Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  The men spread their blankets on the filthy floors and draped them over the open doors to keep off the blasts of freezing wind. They dined on hardtack and canned corned beef as they jolted for four days across France to Lorraine. Donovan remarked on the lack of sanitary arrangements and discovered that it was impossible to keep the men on the train whenever it stopped at some small town. There was a weary day, a cold and sleepless night, and then, on November 15, the battalion detrained at Savoie.

  There was nobody at the station to meet the battalion, and Donovan had to discover where his command was to go as best he could. Their legs stiff from being cramped in a cold boxcar, the men hiked over the frozen roads to Naives-en-Blois, which Father Duffy described as “a group of forty houses along the slopes of a crinkled plain.” There they established regimental headquarters in the town that the men’s fumbling tongues called Blooey. The officers were billeted in the houses lining two muddy streets. The men spread their blankets on the straw of stables and barns, ten, 15, or 30 to a building, depending on its size.

  “There are three classes of inhabitants in the houses—” read Father Duffy as he censored a letter a soldier had written home, “first, residents; second, cattle; third, soldiers.”

  “It was here that our troubles really began,” wrote Joyce Kilmer. “The hell of it was the foulup in clothing. Here we were in the Vosges Mountain area, with what was to be one of the worst winters in French history beginning, and half the men didn’t have their overcoats. Can you imagine that? Hardly any of them had winter brogans—many were walking around in those light shoes you’d wear in a dress parade during the summer. Why, the next thing you knew a lot of the boys had rags on their feet. And the blankets—we had lightweight summer ones until the first of the year.”

  “It does not seem real that I should be here in the land of chivalry,” Donovan wrote, “and battle seems highly improbable. I live with Madame Depuis, whose husband died during the war and whose son is now at Verdun. She is very agreeable and old and motherly. She has given me a pleasant room.”

  Donovan was concerned by the failure of winter uniforms to arrive and by the lamentable sanitary conditions in the town. “The last soldiers were French, and they departed some time ago. I believe that no cleaning has been done since that time. The important thing is cleaning of the streets and the adoption of sanitary and hygienic measures.” The water, at least, he thought to be quite good, “but for the present we boil it for all purposes.” He also observed that it grew dark at four and at six a heavy mist began to descend. “It is droll here,” he said, “with no telephone and no means of transportation. Yet surprising how soon one is accustomed to the lack.”

  Donovan went boar hunting with the mayor of the town. “The scheme was to have a group go in at one end with dogs and chase them toward the other end. When one is caught sight of, a great shout is set up by the beaters so that the men waiting may be ready. Rustled up three, and one of villagers killed one of them. These boars are the real thing and when wounded are quite ugly. Just now the Mayor came in person to invite me to a great feast of boar eating. They think me quite a linguist. In fact, I seem to be quite amusing to them.”

  5

  Rehearsal for War

  WHILE THE BATTALION was getting settled in France, Donovan was ordered to a Field Officers’ School for a course that would acquaint him with the French Army’s hard-won knowledge of trench warfare. He soon missed Madame Depuis’s comfortable house. Observed Donovan,

  This field officers’ school should be good to teach humility. We come here from fairly comfortable billets to a different arrangement altogether. We are on the side of a high hill. Mud, just as tenacious and much more abundant and long-staying, predominates. We are in barracks, much on the style of the officers’ camps, only without floors. No light but candle and lanterns. Cots, muddy floors, and dampness. I am rather glad of it all myself because it means a little taste of inconvenience, and I was beginning to think it was a war de luxe. I am looking forward to the work with real pleasure and hope it is hard. I want to get it into my fibre and be able to impart it to the battalion.

  Twenty-five percent of the officers at the school were permitted to go to Paris each week, but Donovan did not put his name in for leave. “I have not put my name in, as I have no desire to go there,” he said.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s son Archie came to see Donovan. Another of the former President’s sons, Ted, was stationed only 5 miles away, but Bill Donovan was too preoccupied with learning the military lessons of his French mentors to go and see him. He found the meals “quite good and almost too abundant. Exercise is what I need most.” He wrote,

  A hundred different human frailties now assert themselves. Jealousies and pettiness and selfishness. And then out of it all stand a few strong figures who are true and patriotic and unselfish.

  There are many doleful expressions around here, homesick and blue. Many of these young married fellows are down and out. What I contemplate is far different and far more amusing than you see at home. There are now over fifty crowded into this barracks. It is muddier than outdoors; the fires won’t burn. Constantly you hear coughing through the room. In spite of it all, my health is good, and I am getting in some good hours of studying.

  Curiously, Donovan does not say if he himself were sometimes “doleful, homesick and blue,” missing Ruth and the children. Yet he wrote regularly to Ruth, telling about his life in France.

  In Naives-en-Blois, Donovan had begun to study French with the villagers. Now he complained that he was living entirely with Americans, none of whom seemed interested in learning the language of the country in which they found themselves. One day he went to the French hospital to beg a hot bath. When he had finished a long soak in water as hot as he could get it, Dr. Wilbert, a young French physician, asked if Donovan would like to meet with him for an hour every day. The doctor would teach the American French, and Donovan would teach him English. Donovan readily agreed. He soon made a close friend of the doctor, who before the war had been a children’s specialist in Paris.

