But I believe in making use of all the talent in my army, even among the rank and file. Therefore I respectfully ask whether you think some of your baseball secrets would be of strategic value to us in the prosecution of this war, either offensive or defensive, and if so whether you would be willing to provide us with the same.
By the way I note with pleasure that our first names are the same. It makes a sort of bond between us which I trust will be further cemented if you can be of assistance to me in my task.
I shall eagerly await your reply. Sincerely,
Black Jack Pershing
Follies Bergere, Paris, France.
That is the letter I got from him Al and I’ll say its some letter and I bet if some of these smart alex officers seen it it would reduce some of the swelling in their chest but I consider the letter confidential Al and I haven’t showed it to nobody only 3 or 4 of my buddys and I showed it to Johnny Alcock and he popped his eyes out so far you could of snipped them off with a shears. And he said it was a cinch that Pershing realy wrote it on acct. of him signing it Black Jack Pershing and they wouldn’t nobody else sign it that way because it was a private nickname between he and some of his friends and they wouldn’t nobody else know about it.
So then he asked was I going to answer the letter and I said of course I was and he says well I better take a whole lot of pains with my answer and study up the situation before I wrote it and put some good idears in it and if my letters made a hit with Gen. Pershing the next thing you know he would probably summons me to Paris and maybe stick me on the war board so all I would half to do would be figure up plans of attacks and etc. and not half to go up in the trenchs and wrist my life and probably get splattered all over France.
I would go if Black Jack wanted me and after all Al I am here to give Uncle Sam the best I have got and if I can serve the stars and stripes better by sticking pins in a map then getting in the trenchs why all right and it takes more than common soldiers to win a war and if I am more use to them as a kind of adviser instead of carrying a bayonet why I will sacrifice my own feelings for the good of the cause like I often done in baseball.
Your pal,
Jack
In the trenchs, May 18.
FRIEND AL: Well Al if I am still alive yet its not because I laid back and didn’t take no chances and I wished some of the baseball boys that use to call me yellow when I was in there pitching had of seen me last night and I guess they would of sang a different song only in the 1rst. Place I was where they couldn’t nobody see me and secondly they would of been so scared they would of choked to death if they tried to talk let alone sing.
Well yesterday P.M. Sargent Crane asked me how I liked life in the trenchs and I said O.K. only I got tired on acct. of they not being no excitement or nothing to do and he says oh they’s plenty to do and I could go out and help the boys fix up the bob wire in Nobodys Land. So I said I didn’t see how they could be any fixing needed as they hadn’t nothing happened on this section since the war started you might say and the birds that was here before us had plenty of time to fix it if it needed fixing. So he says “Well any ways they’s no excitement to fixing the wire but if you was looking for excitement why didn’t you go out with that patrol the other night?” So I said “Because I didn’t see no sence to trying to find out who was in the other trenchs when we know they are Germans and that’s all we need to know. Wait till they’s a real job and you won’t see me hideing behind nobody.” So he says “Ive got a real job for you tonight and you can go along with Ted Phillips to the listening post.”
Well Al a listening post is what they call a little place they got dug out way over near the German trenchs and its so close you can hear them talk sometimes and you are supposed to hear if they are getting ready to pull something and report back here so they won’t catch us asleep. Well I was wild to go just for something to do but I been haveing trouble with my ears lately probably on acct. of the noise from so much shell fire but any ways I have thought a couple times that I was getting a little deef so I thought I better tell him the truth so I said “I would be tickled to death to go only I don’t know if I ought to or not because I don’t hear very good even in English and of course Jerry would be telling their plans in German and suppose I didn’t catch on to it and I would feel like a murder if they started a big drive and I hand’t gave my pals no warning.” So he says “Don’t worry about that as Phillips has got good ears and understands German and he has been there before only in a job like that a man wants company and you are going along for company.”
Well Al it finely come time for us to go and we went and if anybody asks you how to spend a pleasant evening don’t steer them up against a listening post with a crazy man. There was the bosh trench about 20 yrds. from us but not a sound out of them and a man couldn’t help from thinking what if they had of heard us out there and they was getting ready to snoop up on us and that’s why they was keeping so still and it got so as I could feel 1 of their bayonets burrowing into me and I am no quitter Al when it comes to fighting somebody you can see but when you have got a idear that somebody is cralling up on you and you haven’t no chance to fight back I would like to see the bird that could enjoy himself and besides suppose my ears had went back on me worse than I thought and the Dutchmens was really making a he—ll of a racket but I couldn’t hear them and maybe they was getting ready to come over the top and I wouldn’t know the differents and all of a sudden they would lay a garage and dash out behind it and if they didn’t kill us we would be up in front of the court’s marshall for not warning our pals.
