5
HOW DO I PUT THIS? If you spend enough time around the, uh, superannuated, you come to recognize certain portents that don’t bode well for their continued longevity. For instance, a fall followed by a broken hip is usually bad news; otherwise-relatively-active men and women are suddenly rendered bedridden, and that kind of state can kill you any number of ways. The need for surgery is an ill omen; folks that age rarely come through a serious operation just fine. In fact, any kind of major change or minor illness can prove calamitous to the very elderly. (I don’t deal with them particularly well, either.)
I say all this by way of explaining why I was so nervous during the three-hour drive up the western shore of Lake Michigan from Milwaukee to Kewaunee, Wisconsin, to meet 104-year-old Arthur Fiala. It was September 6, 2003, just two weeks since I had first made his acquaintance over the telephone, but in that short time the following things had happened: His wife of sixty-seven years suddenly died; he moved out of the farmhouse he had lived in for fifty-four years and into a local nursing home; and he contracted pneumonia. I felt like I was racing the grim reaper, and I didn’t like my odds.
I’d found Mr. Fiala through both the French List and Google, but if I hadn’t called his house exactly when I had, I might never have gotten to talk to him at all. As it happened, his granddaughter, Deb, was visiting that morning, and Deb was the only person who ever answered the phone in that house; Art Fiala and his wife, Adeline, were both too deaf to use it anymore. I got to talk to him a bit that morning anyway, then immediately booked tickets to Wisconsin.
To get to Kewaunee, I drove a couple of hours north to Green Bay (stopping in Sheboygan for a breakfast bratwurst), turned right on Route 29 (also known as the World War I Veterans Memorial Highway), and drove about thirty miles, past hamlets with names like Poland, Pilsen, and Krok (and a billboard for a bison farm named the Spunky Buffalo), until I reached the water: Lake Michigan. I know it’s a lake, but in Kewaunee, it might as well be the ocean. The nearest landfall, in northern Michigan, is more than fifty miles east, well beyond the horizon. Kewaunee even has its own lighthouse, which from a distance looks like a little dollhouse sitting atop a pier. The town itself is quaint enough, possessed of an old-country feel; I soon learned that just about everyone in it was of Czech descent. Most of them couldn’t believe I had no idea what a kolache was. (In case you’re not Czech: It’s a type of pastry.)
Arthur Fiala had taken up residence in a low, nondescript modern brick building on the outskirts of town. I met Deb in the lobby and followed her to her grandfather’s room. The man didn’t look good, lying there in a plaid shirt and gray chinos and enormous black eyeglasses, an oxygen hose hooked up to his nose. He seemed to be shrinking, withering within his own clothing. I soon discovered, though, that he was quite spunky—much more so, I imagined, than those ill-fated buffalo.
“I was out of a job, and I made up my mind, I decided to join the Army,” he asserted before I had a chance to ask him any questions. Sick as he was, he remembered why I’d come and wanted to get right to it.
He was born in Kewaunee on February 17, 1899 (at least he thought so; the 1900 census says it was 1898). According to tradition, the family name was originally spelled “Fijala,” and Arthur’s father, Charlie, had been born somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, during the middle passage of their immigration from what is now the Czech Republic. Charlie himself had told the census taker in 1900 that he’d been born in America in 1869, and listed his parents’ birthplace as Bohemia. (His son later revealed that Charlie had lied about where he’d been born, afraid his employer, the post office, might fire him if they knew the truth.) Arthur’s mother, Mary, was born in Wisconsin in 1872; her father was a German immigrant, her mother, depending upon the census, born in either Wisconsin or Bohemia.
Wherever he was born, Charles Fiala grew up in Kewaunee and worked there all his life. “When my dad got married, he was lighting streetlamps in Kewaunee for fifteen dollars a month,” his son told me. “And then he got a job delivering groceries. Then he took an exam for a mail carrier. Rural. And he passed that, and he spent the next thirty years as a mail carrier.”
“How did he get around?” I asked. “Did he have a horse and carriage?”
