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THE AUTHOR OF First Call, the book that offered the cheerful (or depressing, depending upon your perspective) assessment of the state of vice in France, was a man named Arthur Guy Empey. First Call was actually Empey’s second book, and that one passage tells you pretty much all you need to know about it. His first book, though—Over the Top—well, now, that one was really something.
Almost from the moment it was published, in June, 1917, Over the Top was a tremendous success. In its March, 1918, issue, The Bookman, a trade journal for the publishing industry, reported that the book “has been selling at the rate of two hundred and fifty copies every business hour since its publication last June.” If you do the math, you come up with the figure of nearly four hundred thousand copies in print at that point—this at a time when the population of the United States was less than a third of what it is today, and literacy rates were significantly lower, too. By the time the war ended that autumn, more than a million copies of Over the Top were in print. If you want to know what one book almost all Americans were reading back in 1917 and 1918, what single volume most informed their vision of what that war was really like for the men in the trenches of France, this is it. It shares, in a voice that even today sounds surprisingly modern, a tale that most returning soldiers did not care to.
Writers love to grouse about the undeserved success of best-selling authors, but Over the Top is, in fact, a wonderful book—interesting, compelling, well written, and even, in spots, very funny. Still, as is so often the case, its success was due, in large part, to good timing: It was published just two months after America entered the war, and weeks after Congress passed the Selective Service Act, effectively establishing the first draft since the Civil War. Americans were excited, apprehensive, and above all hungry to learn about this war they were now in. Empey, as it happened, was the man to feed that hunger. A fellow American, he’d lost patience when the sinking of the Lusitania did not propel his country into the war, so he made his way over to England, convinced the British Army to let him enlist, shipped out for France, saw a good bit of action in the trenches, and was badly wounded at the Somme, so badly that he was not expected to live. But he did live, and was eventually discharged and shipped back home, where he got to work on a book about his experiences. He didn’t plan the timing of its release, but if he had he certainly couldn’t have done any better. The convergence linked Arthur Guy Empey with the Great War in the minds of millions of Americans; and eventually, when that war was forgotten, he was, too.
In 1917, when Over the Top began to sell, Empey gave some newspaper interviews, and the few that survive and can be found today are among the only sources of any information about his early life. To call them “interviews,” though, takes a good bit on faith, as they were all printed as soliloquies, and you get the sense, in reading them, that Empey (or perhaps a publicist) wrote them in full beforehand and just sent them out to be published as they were. They certainly serve to help create the legend he wished to proliferate. “When I first opened my eyes, I breathed the air of the Rockies,” he declares. “It is with pride that I state that I am a pure, unadulterated American.”
He was born on December 11, 1883, in Ogden, Utah, and his adventurous spirit, he claims, first manifested itself when he was four; the family was then living in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “I took it into my head to explore the sandhills,” he tells us, “and after a frantic twelve-hour search by my parents, was brought back to the fold.” His parents then put up a locked gate, which did manage to keep him in, as did the fact that, on several occasions, his father caught him trying to pick the lock, and, in the splendid parlance of the day, “applied the slipper” to his son. Thus was young Empey’s wanderlust stifled, or perhaps merely channeled through that of his family, which eventually moved to Virginia, then Canada, then New York. Empey enrolled in Brooklyn’s Manual Training High School, where he played left halfback on the football team (“the most worthy thing I did in high school”), and where his adventurousness resurfaced. “While in high school I took a notion to go to sea,” he declares. “I ran away and shipped as second cook on the tramp steamer Cuzco.” Nearly seven months later, he tells us, having “put in at twenty-six different ports and peeled eleven million barrels of ‘spuds,’” he returned to New York with “a monkey, a parrot and about $8 in silver.”
Empey was only home for a couple of weeks before boredom drove him to join Brooklyn’s 47th National Guard Regiment, where, he says, he made sergeant before choosing to return to sea, this time with the United States Navy. He was assigned to “the USS Missouri, or Misery, as we called her.” It was an ill-fated post: The Missouri rammed and nearly sank another American battleship in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and later, on April 13, 1904, caught fire during target practice. Thirty-six sailors were killed; “I barely escaped with my life,” Empey declares.
