week short of his 111th birthday—that he had, really, told me a lot of stories during our first visit: the time a tree saved his life by catching a German shell; how he climbed up into it to retrieve that shell and then brought it to his captain, who had jokingly ordered him to fetch it and was terrified when the order was actually carried out; the time a horse saved his life by stopping, with its body, shrapnel from another German shell before it could tear into his; burying that horse, and many others, to keep the wolves from getting at them; the fellow in his battery who once slapped a horse on the rear and paid for it with his life; “Upstairs, two dollars.” For years after that first visit, I spent a lot of time wondering about the stories I had come by too late to hear, not just from him but the rest of them, too; and about the veterans, centenarians and supercentenarians, that I never got to meet at all—because I didn’t start looking until 2003, or because I couldn’t arrange the trip in time once I did find them, or because they or their family felt uncomfortable for some reason, or because a cantankerous administrator at the Bay Pines VA hospital in Florida was in a bad mood and decided to abuse power he shouldn’t even have had. That last bit might have tipped you off to the fact that I still do think about it, sometimes.

But much more often, now, I think about the stories—astonishing, frightening, heartbreaking, hilarious—that I did get to hear. And I think about the remarkable men and women I did get to meet, about how few of them there were, and how hard they were to find. It amazes me, still, that there were so many wonderful characters, and so many great stories—and so much history, otherwise lost—remaining yet in such a small pool. I imagine it always will.

Boy: Was I lucky.

In a park outside the public library in my hometown, in Westchester County, New York, stands a World War I monument. When I was a kid, I made great use of that library (it’s said the new wing was funded entirely by my overdue fines), and, in the process, got to know that monument well. It’s a life-sized statue of an American infantryman, standing between two tree stumps. His left hand, hanging down at his side, clutches his rifle. (There’s no bayonet on it; even in those pre-litigious days, I guess someone knew that would be a bad idea.) His right, raised over his head, cradles a pineapple grenade. A legend in the base reads: SPIRIT OF THE AMERICAN DOUGHBOY. The term “doughboy,” in case you’re still wondering after all this time, is most commonly used as a nickname for a soldier of the American Expeditionary Forces. Its origins are obscure and contested: Some say it refers to the phenomenon of infantry, covered in dust after a long march down dirt roads, looking as if they had been rolled in flour; others attribute it to the popularity of doughnuts—distributed by the Salvation Army and other organizations—among soldiers of the AEF. There are still other theories, too.

I was quite intrigued by that statue back then, spent a lot of time looking at it. There was nothing else like it in town—the closest thing was a plaque in the post office listing the names of local residents who’d fought in the Revolution, but that was small and plain and upstaged by a huge WPA mural of some guy trying to get control of a runaway team of horses—and though, in my elementary-school days, I didn’t know exactly what it was about, I knew it was something important. And I knew, too, that though it stood right out in the open in a corner of the park near a busy intersection, it was ignored. I never saw anyone else stop to look at it, or even slow down as they walked by. Once or twice a year a wreath would appear propped up against its pedestal, sit there for a while, and then disappear. That was it. I didn’t care: I loved that monument.

I’m not sure when, exactly, it happened, but at some point—probably after I left for some years and then returned as an adult—I discovered that it was ugly. Really ugly. My hometown is small; perhaps they couldn’t raise the money for a nicer monument, or perhaps the selection committee was just one person whose taste wasn’t very good. However it happened, we ended up with a dopey-looking doughboy. His uniform is entirely correct, but inartfully rendered so that it all looks wrong, somehow: His helmet is dangerously close to a derby; his puttees appear to be telescoping calves. His gas-mask bag resembles a man purse slung around his neck, and his ammunition belt reminds me of an ill-chosen 1960s accessory. His posture is odd—neither standing still nor running, he appears to be taking a casual stroll among the tree stumps, holding a grenade over his head for some reason. His eyes betray no emotion, no urgency, and, frankly, no intelligence. And his mouth is wide open. What could he possibly be saying? “Hey, Captain! What am I supposed to do with this, again?” No wonder nobody ever looked at it.

But you know that isn’t quite true, because I already told you that I did. A lot. Before I ever read a word about soccer balls and kilts and trenches and barbed wire, before my mother told me about the old men at the Bronx VA who’d never recovered from being gassed—before, even, I first encountered Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel—that monument was World War I to me. It told me: This is something you need to know about. Remember. And so it did its job.