“Yeah,” he said, “when he got that job, he had to buy a couple horses, a buggy, a cutter [a type of sleigh], and feed his animals, and feed our family, all in one.”
Charlie’s youngest child, Arthur, went through all of his schooling right there in Kewaunee. “Did you work also while you were in school?” I asked him.
“Not that I know of,” he replied.
“So, then, you were telling me that you were looking for a job; this is how you came to go into the Army?”
“Listen,” he said, “I got something to tell you first. I was in high school. And the principal was a dirty devil. And he asked me a question in algebra one day, and I didn’t know it. He said to me, ‘Art, if I were you I would pick up your books and go home and help your father earn a living.’” And he did. At least, he went home and never returned to school. He was fifteen or sixteen at the time, and wasn’t too terribly upset about it. To hear him tell it, he had been granted parole.
“A neighbor of mine,” he told me, “was a captain on a boat, and he offered me a job on the boat. And I went from Kewaunee to Milwaukee in a boat. And it was rough, and I was seasick the whole trip. When I got to Milwaukee, I jumped off the boat and went to Chicago. I had some relatives down there. And there I worked for a while. All I could tell, I don’t. I can’t tell you all the damn stories.”
But he told me quite a few of them: How he left Chicago and headed up north, back to Wisconsin with a buddy, where they lived in a farmer’s granary for a while and trapped. Eventually he made his way to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he got work as an inspector at a Nash automobile plant—a good job, especially for a teenaged high school dropout. A much-coveted job, apparently. “One day a guy came up to me,” he recalled more than eighty-five years later, “and he said, ‘Don’t come to work tomorrow.’ He said, ‘There’s nobody going to come tomorrow.’ And I stayed home.” The fellow, he later learned, had been jealous of young Fiala’s position, and had told the foreman that day that Art was actually trying to foment a strike. “And when I came back to work the next morning,” he said, “the foreman kicked me out of the plant. I didn’t have enough sense to talk up.”
And he added: “That’s when I joined the Army.”
We spend so much time these days celebrating our men and women in service as selfless heroes—which, often, they are—that we fail to consider the fact that many of them joined up not, primarily, out of a sense of duty, but because it made good economic sense. If you can’t find other work, the Army offers you a steady paycheck, free room and board, medical and dental care, transportation, and even a natty wardrobe. It also offers the promise of travel and adventure. Sure, these perks all come with the chance that you may be killed or maimed, but the possibility of being shot to death is better than the certainty of starving to death. Besides, those threats always seem remote at the enlistment center.
None of that, though, has any bearing on the fact that Private Fiala served honorably in France. Eighty years later, that service was recognized with the Legion of Honor. Mr. Fiala earned that medal. It doesn’t matter that he enlisted, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, because he needed the work. As far as he was concerned, that fact only made his story more interesting; perhaps that’s why he led off with it.
He told me he went to a recruitment center in Green Bay; they must have sent him to Columbus Barracks, Ohio, because that’s where his discharge papers say he officially enlisted, on February 23, 1918. “Now, hear,” he said. “When I enlisted, I didn’t tell the recruiter what branch of service I wanted to get into. I said, ‘That’s up to you.’ I said, ‘Get me into an outfit that goes over to France quick.’ And he put me into an engineer outfit, the 20th Engineers. And we had two weeks’ training . . . that was it.”
They were in a hurry. The 20th Engineers was a special unit; though technically a regiment, it was not attached to any division, and in fact, by the end of the war, it comprised some thirty thousand soldiers, more than most divisions. A great many of them—perhaps a majority—were lumberjacks. The 20th was charged, primarily, with providing the AEF with the timber it needed. And it needed a lot. Urgently. According to Alfred H. Davies, who wrote and published Twentieth Engineers, France, 1917–1918–1919 shortly after the war, one of General Pershing’s first cables from France called for lumbermen, saying that to send over infantry divisions before a good timber operation could be established would be fruitless. “If an army of the size contemplated was to be put at the front,” wrote regimental chaplain Captain Howard Y. Williams in a foreword, “docks must be built; railroads laid; barracks, warehouses, hospitals, bakeries, refrigerator plants, and power plants provided; and trench timbers, dug-outs, and barb-wire stakes furnished. The basic factor in all these necessities was lumber and the Twentieth Engineers, detailed to this task, more than met their tremendous responsibility.”