So he returned to the Army, this time to the 12th United States Cavalry; records show he enlisted on July 10, 1905, giving his height as five feet four and a half inches, and his occupation as “lifeguard.” He was, he tells us, eventually promoted to the rank of sergeant major, although the highlight of his service in the 12th was giving “exhibitions of rough riding at the Jamestown exposition” of 1907. On July 15, 1908, he reenlisted, this time with the 11th United States Cavalry—the 1910 census lists him as a corporal stationed at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia—but on July 2, 1910, the record shows, he went absent without leave, or AWOL (the original designation—desertion—is crossed out on the form), surrendering to military authorities thirteen days later. He was ultimately discharged at San Antonio on July 25, 1911, presumably honorably; the record notes him as “reformed.” Empey understandably omits this episode from his account of his time with the 11th, stating only that he “did duty with them on the Mexican border during the trouble in 1911.” There was a lot of “trouble” along the border in those days; a few years later, General John J. Pershing would lead his own troops across it in search of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, only to return empty-handed.
By his own account, Empey served a total of six years in the cavalry. Upon discharge, he returned to New York, where he joined a mounted National Guard unit, and then, when his term of service expired, joined another. He also, depending upon which account you read, “started in business for myself” (business unspecified) or went to work for “a well-known detective agency” (job title unspecified). But with the coming of the war, his wanderlust apparently returned. Records show that he applied for a passport on October 18, 1915, in New York, now listing his height as five feet five, his hair and eyes as brown, his nose as straight, his forehead as high, mouth large, chin square, complexion dark. He gives his occupation as “private investigator,” and claims he wishes to travel abroad—specifically, to France and England—for the purpose of “legal investigations.” He does not confirm or even mention any of this in his later accounts; rather, he tells us: “I thought I would take a peep at France, so I shipped on the horse ship La Gascogne as assistant veterinarian, and after ducking the submarines we landed thirteen hundred horses for the French artillery at Bordeaux, France.” He returned right home, he says, but shortly after his arrival, while walking down Broadway, “I heard a German pass the remark about the Americans being too proud to fight, so I went to London and joined the British army.”
I won’t speculate on how much of this autobiography is factual, except to note that in Over the Top, Empey tells a different version of the story of how he came to enlist. He was working in Jersey City, he writes, when word came into his office of the sinking of the Lusitania. He and his office-mate, a lieutenant in the New Jersey National Guard, immediately break out the muster rolls, expecting a declaration of war to come at any moment. “We busied ourselves till late in the evening,” he recalls, “writing out emergency telegrams for the men to report when the call should come from Washington.” But the call never came. “Months passed,” he writes, “the telegrams lying handy, but covered with dust”; eventually, he and the lieutenant threw them away. “He was squirming in his chair and I felt depressed and uneasy,” Empey confesses. And then:
The telephone rang and I answered it. It was a business call for me requesting my services for an out-of-town assignment. Business was not very good, so this was very welcome. After listening to the proposition, I seemed to be swayed by a peculiarly strong force within me, and answered, “I am sorry that I cannot accept your offer, but I am leaving for England next week,” and hung up the receiver. The Lieutenant swung around in his chair, and stared at me in astonishment. A sinking sensation came over me, but I defiantly answered his look with, “Well, it’s so. I am going.” And I went.
Arthur Guy Empey was by no means the first American to join the fight. Since the war had begun in Europe in 1914, American citizens had been sailing off to England, or making their way up to Canada, to get around their own country’s neutrality and get in their own shot at the Kaiser. (Or possibly to fight for the Kaiser, though I’ve never read about any such men.) Empey, though, writes as if he were the only one, and the early sections of Over the Top are filled with comic scenes of Englishmen encountering a Yank for the very first time and not knowing quite what to make of him. He has difficulty getting someone to let him enlist, more difficulty getting someone to give him something to do, more difficulty still getting anyone to agree that he should be allowed to fight. And when at last he does manage to get himself sent to training camp, misunderstandings compound misunderstandings. (He never quite tells us which unit he joined, just that they were part of the Royal Fusiliers; if you hold a magnifying glass up to the photo he includes of his arm and identification disk, though, you can make out that he was a private in the Machine Gun Company of the 167th Brigade, 56th Division.) They find his brand of English incomprehensible, and we quickly come to understand, by way of his phonetically rendered cockney accents—you could call it a bad movie brogue, but movies were still silent then—that the feeling is mutual. Empey, the proud autodidact, eagerly shares what he learns regarding regulations, equipment, terminology, slang. But then he gets sent to France, and at this point the experience changes for the reader as quickly and dramatically as it did for him:
The odor from a dug-up, decomposed human body has an effect which is hard to describe. It first produces a nauseating feeling, which, especially after eating, causes vomiting. This relieves you temporarily, but soon a weakening sensation follows, which leaves you limp as a dish-rag. Your spirits are at their lowest ebb and you feel a sort of hopeless helplessness and a mad desire to escape it all . . . a vague horror of the awfulness of the thing and an ever-recurring reflection that, perhaps I, sooner or later, would be in such a state.
