The three lieutenants stood in the numbing cold outside Berry’s office waiting their turns. The temperature was near zero. When Lieutenant Paterson was called first, Marks and Truman remained standing for another hour and a half. When Harry’s turn came, the general and three colonels took him “over the jumps” for more than an hour, Berry becoming so loud and rough that Harry had trouble remembering anything. If he had the right answer, it only made Berry more angry. If he was unable to answer at all, Berry would stalk up and down the room pulling on his mustache and shouting, “Ah, you don’t know, do you?” or, “It would be a disaster to the country to let you command men!”
Harry came out flushed and angry and fearing the worst. Then, because it was nearly the lunch hour, Marks was kept only thirty minutes. As it turned out, all three lieutenants were passed, though Harry was not to learn of his promotion for another several months. He was told only that he and Paterson would be going overseas in advance of the others, as part of a select group of ten officers and one hundred men to be given further training in France, which he knew to be a high commendation.
“I suppose you will have to spend the rest of your life taking the conceit out of me,” he wrote Bess. “Mary is fully convinced that I am overloaded with it, although I never thought so.”
On the eve of departure, not knowing what else to do about his automobile, he sold it for $200.
The night of March 19, 1918, he was “moving out at last,” by troop train, the ride so rough he could hardly complete his letter to Bess. “I’d give anything in the world to see you and Mamma and Mary before I go across,” he wrote. “…You can write me Detachment 35th Division, 129th F.A., Camp Merritt, New Jersey, and I’ll probably get it.” When the train stopped briefly in the Kansas City yards, he was out of the car in an instant, running down the tracks in the dark looking for a telephone. A switchman in a shed told him to help himself. “The phone’s yours,” Harry would long remember the man saying. “But if she doesn’t break the engagement at four o’clock in the morning, she really loves you.”
On leave in New York before sailing, he and four other officers put up at the McAlpin Hotel on Broadway, and “did the town” as best they could in the little time available. They saw a vaudeville show at the Winter Garden, rode the subway, walked up Broadway after dark, up Fifth Avenue the next morning. By high-speed elevator they went to the top of the fifty-eight-story Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest skyscraper. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, ate in a Chinese restaurant. Harry, who had expected to be overwhelmed with admiration for New York, found it all very much overrated. The show at the Winter Garden was a flat disappointment. The celebrated lights on Broadway looked no different to him than those on 12th Street in Kansas City. The McAlpin was no better than Kansas City’s Muehlebach (which he spelled Muleback). And besides there were too many Jews. He called it a “Kike town” in a letter to Bess, and to the Nolands explained that in addition to the millions of “Israelitist extraction,” there were millions of “wops” as well. As for pretty girls, Kansas City had twice as many.
Only the Woolworth Building lived up to expectations. The view from the top was well worth the 50-cent admission.
Shopping on Madison Avenue, he was touched by the patriotic feelings of an optometrist who charged him just $17.50 for two pairs of aluminum-framed glasses, much less than he would have had to pay at home. To be on the safe side Harry was going to France with six pairs of glasses, all pince-nez.
“I imagine his vision with glasses is 20–20, but without the glasses he couldn’t recognize his brother twenty feet away,” another officer named Harry Vaughan would later explain. They had become friends at Doniphan. “So, he always has had several pair on hand in case…he would be so helpless without them, and he was advised that he could not wear the ordinary glasses with the side pieces over the ears in action, because it would interfere with wearing your gas mask, you see. It would leave a hole on either side that you would be able to get gas through. So he brought…I believe he said, four or five of his lens prescriptions in pince-nez.”
The George Washington, a confiscated German luxury liner with seven thousand troops aboard, sailed the night of March 29, 1918, Good Friday, nearly a year to the day since the President’s declaration of war. “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses,” Harry remembered. He and Lieutenant Paterson stood at the rail for some time talking about German submarines and “a lot of things ahead.” Then they went below and, as Harry recalled, passed the rest of the night playing poker.
The weather was clear the whole way across, perfect submarine weather. The ship was part of a convoy, sailing a zigzag course once it reached the submarine zone. There were endless lifeboat drills and calisthenics on deck. Life preservers were worn at all times. At night, the ship was dark, smoking on deck forbidden. No one had much space. Officers were sleeping six to a cabin. As the time passed, Harry, who did not know how to swim and had never seen an ocean, wondered why anyone would ever want to be a sailor. He ached for home. The water was either blue or lead-colored, he noted, depending on whether the sun was out or in. The only variety in the panorama came at sunrise or sunset, and the sunsets weren’t half as good as back home.
II
The George Washington steamed into the crowded harbor of Brest the morning of April 13. The day was warm and sunny, and First Lieutenant Truman thought the town looked “quite wonderful.” It wasn’t Paris, but if Paris was as much livelier as it was bigger, then Paris had to be “some town.” Bands were playing, welcoming crowds lined the shore, thousands of people cheering and waving flags.
