This was on September 27. Later that same night, as the battery moved on, Harry was on horseback when he was hit in the face by a low-hanging branch and suddenly found himself without his glasses and unable to see. The horse kept moving with the column. Harry turned frantically in the saddle to look behind, only to find the glasses sitting nicely on the horse’s back.
In his diary he had time for the barest record:
September 28: Moved to position on Cheppy-Varennes road Fire on Boche O.P. [Observation Post]…on Boche Bty moving out.
September 29: Fired barrages
September 30: Same as yesterday
One soldier wrote, “The artillery fire has been something awful for the past two days. Shells are screaming over our heads constantly. The Germans shell us quite often, and we are continually hugging the earth, making ourselves as thin as possible. I feel like a man of fifty….”
On the afternoon of the 29th, reports came that the infantry was losing ground. American stragglers began streaming past. The Germans were about to counterattack. Harry’s immediate superior was Major John Miles and as every man knew there were just two possible orders to give for a position about to be overrun. One was “direct fire”—point-blank fire into the advancing enemy—and then stand by the guns to die or be captured. The other was to abandon the guns and fall back. “Well, men,” Miles said. “Get ready and we’ll give them direct fire.”
The German attack never came. Still, as Lieutenant Lee would write, “The coolness, the steady courage, the readiness to stand fast to the last, evidenced by Major Miles and his men on that anxious afternoon, were none the less inspiring that they were not pressed to the final sacrifice.”
Casualties among the infantry were heavy—as high as 50 percent in the 35th Division. Litter cases at the dressing station at Cheppy numbered in the hundreds. Fourteen ambulances loaded with wounded had been sent to the rear from that one station in a single day. On September 30 thousands of men were being fed there, most of whom had been wounded or gassed. Father Tiernan was busy burying the dead under fire all afternoon. One ambulance company alone suffered more than fifty casualties.
The Meuse-Argonne offensive was to have been another swift, smashing American victory, like Saint-Mihiel, but it was not. Sedan was ultimately taken, but at appalling cost. The Meuse-Argonne was the battle that produced the so-called “Lost Battalion,” an infantry unit that was trapped for five days and suffered casualties of nearly 70 percent, and also the most appealing American hero of the war, infantryman Alvin York from the hills of Tennessee, who single-handedly captured 132 Germans in one day. In all, in 47 days of fury, there were 117,000 American casualties. In the military cemetery on the Romagne Heights, at the center of the battlefield, 14,246 dead would be buried, making it the largest American military graveyard in Europe.
“It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it’s bad enough,” Harry wrote Bess in the first week of October. The heroes, he added, are all in the infantry.
The regiment was pulled back for rest. His own men looked like scarecrows and their respect for him had never been greater. “He was the Captain, he was the head man,” Vere Leigh said later, “and he was treated as such, we respected him, and he earned it. That’s why we respected him, because he earned it…. He’s not a dramatic type or anything like it. He’s no Patton, you know. He might have been a better soldier than Patton, but he was not a showoff.”
Harry had lost 20 pounds. He could hardly believe what he had been through. Terrible as it had been, it was also “the most terrific experience of my life.” He couldn’t help feeling proud. His men were alive and in one piece.
In mid-October, with the weather still cheerless and colder than before, the regiment took up new positions on the bleak heights east of Verdun, above the Meuse River Valley, in preparation for what was to be the final drive. Days were spent laying telephone wires, digging new dugouts, and camouflaging. His battery was soon so perfectly concealed that Harry himself had trouble finding it after dark. His dugout, down the road, was a “palace,” with stove, table and chair, a telephone beside his cot—“all the comforts of home except that I’ll have such a habit of sleeping underground that I’ll have to go to the cellar to sleep when I get home.”
Lieutenant Harry Vaughan, who was in a different regiment and who had been out of touch with Harry since Camp Doniphan, was seeing more of him now and puzzled how, after weeks in the trenches, any man could look so consistently clean and dapper.