Captain Williams continues:
It meant work; hard, monotonous, and unrelenting, but never did men respond more nobly. From these first days in the Fall of 1917 when I saw men hitched to wagons and pulling like horses because we had none; through those terrible spring days of 1918 when the Germans were driving on toward Paris and these men scattered from the Pyrenees to the Argonne toiled day and night to make possible our defense; down through the armistice until the last man came home, in all my experience across the seas I never saw more faithful and conscientious effort. Brave deeds abounded in France but equal in spirit to any of them was the persistent devotion to his task, so vitally essential but lacking in personal glory, of many a man in this largest regiment in history.
Brave deeds, though, don’t always spare you the indignity of being forgotten. If not for Private Arthur Fiala, the last surviving veteran of the largest regiment in history, I would never even have heard of the 20th Engineers.
Which seems both odd and understandable. Understandable because you never really hear much about military engineers, unless you’re related to one or happen to live near a place that floods a lot, like the Mississippi River delta; odd because the 20th was so very large, and served throughout France, from the front up in Lorraine down to the Spanish border. And because they were, at the time, considered so important by the AEF’s high command. And because, quite simply, the war could not have been prosecuted without them. “All of the construction in the Service of Supplies were dependent upon lumber,” Davies writes, expanding upon Captain Williams’s introduction. “And the Front Lines required it for dugouts, trench construction entanglements, compounds for prisoners, bridges, and a great variety of other uses. Even coffin lumber was to be provided by the forest troops.” Good thing France still had a lot of trees.
The 20th Engineer Regiment was officially established on September 9, 1917, on the campus of American University, in Washington, D.C.—or, as it was known during the war, Camp American University. Unlike other regiments, which were established all at once and had an enlistment cap, the 20th Engineers grew and grew. “For several reasons, principally those of clothing and shelter, it was found impossible to recruit and train the entire regiment at one time,” Davies explains. Battalions were formed, trained, and shipped overseas in batches.
Arthur Fiala’s batch, the 26th Company, part of the 9th Battalion, shipped out for France, aboard the transport Mount Vernon, on March 27—just thirty-two days after he’d enlisted.
Somewhere in all that rush, the 9th Battalion of the 20th Engineers may have had an experience that, in America at least, was fairly singular to World War I. It was the last week of March, 1918. “We were supposed to go to New York to get on the boat,” Private Fiala recalled eighty-five years later. “We had two boxcars full of barracks bags, with all the equipment that we were supposed to have when we got to our destination in France.” He paused, then pounced: “It caught fire. And we think, I think it was sabotaged,” he explained.
Yes: sabotage. For surreptitious skullduggery on American soil, no other war can touch that one.
The Germans, you see, were no fools; from the moment war broke out in Europe, they understood that there was no chance America might enter the conflict on their side. At best, they hoped, the United States would sit it out; at worst, it would throw its enormous manpower, wealth, and industrial might behind the Allied cause. Even America’s muscular neutrality hurt the Germans: While all combatants’ ships were “quarantined” at American ports at the outbreak of war, Britain, with its vastly larger fleet, could spare them much more easily than Germany could. And though Americans were free to trade with all combatant nations, Britain’s tight blockade of Germany’s small seacoast effectively meant that the United States could really only trade with the Allies. This, in turn, led to a sense, in America, that an Allied victory was inevitable, which disinclined American bankers to lend money to the Germans. Ninety-nine percent of all American money sent to combatants before 1917 went to Allied nations; if it belied American “neutrality,” it was nevertheless good for business, since the United Kingdom spent fully half of its war budget in the United States. Of course, the fact that American banks loaned so much money to Allied nations made their victory all the more desirable to the United States, since, should they lose the war, all that money would be lost; so Americans loaned them yet more money, to enable them to buy more munitions. This vicious cycle was exacerbated by the fact that, at the war’s outset, Britain cut Germany’s undersea cable, which meant that all transcontinental news and information was conveyed to the United States through Allied channels alone.