The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France by this time numbered nearly a million men, a figure that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. Only the summer before, on July 4, when the first American infantry unit marched through Paris, there had been just fourteen thousand American troops in all of France. Now, the seven thousand “doughboys” who came down the gangways from the George Washington were but a fraction of the monthly total. That April, 120,000 arrived. Soon there would be 250,000 landing every month until eventually there were 2 million American troops in France.
Four hundred miles away from the docks at Brest, to the northeast at the Belgian border, one of the most savage battles in history was raging. Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff had launched a massive frontal assault on the Allied lines along the River Lys, near Armentiéres. With Russia out of the war since December, after the fall of the czarist regime, the Germans were free to concentrate on one front, as they had wanted from the beginning, and this was intended to be their deciding offensive. The losses were appalling. Only the day before, April 12, the British commander, General Sir Douglas Haig, issued his famous order: “With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.” The Battle of the Lys lasted three weeks until the Ludendorff offensive was stopped. Winston Churchill would consider it the critical struggle on the Western Front and, thus, of the war. Yet to Lieutenant Truman and the thousands arriving with him, none of this was apparent. What they saw their first days ashore and for weeks, even months to come, was the France that was not the war. As Harry wrote to the Noland sisters, he felt like Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad, as much a tourist as a soldier.
Being an officer in the AEF, he found, meant accommodations such as he had never known or expected. At the hotel in Brest he had a room to himself larger than any in the Gates mansion. There were double lace curtains at the window and a white marble mantelpiece with a seventeenth century Dutch clock under a glass case, a beautiful affair even if it didn’t run. Chairs were upholstered in red plush, floors polished smooth as glass. He admired a crystal water decanter and a mahogany wardrobe with a full-length mirror in which he could also admire himself in his new overseas cap and Sam Browne belt.
For nearly two weeks he did little more than enjoy himself. If he had been disappointed by New York
and the Atlantic Ocean, France more than made up for it. He enjoyed the food (the bread especially) and the wine. He admired gardens so well cultivated and cared for that there was hardly a weed to be seen. The whole surrounding countryside with its irregular patchwork of fields and hedgerows made him wish he were a painter, he told Bess. “The people generally treat us fine and seem very glad to accommodate us in any way they can.” Later he wrote, “I’m for the French more and more. They are the bravest of the brave.” They also knew how to build roads as smooth and solid as a billiard table “and every twenty meters there are trees on each side.” Nor could he get over the way audiences at the movies clapped and cheered during the love scenes. “They are the most sentimental people I ever saw,” he noted approvingly. If ever he had to give up being a Missourian, he decided, he would be a citizen of France, though so far he hardly dared try the language other than to say, “Je ne comprends pas.”
Good food, wine, and cognac were all plentiful and an American soldier’s pay went far. Harry calculated that his came to 1,100 francs a month, enough nearly “to retire on over here.” A fine meal cost about 10 francs. Wine and cognac were a comparable bargain. Most of the 35th Division, having been too long in Oklahoma, seemed determined to drink France dry. But they were certain to fail, he also noted, the supply being “inexhaustible.”
As he did not report to Bess, women, too, were plentiful. Temptation beckoned in Brest, as it would later in every interior city he went to in France. One American lieutenant wrote in his diary, “Wandering through dark streets. Ever-present women. So mysterious and seductive in the darkness…. A fellow’s got to hang on to himself here. Not many do.” But apparently Harry did.
“Personally, I think Harry is one of the cleanest fellows…the cleanest fellows morally that I ever saw, or know,” First Lieutenant Edgar Hinde of Independence would remember. “I never saw him do anything out of the way that would be questionable in the way of a moral situation. He was clean all the way through. I always admired him for that quality and you know when a man’s in the Army, why his morals get a pretty good test.”
“Wish I could step in and see you this evening,” Harry wrote to Bess the night of April 17, after five days in France. “Have only seen one good-looking French woman and she was married to some French general or admiral or something, anyway he had seven or eight yards of gold braid on him.”
At the end of April he was assigned to an elite artillery school 500 miles to the east, near the hilltop town of Chaumont, in Lorraine where Pershing had his headquarters. The first-class coach Harry traveled in was upholstered like a Pierce Arrow limousine, he reported happily to Ethel Noland. No wealthy civilian on tour ever had things better.
His new quarters were even more splendid than anything he had yet seen, a seventeenth-century gray stone chateau set in a lovely, walled park in the middle of a picture-book village called Montigny-sur-Aube, this in turn set in a gently sloping valley. There was a magnificent garden, a moat, stone walls six feet thick, tile floors, marble stairs, hand-carved woodwork, “everything you like to read about,” he told Ethel. “You’d never think that a war was raging in this same land, it is so peaceable and quiet and pretty.” Spring had arrived in full glory, with soft, fragrant air and trees along the brows of near fields all a delicate green. His one problem was the bells that kept him awake the first few nights. The church clock would strike eleven, “and then the clock on the Hotel de Ville would strike eleven five minutes later and then five minutes later some clock that I haven’t been able to locate yet would strike eleven. By that time the church clock had started on eleven fifteen and it was one continual round of pleasure all night long.”
