8
THE WAR WAS BIG BUSINESS, not just for munitions plants and textile mills and Tin Pan Alley, but for just about everyone who could figure out a way to plug into it somehow. Doughboys, or at least their images, were recruited to sell untold numbers of items—pretty much everything you can imagine, including Cream of Wheat cereal, Wrigley’s chewing gum, Yale padlocks, B. F. Goodrich tires, FTD flowers, Palmolive soap, Swift’s Premium bacon, Hupmobile motorcars, Parker fountain pens, Gem razors, Colt firearms, Kodak film, Alvin silverware, Covert truck transmissions, AT&T telephone service, and just about every brand of near-beer then in existence. Showing a doughboy getting excited about a particular brand of silverware was probably a bit of a reach; about any kind of near-beer was just ridiculous.
In almost every regard, though—beauty, eloquence, audacity—it’s hard to top a full-page, full-color advertisement that the Victor Talking Machine Company of Camden, New Jersey, manufacturer of both phonographs and records, ran in certain magazines in 1918. The central illustration features a sturdy Victrola IX in a dugout, resting atop its own shipping crate, around which sit a bunch of doughboys, cigarettes and smiles, at ease. Some are still wearing their helmets; one is smoking a pipe and cleaning his rifle. The dugout in the drawing looks quite nice, not a shelter clawed out of the dirt so much as a cozy (not to mention clean and dry) basement rumpus room. And a large one, at that, because there is space enough behind the Victrola for about a dozen elaborately costumed characters. The text, titled “Cheering Our Boys in France,” explains:
Caruso is singing in the trenches in France tonight. Alma Gluck is there, too, and John McCormack and Geraldine Farrar and Galli-Curci and all the glorious golden voices. The violin of Heifetz and Zimbalist, the piano of Paderewski are heard. Sousa’s Band is there and the pathos and laughter of that sturdy, fighting Scotsman, Harry Lauder.
Thousands of miles from home in a land torn by battle, our boys yet listen to the spiritual voice of Art. Through the Victrola, the mightiest artists in all the world sing to them the hymn of victory, cheer them with their wit and laughter, comfort and inspire them.
“A singing army is a victorious army,” says General Pershing. The great artists of the world are on the firing line, rallying our hosts about the banner of Freedom.
Now, I seriously question whether anyone actually lugged a forty-some-odd-pound Victrola IX (with no carrying handle) to France, much less into a dugout. And I’m not sure Galli-Curci and Alma Gluck and Heifetz and Paderewski would be the choices of a group of overtired, underfed men squatting in the mud. But I don’t doubt that the ad, which ran in American magazines, sold quite a few Victrolas back home, along with a good many Sousa and Zimbalist and John McCormack and Harry Lauder records. And a lot of “Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy,” too. So you can add Victor phonographs and records to that list of products. And while you’re at it, add the many newspapers and magazines in which all of it was advertised, too.
But with the exception of the manufacturers of war materiel, printing presses probably did the biggest business of all during the war. They churned out sheet music, of course, and posters, and notices, and handbills, and leaflets, and Liberty Bonds, around the clock. But none of that kept them nearly as busy, I imagine, as did publishers—not simply with the aforementioned newspapers and magazines, but with mountains of books, and booklets, and pamphlets. If World War I produced a bottomless well of sheet music, it also generated, in the nineteen months Uncle Sam was at odds with the Kaiser, enough books to fill your local public library. And probably the one down at the high school, too.
Most of them went out of print shortly after the armistice, and were never reissued, a fact that conceals the tremendous amount of influence they exerted during those nineteen months. If you want to know what people were thinking on the Home Front in 1917 and 1918, just stroll through the stacks of the great World War I library and pull a few choice titles off the shelves.
Face to Face with Kaiserism, by James W. Gerard. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918.
The title page identifies the author as “Late Ambassador to the German Imperial Court, Author of ‘My Four Years in Germany.’” It’s quite an understatement. Not only had James Watson Gerard served as the American ambassador to Germany, he had done so from late 1913 to early 1917, meaning that he had arrived there less than a year before the war began, and was recalled when the United States severed diplomatic ties with Germany as a prelude to declaring war on it. As an ally of Tammany Hall, Gerard had been elected to a seat on New York State’s Supreme Court, and then worked hard to elect Woodrow Wilson, a fellow Democrat, to the presidency in 1912; more important, he donated a lot of money to Wilson’s campaign. Diplomatic posts are often the reward of choice for this kind of largesse, and a few months later, Wilson offered to appoint him minister to Spain. Gerard held out until the title was upgraded to ambassador, then accepted, but before he had the chance to leave for Madrid, Wilson decided to send him to Berlin instead. Perhaps Wilson had discovered that Gerard had initially backed Theodore Roosevelt for the party’s nomination; the president must have known that Spain would be a much easier post, with much better food.