And so Germany turned to espionage and sabotage. It developed an extremely sophisticated network in America, working out of German government offices at 45 Broadway, near Wall Street in lower Manhattan. The city of New York, even then the most ethnically diverse place in the world, was the perfect place to host an international spy ring. Foreign accents wouldn’t stick out there; it had a large German and Austro-Hungarian population; and the rest of the city wasn’t particularly amenable to the Allied cause, either. Irish New Yorkers, for instance, had no desire to go to war in support of the hated British, while Jewish immigrants, many of whom had fled the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Russian Empire, weren’t exactly enthused to risk their lives for the czar. Even after America entered the war, it continued to be unpopular in New York; the city’s mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, was thrown out of office in November, 1917, for supporting it. Mitchel would go on to join the Army Air Corps, where he would fall out of a plane to his death during a training exercise, having failed to fasten his seat belt.
In America, German agents dabbled, mostly unsuccessfully, in early forms of germ warfare, spreading (or trying to spread) anthrax, poisoning livestock, spoiling crops. Some believe they tore up railroad tracks out West. Most often, though, they targeted munitions factories, and the ships that would carry those factories’ output across the Atlantic. After all, they knew none of that stuff was making it to Germany. Probably the most famous incident happened on July 30, 1916, when saboteurs blew up a railroad yard and munitions depot (and, in the process, nine hundred tons of ammunition bound for the Western Front) on the small island of Black Tom, off the coast of Jersey City. The explosion, which was later estimated as the equivalent of an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale, sent shrapnel and debris into the Statue of Liberty and blew out windows in Manhattan; it was felt in Philadelphia, and heard in Maryland.
The effect of all this activity was to create a sense of paranoia in an America that was completely unprepared for it. The Germans went from lingering beneath suspicion to being suspected of much more than they actually did; sabotage, and saboteurs, were now everywhere, even places they weren’t, which was almost everywhere. So I don’t know if German agents really burned Arthur Fiala’s railroad car or not. In the end, it really doesn’t matter: he thought they did. And his stuff was gone. All of it. “So when we got on the boat,” he told me, “all we had was a pack, our pack sack with a couple blankets and a mess kit. That’s all we had.” That, and the clothes on their bodies.
“There were eleven boats in our convoy. The first four days out on the ocean were beautiful. I enjoyed the ride. Then I got seasick. I was sick for four days. And in the meantime, they wouldn’t let us take our clothes off, so in case we got torpedoed, we had our clothes on. Well, and I was seasick for four days, and I decided to try to get something to eat. And I went down, I got in the galley, and I got half of a grapefruit. And I ate that, and then I was going to get another one, and then the abandon-ship alarm sounded. We had to all go up on deck. They thought we were going to be hit. Well, it so happened there wasn’t any, uh . . .”
“U-boats?”
“U-boats, that’s it. What came to meet us was subchasers. Oh, are they beautiful! . . . They’re narrow and slick, and boy can they travel! They were, see there were eleven boats in our convoy, and they were, they were just running between our boats.”
“Pretty,” Deb said. She’d served four years in the Navy herself.
“Pretty sight,” her grandfather concurred.
The Mount Vernon landed at Brest on April 8, 1918. Their timing wasn’t great. “When we landed, they marched us uphill about three miles,” Private Fiala recalled. “So they said plunk these [packs] in the barracks. But we got up there, there was no barracks. There was nothing but a field with pup tents. And it was pouring, it was all mud. We couldn’t sleep. Well, good thing, we were called out to go back down to the boat. And we worked there, we unloaded boats all night. We were pooped out. Then they took us back up this hill. And then the next day we were loaded on a train. Looked like boxcars. No seats in there, just lay down like a dog. And I don’t know, over two or three days we were on, across France. Slow train!” Boxcars in France back then were labeled “40-8”—that is, forty men per car, or eight horses.