The dead body in this instance—and there are a lot of them in Over the Top—is that of a German soldier, stumbled upon by a member of Empey’s digging party when, in the darkness, he inadvertently thrusts his pick into its lifeless chest. “One of the men fainted,” Empey reports, adding, gamely: “I was that one.”
When you read something like that, the question of why Empey’s book became such a sensational bestseller just disintegrates in your mind. But it is soon replaced by another: How did something like this even manage to be published at all in 1917, given that the country had just entered that same war? Because Empey wasn’t just relating the horrors of war; he was testifying to the rank stupidity of the men in charge of waging it.
Take this description of a nighttime mission assigned to Empey and a few others shortly after they arrived in the trenches—that is, long, muddy ditches filled with rats and vermin and separated from the enemy’s long, muddy ditches by no more than a few hundred yards of shell-ravaged earth known, for good reason, as No Man’s Land:
All we had to do was crawl out into No Man’s Land, lie on our bellies with our ears to the ground and listen for the tap tap of the German engineers or sappers who might be tunneling under No Man’s Land to establish a mine-head beneath our trench.
Of course, in our orders we were told not to be captured by German patrols or reconnoitering parties. Lots of breath is wasted on the Western Front giving silly cautions.
Ill-conceived as this assignment is, Empey and the other men do it anyway, and without question, or at least uttered question. At one point, lying there completely exposed, they are very nearly discovered by a German patrol.
A dark form suddenly loomed up in front of me, it looked as big as the Woolworth Building. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins and it sounded as loud as Niagara Falls.
Forms seemed to emerge from the darkness. There were seven of them in all. I tried to wish them away. I never wished harder in my life. They muttered a few words in German and melted into the blackness. I didn’t stop wishing, either.
That time, everyone made it back. “The next morning I was stiff as a poker and every joint ached like a bad tooth,” Empey tells us, “but I was still alive, so it did not matter.”
Another night—the hard work, it seems, was always done under cover of darkness—Empey is sent out to inspect the enemy’s barbed wire fence. He manages to complete this portion of the mission, but becomes disoriented while returning to his trench and nearly crawls into a German trench, instead; he is discovered, leaps to his feet, and sprints back toward his own lines. “The bullets were biting all around me,” he tells us, “when bang! I ran smash into our wire.” He is nearly shot by a British sentry.
Despite that, he remains quite fond of “Tommy,” or the typical British soldier; he also develops a grudging but firm respect for the enemy—and even, in some cases, affection. Prussian and Bavarian units usually gave Tommy “a hot time of it,” but the Saxons were, in Empey’s view, much more civilized. When Saxon and English units faced each other, he writes, “both sides would sit on the parapet and carry on a conversation.” They would chat genially; then, “when the Saxons were to be relieved by Prussians or Bavarians, they would yell this information across No Man’s Land and Tommy would immediately tumble into his trench and keep his head down.” The Saxons did the same when the English called out that they were about to be replaced by feared Irish troops. “The Boches,” Empey explains, invoking a popular ethnic epithet of the day, “hate the man from Erin’s Isle.”
One night, Empey offers some newly captured German prisoners a drink, and is surprised when one responds, “Thank you, sir, the rum is excellent and I appreciate it, also your kindness.” They strike up a conversation: “He told me his name was Carl Schmidt, of the 66th Bavarian Light infantry,” Empey recounts. “That he had lived six years in New York (knew the city better than I did), had been to Coney Island and many of our ball games. He was a regular fan. I couldn’t make him believe that Hans Wagner wasn’t the best ballplayer in the world.” Later, after an escort comes to take the prisoners to the rear, Empey confesses: “I liked that prisoner, he was a fine fellow and had an Iron Cross, too. I advised him to keep it out of sight, or some Tommy would be sending it home to his girl in Blighty as a souvenir.”
It’s not all horror and drudgery and moral dilemmas. Empey writes entire chapters on the things soldiers do when they aren’t dodging bullets and artillery and poison gas, or being sent on suicidal missions, or trying not to become too fond of enemy prisoners. He discusses, at some length, tea and rum, cards and dice, inspection and drills and church services and parades, a musical play he and some friends write and perform for their fellow troops at a makeshift theater “situated corner of Sand Bag Terrace and Ammo Street.” They even, somehow, manage to print up elaborate playbills.