Before Battery D, in the distance, rising on the grim horizon like the hump of an evil subterranean monster, was the famous bastion of Douaumont, once the showpiece of French defenses, the greatest fortress in the world. Harry thought it and the surrounding landscape comprised the most dreary prospect he had ever looked upon. Shattered dead trees stood like ghosts. The ground everywhere was a mass of shell craters. In Verdun itself not a building remained undamaged. The ancient city had caught the full force of the war. The civilian population had long since fled. Harry tried to imagine the same panorama before the war, with everything as cultivated and beautiful as the rest of France he had seen.
To stem the German tide in 1916, France had sent an unending column of men and artillery to Verdun. The fury and horror had been like nothing in history. The French, Harry was told, had put their 75s “hub-to-hub” for direct fire at the advancing enemy. The battle lasted ten months, the longest ever. Casualties on both sides came to 900,000 men. The ground everywhere was still a rubbish heap of weapons, shells, shreds of clothing, and no one knew how many dead. In a letter to the Noland sisters, he described a field a short distance to the west of his position “where every time a shell lights it blows up a piece of someone.” In none of his letters did he complain. In none did he even begin to describe the truth of the horrors he had seen. Like nearly every man writing home, he tried to put a good face on things. Only now did he seem to waver somewhat. He couldn’t shake the presence of the dead from his mind. “When the moon rises…,” he told Bess, “you can imagine that the ghosts of the half-million Frenchmen who were slaughtered here are holding a sorrowful parade over the ruins.” He did not, however, mention the smell or the rats everywhere.
To Ethel Noland he sent a poppy he found among the rocks near his new observation post, close to the German lines, at the end of a four-mile, zigzag hike through the trenches. He had brought back two flowers, the other for Bess.
The men were kept busy working on their positions, gas-proofing dugouts, moving ammunition, standing guard. The shelling continued. Guns boomed somewhere, near or far, almost continuously.
The weather turned colder. There was more rain. A day with sunshine was an event worth noting in his diary. “Fine day,” Harry wrote October 28. “Very fine day,” reads the entry for October 29. Before dawn on November 1 came another “show” like the one at the Argonne, as every battery opened up on the German lines for five straight hours.
For weeks there had been rumors of peace. A German pilot shot down just behind Battery D said the war would be over in ten days. On November 7 a United Press correspondent, Roy Howard, sent a cable from Paris saying hostilities had ceased at two o’clock that afternoon. The news was false.
On November 9 the infantry went forward once more, after an hour-long barrage. Harry’s friend Captain Ted Marks, and Battery C, were ordered forward in support of the infantry. The next day the drive and its artillery support continued. The morning of November 11, Battery D was firing again when, at about 8:30, Captain Truman was notified by headquarters that in exactly two and a half hours, at 11:00 A.M.—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—the Germans would sign an armistice agreement.
Sergeant Meisburger was called to Captain Truman’s dugout, where he found the captain stretched on the ground eating a blueberry pie, a wide grin on his face. “He handed me a piece of flimsy and said between bites, ‘Sergeant, you will take this back and read it to the members of the battery.’ ” What puzzled Meisbur
ger was where Captain Truman had obtained the blueberry pie.
“My battery fired the assigned barrages at the times specified,” Harry wrote. “The last one was toward a little village called Hermeville…. My last shot was fired at 10:45.”
When the firing ceased all along the front line [he continued] it…was so quiet it made me feel as if I’d been suddenly deprived of my ability to hear.
The men at the guns, the Captain, the Lieutenants, the sergeants and corporals looked at each other for some time and then a great cheer arose all along the line. We could hear the men in the infantry a thousand meters in front raising holy hell. The French battery behind our position were dancing, shouting and waving bottles of wine…. Celebration at the front went on the rest of the day and far into the night. Very pistols, rockets and whatever else was handy were fired.
I went to bed about ten P.M. but the members of the French Battery insisted on marching around my cot and shaking hands. They’d shout “Vive le Capitaine Américain, vive le Président Wilson,” take another swig from their wine bottles and do it over. It was 2 A.M. before I could sleep at all.