“Then,” he told me, “we landed in a little town called La Cluse. And that was in the foothills of the Alps mountains. Here, I’ve got to tell you one thing about that: See, when we got there, we found out that our carload of food was lost. We were hungry, hungry as hell! So I thought, I’ll take a walk uptown, and maybe I could buy something. I didn’t have much money, but I found some figs.” It was the first break he seemed to catch in a while. He even got a chance to laugh. “There was a Frenchman walking ahead of me,” he said, “and he stopped by a big tree to take a pee. And while he was taking a pee, there was a woman coming down the street, and he was holding it in one hand and tipping his hat with the other hand. That was the first thing that struck me as funny.”
Later that day, the cook managed to find some beans. “Boy, that tasted like ice cream, I’ll tell you. That was good. Piece of bread and some of those beans.”
The men marched another three miles up to a plateau, where they pitched camp by a creek. “And we didn’t have our clothes off for nine days; we pulled off our clothes and jumped in the creek to wash off. And then a lot of the boys started fires around and everything.” It was, after all, still cold up there. That night, they pitched tents and slept; in the morning, they awoke to snow. “Snow, snow, snow, everywhere . . .we had no extra stockings, no nothing. Well, it snowed so damn hard we couldn’t, we didn’t know where to sleep. And there was a farmer up there, he let us sleep in the barn. So we all—can you picture two hundred and fifty guys—”
“No!” Deb said.
“—sleeping in a barn. Like sardines!” He added: “And by God, you know, nobody caught a cold.”
Eventually, someone tracked down that boxcar full of food, but trucks couldn’t make it up to camp in the snow, so 250 men had to trudge down the mountain and carry it back up by hand. Dinner that night was beef stew. “They gradually got a kitchen going and everything. And do you know what we were up there for? We were up there logging. We were making products, wood products, to be shipped to the front.”
“Like what kinds of things?”
“Well, logs, railroad ties, camouflage poles, all kinds of stuff like that . . . There was about half of them guys in that outfit that were real lumberjacks. And we younger guys, we would go up in the woods, up in the woods in the mountains, and they would cut the logs down, and then we younger guys would chop the limbs off. They called us, we were ‘swampers’ . . . Well, anyway, then, here’s the part: One day we were going down the mountain with a team of horses, there was about seven of us on the wagon, and the horses got wild and they jumped, they went off the side of the mountain. And we all went down the mountain. And lucky thing there was enough trees there to stop us. But anyway, I got, we all got hurt. I broke my wrist . . . so I didn’t, I couldn’t do anything for a while. And when my wrist got better, they gave me a job, to work around the kitchen.”
And that’s how Private Arthur Fiala became a cook.
It was a lucky break, as it were. Logging was dangerous work in peacetime; in war, with its accelerated pace and increased demands, it became very dangerous. “In the beginning, when we were there, they used to cut logs up in the mountains,” Art Fiala explained to me. “And they would slide them down the mountain, and they would peel them, you know, so they were slippery. And a personal friend of mine, he got killed from a log, yeah, knocked him down. We had about eight guys I think got killed, died in the outfit . . . And one guy,” he declared, “one guy was murdered. Somebody, we found one of our men under a bridge with a hole in his head. Somebody hit him.”
Some of the men in his outfit were felled not by logs, but by disease, which, despite great medical advances since the last big war, still killed thousands of Americans in uniform during World War I. It even, almost, managed to kill Art Fiala.
It started in the kitchen. “For some reason or other,” he recalled, “the ventilation was bad in that camp, and I got pleurisy.” Pleurisy: an inflammation of the pleura, which line the lungs. Often caused by infection. It can make breathing very painful. It can also kill you any number of unpleasant ways. It’s one of those diseases you don’t hear about anymore; today it can be cured by a visit to a doctor’s office and some over-the-counter drugs. Not then, though.
“I was sick,” he told me, nodding gravely over the din caused by the machine that was pumping oxygen into his nose. “And I called the doctor. He came down, he looked at me, just put his head in the tent. He never touched me. He left a couple of aspirin tablets. That’s all I got.” He was sitting up now, looking disgusted, but lively.