As soon as Gerard returned to American soil—and maybe even before that—he set to work on his memoir, My Four Years in Germany, which would be published by Doran later that year. It reads, in part, like a diary: He spends a lot of words recounting the mundane functions of an ambassador in Edwardian Europe—ceremonies, conferences, tours—in part, I imagine, to give the reader a sense of what it was like to be an American in Germany just then, and in part to glorify his own memories. But the rest of the book is an analysis of Germany—its people, its government, its national character—and, let us just say, when Gerard ceased being a diplomat, he ceased being diplomatic. After spending so many years in Germany, he didn’t seem to come away with anything good to say about the place or its people. Actually, from the beginning, he pretty much takes the stance that it and they are fit for nothing but to be destroyed. “We are warring against a nation whose poets and professors, whose pedagogues and whose parsons have united in stirring its people to a white pitch of hatred, first against Russia, then against England and now against America,” he writes in the book’s foreword, and ramps it up from there. (In the very next paragraph, he warns, with remarkable prescience: “Russia may either break up into civil wars or become so ineffective that the millions of German troops engaged on the Russian front may be withdrawn and hurled against the Western lines.”)
Gerard outlines his assessment of the enemy on the same page:
We are engaged in a war against the greatest military power the world has ever seen; against a people whose country was for so many centuries a theatre of devastating wars that fear is bred in the very marrow of their souls, making them ready to submit their lives and fortunes to an autocracy which for centuries has ground their faces, but which has promised them, as a result of the war, not only security but riches untold and the dominion of the world; a people which, as from a high mountain, has looked upon the cities of the world and the glories of them, and been promised these cities and these glories by the devils of autocracy and war.
You won’t find a single “on the other hand” on any of My Four Years’ 330 or so pages. Gerard is just relentless: He hates every last thing about Germany and its people. There’s their educational system:
The teachers in the schools are all government paid and teach the children only the principles desired by the rulers of the German people. There are no Saturday holidays in the German schools and their summer holidays are for only three to five weeks. You never see gangs of small boys in Germany. Their games and their walks are superintended by their teachers who are always inculcating them in reverence and awe for the military heroes of the past and present.
And their culinary preferences:
Many of the doctors who were with me thought that the heavy eating and large consumption of wine and beer had unfavourably affected the German national character, and had made the people more aggressive and irritable and consequently readier for war. The influence of diet on national character should not be underestimated. Meat-eating nations have always ruled vegetarians.
And let’s not even get into their notions of fun. Though he does:
In connection with court dancing it is rather interesting to note that when the tango and turkey trot made their way over the frontiers of Germany in the autumn of 1913, the Emperor issued a special order that no officers of the army or navy should dance any of these dances or should go to the house of any person who, at any time, whether officers were present or not, had allowed any of these new dances to be danced. This effectively extinguished the turkey trot, the bunny hug and the tango, and maintained the waltz and the polka in their old estate.
And, as a friend of such notable American Jews as Henry Morgenthau Sr., ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and Adolph S. Ochs, owner of the New York Times, Gerard is offended by German anti-Semitism. “Jews are not admitted to court. Such Jews as have been ennobled and allowed to put the coveted ‘von’ before their names have first of all been required to submit to baptism in some Christian church,” he tells us. “Jews have not much chance in government service.” The only reason, he speculates, that Germany’s POW hospitals are “in as good condition as could be expected” is “the fact that so many doctors in Germany are Jews. The people who are of the Jewish race are people of gentle instincts. In these hospitals a better diet was given to the prisoners.”
It was certainly true back then that, in America, Jews could and did serve at very high levels in the government and diplomatic corps; Ambassador Morgenthau was evidence of that. Even so, the United States was far from devoid of institutionalized anti-Semitism in those days. So, for that matter, were America’s allies Great Britain and France, while in yet another ally nation, czarist Russia, Jew-hatred was much worse—and more violent—than in Germany. And I’m no expert on the history of American education, but I suspect that the life of a schoolboy wasn’t all that different in the United States at the time. (Except for the Saturday thing, of course; those Teutonic fiends!) And the United States wasn’t exactly a nation of abstemious, teetotaling vegetarians back then, either, though Americans did enjoy a good bunny hug.
The book-buying public of 1917 didn’t have much interest in second-guessing Gerard; America was at war with the Germans, and he had lots of juicy stories to tell about them. There’s the one where, during a party, the German colonial minister “planted himself some distance away from me and addressed me in German saying, ‘You are the American Ambassador and I want to tell you that the conduct of America in furnishing arms and ammunition to the enemies of Germany is stamped deep on the German heart, that we will never forget it and will some day have our revenge.’” Well! That’s not very festive. The Kaiser himself tells Gerard, “America had better look out after this war,” and “I shall stand no nonsense from America after the war.” I guess he thought he was going to win.
The most despicable thing about Germany, though, as far as Gerard is concerned, is that they despise America. “I believe that to-day all the bitterness of the hate formerly concentrated on Great Britain has now been concentrated on the United States,” he declares. We must crush them, he warns Americans, or they will crush us.