A lieutenant named Broaddus of Battery F had been up in a balloon directing artillery when the cease-fire came. Below him, he remembered, “people went so wild celebrating that they forgot to pull me down…and I sat there for two hours.”
“You’ve no idea how happy we all were to have the war end,” wrote Harry to Ethel Noland. “You know that the continual and promiscuous dropping of shells around you will eventually get on your nerves considerably and mine were pretty tightly strung by 11 o’clock November 11. It was the most agreeable sigh of relief I ever have [had] when word came to cease firing.”
The Great War was over and to the victors it seemed a triumph for civilization. It was left now to the statesmen to make a lasting peace. In less than a month President Wilson was on his way to France on the George Washington, the ship that had brought Harry and so many thousands.
For the 129th Field Artillery the war had been the Meuse-Argonne offensive and it had cost the regiment 129 battlefield casualties. Battery D suffered only three men wounded, one of whom later died, but they had been on a special detail with an ammunition train at the time, not under Captain Truman’s command. “We were just—well, part of it was luck and part of it was good leadership,” said Private Vere Leigh. “Some of the other batteries didn’t have that kind of leadership.”
IV
Two weeks and two days after the Armistice, Captain Harry Truman was on leave in Paris dining at Maxim’s. At a nearby table he saw the prettiest woman he had laid eyes on since coming to France and to his delight found she was an American with the Red Cross. After dinner he and several other officers went to the Folies-Bergère, where the “little ladies” clustered about them during the intermission. (Years later he would call the show “disgusting,” but at the time he told Ethel Noland it was about “what you’d expect at the Gaiety only more so.”) He saw Notre Dame and Napoleon’s Tomb. At the Arc de Triomphe, his trench coat belted tight against the November air, he posed for a snapshot beside a captured German cannon. He rode a taxi the length of the Champs-Elysees, up the Rue Royale, down the Madeleine, back up the Rue de Rivoli, over the Seine by the ornate Alexander III Bridge. He visited the Luxembourg Palace, the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre, strolled the Boulevard de l’Opéra, “and a lot of side streets besides.” All in twenty-four hours.
From Paris they took the train to Nice. Paris, said Harry, was “as wild as any place I saw.” Nice was “ideal,” with the Mediterranean on one side, the foothills of the Alps on the other. His hotel, “a dandy place,” overlooked the sea. “The view from my window is simply magnificent…. There is no blue like the Mediterranean blue,” he told Bess, “and when it is backed by hills and a promontory with a lighthouse on it and a few little sailing ships it makes you think of Von Weber’s ‘Polacca Brillante,’ which I am told was composed here.” She was all that was needed to make the place heaven.
He saw his first palm trees, walked in the sunshine, ate like a king, and in the first days of December drove to Monte Carlo, where he was startled to see a real-life princess drinking beer. He and Major Gates hired a car and drove to the Italian border, returning to Nice by way of the Grande Corniche, “the most beautiful drive I ever had.”
In Paris again, his leave about over, he and Major Gates went to the opera, to a performance of Thaïs by the French composer Massenet, which was then immensely popular in France. The Place de l’Opéra was ablaze with lights, as it had not been since 1914. After his days on the Riviera, with his longing for the woman he loved, the sensuous music stirred him deeply. It was “beautifully sung and the scenery [more palm trees] was everything that scenery can possibly be.” This, he emphasized in his letters, was the “real” opera. He would have paid the admission if only to see the gilded glory of the building.