Most things don’t age as well as the men and women I interviewed over the course of several years in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Monuments weather, and slowly—but, sadly, not uniformly—change color. (The last time I saw him, my guy looked like a bank dye pack had exploded on him.) Sheet music can fade, and sometimes crumble to confetti. Book bindings can crack, and spill out yellowed pages. Posters can crease, split, dissolve. Reputations and fame can diminish, or evaporate entirely. And memories can become corrupted well before they’ve even had time to start dissolving. In the last chapter of Company K, Private Sam Ziegler, the war some years behind him, is taking a summer road trip with his wife and children when he decides “to go see the old training camp again.” Perusing a roster, he discovers that his old sergeant, “Pig Iron” Riggin, is still stationed there, and asks to see him; “I’d like to talk to him about old times,” he tells the post commander, and soon he and Pig Iron are walking through the camp together. Inside his old bunkhouse, Sam notices that someone has put up metal plaques next to each bed, indicating who had slept there during the war; he quickly finds his own name, and then begins browsing through the others, reminiscing with the sergeant. Or trying to, anyway: The two of them can’t seem to remember any of the same men, or anecdotes, colorful though they were. In the book’s final paragraph, Ziegler tells us:

I stood there thinking, trying to bring up the faces of the men I used to soldier with, but I couldn’t do it. I realized, then, that I would not have remembered the face of Riggin, himself, if I hadn’t known who he was beforehand. I began to feel sad because it had all happened so long ago, and because I had forgotten so much. I was sorry that I had come to the camp at all. Pig Iron and I stood there looking at each other. We didn’t have anything to talk about, after all. Then we locked the old building and went outside.

Some might consider that sort of memory loss a blessing; the author of Ziegler’s words, William Campbell (writing as William March) surely would have. But he was not so graced. The war tormented him for decades after it ended. Perhaps he had hoped that writing Company K might enable him to let go of it at last. It didn’t. The book itself went out of print after its initial run. Campbell battled depression and writer’s block for decades, and suffered a nervous breakdown at one point. Subsequent novels—all of them literary, none dealing with war—failed to gain much attention. In 1952, the Lion Press brought Company K back into print; my copy, a twenty-five-cent paperback edition, features a cover illustration of a trio of exhausted, battered infantrymen slogging through ruins, past a dark-haired, barefoot chippy trying unsuccessfully to beckon them. The men are all wearing World War II uniforms.

In April, 1954, March published The Bad Seed, a novel about a sociopathic, homicidal eight-year-old girl. It became a phenomenal success, a bestseller that would be adapted for the stage by the renowned playwright Maxwell Anderson, and later made into a movie—twice. Campbell, though, didn’t live to see any of that; he died of a heart attack on May 15, 1954, just a few weeks after the book’s release. He was sixty years old, and had been living in New Orleans, not far from George Briant.

My grandfather Abraham Rubin was born in 1890 in Minsk, in what was then known as Byelorussia, or White Russia, in the old Russian Empire. In January, 1906, at the age of fifteen, he left home, traveled to Berlin, caught a train to Hamburg, then made his way to Cuxhaven, where he boarded the Hamburg America Line’s SS Amerika, arriving in New York on February 16, 1906. When the war broke out in Europe, the Amerika was docked in Boston; it sat there, trapped, for two years and eight months, until the United States entered the war, seized it, rechristened it the USS America, and commissioned it as a troop transport.

A couple of months later, my grandfather, having just opened his own business in Manhattan after a decade of working very long hours and saving up, was drafted. He was sent to Camp Upton, in Yaphank, on Long Island (where Irving Berlin got to sleep late while writing Yip-Yip-Yaphank), and inducted into the 77th Division—specifically, into Battery C of the 306th Field Artillery. Despite the fact that a great many of the men in the Statue of Liberty Division were also immigrants, a lot of them from backgrounds very similar to his—and despite the efforts of the Foreign-speaking Soldier Subsection of the Military Morale Section of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department—it was, I believe, a difficult adjustment for him. He was twenty-seven years old, had lost his nascent business, and, though he had not yet married and started a family of his own, he was probably pretty homesick for the city, and his life there, and the people he’d had to leave. Those people knew it, too.

My grandfather died in 1978, at the age of eighty-eight; not quite Fred Hale territory, but respectable. I was eleven years old at the time, and hadn’t known him all that well, since he and my grandmother had been living in Miami Beach for most of my life. I had a vague sense that he had served in the Army at some point—there were old photographs here and there, including one fairly large portrait of him in uniform—but for some reason I failed to connect him with that monument by the library. It didn’t occur to me then to ask him about his service, and the war; by the time it did, he was long gone.