He wasn’t the only one who believed that sort of thing back then. In September, 1914, with the war scarcely a month old, Walter Lippmann, a prominent American liberal intellectual and one of the founders of the New Republic, wrote to a friend, “If Germany wins . . . the whole world will have to arm against her—the U.S. included, for Germany quite seriously intends to dominate the World.” By 1917, a great many books were being published about this country America was now at war with; I am perhaps most fond of one written by a journalist named D. Thomas Curtin, who managed to make his way into wartime Germany before the United States entered the conflict, then returned to write a memoir and analysis he called The Land of Deepening Shadow. Though its title is by far my favorite thing about it, the book itself is an entertaining read. Curtin is no fan of Germany—the title should tell you that much—but he at least has some pity for its people, whom he sees, to an extent, as victims:
Unhealthy-looking little men are these German boys of from twelve to fifteen during the war. The overwork, and the lowering of their diet, has given them pasty faces and dark rings round their eyes. All games and amusements have been abandoned, and the only relaxation is corps marching through the streets at night, singing their hate songs and “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles.”
Doesn’t sound very relaxing. Of course, their teacher can spice things up for them in the classroom . . . can’t he?
Years before the war the Government corralled him for its own. It gave him social status, in return for which he would do his part to make the citizen an unquestioning, faithful and obedient servant of the State. As soon as he enters on his duties he becomes a civil servant, since the universities are State institutions. He takes an oath in which it is stipulated that he will not write or preach or do anything questioning the way of the State. His only way to make progress in life, then, is to serve the State, to preach what it wishes preached, to teach history as it wishes history taught.
Guess not. Surely, though, the church is a good foil to this program of indoctrination:
The admixture of Biblical references and German boasting are typical of the lessons taught at German Sunday Schools, which play a great role in the war propaganda. The schoolmaster having done his work for six days of the week, the pastor gives an extra virulent dose on Sabbath. Sedan Day [a celebration of the great German victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71], which before the war was on the culmination of hate lessons, often formed the occasion of Sunday School picnics, at which the children sang new anti-French songs.
Well, that explains those Gott Mit Uns belt buckles German soldiers wore as part of their uniforms: “God is with us.” Those were probably the single most-prized war souvenir for a doughboy. It was hard to get a German to part with one, at least while he was alive.
Curtin would call that kind of tenacity mindless; the typical Prussian, he argues, is little more than a drone at the service of the Kaiser, his generals, and his ministers. “The German, with his cast-in-a-mould mind, does not understand the trait developed among other peoples of seeing things for themselves. He is unacquainted with originality in human beings,” Curtin explains. “The majority of Germans of all classes believe what they are officially instructed to believe, no more, no less. The overmastering self-hypnotism which leads the present-day German to believe that black is white, if it adds to his self-satisfaction, is one of the most startling phenomena in history.” Of course, a case could be made that, in publishing his book, Curtin was hoping to instruct the American people on what to believe about Germany. For instance, Americans should hardly be surprised, he tells us, that Germany had spies in the United States even before the war began: “Spying is just as essential an ingredient of Prussian character as conceit, indifference to the feelings of others, jealousy, envy, self-satisfaction, conceit, industry, inquisitiveness, veneration for officialdom, imitativeness, materialism, and the other national attributes that will occur to those who know Prussia, as distinct from the other German States.”
He tries, at least, to end the book on an optimistic note:
It is part of the Prussian nature to push everything to extremes, a trait which has advantages and disadvantages. It has resulted in brilliant achievements in chemical and physical laboratories, and in gout, dyspepsia and flabbiness in eating establishments. A virtue carried too far becomes a vice. In Germany patriotism becomes jingoistic hatred and contempt for others, organization becomes the utilization of servility, obedience becomes willingness to do wrong at command.
I said he tries. Turns out there’s not much room for sunshine in The Land of Deepening Shadow.
My Four Years in Germany was a tremendous hit. It catapulted a little-known judge/ambassador/Tammany operative into the stratosphere of celebrity, where the air can get a bit thin. He set out on a cross-country speaking tour, during which he fomented paranoia about all things German, including Americans of German descent; the low point was a speech he gave to the Ladies Aid Society of St. Mary’s Hospital in New York, titled “Loyalty and German-Americans,” in which he inveighed:
We must disappoint the Germans who have always believed that the German-Americans here would risk their property, their children’s future, and their own neck, and take up arms for the Kaiser. The Foreign Minister of Germany once said to me “your country does not dare do anything against Germany, because we have in your country 500,000 German reservists who will rise in arms against your government if you dare to make a move against Germany.”
Well, I told him that that might be so, but that we had 500,001 lamp posts in this country, and that that was where the reservists would be hanging the day after they tried to rise. And if there are any German-Americans here who are so ungrateful for all the benefits they have received that they are still for the Kaiser, there is only one thing to do with them. And that is to hog-tie them, give them back the wooden shoes and the rags they landed in, and ship them back to the Fatherland.
You’d think that sort of talk would hurt book sales; it didn’t. Instead, a fledgling movie outfit run by four brothers named Warner turned it into a film (“I shall stand no nonsense from America after the war” was the pull-quote for the poster) and with it produced their first national hit. Shot in New Jersey, the film adaptation of My Four Years in Germany generated some controversy with its depiction of German atrocities in Belgium; it was also, somehow, both wooden and histrionic. Ticket sales were brisk nevertheless.