But in war, even tales that begin happily often end in tragedy. At one point, after a particularly long and hazardous spell in the trenches, Empey’s unit is relieved and sent back behind the lines; then, to his great surprise and joy, he and forty other men are awarded leave time in England. They climb aboard trucks and travel overland for a couple of hours until they reach a rail station, where they wait for the train that will take them to the port of departure. When it arrives, five hours late, they are loaded onto boxcars, which take two days to reach the port. Before they can board their ship, though, they are stopped by an officer, who informs them that all leave has been canceled, and that they will have to get right back in those boxcars and return whence they came. “Beastly rotten, I know,” he says by way of consolation. “If you had been three hours earlier you would have gotten away.”
Empey and the others, it seems, are needed for an attack that’s about to begin. “Seventeen of the forty-one will never get another chance to go on leave,” he tells us. “They were killed in the attack.”
That, though, is only the beginning of this awful tale. For in the attack, Empey and his machine gun company charge across No Man’s Land and occupy a German trench that has already been shelled heavily. “I never saw such a mess in my life,” he reports:
. . . bunches of twisted barbed wire lying about, shell-holes everywhere, trench all bashed in, parapets gone, and dead bodies, why, that ditch was full of them, theirs and ours. . . . Some were mangled horribly from our shell fire, while others were wholly or partly buried in the mud, the result of shell explosions caving in the wall of the trench. One dead German was lying on his back, with a rifle sticking straight up in the air, the bayonet of which was buried to the hilt in his chest. Across his feet lay a dead English soldier with a bullet hole in his forehead. This Tommy must have been killed just as he ran his bayonet through the German. . . .
At one point, just in the entrance to a communication trench, was a stretcher. On this stretcher a German was lying with a white bandage around his knee, near to him lay one of the stretcher-bearers, the red cross on his arm covered with mud and his helmet filled with blood and brains. Close by, sitting up against the wall of the trench, with head resting on his chest, was the other stretcher-bearer. He seemed to be alive, the posture was so natural and easy, but when I got closer, I could see a large, jagged hole in his temple. The three must have been killed by the same shell-burst.
I have only rarely come across a description of combat as graphic as this one. And I’ve never read anything like it from this period, a time when a certain genteel sensibility still reigned over the American consciousness. But Empey just shatters that sensibility; or at least seems entirely unaware of its existence. This passage, like many others in Over the Top, is more modern, in that sense, than most of what would be written on the subject for thirty or forty years afterward.
This, though, is not even Empey’s most impressive accomplishment; that would have to be the fact that throughout the book, without diluting or minimizing the horror of what he sees and experiences, he manages to maintain a sense of humor and a tone just light enough to keep you from putting his book down and pouring yourself a stiff drink. To tell you the truth, I have no idea how he does it; but he does, even while telling this particular story. Taking the trench was easy, he reports, but holding it is another matter; three of his men are killed just trying to set up their machine gun. “One of the legs of the tripod was resting on the chest of a half-buried body,” he recounts. And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, he makes a discovery:
Three or four feet down the trench, about three feet from the ground, a foot was protruding from the earth; we knew it was a German by the black leather boot. One of our crew used that foot to hang extra bandoliers of ammunition on. This man always was a handy fellow; made use of little points that the ordinary person would overlook.
Despite being shelled and shot at throughout six straight days—all the while crouching among the unburied dead, watching “their faces become swollen and discolored,” while “the stench was fierce”—Empey managed to develop a strange fixation:
What got on my nerves the most was that foot sticking out of the dirt. It seemed to me, at night, in the moonlight, to be trying to twist around. Several times this impression was so strong that I went to it and grasped it in both hands, to see if I could feel a movement.
I told this to the man who had used it for a hat-rack just before I lay down for a little nap. . . . When I woke up the foot was gone. He had cut it off with our chain saw out of the spare parts’ box, and had plastered the stump over with mud.
During the next two or three days, before we were relieved, I missed that foot dreadfully, seemed as if I had suddenly lost a chum.
Empey’s sense of humor comes in particularly handy when he reflects on the subject of military discipline. It was, to say the least, draconian; Jefferson Davis once famously declared that the poorest use of a soldier is to shoot him, but a half century later, the British Army still hadn’t caught up with the late Confederate president. If you need another reminder of how much things have changed since World War I, consider this: Men could be, and often were, shot by their own for any number of offenses, including, but not limited to, by Empey’s account, “desertion, cowardice, mutiny, giving information to the enemy, destroying or willfully wasting ammunition, looting, rape, robbing the dead, forcing a safeguard, striking a superior, etc.” (In one notorious instance that came to light after the war, a cat, which had taken to scurrying back and forth between the lines in search of food, was shot as a spy by the French after some German soldiers strapped a collar, bearing a note with greetings in pidgin French, around its neck.)