Forbidden to give his location, he was able to say only that he was “somewhere in France.”
The first week at the artillery school was the most difficult ordeal he had ever experienced. After that, the work got harder. He felt he was in over his head, having never been to college, and worried constantly that he would fail. The mathematics was all at the college level. He studied surveying and astronomy. There was no time for anything but work, from seven in the morning until ten at night. There was hardly time to get from one class to the next. He had no idea what was happening in the war and of the outside world, he said, he was as ignorant as if he were in Arkansas.
Training in the classroom and on the firing range centered on the French 75-millimeter gun, a small, rapid-fire, rifled cannon known for its mobility and phenomenal accuracy. It had been developed twenty years before, its technology guarded by the French as a military secret. The slim, 6-foot barrel was of nickel steel and other alloys that were kept classified. The breechblock, gun carriage, and hydropneumatic recoil system were all of special design. Because the gun recoiled on its carriage, it stayed in place with each shot, and thus no time was lost correcting its aim between shots, which was the secret of its rapid fire. It could get off twenty to thirty shots a minute and had an effective range of five miles. Being light in weight compared to most cannon, a little over a ton and a half, and maneuverable with its high-spoked wooden wheels, it was considered ideal for trench warfare. The fire from a battery of four was murderous.
It was called the marvel weapon. The French would later say it won the war for them. No American or British-made fieldpiece could compare and American units relied on it almost exclusively. (Virtually no American fieldpieces-or American airplanes or tanks-were used in the war, for all the troops supplied by the United States.) To the Germans, it was the “Devil Gun.”
I’ve studied more and worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever did before in my life [Harry wrote to Bess at the end of May]…right out of one class into another and then examinations and thunder if you don’t pass.
We had a maneuver yesterday and General Pershing himself was there. I was in command of a battalion of artillery and he did not even come around to see if I could fire that many guns…. My part was mostly play-like except the figures. I was supposed to have three batteries, which were represented by three second lieutenants. Had a second lieutenant for adjutant and a major for regimental commander. We had a good time and walked about six miles besides. There were Major Generals, Brigadiers, Colonels, Majors and more limousines than a January funeral. It was a very great pleasure to see a Major General click his heels together and nearly break his arm coming to a salute when The General came along. You don’t often see Major Generals do that.
On Sundays he attended services at the Catholic church, where the air was chill and he was unable to understand a word. France was a grand place for Frenchmen, he had decided, and he didn’t blame them for fighting for it; “and I’m for helping them, but give me America, Missouri and Jackson County for mine with the finest girl in the world at the county seat,” he wrote on May 5, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday.
One of his examinations given on a Saturday in May would have driven the president of Yale University to distraction, he reported. The Sunday after, with little to do, he discovered volumes of music-Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann-and a “dandy” piano in a YMCA that had once been the home of a wealthy local family. He played at length while the other officers listened. “It sure was a rest after the week’s work.”
After five weeks, his ordeal over and feeling extremely lucky to have “slipped through,” he was ordered to rejoin his old regiment, which by now had arrived in France and was stationed at Angers. Heading west again by train, he seldom took his eyes off the passing scenery. Like so many American soldiers, he was astonished not only at how beautiful the country was but how very old. A young officer traveling with him, Arthur Wilson, remembered being amazed at Harry’s knowledge of French history. “He had maps and he knew where we were going. It didn’t mean anything to me….” During a wait at Orleans, Harry insisted they get out and see the city’s famous cathedral and the equestrian bronze of Joan of Arc in the main square.
At Angers, to his total surprise, he learned he had been made a captain months earlier. N
o one had bothered to tell him. He only found out when he saw it reported in The New York Times.
As adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, he was assigned to teach the other officers what he had learned. “I just barely slipped through at the school, and now they’ve got me teaching trig and logarithms and surveying and engineering,” he told Bess. Didn’t she think it amusing that an “old rube” from Missouri was handing out such knowledge to the Harvard and Yale boys? In another letter, he said he had never known how valuable a university education was until now.
She wrote to him faithfully, as did Mamma, Mary Jane, and Ethel Noland. Their letters took a month or more to reach him and arrived usually in batches of six or seven. “Please keep writing,” he told them. Knowing how they worried, he said nothing upsetting, never a word of discouragement or serious complaint. “No I haven’t seen any girls that I’d care to look at twice….” He was eating well, walking as much as fifteen miles a day. He never felt better, nor looked so good with his new captain’s bars. “I look like Siam’s King on a drunk when I get that little cockeyed cap stuck over one ear, a riding crop in my left hand, a whipcord suit and a strut that knocks ’em dead.” (“That was one of the things about this war,” Willa Cather would write, “it took a little fellow from a little town, gave him an air and a swagger….”) He had Arthur Wilson take his picture sitting on a horse. Like every good American soldier, Captain Harry Truman conceded, he had an “insane desire” to let the home folks know how he looked.
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