“Well, here’s the point,” he continued. “On the edge of town, there was a woman living. She had about three little kids. She was taking care of a railroad crossing, I don’t know what she had to do. She found out I was sick, she come to the tent, she brought hot tea to me. That woman never failed,” he said emphatically. “Until I got well, she came in three times a day. And one day, one day she came with a plaster, plastered my chest even.” His hands mimicked the act across his chest. “She was good.”
“How nice!” Deb said.
“I’ll never forget, never forget her,” her grandfather asserted. “I give her a lot of credit. And here’s the point: One day, one day I heard we were going to break up that camp. So at ten o’clock at night, when everybody was supposed to be in bed, I went to my kitchen. I took a flour sack; we used to get those tins of bacon, like that, like the big tin. I took, I gave her a can of that bacon, I gave her flour, sugar, coffee, all I could carry on my back. And I brought it to her that night. I woke them up at ten o’clock at night. Oh,” he said, nodding his head earnestly, “you’ve never seen any happier people. They deserved it.” Staples—not to mention luxuries like bacon—were scarce for civilians in France.
Laurence Moffitt had said that the men of the Yankee Division ate very well in France, many of them better than they’d ever eaten at home, and Art Fiala agreed, especially regarding the men in his outfit. Except, he admitted, once.
“One day, a couple of the boys, we decided we were going to take a trip, a trip uptown,” he told me. “And maybe have a little fun for a change, see? And I didn’t get back to camp to make supper. And when I got back up . . . my kitchen was all ripped to hell. They were, guys were hungry and broke in the kitchen and opened up all kinds of cans and all kinds of stuff. And the sergeant that was in charge of the camp, he come up to me and he says, ‘You’re fired!’ On account of what I did, see.
“Well, the next day,” he continued, “a motorcycle with a sidecar came down and picked me up and took me back to camp. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, now I’m in for it. I’m going to get hell!’ But when I got back to camp, I was greeted with open arms! And all the officers come up to me and said: ‘You’re promoted to officer’s cook!’”
He smiled.
Art Fiala spent the rest of the war as a cook—at La Cluse, and Nantua, and in la Forêt de Meyriat. Though he, and the rest of the 20th Engineers, were behind the lines, the war managed to reach them anyway, this way or that. “One thing I never forgot,” he told me, “in one camp, one of them camps where I was cooking, we got some casualties came there. And one guy come up to me and asked me if I could give him a job in the kitchen. And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll give you a job in the kitchen.’ He was the principal from a high school.” Considering his experience with his own high school principal back in Kewaunee, he must have enjoyed that.
All in all—unless you counted that broken wrist, that bout with pleurisy, and those long, soggy, exhausting first weeks in France—it sounded to me like Art Fiala had had a pretty good time Over There. He enjoyed the work (especially making pancakes), was well liked, well treated by his officers, and well fed. After the armistice, he was transferred to a camp in Bordeaux, where he only had to cook every third day. He scaled fences and hopped trains for free with his buddies, was once sent down to the Spanish border in a car to deliver food to some big shot, and enjoyed the company of French women more than he cared to discuss with me in detail, at least with his granddaughter around. “My wife used to throw that up to me all the time,” he said with a hint of mock exasperation. “Say, Debbie, you haven’t got that card there from that girl, have you?”
“No,” she said.
“I got a card from a girl from France,” he explained to me. “She said, ‘We’re all thinking about you, we all like you,’ or something like that. I don’t know. I wish,” he said to Deb, “you would have had it.”
“Well, I found it,” she replied, “and then Grandma got mad.”
“So tell me about meeting the girls over there,” I said to him. “What was that like?”
“They were, they were pretty nice,” he said with a big smile.
“Where did you meet them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do!” Deb declared with a laugh. “I won’t tell, Dad.”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I don’t remember too much about that. But I remember, I remember I used to have one girlfriend I know of. Adeline always used to throw that up to me. ‘You and your French girl!’” He couldn’t recall her name; said she’d been in Nantua.
“So how would you meet them?” I asked him again.
“I don’t know.”
“Would you go into town?”
“Oh, hey, listen,” he said, earnestly. “They were looking for Americans. Oh, hell!”