And if you weren’t put in front of a firing squad, you might well have ended up wishing you had been. As Empey tells us, in cases where “there is a doubt as to the willful guilt of a man who has committed an offence punishable by death”—say, if he wasted ammunition by accident, perhaps due to poor aim—he was often sentenced, instead, to spend sixty-four days in a front-line trench, ineligible for relief, and bound “to engage in all raids, working parties in No Man’s Land, and every hazardous undertaking that comes along. If you live through the sixty-four days,” Empey says, “you are indeed lucky.” And for “repeated minor offences,” one could draw what was officially known as “Field Punishment No. 1,” for which, Empey recounts, “a man is spread eagled on a limber wheel, two hours a day, for twenty-one days”—and also, in what seems like an afterthought, restricted to a diet of water, hard biscuits, and something called “bully beef.” The unofficial term for Field Punishment No. 1 was “crucifixion,” and the British, it seems, doled it out about as liberally as the Romans had.
Executions were shockingly common, too, especially for the crime of “cowardice,” whose broad definition embraced everything from hesitating before going “over the top”—that is, climbing up out of a trench and charging into No Man’s Land—to what, in the next war, would come to be regarded as “shell shock.” In the 1980s, what had once been a capital offense was officially reclassified as posttraumatic stress disorder; but it wasn’t until 2006 that the British Army began apologizing to the descendants of soldiers executed for a transgression that is now universally recognized as a psychiatric syndrome.
That was nine decades too late for Arthur Guy Empey, who was, as he writes, once awakened at 2:00 a.m. by a regimental sergeant major, with orders for the sleeping man to get dressed and equipped and, without a word, follow him out into the rainy night. Empey is led to a barn and told to sit there in silence. There are men there already, sitting in the darkness, and while they wait quietly, more are led in, until there are a dozen of them in all, none of whom Empey recognizes. They are then led out and marched for an hour until they find themselves in a courtyard, standing before four stacks of rifles. “Men, you are here on a very solemn duty,” an officer tells them. “You have been selected as a firing squad for the execution of a soldier, who, having been found guilty of a grievous crime against King and Country, has been regularly and duly tried and sentenced to be shot at 3:28 a.m. this date.” The officer informs the firing squad that one of the twelve rifles has a blank cartridge in it, but that “every man is expected to do his duty and fire to kill.”
“My heart was of lead and my knees shook,” Empey confesses. “After standing at ‘Attention’ for what seemed like a week, though in reality it could not have been over five minutes,” the men hear whispers and footsteps, and then, against a far wall, Empey spots “a dark form with a white square pinned on its breast. We were supposed to aim at this square.” Empey, though, decides to aim at a white spot on the wall, instead. When he fires, he tells us, “I could see the splinters fly. Someone else had received the rifle containing the blank cartridge, but my mind was at ease, there was no blood of a Tommy on my hands.” When it is all over, the men are ordered to “return, alone, to your respective companies, and remember, no talking about this affair, or else it will go hard with the guilty ones.”
“We needed no urging to get away,” Empey says. He never learns the dead man’s name, nor the offense for which he was sentenced to die; and, as a compassionate gesture, the army that executed the unfortunate soldier will tell his family even less. “In the public casualty lists,” Empey tells us, “his name will appear under the caption ‘Accidentally Killed,’ or ‘Died.’”
And perhaps, in the end, he wasn’t much worse off than his friends still in the trenches; odds were good they would get shot, too, or shelled, or gassed, or find some other way to die before they could make it back home. In one of the finest memoirs of that war, Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That (first published in 1929), almost every fellow soldier Graves mentions somewhere—officers and enlisted men, aristocrats and commoners, in scores of anecdotes that occupy pages or merely half a sentence—is, in the end, killed at the front. It is so common an experience, really, that at a certain point it starts to feel like Graves only mentions their deaths as a way to punctuate the end of a sentence; you get the sense that everyone who served in the trenches long enough arrived at the understanding that he would probably not live to see the war’s end. Graves, a lieutenant in the British Army, barely did himself; he was wounded so badly at the Somme that he was not expected to live, and his colonel wrote his parents and told them he had died. It was only after his aunt accidentally came across him while visiting someone else at the hospital where he was recovering that Graves’s family discovered the error.
The Somme lasted four months and claimed more than a million casualties. Nearly twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on the first day alone, their army’s worst day in history. The battle had been planned by the Allies for months, and the buildup was massive. Empey describes a “never-ending stream of men, supplies, ammunition and guns pouring into the British lines.” When massive howitzers would pass, he writes, “a flush of pride would mount to my face, because I could plainly read on the name plate, ‘Made in the U.S.A.,’ and I would remember that if I wore a name plate it would also read, ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ Then I would stop to think how thin and straggly that mighty stream would be if all the ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ parts of it were withdrawn.”