In 2000, my parents sold the house in which I had grown up, and were cleaning it out when they found, down in the basement, a cardboard box full of things my grandfather had saved, going back to his childhood in Russia. There were school notebooks and drawings, his passport, his train ticket from Berlin to Hamburg, a piece of stationery from the Amerika. Postcards addressed to him in Yiddish and Russian. His draft notice; furlough passes; railroad passes from Yaphank to Pennsylvania Station. A mezuzah and prayer book from the Jewish Welfare Board. A canvas rifle case. (Sadly, there was no rifle in it anymore.) Some uniform buttons. An Army-issued razor kit, and wristwatch. A pair of identification disks; a copy of the CPI’s Home Reading Course for Citizen-Soldiers, too. There were no letters that he’d written, but there were a few that he’d received. Most were official correspondence. One wasn’t.

Addressed to “Abraham Rubin, 306 Field Artillery, 16 St. and 4th Av., Battery C, Camp Upton, LI,” it was sent to him by his uncle, Morris Abramson. Like my grandfather, his mother’s brother, Morris, was an immigrant. He was somewhat older than my grandfather, I imagine, when he arrived in America, and English was not his native language. But he wrote in English. I have corrected his spelling and punctuation, but nothing else:

New York, Oct. 16/17

My Dear Abe!

Your postal and letter received!

And in reply will say that I have so much to tell you, so much to write to you, that I can’t start it at all.

All I know is that I set down with the intention to write you a cheerful letter. But if he, that is my letter, will not come up to the standard of cheerfulness, do not blame me for it. For there are times in life when emotion controls reason, when the heart controls the brain and hand. I really mean to write and send you nothing but cheers. But my uncontrolled heart jumps out and dictates to my hand to spell it “Tears.” . . .

So as I have said before, do not blame me for it! What I really want to tell you is that we are all missing you very much. And let me tell you, dear Abe, that I would rather serve in the Army, and struggle and suffer and even die on the field of battle, but to be liked and beloved by everybody as you are, than to live and enjoy all the pleasures of civil life and to be hated and despised by everybody—for instance, as your dear brother-in-law, A.R. So you see, dear Abe, even now you are a million times better-off than he is. And I want you to put that in your pipe and smoke, and watch the twists and turns of the smoke, and you will see that it will spell for you: “Cheer Up!”

Cheer up. For if you will look up the history of the world, you will find that from our great teacher, Moses, up to the present great men, all of them fought for the rights of others. And that’s what made them great. And I think it is a privilege, an honor, a glory, to fight for other peoples’ rights. Especially we Jews, who are charged by the enemies of mankind with being leeches and money-lenders, must show to those Rats of Darkness that we can sacrifice our fortunes, our blood, our lives for the rights of humanity. And we must show to the world that when it comes to fight, that the spirit of the Maccabees is in us as strong today as it was centuries ago!

In short, dear Abe, no one knows better than I the sacrifice you have made for our beloved country. But money could never buy the honor and glory when, in years to come, in the Roll of Honor will be found the name of Abraham Rubin, a Jew, a soldier, who was a credit to his country, a credit to his nation, a credit to his family, and a credit to himself. Don’t you think it’s worthwhile to fight for it?

I want to tell you, dear Abe, you have been a good boy. A good son. A good brother. A good nephew. A good friend. So keep it up, boy, and be a good soldier!

And don’t forget, that wherever you will be, in Yaphank or in the trenches of France, the hearts of your country, the hearts of your nation, the hearts of your family, will always be with you. And my tears which roll between these lines are dumb witness, that every word I say to you, every advice I give to you, comes from the bottom of my heart, and are meant for your good!

Now, dear Abe, let me know at once if we need a pass to see you. And also let me know before Saturday if you are coming to New York. If not, I will come out to see you next Sunday. And let me know what you need, so I could bring it to you.

With love and good wishes to you, and to all your friends in arms, I remain yours,

Morris Abramson

P.S. Lena tells me to tell you that she is sending you her best regards and her best wishes and xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Morris

When I read this letter sometimes I think of the tiny, bright blue flowers I once spotted peeking out of the charred plot of earth where a dignified old building had recently burned to the ground. That war was a terrible thing; people understood that then as well as they do now. Minsk sat near the edge of the Eastern Front for much of the war, and saw a fair amount of action; Morris’s sister, my grandfather’s mother, was still there then, as were my grandfather’s father, two of his sisters, several nieces and nephews, and countless aunts and uncles and cousins. I am sure that few of them, perhaps none at all, had been heard from for years by the time Morris Abramson wrote that letter. Some of them, I imagine, had already been claimed by hunger, or disease, or German guns. Others, perhaps many others, would not live to see the end of the war, or of the civil war that immediately followed.