Well when this here Phillips finely opened his clam and spoke I would of jumped a mile if they had of been any room to jump anywhere. Well the sargent had told us not to say nothing but all of a sudden right out loud this bird says this is a he—ll of a war. Well I motioned back at him to shut up but of course he couldn’t see me and thought I hadn’t heard what he said so he said it over again so then I thought maybe he hadn’t heard the sargent’s orders so I whispered to him that he wasn’t supposed to talk. Well Al they wasn’t no way of keeping him quite and he says “That’s all bunk because I been out here before and talked my head off and nothing happened.” So I says well if you have to talk you don’t half to yell it. So then he tried to whisper Al but his whisper sounded like a jazz record with a crack in it.
So he shut up for a while but pretty soon he busted out again and this time he was louder than ever and he asked me could I sing and I said no so then he says well you can holler can’t you so I said I suppose I could so he says “Well I know how we could play a big joke on them square heads. Lets the both of us begin yelling like a Indian and they will hear us here and they will begin bombing us or something and think they are going to kill a whole crowd of Americans but it will only be us 2 and we can give them the laugh for waisting their ammunitions.”
Well Al I seen then that I was parked there with a crazy man and for a while I didn’t say nothing because I was scared that I might say something that would encourage him some way so I just shut up and finely he says what is the matter ain’t you going to join me? So I said I will join you in the jaw in a minute if you don’t shut your mouth and then he quited down a little, but every few minutes he would have another swell idear and once he asked me could I imitate animals and I said no so he says he could mew like a cow and he had heard the boshs were so hard up for food and they would rush out here thinking they was going to find a cow but it wouldn’t be no cow but it would be a horse on them.
Well you can imagine what I went through out there with a bird like that and I thought more then once I would catch it from him and go nuts myself but I managed to keep a hold of myself and the happiest minute of my life was when it was time for us to crall back to our dug outs through Nobodys Land but at that I can’t remember how we got back here.
This A.M. Sargent Crane asked me what kind of a time did we have and I told him and I told him this here Phillips was squirrel meat and he says Phill
ips is just as sane as anybody usualy only everybody that went out on the listening post was effected that way by the quite and it’s a wonder I didn’t go nuts to.
Well its a wonder I didn’t Al and its a good thing I kept my head and kept him from playing 1 of those tricks as god knows what would of happened and the entire regt. might of wipped out. But I hope they don’t wish no more listening post on me but if they do you can bet I will pick my own pardner and it won’t be no nut.
Your pal,
Jack
From Treat ’em Rough, by Ring Lardner; Bobbs-Merrill; Indianapolis, 1918, and The Real Dope, Bobbs-Merrill; Indianapolis, 1919.
Epilogue:
Guide
The killing and the irony lasted until the very end. On the morning of November 11, 1918, with the armies knowing in advance that firing on the western front would cease at 11:00 a.m., there were still over ten thousand casualties, including 2,738 dead—a one-day butcher’s bill comparable to D-Day’s in the next war. Ambitious officers wanted to burnish their war record while they still could, old scores were yet to be settled, and some units either didn’t get the message about the armistice or chose to ignore it; a good many died when gunners celebrated by firing off a last round. Among the casualties were Private George Ellison, shot by a sniper just east of Mons at two minutes before 11:00, the last official British fatality of the war, and Private Henry Gunther, killed by German machine gunners as he charged a roadblock near Ville-devant-Chaumont at 10:59, the last official American fatality of the war.
November 11, 1918, is usually thought of as a time of wild celebration across the victorious Allied nations, but it’s clear that this mood was far from universal. Too many families mourned too many sons for them to feel anything but sorrow. Writers picked up on this sense of loss (George Bernard Shaw: “Every promising young man I know has been blown to bits”) and, looking toward the future, added many somber warnings.
Here is D. H. Lawrence voicing his opinion at an Armistice night party in London.
“I suppose you think the war is over and that we shall go back to the kind of world you lived in before. But the war isn’t over. The hate and evil are greater now than ever. Very soon war will break out again and overwhelm you. It makes me sick to see you rejoicing like a butterfly in the last rays of sun before the winter. The war isn’t over. The evil will be worse because the hate will be dammed up in men’s hearts and will show itself in all sorts of ways which will be worse than war.”
No writer was more unlike Lawrence than H. Rider Haggard, the adventure novelist known for King Solomon’s Mines, but he shared the same foreboding.
“The Germans will neither forgive nor forget. They have been beaten by England and they will live and die to smash England—she will never have a more deadly enemy than the new Germany. In future years the easy-going, self-centered English will forget that just across the sea there is a mighty, cold-hearted and remorseless people waiting to strike her through the heart. For strike they will someday.”
Thomas Hardy, at seventy-eight, found a more nuanced way to express the 11/11/18 mood.
Calm fell. From heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered, “It had to be!”
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”
The moment the war ended thousands of people—“pilgrims,” as the press called them—began spontaneously making their way to the western front battlefields to see for themselves where the fighting had taken place. Many of these first visitors were parents who had lost sons and wives who had lost husbands; they needed to find what we now call “closure,” seeking the graves of their soldiers or, if they were among the huge numbers of missing, at least their names on a monument or plaque.