Ten hours before the battle promptly commenced, at 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, Empey and nineteen other men volunteered for a nighttime mission: They were to sneak across No Man’s Land, raid an enemy trench at a certain point in their front line, snatch up a couple of German soldiers, and bring them back to British lines, where the Germans would be interrogated for intelligence purposes. Specifically, the British command hoped to learn the precise location of a couple of German machine guns that British artillery had failed to silence. HQ presented it as a straightforward exercise, but Empey wasn’t so sure: “I had a funny sinking sensation in my stomach, and my tin hat felt as if it weighed about a ton,” he tells us. His commander’s instructions didn’t do much to raise his spirits:
“Take off your identification disks, strip your uniforms of all numerals, insignia, etc., leave your papers with your captains, because I don’t want the Boches to know what regiments are against them . . . and I don’t want any of you to be taken alive. What I want is two prisoners and if I get them I have a way which will make them divulge all necessary information as to their guns. You have your choice of two weapons—you may carry your ‘persuaders’ or your knuckle knives.” . . .
A persuader is Tommy’s nickname for a club. . . . It is about two feet long, thin at one end and very thick at the other. The thick end is studded with sharp steel spikes, while through the center of the club there is a nine-inch bar, to give it weight and balance. When you get a prisoner all you have to do is just stick this club up in front of him, and believe me, the prisoner’s patriotism for Deutschland ueber Alles fades away and he very willingly obeys the orders of his captor. If, however, the prisoner gets high-toned and refuses to follow you, simply “persuade” him by first removing his tin hat, and then—well, the use of the lead weight in the persuader is demonstrated, and Tommy looks for another prisoner.
The knuckle knife is a dagger affair, the blade of which is about eight inches long with a heavy steel guard over the grip. This guard is studded with steel projections. At night in a trench, which is only about three to four feet wide, it makes a very handy weapon. One punch in the face generally shatters a man’s jaw and you can get him with the knife as he goes down.
Then we had what we called our “come-alongs.” These are strands of barbed wire about three feet long, made into a noose at one end; at the other end, the barbs are cut off and Tommy slips his wrist through a loop to get a good grip on the wire. If the prisoner wants to argue the point, why just place the large loop around his neck and no matter if Tommy wishes to return to his trenches at the walk, trot or gallop, Fritz is perfectly agreeable to maintain Tommy’s rate of speed.
I cannot even imagine the reaction of the typical American who read these words in the summer or fall of 1917; certainly, persuaders, knuckle knives, and come-alongs were never featured on the British fundraising and propaganda posters that somehow, despite the official American posture of neutrality, managed to make their way onto walls throughout the United States. It was a bloody war, to be sure, but a civilized one, conducted under the time-honored codes of chivalry—wasn’t it?
Back in the trenches, Empey and his fellow volunteers, equipped additionally with four hand grenades apiece (“these to be used only in case of emergency”), their hands and faces blackened to help conceal them in the light of German flares, or “star shells” (“In a trench raid there is quite sufficient reason for your face to be pale. If you don’t believe me, try it just once”), go over the top and slowly crawl through No Man’s Land, communicating with each other through a series of coded taps. After about a half hour, they arrive at the Germans’ front trenches, or, more accurately, at the barbed wire just in front of them. “Then,” Empey says, “the fun began.”
I was scared stiff as it is ticklish work cutting your way through wire when about thirty feet in front of you there is a line of Boches looking out into No Man’s Land with their rifles lying across the parapet, straining every sense to see or hear what is going on in No Man’s Land. . . . There is only one way to cut a barbed wire without noise and through costly experience Tommy has become expert at doing this. You must grasp the wire about two inches from the stake in your right hand and cut between the stake and your hand. . . .
During the intervals of falling star shells we carried on with our wire cutting until at last we succeeded in getting through the German barbed wire. At this point we were only ten feet from the German trenches. If we were discovered, we were like rats in a trap. Our way out was cut off unless we ran along the wire to the narrow lane we had cut through. With our hearts in our mouths we waited for the three-tap signal to rush the German trench. Three taps had gotten about halfway down the line when suddenly about ten to twenty German star shells were fired all along the trench and landed in the barbed wire in rear of us, turning night into day and silhouetting us against the wall of light made by the flares. In the glaring light we were confronted by the following unpleasant scene.