That war should never have happened; you can argue, as did my old history professor Bruce Kuklick at Penn, that once it did start, the United States should never have entered it. But it did, and then it did, and since it did, you embark down a sure path to cynicism, and perhaps depression or even despair, if you don’t try to find at least some little green shoots among the millions and millions of dead, 117,000 or so Americans among them, not to mention the uncountable number of lives that might have been spared, technically, but were ruined nonetheless, and the many millions more (including those two sisters, all those nieces and nephews, and who knows how many of those aunts and uncles and cousins) who perished during the second war that the first war wrought. And so you contemplate all those doughboys who marched off in high spirits with high ideals, who brought America to the world, and to a seat at the dais of nations for the first time, and brought back perhaps even more than that; and you think about the people at home, searching amid uncertainty and anxiety and fear to find something higher, something eternal, that might possibly, in the best of all cases, come out of this awful calamity—and then pass it on to one of those doughboys. Maybe your nephew.

So, in addition to all those veterans and their stories, in addition to all the books and posters and sheet music and other artifacts of that war, I take this letter and pin it to that wheel, taking care to leave some space for all the letters and identification disks and booklets and everything else out there that remains yet in some old cardboard bin in a basement, or locked in a keepsake box that no one has tried to open for decades, or pressed between the yellowed pages of some aged book that is itself pressed between other aged books high up on a shelf. Though the last of the doughboys are now gone and will never return, I like to think that, like the battlefield detritus that pops up every time a field is plowed in certain parts of France, these things will continue to surface for at least a few centuries more.

I don’t particularly believe in an afterlife, and have never considered it a constructive exercise to spend time thinking about the world to come rather than the one we know for certain exists and have to live in for a while; but if you meet and get to know even a little bit some two or three dozen very old men and women who share their rich and complex stories with you and then die shortly thereafter, you come to understand why other people choose to believe in, and dwell on, such things. More than I can say, I like the thought, the image of all those men I met who lost their fathers before their tenth birthday, reuniting with them after a century’s separation; of Art Fiala cooking up a mess of pancakes and bacon with that French woman who nursed him back to health; of Reuben Law and his grandfather, James Madison Bowler, swapping tales of army life; of Eugene Lee once again throwing a baseball, or maybe a pair of dice, with Joe Wnuk; of Frank Buckles pulling up on a motorcycle with a sidecar and offering a ride to John J. Pershing or Eddie Rickenbacker; of Moses Hardy and the rest of the 805th Pioneer Infantry all sitting together, soldiers and officers, and taking in a show; of the men of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, one by one, filing past Corporal J. Laurence Moffitt as he checks off their name in his register; of Private William Lake, after a long hike, cresting a hill and coming upon Captain Elijah Worsham, and the two of them shaking hands vigorously and then saluting each other, because there’s no reason not to; and of me, seeing all of them, the whole lot, again once more, if only for a few minutes.

I wouldn’t even ask a single question.

Appendix

Typical U.S. Army Infantry Units in World War I

A corps comprised several divisions; an army comprised several corps.

A Note on Methods

All of the World War I veterans featured in this book were interviewed in person; all of the interviews were conducted by me.

On a couple of occasions, the interview subject said something of note at a time when the camera was off or the tape was being changed; these were written down by me immediately. On one occasion, I called a veteran on the telephone several months after our visit to obtain a little more information on a specific matter.

The very old (and the rest of us, too) often speak haltingly, repeating words, clauses, and even entire sentences while grasping for what to say next. The transcript has for the most part been scrubbed of such interjections as “um” and “uh,” and of fragments and repetitions that were not part of the subject’s chosen way of relating their story (or of my chosen way of posing a question). I also, on a handful of occasions, took the liberty of correcting an uttered mistake within a quote, such as when a subject confused 1917 with 1918, or vice versa. I would be grateful, should the need ever arise in the future, if someone would do the same for me.

I did not correct subjects’ grammar or word choices. At the same time, I did not feel the need to render their dialect phonetically (with a few exceptions, as noted).

Finally, I should note that the various topics of conversation are not necessarily presented in the order in which they were discussed. The conversations were rarely linear. In constructing a narrative that would tell the veteran’s story in a way that would prove most meaningful for both the reader and the legacy of the interviewee, I have sometimes altered the order in which some topics are presented here relative to when they were discussed during the interview(s). Great care has been taken to preserve the context of all quotes, statements, and discussions, and to avoid misrepresentation.

—Richard Rubin