Knowing that the movie would be coming out in mid-1918—and also, perhaps, that the war might not last much beyond that—Gerard scrambled to follow up with another book. Face to Face with Kaiserism is like My Four Years in Germany without the autobiographical material, giving the author more pages wherein to lay Germany and Germans to waste verbally, which he does with vim:
The German to-day is essentially practical, cold, cynical and calculating. The poetry and the Christmas trees, the sentiment and sentimentality, remain like the architectural monuments of a vanished race, mere reminders of the kindlier Germany that once was, the Germany of our first impressions, the Germany that many once loved. But that Germany has long since disappeared, buried beneath the spiked helmets of Prussianism.
And then there’s this:
It has been at all times the policy of the German autocracy to keep the people of Germany from amusing themselves. I know of no class in Germany which really enjoys life. . . . The houses are plain and, for the most part, without conveniences of bath rooms and heating to which we are accustomed in America. Very few automobiles are owned in Germany. There are practically no small country houses or bungalows, although at a few of the sea places rich Jews have villas.
Hence the Jews’ aforementioned “gentle instincts.” As for the rest of Germany, their lack of toilets, cars, radiators, country houses, and board games presumably drove them to the crazed impulse to conquer the world, and the delusional notion that they might just get away with it.
Needing to set Kaiserism apart from Four Years, Gerard decided to focus on what set America and other “good” nations apart from Germany—namely, democracy. There is no equal anywhere in Germany’s omnipotent autocracy to President Wilson, Gerard notes, because an autocracy cannot produce men who can temper strength with compassion. Only a democracy can do that. Which is why, of course, America was fighting to Make the World Safe for Democracy.
It didn’t help. Gerard’s second book didn’t sell nearly as well as his first. It did, however, popularize the word “Kaiserism,” quite possibly the best neologism that war produced. It almost makes you wish there were still a Kaiser somewhere so you could casually drop it in conversation from time to time.
The Soldiers’ French Phrase Book. Chicago: Felt & Tarrant Manufacturing Company, 1918.
Remember all those songs about France? “And He’d Say Ooh-La-La! Wee-Wee!”? “Oh! Frenchy”? “You’ll Have to Put Him to Sleep with the Marseillaise and Wake Him Up with a Oo-La-La”? (I may have left that last one out before; it’s a bear to type.) Everyone Over Here, it seems, was terribly excited at the prospect of millions of Red-Blooded American Boys going Over There. What fun they’d all have! Strolling through the City of Light, eating delicate pastries, drinking bold wines, wooing les belles femmes—doing pretty much everything but crouching in muddy trenches, taking the occasional shot at the Hun, and trying hard not to die in the process. No one back home much cared to think about that aspect of the Expedition. And can you blame them? Those were their boys out there, their sons and husbands and brothers. Newspapers didn’t want to write about it if they could possibly avoid it; bad for morale. The Army didn’t disagree—it sometimes told newspapers what not to print, and more often just withheld certain information. Not many went looking for it, either.
Instead, almost everyone chose to focus on the less-hazardous elements of the adventure, conjuring scenes of their Johnny, who’d never left Gage County, Nebraska, before, suddenly in the midst of the most exotic and civilized country in the world, a place where they didn’t even speak English. Can you picture Johnny trying to order eggs in one of those fancy cafés on Rue de something-or-other? Would he just crow like a chicken until they figured out what he wanted? Sure, that had worked for Art Fiala, but you couldn’t count on it hitting every time.
And so, on page 32: Apportez-moi deux oeufs à la coque mollets. “Bring two soft boiled eggs.” For hard-boiled, say à la coque durs. Those are your two options, according to Messrs. Felt and Tarrant. Of course, even if you’re not in the mood for eggs, they’ve got you covered. “Waiter, bring the bill of fare.” “Bring me some fresh bread and butter.” “Bring some meat right away.” “A rare beefsteak.” “I should like some veal chops.” “With cauliflower or cabbage.” “Where is the cheese?” “Have you wine or cider?” (Hello—it’s France.) “Give me a glass of water.” “I will now take a cup of coffee.” And, of course: “Bring me some stale bread and milk.” Ah, haute cuisine. Don’t forget, as you sit down, to declare, “I am ravenous,” or “I have a great appetite.” And if anything looks fishy after “Give me the bill,” feel free to break out “There is a mistake in the addition.”
Over the years I have picked up a number of these dictionaries; I can only imagine how many thousands were published and then given to soldiers or, more likely, sold to their loved ones, who may or may not have passed them along to an actual doughboy. Some, like First Lessons in Spoken French for Men in Military Service, are as dry as their titles, offering little more than grammar lessons and basic vocabulary; not a great way to learn a foreign language, at least in my experience. Others, like the Gordon-Detwiler Institute’s Soldiers’ French Course, combine the dry stuff with phrases, many of which are strangely specific: “I shall give him a neck-tie.” “You perceive the clamor of the street.” “They will visit us the day after to-morrow and will come in the new automobile.” “He has a longer right arm than left.” “You punish the wicked and the culprits.” “Have you paid the customhouse duties on these hats?” “They will start on the way to pass the winter in Cuba.” “She will sell her jewels and give the amount of money to the Red Cross.” “Is Philadelphia far or near from here?” “Your collar-bone is dislocated.” “You have saved my life.” Sadly, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine scenarios where those last two, at least, might have proven useful.