  On a typical Sunday, Donovan reported, he arose at 7:00 A.M. “Great variety of weather in the past two hours, sun, rain, hail, and snow,” he wrote to Ruth. He read maps, went to Mass, and wrote to Ruth that “the town dates from the 12th century and looks as if it has tried to save the accumulation of dirt for all these years.” Despite the bad weather, Donovan occupied his spare time with muddy walks through the countryside. He wore out his shoes and socks and had to buy more from the quartermaster. He wrote to Ruth to send socks. He confessed to a yen for candy and hoped that she would send him some in a Christmas box.

  The day that Gen. John Pershing came to the Field Officers’ School a cold snap froze the mud. The sun sparkled as Donovan and his fellow officers demonstrated before the commander of the American Expeditionary Force how to lead a bayonet charge, control the firing line, launch rifle grenades, raid a trench, aim trench mortars, and direct artillery fire. Live ammunition was used throughout the day.

  Four fashionably dressed ladies, as well as President Wilson’s friend Col. Edward M. House, had accompanied the general. “I think the ladies scarcely knew what it was all about,” Donovan wrote to Ruth.

  As for Pershing, Donovan described him as “short of six feet. Thick through the chest; not so well set up in the legs; exceedingly well dressed, tan shoes, spurs, leather puttees laced in English fashion up the front, a dark, olive drab overcoat, very snappy—and a nice fitting hat. His face is softer than his pictures, and he has not the grim expression seen in them. He looks like a real he-man.”

  Soon afterward Donovan and five other officers moved from the barracks into a tiny Swiss-style chalet with a wooden floor and a stove. The stove seemed to them the most marvelous invention achieved by mankind. Nor was the chalet crowded, since three of the men assigned to it were on the sick list. Donovan felt pampered, and his conscience began to trouble him. How could he be living so comfortably when the men of his battali
on were undoubtedly shivering in the cold? He felt better about things when he was chosen to referee a French Army maneuver in the field for three days with only his bedroll to keep off the chill. The French soldiers impressed him—they were not as big as the Americans, but they were tough and wiry. Some of them, apaches from the Parisian slums, particularly interested him. “To me they have a certain air that is quite attractive,” he wrote in his journal.

  Possibly he was missing his own command of young New Yorkers. He did not have long to wait to see the First Battalion of the 69th, for he soon completed his course and returned to Naives-en-Blois. The men groaned when the man some called Blue-Eyed Billie came back. They had reason to groan. The cruel weather did not keep Donovan from leading the First Battalion on long marches. Kilmer noted in his diary:

  “December 7, hiked 10 kilometers. Food—coffee like water, lukewarm—a few strips of bacon—all we had that day.

  “December 10, hiked 10 kilometers—many of the men without shoes—weather freezing. One meal, some kind of stew.”

  The front was close enough so that when the wind was right the men could hear the boom of the big guns at St. Mihiel. The stalemate on the front continued, but there were frequent exchanges of artillery fire. Donovan and his men feared that German planes might appear overhead and drop bombs, so at night it was counted too dangerous to light a cigarette outdoors.

  Exultant at being back in command, Donovan drilled his men and conditioned them to the hardships of a winter campaign. The men complained bitterly, but he paid no attention. One day Father Duffy overheard three doughboys discussing their CO. One thought he was a prince of good fellows and should, in fact, be the king of Ireland. One of the others agreed.

  “He’s a son-of-a-bitch!” announced the third.

  They argued furiously, with Donovan’s defenders maintaining that he was no easier on himself than on the men he led.

  The third soldier finally gave in. “He’s a son-of-a-bitch,” he said, “but he’s a game one.”

  When Father Duffy told Donovan of the incident, he laughed. “Father, that’s what I want on my epitaph,” he said.

  Some of the men took to calling Donovan Galloping Bill, as the troopers of Troop I had named him down on the Mexican border; others nicknamed him Hard-Boiled Bill. One day Donovan led the men on a wild 3-mile run, vaulting over walls, plunging down embankments, leaping over ditches, writhing through barbed-wire entanglements. They ended up gasping for breath in a windswept field. Donovan glared at the men. “What’s the matter with you guys?” he demanded. “I’ve got the same fifty pounds on my back as you men, and I’m ten years older.”

  There was silence broken only by the sound of panting men. Then from the rear of the group came an anonymous reply: “But we ain’t as wild as you, Bill.”

  Donovan was to bear the name Wild Bill for the rest of his life, even though his leadership was believed by both his fellow officers and his command to be as quiet and analytical as it was bold and strenuous.

  While the battalion was in training at Naives-en-Blois, big Mike Donaldson went AWOL. Marine MPs caught up with him in Paris and clapped him in a guardhouse. When he was returned to the 165th, Donovan put him to work digging a hole ten feet by ten feet. It took the muscular giant all day. When he was told that Donaldson had completed the hole, Donovan said, “All right, now make him fill it up.”