He returned to a division encampment near Verdun notable only, he said, for its copious mud. The wait to go home became endless. “To keep from going crazy we had an almost continuous poker game,” remembered his friend from Independence, Captain Roger Sermon of Battery C. When news of the influenza epidemic at home reached camp, Harry became so alarmed he hardly knew how to contain himself. Bess and her brother Frank had both been down with the “Spanish flu,” he learned, Mary Jane and Ethel Noland as well, all through the weeks he had been on leave, and though all four were on the mend he kept worrying. “Every day nearly someone of my outfit will hear that his mother, sister or sweetheart is dead,” he wrote. “It is heartbreaking almost to think that we are so safe and so well over here and that the ones we’d like to protect more than all the world have been more exposed to death than we.” By the time the epidemic ran its course, vanishing mysteriously early in 1919, the number of deaths in the United States reached 500,000, including 25,000 soldiers, or nearly half the number of American battlefield deaths in the war. At Camp Doniphan alone fifty-one had died.
When in late January Harry learned that his favorite battery clerk, Sergeant Keenan, had died in the base hospital of appendicitis, he wrote in his diary, “Would as leave lost a son.”
General Pershing and the Prince of Wales came for a division review. Pershing shook Captain Truman’s hand and told him he had a fine-looking bunch of men and to take them home as “clean morally and physically as they were when they came over….” Harry took the order quite to heart.
It’s some trick to keep 190 men out of devilment now [he wrote later to Ethel Noland]. I have to think up all sorts of tortures for delinquents. It’s very, very lucky that we are far from wine, women and song or we’d have one h--- of a time. Sometimes I have to sock a man with extra duty that I sure hate to punish. You know justice is an awful tyrant and if I give one man a nice muddy wagon to wash on Sunday, because he went to Verdun without asking me if he could, why I’ve got to give another one the same duty if he does the same thing even if he has the most plausible excuse. I’m crazy about every one of ’em and I wouldn’t trade my messiest buck private for anybody’s top sergeant. It very nearly breaks my heart sometimes to have to be mean as the dickens to some nice boy who has been a model soldier on the front and whose mail I’ve probably censored and I know he’s plum crazy about some nice girl at home but that makes no difference. I have to make ’em walk the chalk. You’d never recognize me when I’m acting Bty Commander.
He was thinking constantly of home and what was ahead for him. He wrote in his letters of returning to the farm, but he mentioned also the possibility of running for political office on his war record—for eastern judge in Jackson County, possibly even for Congress. After what he had seen of peacetime Army life, he said, he would give anything to be on the House Military Affairs Committee. Like a great many of his fellow reserve officers, he had acquired a decided bias against West Pointers. He thought most of them pompous, lazy, and overrated, and couldn’t imagine himself living under such a system. “I can’t see what on earth any man with initia
tive and a mind of his own wants to be in the army in peacetimes for,” he wrote. “You’ve always got some fossil above you whose slightest whim is law and who generally hasn’t a grain of horse sense.” As a boy, he told Bess, he had “thirsted for a West Point education…only so you could be the leading lady of the palace or empire or whatever it was I wanted to build.” All he knew now for certain was that he longed to get “back to God’s country again,” to “the green pastures of Grand Old Missouri”; that, in fact, he had no place to go but home; that he was broke, and in love—“I love you as madly as a man can”—and eager to be both out of the Army and married just as soon as possible. He dreamed of walking down North Delaware Street. He dreamed of owning a Ford and touring the country with her. “Maybe have a little politics and some nice little dinner parties occasionally just for good measure. How does it sound to you?”
“We’ll be married anywhere you say at any time you mention,” he wrote in another letter, “and if you want only one person or the whole town I don’t care as long as you can make it quickly after my arrival.”
“You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to,” she wrote in response, in the earliest of her letters to have survived. “I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.” Her mother, she said, hoped they would move in with her at 219 North Delaware. “Just get yourself home and we won’t worry about anything.”
He hated the waiting. He wished “Woodie” (Woodrow Wilson) would quit his “gallivanting” in France and depart, so every American soldier could, too. Saving the world was of no concern any longer. “As far as we’re concerned,” he told Ethel Noland, “most of us don’t give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether Russia has a Red Government or no Government and if the King of the Lollypops wants to slaughter his subjects or his Prime Minister it’s all the same to us.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 428