I don’t know, though, if all these books were about practical French as much as aspirational. (Certainly, it’s pretty aspirational to imagine you’ll be able to ask someone in Verdun for directions to Philadelphia.) When you’re young and male and dropped into a foreign country, you tend to pick up the language on the fly—trying to get something to eat, maybe, or to drink, or to chat up a pretty girl. Or to find shelter during an artillery barrage, although I imagine hand gestures and facial expressions would probably do in that situation.
Still, it must have been fun to imagine that you might need all of those restaurant expressions from The Soldiers’ French Phrase Book, or many of the others it taught, like, “I shall be in London next week,” “Paris is as beautiful as Chicago,” “What do you say, Miss?,” “I give you full authority to do as you please,” “The captain fell from his horse,” “You have my sabre,” “Long live France!,” “Long live America!,” and “You will always be in my memory.”
And, lest you suspect these books were entirely impractical, there is also: “Tell him the colonel asks for him,” “We had a narrow escape,” “He has been wounded in the chest,” “A piece of shrapnel broke his ankle,” and “A bullet pierced his lips.”
A Yankee in the Trenches, by R. Derby Holmes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1918.
Like Arthur Guy Empey, Bostonian Robert Derby Holmes sailed off for England and enlisted in the Army there well before America entered the war. Empey did it, he tells us, out of anger at the sinking of the Lusitania and a desire to show the Germans what was what; Holmes, on the other hand, explains he joined up because he was afraid of missing out on what was clearly shaping up to be the greatest event of his lifetime. “As the war went on,” he tells us in the opening pages, “it became apparent to me, as I suppose it must have to everybody, that the world was going through one of its epochal upheavals; and I figured that with so much history in the making, any unattached young man would be missing it if he did not take a part in the big game.”
Holmes and Empey cover much of the same ground: Tommies, trenches, cooties, army food. And each, independently, describes a rather striking phenomenon:
Daylight movements in No Man’s Land are somehow disconcerting. Once I was in a trench where a leg—a booted German leg, stuck up stark and stiff out of the mud not twenty yards in front. Some idiotic joker on patrol hung a helmet on the foot, and all the next day that helmet dangled and swung in the breeze. It irritated the periscope watchers, and the next night it was taken down.
Either the German-boot-with-German-leg-inside-it-sticking-up-out-of-the-ground motif was a widespread urban legend on the Western Front, or it really happened, and often. Horrible as that image is, Holmes outdoes it with a tale he shares about a night he was sent on patrol down to a sloping riverbank:
Sliding gently through the grass, I kept catching my feet in something hard that felt like roots; but there were no trees in the neighborhood. I reached down and groped in the grass and brought up a human rib. The place was full of them, and skulls. Stooping, I could see them, grinning up out of the dusk, hundreds of them. I learned afterwards that this was called the Valley of Death. Early in the war several thousand Zouaves [French or French Colonial infantry dressed in old-timey North African–style uniforms comprising open tunic, baggy pantaloons, sash, and fez] had perished there, and no attempt had been made to bury them.
One thing Holmes discusses that Empey doesn’t is the proliferation of other Yankees in the trenches prior to 1917; Empey doesn’t quite imply that he was the only American there, but he never mentions, even in passing, that he wasn’t. Furthermore, to hear Empey tell it, Tommy’s only complaints about the war are the mud and the hours; he’s long since gotten used to cooties, rats, and army food, and only gripes about them anymore with a grudgingly affectionate twinkle in his eye. Holmes, however, bravely reveals that many English weren’t all that happy to be in Flanders just then:
Some of the opinions voiced out there with more frankness than any one would dare to use at home would, I am sure, shock some of the patriots. The fact is that any one who has fought in France wants peace, and the sooner the better. . . .
I should say offhand that there was not one man in a hundred who was fighting consciously for any great recognized principle. And yet, with all their grousing and criticism, and all their overwhelming desire to have it over with, every one of them was loyal and brave and a hard fighter.
If that passage made readers uncomfortable, it didn’t hurt sales; for a time, A Yankee in the Trenches appeared on bestseller lists right alongside Over the Top. Little, Brown ran ads for the book featuring a glowing blurb calling it “the most entertaining war book that I have read, and I have read many.” The blurb’s magnanimous author was Arthur Guy Empey.
The Chicago Daily News War Book for American Soldiers, Sailors and Marines. Chicago: The Chicago Daily News Company, 1918.