The killing fields hadn’t been prettied up yet—the devastation was plain to be seen—and a careless pilgrim, straying across the trenches, could easily blow herself up on a buried shell (as, a hundred years later, a careless Belgian farmer occasionally still does). Mildred Aldrich, from her little village of Huiry, writes movingly of her own pilgrimage to the nearby American battlefield at Chateau-Thierry in the excerpt included on page 308.
Along with the mourners came thousands of well-heeled tourists, curious to explore the famous battlefields. As early as 1917, the Michelin Tire Company had begun issuing guidebooks to the western front, meticulously researched and heavily illustrated with maps and evocative photos of French villages before the fighting and their ruins afterwards. Included—and this was very rare in books published during the war—were photographs of dead soldiers lying where they fell. These early guides, published while the war was still on, may have given ordinary people, fed nothing but propaganda, their first look at a truthful depiction of the carnage.
The Michelin editors set out their intentions in a brief forward.
“For the benefit of tourists who wish to visit the battle-fields and mutilated towns of France we have tried to produce a work combining a practical guide and a history … Such a visit should be a pilgrimage, not merely a journey across the ravaged land. Seeing is not enough, one must understand; a ruin is more moving when one knows what has caused it; a stretch of country which might seem dull and uninteresting to the unenlightened eye becomes transformed at the thought of the battles that have been fought there … Our readers will not find any attempt at literary effect in these pages; the truth is too beautiful and tragic to be altered for the sake of embellishing the story.”
The anonymous compilers of these guides took great pains to include even small sites of interest, so after directing tourists to where three elderly hostages were shot by the Germans outside the village of Varreddes during the Battle of the Marne, they lead them on, with great specificity, to another landmark.
“After having traversed Varreddes and before re-crossing the canal a tree will be noticed on the left of the road (the 38th on the way out) which has been pierced by a 75 shell as by a punching press.”
Enough of these guidebooks were published that they form a Great War genre of their own, one that remains surprisingly moving and evocative a hundred years later; there is no better way to understand what the ravaged western front looked like than by perusing the Michelin battlefield guides published immediately after the war ended.
Closely linked to these was another style of postwar book: the visit to the old western front by soldier-writers who had once served there. Almost all of these are thoughtful, well-written, and moving, and they form a bridge to the harder, more disillusioned novels and memoirs that were published in the 1920s, which came to form the canon of World War I literature. C. E. Montague called his own account of this mood Disenchantment, one of the earliest to be published—the extract included in this section points the way to the familiar literature of the war, the books whose power and impact still determine how we remember it.
A hundred years after the fighting ended, it should be possible, if it ever will be possible, to gain some perspective on the years 1914–18, to write of what happened with the Olympian kind of detachment a century can bring. Measured against the long history of mankind, four years in the early twentieth century shouldn’t matter very much. A continent of nation-states fell out with each other, the conflict spread across the world, and a rough equivalence between the armies engaged and various technological improvements in military defense (as well as an old one: digging holes) meant that millions of young men would needlessly die. The original reasons for fighting, no matter what revisionist historians might claim, now seem like a form of inexplicable insanity. Alberto Moravia, the Italian novelist, might not have been exaggerating as much as he thought when he termed World War I “an outbreak of collective madness, the reasons for which should be studied by the psychoanalyst rather than the historian.”
If we want to apply even more hindsight to the war, we can see it as another form of collectiv
e madness: environmental madness. The Great War (though the thought would not have occurred to a single one of its participants) was a carbon war, releasing huge amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere; indeed, access to Arab oil was one of the strategic prizes the war was fought over.
Environmental scientists now understand that the world’s temperatures and CO2 levels were beginning to rise even by 1914. If statesmen and generals had been granted superhuman powers of foresight, they would have worried about their armies’ carbon footprint and not the gain or loss of a few yards of mud. If civilization in the twenty-first century is heading toward environmental suicide, then surely we must look back on the twentieth with an eye toward those events that contributed to our doom—and, looked at that way, World War I was a senseless distraction that, along with World War II, kept us from understanding where the real existential danger to mankind’s future lay.
In the same way, though with less exaggeration, it’s now possible to draw back from the literature of the period, to see it in perspective—and the first thing that hits you, taking this long view, is that literature not only existed but thrived. Back before computers, before television and radio, before talkies, before color photos, before all the marvels and doodads of the last hundred years, people seeking to understand the world turned automatically to books, novels, poems, essays, and plays as the best means available to understand the world—often, as the only means possible.
It’s plausible to assume that in 1914 there were more serious writers at work and more serious readers willing to read them than at any time before or since; writers never had such power and influence over the minds of men. Simultaneously, the Western world approached the worst catastrophe it had ever known, so these writers and readers were faced with their hardest challenge ever. This is why World War I is the most “literary” war; there was simply no better way for a thinking person to try to come to terms with it than by reading books.
Where Wars Go to Die Page 30