All along the German trench, at about three-foot intervals, stood a big Prussian guardsman with his rifle at the aim. . . . About three feet in front of the trench they had constructed a single fence of barbed wire and we knew our chances were one thousand to one of returning alive. We could not rush their trench on account of this second defence. Then in front of me the challenge, “Halt,” given in English rang out, and one of the finest things I have ever heard on the western front took place.
From the middle of our line some Tommy answered the challenge with, “Aw, go to hell.” . . . He wanted to show Fritz that he could die game.
The Germans, unimpressed, open fire with their machine guns while also throwing grenades. “The Boche in front of me was looking down his sight,” Empey says. “Then came a flash in front of me, the flare of his rifle—and my head seemed to burst. A bullet had hit me on the left side of my face about half an inch from my eye, smashing the cheek bones. I put my hand to my face and fell forward, biting the ground and kicking my feet. I thought I was dying. . . . The blood was streaming down my tunic, and the pain was awful.” He loses consciousness for a moment, then comes to and tells himself, “Emp, old boy, you belong in Jersey City and you’d better get back there as quickly as possible.” This was no mere exhibition of roughriding.
He crawls away under the machine-gun fire, looking for the hole he’d cut in the barbed wire; but before he gets there,
I came to a limp form which seemed like a bag of oats hanging over the wire. In the dim light I could see that its hands were blackened, and knew it was the body of one of my mates. I put my hand on his head, the top of which had been blown off by a bomb. My fingers sank into the hole. I pulled my hand back full of blood and brains, then I went crazy with fear and horror and rushed along the wire.
He finds the gap, but as he rises to his feet, a voice in his head tells him to look around; as he does, a bullet hits him in the left shoulder. “It did not hurt much,” he says, but “then my left side went numb. My arm was dangling like a rag. I fell forward in a sitting position. But all fear had left me and I was consumed with rage and cursed the German trenches.” With his good hand he grabs a grenade, pulls the pin with his teeth, and “blindly” throws it toward the German trench. Seeing it explode, and once again “seized with a horrible fear, I dragged myself . . . through the barbed wire, stumbling over cut wires, tearing my uniform, and lacerating my hands and legs.” He is just about to make it through to No Man’s Land when that same voice in his head tells him to turn around; again he obeys, and another bullet hits him in the same shoulder. “Then it was taps for me,” he says. “The lights went out.”
He wakes up in a shell hole in No Man’s Land; “How I reached this hole I will never know,” he tells us. Bullets are still flying just overhead. He is in great pain, soaked in his own blood, “and a big flap from the wound in my cheek was hanging over my mouth. The blood running from this flap choked me. Out of the corner of my mouth I would try and blow it back but it would not move.” He tries to wrap a makeshift bandage around the wound, but fails. “You would have laughed if you had seen my ludicrous attempts at bandaging with one hand,” he assures us, though I doubt it. He wasn’t laughing, either. “I had an awful horror of bleeding to death and was getting very faint. . . . The pains in my wounded shoulder were awful and I was getting sick at the stomach.” He passes out again, for an indeterminate spell.
“When I came to,” he recalls, “hell was let loose.” The Battle of the Somme was under way.
“An intense bombardment was on, and on the whole my position was decidedly unpleasant,” he explains. But then, from the friendly trenches somewhere beyond his shell hole, a cheer rises up, and the British come storming over the top. The first wave are “Jocks,” or Scots, in full regalia. They were known to kick soccer balls ahead of them as they charged up out of the trenches; Empey doesn’t report seeing this, but still, he says,
They were a magnificent sight, kilts flapping in the wind, bare knees showing, and their bayonets glistening. In the first wave that passed my shell hole, one of the “Jocks,” an immense fellow, about six feet two inches in height, jumped right over me. . . . One young Scottie, when he came abreast of my shell hole, leaped into the air, his rifle shooting out of his hands, landing about six feet in front of him, bayonet first, and stuck in the ground, the butt trembling. This impressed me greatly.
Right now I can see the butt of that gun trembling. The Scottie made a complete turn in the air, hit the ground, rolling over twice, each time clawing at the earth, and then remained still, about four feet from me, in a sort of sitting position. I called to him, “Are you hurt badly, Jock?” but no answer. He was dead. A dark, red smudge was coming through his tunic right under the heart. The blood ran down his bare knees, making a horrible sight. On his right side, he carried his water bottle. I was crazy for a drink and tried to reach this, but for the life of me could not negotiate that four feet. Then I became unconscious. When I woke up I was in an advanced first-aid post. I asked the doctor if we had taken the trench. “We took the trench and the wood beyond, all right,” he said, “and you fellows did your bit; but, my lad, that was thirty-six hours ago. You were lying in No Man’s Land in that bally hole for a day and a half. It’s a wonder you are alive.”