It’s pocket-sized—a bit broader in area than a checkbook, and about as thick—but somehow the Chicago Daily News managed to cram 192 pages into such a small package, and a minor encyclopedia’s worth of information into those 192 pages. Here’s just a sampling: fully illustrated guides to American, French, British, and German military insignia, both army and navy; American, British, French, German, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Italian, Austrian, Australian, Polish, Portuguese, Belgian, and Scottish headgear—army and navy, officers and enlisted men, regular service and special details; Allied and German aeroplanes; codes and signals; knots and splices; rifles and bayonets; American, French, and German map symbols; and French road signs. There are intricately detailed two-page maps of the Western Front, Europe, the United States, and, most important, Paris; a list of Paris hotels, organized by price; tutorials on the French “75” gun, the metric system, French currency, methods of finding true north and measuring the distance to the horizon, getting your bearings, and “German Poison Gasses”; a three-year calendar; French–English and English–French dictionaries; selected German phrases, including “Surrender!,” “Hands up!,” “Drop your rifles!,” “No talking,” “Give me your pay-book, your diary, your note-book,” “How many machine-guns are there in this trench, and where are they placed?,” “Don’t shoot,” “I am badly wounded,” “Please carry me,” “Take me to a hospital,” “I am cold,” “I know nothing about that,” and “I am an American”; and, of course, a selection of American war songs. And the “Marseillaise.” And directions for doughboys to the Paris and London offices of the Chicago Daily News, “where all the facilities of reading and writing rooms are at their service.” And if you don’t much care for the Chicago Daily News, “the leading American newspapers are on file” there, too. How much would you expect to pay for such a resource? Put that wallet away. “The national uniform,” the title page declares, “is in itself an order for a free copy of the book.”
It’s an impressive little volume—truly, I think, the kind of thing that makes you want to enlist if you haven’t already. That may explain how it scored forewords from Secretary of War Newton Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. It also received an endorsement—printed in both English and French—from no less than the head of the Supreme War Council, the newly created Allied central command, who signed his name, simply: “Joffre.”
Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre. Better known as, simply, “Papa.” The most beloved and respected general in France.
Now that was a real get.
The First Shot for Liberty, by Osborne de Varila. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1918.
On October 22, 1917, Corporal Osborne de Varila, serving in the French town of Nancy with Battery C of the 6th Field Artillery, was given the honor of firing the first American shot of the war—fittingly, a 75-millimeter shell, millions of which had already sailed through the air of France during the past three years. Battery C expended a lot of energy wresting that honor from the rest of the 6th FA, all of whom wanted it for themselves; when told another battery was “out to steal the bacon,” a gunner cried: “Are we going to let them get away with it?”
“We’d be a sick lot of hounds if we did,” replies Corporal “Reddy” (on account of his red hair) de Varila. So he and the rest of Battery C haul their gun “through the storm and pitchy darkness, for a distance of three-quarters of a mile over an almost impassable country—a swamp pocked with mud-choked shell-holes.” And yet, when the moment is upon him—“I pulled the lanyard of the little spitfire, and America’s first shot of the war went screaming into German territory”—Reddy confesses that he is “filled with a thousand conflicting emotions,” though he doesn’t tell us what any of them were; back then, emoting was not on a man’s menu.
And de Varila, though only eighteen years old, is nevertheless all man. His prose is thoroughly marinated in testosterone. “I will concede that I come of a race of red-headed, freckle-faced fighters, and am proud of it,” he tells us on the very first page. In the 1870s, his father served out West in the US Cavalry, where “the Indians dubbed him, ‘Red the Brave.’” His paternal grandfather fought for the CSA under Stonewall Jackson; his maternal grandfather for the Union under U. S. Grant. “My mother was of Irish descent, and my father French,” he tells us. “Now, you need wonder no longer why I love to fight when the fighting is good. When you get a French and Irish combination, and breed it for several generations on the stimulating soil of the good old United States, you are bound to produce something that absolutely refuses to ‘let George do it,’ when there is a scrap on deck.” He continues:
I was fifteen years old when the Kaiser and his gang of international burglars set out to crack the safes of the nations of the world, and revive the chain-gang methods of the unholy old Roman Empire.
I wanted to get into it then, honest I did, although I had blossomed out in my first suit of long trousers, and was proudly wearing my first dollar watch.
His mother, though, wouldn’t let him go. But then, three years later:
The bottom dropped clean out of my education when Congress bucked up to the occasion and declared the United States at war with the German Empire.
Wow! Every fighting de Varila in the whole list of de Varilas seemed to rise up before me in spirit and announce:
“Now is the time to get in, my boy.”
That settled me; I determined to get into the scrap while the getting was good. I was eighteen then, and big for my age. All I needed was my mother’s signature to precipitate me into the biggest war in history. I packed my suitcase, went home and told my mother I was going to enlist in the United States Army.
She was game and didn’t even blink a tear. . . .
“You are a de Varila,” she said, “and I’d be ashamed of you if you didn’t want to go.”
So off her son goes to France, and pretty soon he and his buddies in the 6th FA are just about running the war:
It is true that the American gunners are the best in the world. They have a truer eye, a steadier hand and work more quickly and accurately than the artillerymen of any other nation. We demonstrated that after we had been on the front line but a few days, and when American batteries get going good over there, Germany is going to realize that the Yanks are on the job. American gunners are going to deliver the knockout to Von Hindenburg’s forces.
After firing that first shot, de Varila traffics in a fair amount of rather gruesome propaganda, like this tale:
In the little shell-torn village where my battery was quartered when we first moved up to the front line, lived a young French mother with her two-year-old son. Just before this son was born she was taken prisoner by some German cavalrymen, and sent to a hospital in Germany. When her child was born it was taken from her and returned two weeks later, with its sight destroyed.
“If your child had been a girl,” explained the brutish German surgeon, “we would not have done this. But we of the Fatherland must make sure that the French will never again take up arms against Germany.”