“Why was that?”
“I don’t know. They wanted us. They liked us. They liked American boys.”
“Were they pretty?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded. “Some of them were pretty nice.”
“What would you do?” I asked. “Would you go dancing?”
“No, just walk around . . . I don’t know,” he said.
After we’d talked for about an hour, Mr. Fiala suddenly said he was feeling very tired. He looked very tired. Honestly, he looked half dead. I felt bad, but Deb assured me that her grandfather loved—loved—to talk. A few years earlier, when the French had come to Kewaunee to present him his Legion of Honor, they held a little ceremony at the high school auditorium, hosted by the mayor. Art was supposed to be escorted up to the podium, receive his medal, say thank you, and sit down. Except nobody told him that; instead, he spoke for a half hour. Without notes. He was 100 years old at the time.
We left him to rest for a couple of hours, and returned to find him awake and awaiting us. We talked about a lot of things: how the Army had gotten him hooked on cigarettes for the rest of his life; about the dancing that went on when the armistice took effect; how he’d sailed home on the SS Luckenbach in May, 1919, telling an officer to go to hell when he’d ordered Private Fiala to go work in the ship’s galley; how he’d spent his first night back in America sleeping on a park bench in New York, just because he could. He made his way back to the Midwest, worked for a bit at a candy factory in Chicago (he was on an assembly line where peanuts were coated with chocolate), ran a taxi service in Kewaunee for a while, spent four years in northern Wisconsin just hunting and fishing, living for free at some rich man’s lodge. He was a foreman at the Kewaunee Brewery for a while during Prohibition; it made liquid wort in those years. He told me that in 1920, he bought an old car and turned it into the world’s first camper, so that he and his brother could take it hunting. Sold it four years later to a circus. He brewed chokecherry wine, showed me the recipe; it was written on a piece of Fiala’s Taxi Service stationery. He dated his wife for eight years, married her at age thirty-seven. Eventually, they owned a one-hundred-acre farm; he told me farming was the best thing he ever did. They had one child, a son, Carl. They called him Carlie. Private Fiala said he’d been in the American Legion for so long that they paid his dues for him now; that the secret to his longevity was that he ate peanuts every day. He told me that one of his grandfathers had gotten him drunk at a very young age, and that the other one, whose name had actually been Klutz, had met his end while dumping garbage off a cliff into Lake Michigan. He’d fallen in.
Entertaining as it all was, I couldn’t stop thinking about something that had happened earlier that morning, shortly before we’d stopped for a break. I’d just asked him again how he had come to serve in an engineering unit. “Well,” he’d said, “I asked them to put me in an outfit that’s going over quick. And they just happened to be making up that unit. And that’s why I got into that.”
“Why did you want to go over quick?”
“I don’t know.” He was quiet for a moment. “Cocky,” he said, finally. “I wanted to win the war.” He grew quiet again; there was no sound in the room at that moment but the groaning of the machine pumping oxygen into him. I turned off the camera.
And then, suddenly, without sitting up, he declared, loudly: “Listen! The people behind the battle were just as important as the people in the battle!” He took a few breaths, and continued: “I don’t know why the hell they put me in with the engineers! I didn’t ask them to do it! I wanted to be in the battle, but they put me in with engineering.” It sounded almost as if he were crying.
Tell me, how could I ever forget something like that? Here was a man, for all he knew on his deathbed, thinking back to a war that had ended eight and a half decades earlier, and he’s shouting, almost wailing, his regret, and maybe guilt, that in that war, the Great War, he hadn’t served in combat. It was excruciating to behold; for a moment, I hated myself just for being there. I didn’t press the matter that afternoon, when his spirits seemed to have recovered. We spent our time on other things.
An hour or so more of that and he was tired again. “Who am I that you should come here and talk to me? I’m nothing but a dummy,” he said to me at one point. Yet he didn’t want me to leave, either, said he wished I had come to see him before he’d gotten sick, that he could have told me much more. I couldn’t imagine what more there could be, but I nodded. Just before I turned off the camera, I told him I’d come back and see him when he was feeling better. Even as I said it, though, I imagined I might get a phone call from Deb before I left Wisconsin, inviting me to her grandfather’s funeral.