How he got from that shell hole to the first-aid station—how anyone seeing him there even knew he was still alive—Empey does not say. Maybe he never knew. They do tell him that seventeen of the twenty men in his raiding party were killed that night; the officer who led it died while trying to crawl back to his trench. Only one of the twenty returned unharmed. The official communiqué on his trench raid began “All quiet on the Western front,” Empey tells us, and thus did American readers encounter for the first time a phrase that, a dozen years later, Erich Maria Remarque would enlist for the title of the most celebrated novel ever written about that war.
For Empey, that communiqué marks the end of his war. He spends four months in an English hospital, witnesses daily unheralded acts of great courage, selflessness, and altruism, is discharged as “physically unfit for further war service,” and is sent home on the American ship New York, which, records show, left Liverpool on November 11, 1916, arriving at its eponymous port nine days later. As it pulls into the harbor and he spots the Statue of Liberty, he says, “Though it may seem strange, I was really sorry not to be back in the trenches with my mates. War is not a pink tea but in a worthwhile cause like ours, mud, rats, cooties, shells, wounds, or death itself, are far outweighed by the deep sense of satisfaction felt by a man who does his bit.”
And then he wrote a book about it.
That was just the beginning. There was to be a film version, for one thing, shot at Camp Wheeler, Georgia, the War Department graciously offering the production company use of its training trenchworks as locations, not to mention thousands of soldiers of the 82nd Division as extras. Empey himself wrote the screenplay; he also landed the starring role. Like the book, it was a hit, though Empey scarcely had time for red-carpet appearances, occupied as he was with speaking engagements, Liberty Bond rallies, and live demonstrations of trench warfare, staged at some of the country’s largest and most prestigious venues, including, on a half-dozen occasions, Carnegie Hall. They never failed to sell out. He even wrote and published several patriotic songs; my favorite is an anthem of love and trench warfare called “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine.”
Somehow, “while trekking back and forth over this country,” as he wrote in its afterword, he managed to write First Call, a very different kind of book that enjoyed much more modest success than had Over the Top. In the years following the war he published several more books, all of them novels; none did well. In the 1920s, he moved out to California, hired a publicist, and wrote a bunch of screenplays, some of which were produced; none did well. He turned to pulp monthlies, churned out action and adventure and combat stories—“Bulldogging the Boche” and “Horsehair Ropes a Heinie” and “Stretcher Bearers Up!” and “Lay That Wire!” and “When Gunmen Turned Soldiers” and “Cannon Fodder” and “Sealed Orders” and “Two Doughs in a Dungeon” and “Curse of the Iron Cross” and “To the Front in a Hearse” and “Buck Privates Commanding” and “All Quit on the Western Front” and more than a hundred others—until the next war killed both format and genre. In 1943, a reporter for the Associated Press discovered Empey working as a security guard at an aircraft plant. Twenty years later, when he died at a veterans’ hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas, the same wire service misspelled his name “Emtey” in his brief obituary. Five times.
The depth of his fall, though, does not diminish the accomplishment that initially carried him to the heights from which he later plummeted. I don’t mean selling a million copies of his first book; lots of people make and lose fortunes in short order. But more than any other volume ever published, that first book, Over the Top, brought the war to America, and shaped Americans’ understanding of the conflict; and somehow, while doing all that, Empey managed to assure new doughboys’ families back home that it was OK to laugh. Most important, he simultaneously managed to assure those new doughboys that it was OK to be afraid. As he writes in the book’s final passage:
There is one thing which my experience taught me that might help the boy who may have to go. It is this—anticipation is far worse than realization. In civil life a man stands in awe of the man above him, wonders how he could ever fill his job. When the time comes he rises to the occasion, is up and at it, and is surprised to find how much more easily than anticipated he fills his responsibilities. It is really so “out there.”
He has nerve for the hardships; the interest of the work grips him; he finds relief in the fun and comradeship of the trenches and wins that best sort of happiness that comes with duty done.
The same month those words first appeared in print, hundreds of thousands of draft notices, the first of the war, were sent out; and soon, very soon, a great many young men—draftees, like Antonio Pierro, a poor, struggling immigrant who had just managed to establish a toehold in America and was now being sent back to the continent whence he had escaped; and volunteers, like a twenty-year-old Connecticut Yankee named J. Laurence Moffitt who had seen the storm coming and had already enlisted to do his part—would have the chance to measure Empey’s final sentiment against their own experiences Over There.