With her face full of woe and tragedy, the mother told me this story, and I swore vengeance against the Hun as the tale slipped from her trembling lips. Nestled in her lap as she gave me every detail was the living evidence of the crime—the poor little two-year-old who is doomed to go through life sightless because of German Kultur.
If the Germans hope to scare Americans by their campaign of frightfulness they are going to be badly fooled. Every time a Yankee boy comes in contact with one of these cases, it simply whets his desire to kill another Boche.
De Varila sees a good bit of combat, but spends the last weeks of 1917 in the hospital, he writes, with “a very bad case of frozen feet.” Then, in March of 1918, he tells us, “I got my first bad dose of gas. It was mustard gas too, one of the worst kind the devilish Boches send over. I was pumping away at my gun, when suddenly I felt a choking, stinging sensation, and then I passed out like a baby hit with a brick.” He wakes up in a hospital, “blind as a bat. When I discovered there was something the matter with my eyes I was so mad I almost foamed at the mouth.” His war is over.
At least Over There. He does regain his sight after six days, but is nevertheless deemed unfit for the front. Instead, he is sent home, a war hero, to campaign for the Third Liberty Loan drive. He’s ripe for the new challenge, having already told us, a hundred or so pages earlier: “The food improved wonderfully after the raising of the Second Liberty Loan over in America. The folks at home must back us to their last cent if we are to win this war. Money talks harder right now over in France than at any time in the history of the world. There must be a constant stream of cash from the pockets of Americans if we are to keep men and munitions pouring into the fighting zone.” He ends his tale with another appeal:
I am happy that I played my little part in this big war by firing the first shot for liberty. I think it was fitting that I should be sent to Philadelphia, the birthplace of liberty and the shrine of that wonderful old relic, the Liberty Bell. Every man-jack of us who came over is going back to put in more blows against the Hun. We feel that it is our duty to do this, and besides the fascination of war has its grip upon us.
In Philadelphia I met the best girl in the world, and now I have her to fight for as well as my country when I return to France. The Hun peril is a real one, as every American will soon realize if they do not put their full weight into this war. The boys over on the other side are getting splendid treatment, and since the putting over of the last two Liberty Loans there has been plenty of food and clothing. The Yank who fails to get into this war with both feet is losing the opportunity of his life. I will not rest content until I am fighting with my battery again over there in France on the front line. It is my burning desire to send over many more shots for liberty into the Boche trenches.
Sadly, that desire wasn’t the only thing burning within him at that point. According to an old clipping I found from the San Francisco Call, Corporal de Varila “died on June 4, 1920, at a government hospital from the effects of mustard gas.” He was twenty-one years old, and left no will. The short article, dated October 26 of that year, reports that his mother, Clara de Varila of 224 Bartlett Street, filed a petition in San Francisco’s superior court to claim her son’s estate. It was, the anonymous reporter noted, “valued at less than $300.”
Home Reading Course for Citizen-Soldiers. War Information Series, No. 9. Washington, D.C.: The Committee on Public Information, October 1917.
On April 13, 1917, just one week after the United States declared war on Germany, President Wilson issued Executive Order 2594, establishing the Committee on Public Information, “to be composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and a civilian who shall be charged with the executive direction of the committee.” The civilian Wilson chose was George Creel, a reporter for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. Reporters are supposed to be objective, more or less; not George Creel. “An open mind is not part of my inheritance,” he once said. “I took in prejudices with mother’s milk and was weaned on partisanship.”
That mindset made Creel the right man for the job. The Committee on Public Information was, quite simply, a propaganda bureau. And, as those things go, perhaps a relatively benign one; unlike some other American institutions of that time, its stated primary objective was not ginning up anger at and suspicion of America’s enemies, real and imagined, and disseminating what Creel called “hymns of hate.” Rather, it purported more often to accentuate the positive—sometimes going so far as to fabricate it, but still. As Creel wrote in his 1920 memoir, How We Advertised America, “In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”
The Committee pitched stories and press releases across the country and around the world, published its own daily newspaper, called the Official Bulletin, produced feature-length motion pictures with titles like Pershing’s Crusaders and America’s Answer (to the Hun), and got some of the most prominent artists of the day, including N. C. Wyeth, James Montgomery Flagg, and Howard Chandler Christy, to design posters promoting enlistment, bond drives, food conservation, and other such initiatives. Perhaps most impressive, Creel recruited and trained some seventy-five thousand volunteer “Four Minute Men,” who traveled the country giving speeches on patriotic subjects, talks that lasted no more than four minutes, which was believed, at the time, to be the average American’s attention span.
The CPI also published two different series of (usually) free booklets—the Red, White, and Blue Series, for civilians, and the War Information Series, for servicemen. The two series deal with similar issues—mostly the whats, hows, and whys of the war—though the latter’s execution is somewhat less artful, which makes it a much better read.
From No. 11, The German War Code: “The German war code abounds in evidences of unfairness and gross partisanship and appears to have been intended to inculcate hatred in the hearts of the German army against their enemies.” (How dare they!) “German army officers are warned against being misled by the excessive humanitarianism of the present age, which the German manual says has too often degenerated into ‘sentimentality and flabby emotion.’”