I didn’t.
He was still alive a week later. And a month later. And a year later. At one point, influenza swept through the home, killing a number of residents. Not him. He rallied, recovered, thrived. And so, nineteen months after I first met him, I returned to Kewaunee to see him again.
He looked great. He’d put on weight; instead of lying flat on his back, he was sitting in a chair, wearing a bright white fishing T-shirt and a blue cardigan sweater. He had on new eyeglasses that seemed to cover half his face, and an enormous baseball cap that announced: US ARMY VETERAN. The only vestige of his previous illness was the oxygen hose under his nose. His son, Carl, who was with him that day, told me his dad didn’t need it anymore, hadn’t for a long time, but that he liked it. I guess no one at the nursing home cared to argue the point with him.
We covered pretty much the same ground we had the first time I’d been there; he elaborated on this point or that. And then something truly amazing happened.
He was telling me once again about their first night at camp in France, when they’d slept in tents and awoke to a heavy April snowfall—they were in the mountains, after all—and how a French farmer had let all 250 of them sleep in his barn. “I was all right, I slept up above. But some of the guys were down with the horses,” he recalled with a wry grin. And then he added: “Say, that reminds me of something I didn’t tell you last time.”
To convey just how remarkable that statement was, and how stunned I was to hear it, I have to start by reiterating something J. Laurence Moffitt had told me the first time I met him: that his long-term memory was excellent, though his short-term memory was failing. Many of the veterans I interviewed—though not Mr. Moffitt—didn’t recognize me the second time I visited (though of course they all had the good grace to fake it); they had completely forgotten our first meeting. Most of them, in fact, couldn’t remember what they had eaten for breakfast that morning, even though they could recall quite vividly things they’d done and said eighty, ninety, a hundred years earlier. That’s the way the human memory works: last in, first out.
But I hadn’t seen Art Fiala in nineteen months. And the last time I had seen him, he’d been desperately ill, so weak he could only speak for an hour or so before he had to go to sleep. And yet, not only had he remembered our earlier visit—that was clear from the first moment I saw him again—but he actually remembered what he had and hadn’t told me before. I couldn’t do that, and I was almost seven decades younger than he. (He was also able to go off on long tangents—some that lasted twenty minutes or so—and somehow always return to the point of departure. Another skill that eludes me.)
“Say, that reminds me of something I didn’t tell you last time. When we were situated up in that plateau,” he recalled, “I had a little time, and I walked up the mountain farther and I struck a little town, a little town up there. And when I got up on top there, the first thing I noticed, the women had wooden shoes and had a stick across their shoulders carrying two pails of milk going across the road there. And like me, it didn’t take me long to get acquainted with the people there, and they invited me into their home to see what they had there. And did you know that they had their cows in the same room in the house with them? There was a partition there, and you could go in the kitchen and sit there, talk and hear the cows mooing. That’s the way it is. Oh, I’ll tell you, it’s so much different. And there was a guy that used to come up, they had logging, he would come up there with a double wagon of some kind and you know that man would come up there in the morning and go back in the evening with one log. Yes, that’s all they had, a wagon and two parts and got that log on there. But just think of it, you work all day for that.”
So Private Fiala goes off to France, and no sooner does he get there than he stumbles into an Alpine Brigadoon. That was him; and that was his war.
He passed away seven months later, just before Thanksgiving. He died where he’d been born, where he’d lived for just about every one of his 106 years, not far from every place he’d ever spent any considerable stretch of time. Except one, of course. Were it not for the Great War, he almost certainly would have never traveled to a place so distant, and strange, as France was to him.
“The first time I went into a restaurant [there],” he’d told me during that second visit, “we didn’t know what to ask for. We started crowing like a chicken. And finally they know we wanted eggs. That’s the way we got it.”
“You just sat down in a restaurant and started crowing like a chicken?” I asked. “But what if they’d brought you a chicken instead?”
“Well,” he said, “that would have been OK, too.”