From No. 15, Why America Fights Germany: “We are in the war because we had to go in unless we were entirely blind to our own honor and safety, and to the future happiness of the whole world.” Clearly, the CPI—in this case, author John S. P. Tatlock, Professor at Stanford University—was not given to understatement. Nor to underselling; that particular sentence is boldfaced. So are many others, like “The net of German intrigue has encompassed the world,” “All-Democracy is now waging a supreme struggle against all-Despotism,” “Mercy and justice through all the world are at stake,” and the curiously familiar “We must fight Germany in Europe that we may not have to fight her in America.”
From No. 13, German Militarism and Its German Critics: “Some of the characteristics of Militarism are in evidence in all European countries . . . but in no other is the adulation of the soldiery so pronounced as in Germany . . . in no other is Militarism either so exaggerated or so objectionable.” I’m not sure if that means America chose the right country to go to war with, or the opposite.
From No. 14, The War for Peace: “The Allies cannot concede peace until they conquer it. When they do so, it will be permanent. Otherwise they fail.” This cryptic statement was authored by the president of the New York–based League to Enforce Peace, one William Howard Taft. Before he landed that job, Mr. Taft had been, interestingly, secretary of war. Oh, and then president of the United States, at least until he lost his bid for reelection to Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
The first book in the series, The War Message and Facts Behind It, presents the text of President Wilson’s April 2, 1917, address to Congress, complete with annotations. When Wilson declares, “We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people and shall desire nothing so much as the early reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between us,” the booklet’s editor—one Guy Stanton Ford, director of the CPI’s Division on Civic and Educational Cooperation—notes: “There are now two Germanies—the old, noble, idealistic Germany; the new, hard, materialistic nation, created by Prussia. Americans would fain love and recall the former.” And when the president insists, “The right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,” Ford contrasts Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address (“With malice toward none, with charity for all”) with choice tidbits from a diatribe from Friedrich von Bernhardi—“German lieutenant general, and acceptable mouthpiece, not of the whole German nation, but of the Prussian military caste which holds the German nation in its grip”—including “Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war,” and “The idea is presumptuous that ‘the weak nation is to have the same right to live, as a powerful and vigorous nation.’”
So No. 9, Home Reading Course for Citizen-Soldiers, is a bit of a departure—kind of an Over There for Dummies:
In order to make good in the National Army you must, first of all, fit yourself to carry with credit the simple title of “American Citizen-Soldier”—one of the proudest titles in the world. This means that you must develop in yourself the qualities of a soldier. The more quickly and thoroughly you cultivate them the greater will be your satisfaction and success.
The three basic qualities, it tells us, are Loyalty, Obedience, and Physical Fitness, and it ruminates at length on all three. Then there are the three soldierly qualities of Intelligence, Cleanliness, and Cheerfulness; and, finally, the three qualities of battle: Spirit, Tenacity, and Self-Reliance. It’s a very high-minded list, and indeed, the whole booklet is quite so. In the very first of its thirty lessons, it teaches the reader that a fundamental tradition of the American Army “is that of fighting fairly and treating even the enemy with as much humanity as his own conduct will permit. As for slaughtering or enslaving the civilian population of captured territory, attacking prisoners, or assaulting women American soldiers would as little commit such crimes in time of war as in time of peace.”
There are lessons on army insignia, staff branches, and fighting arms of the service, what to expect of camp life, “The Army System of Training,” drilling, guard duty, army courtesy, European warfare, cleanliness, health, equipment and arms, organization, discipline, teamwork. There’s an entire lesson, two pages in length, on marching and the care of feet. (“Keep your feet scrupulously clean. A foot bath can be taken, when other facilities are not at hand, by scraping a small depression in the ground, throwing a poncho over it and pouring water into this from your canteen. Even a pint of water will do for a foot bath. You can bathe all over by making or finding a depression of suitable size and using your poncho as for a foot bath.” I wonder if anyone ever actually took a full-body poncho-bath, and, if so, how that worked out.) There’s the obligatory lesson on “Why We Fight,” and one on “Some National Traditions.” A section on “The Bearing of a Soldier” breaks it down to ten categories, from heels to head. Lesson No. 23 presents a checklist for “Getting Ahead in the Army.” (Number 9: “Ability to sketch and read maps.”) A considerate addition, I think.
And Lesson 11, “Playing the Game,” includes a section titled “Making Use of Spare Time,” which begins:
The use that a man makes of his time off duty is a good test of his character and of his capacity for growth. The good soldier is self-restrained. Don’t spend your time repeating indecent stories. They add nothing whatever to your standing, either with the men to whom you tell them or with your officers. Avoid boisterousness, vulgarity, and profanity.
That doesn’t mean at all that you should keep yourself in the background or that you should fail to be a good “mixer.” Let your personality stand out. Broaden your influence by every proper method. But use your personality and your influence to help the men in your own squad and company carry on their work and prepare as possible for the big task ahead of you.
That image—of eighteen- or twenty-year-old boys arriving at boot camp, being handed a copy of Home Reading Course for Citizen-Soldiers, perusing to this section (page 25, if you’re looking for it), and really drinking it in—is enough to make you wish that somewhere, at some point, everyone would be issued a handbook that would spell these things out for us. I can’t think of a better use for a printing press than that.