  As Christmas approached, the mess sergeants scoured the French countryside for chickens and any other edibles that could be bought. The 165th was resolved to celebrate the day with religious fervor and with a dinner, which many were convinced might be their last good meal on earth. Major Hugh W. Ogden, the judge advocate for the Rainbow Division, noted in his diary that the temperature on Christmas Eve dropped to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. The men shivered in their ramshackle billets and waited for the Christmas Eve services to begin in the 700-year-old village church with its seven-foot-thick tower, in which slits had been cut for bowmen, soldiers of a faraway time.

  Forty men were billeted in a barn near where Lt. Oliver Ames was housed in a village dwelling. “I can hear them singing,” he wrote on Christmas Eve to his wife, “and the most mournfully sentimental songs.”

  Joyce Kilmer, his fingers cramped with the cold, also wrote to his wife on Christmas Eve. “We may have Christmas Mass in the church here tonight. Father Duffy has had a choir practicing for it, and we possess a tenor soloist. He is an Italian, a barber when not singing or soldiering.”

  The men walked through the dark village streets to the church and crowded inside with the villagers, until Cpl. Martin Hogan thought that the sides would be pushed out. Bill Donovan waited with General Lenahan for the church services to begin.

  “We sat in my room until 11:30,” Lenahan wrote in his journal, “and then went to the old village church. Father Francis P. Duffy, chaplain of the 165th Infantry, had made arrangements for Solemn High Mass, having secured the services of the Curé and of several other French priests from nearby towns. The church was filled to capacity with townspeople, chaplains, and soldiers of the French Army, home from the front on Christmas leave. Father Duffy met me at the church door and escorted me through the church to the Bishop’s seat, which I occupied during the mass.”

  The band of the 165th, located on the Epistle side of the sanctuary, played. The regimental officers stood with Lenahan on the Gospel side. Standing on the flooring of cold stone, Donovan listened to the band play “Adeste Fideles,” and the choir sing “Noël” in French. Father Duffy preached in English. The flickering candlelight, the music, the shining faces of the men made a strong impression on everyone there. “It was the most inspiring religious service I had ever witnessed,” wrote Lenahan, back in his warm room.

  The men walked to their stables, their hearts at peace for the moment. By 2:00 A.M. all was quiet in the village and in the surrounding countryside, where the other battalions of the regiment were sheltering as best they could in farm outbuildings.

  It began to snow and continued all night. Snow fell on the ice-glazed roads, on the fields, and on the ancient houses. It sifted through the chinks in stable walls and roofs, and covered the blankets of the sleeping men. Christmas breakfast turned out to be bacon sandwiches with hot coffee, but the plain fare was entirely acceptable to the men because the first real mail from home had arrived. Midday mess was more impressive. There were turkey, chicken, cranberries, mashed potatoes, carrots, bread pudding, nuts, figs, and coffee. The men gorged themselves and trooped into the market shed, where the band played Christmas carols and they sang. There were no presents.

  “It is just as well,” observed Father Duffy, “for we depart tomorrow on a four-day hike over snowy roads, and the less we have to carry the better.”

  The men charged with transport doubtless would have agreed with their chaplain. On Christmas Eve the mules had arrived. Most of them were unbroken and unshod, and getting them ready for departure on December 26 proved a nearly impossible task. Shouts and cursing seemed out of keeping with the spirit of Christmas, so the men tried patience and gentle words on the recalcitrant beasts without any notable success. The wagoners had to throw the mules down on stable floors to put on the unfamiliar harnesses.

  The snow fell all day and throughout the night. The men awoke the next morning to a gray sky. A gusting wind whirled the still falling snow across the roads, over which they set off after a hasty breakfast, straining beneath their 50-pound packs.

  “It was still snowing when we broke camp at nine o’clock,” Corporal Hogan recalled later, “and a head-on wind blew the sharp crystals into our faces and eyes.”

  The 83rd Brigade, made up of the Ohioans and the New Yorkers, marched off over different roads to their evening destinations, some 15 miles away at eight different billeting areas. The snow was often thigh-deep on the roads, which twisted up into the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. Beneath the snow was glare ice, and the soldiers often slipped and fell.

  The men were still in their summer unifor
ms, some had no overcoats, and only a few had gloves. Just as George Washington’s men, their shoes worn out, had trudged through the snow of Valley Forge in bare feet, leaving bloody marks behind them, so did the men of the 165th Regiment on the march that day in the Vosges. Some men whose shoes had worn through bought or begged wooden sabots from the peasants past whose mountain farms the weary column straggled. Others wrapped their feet in gunnysacks.

  Donovan trudged along at the end of the column to pick up stragglers. He came upon an 18-year-old youth who had sunk down into the snow, too tired to get up. He regarded the boy’s bloody feet with compassion.

  “I think I’m going to die,” the youth whimpered.

  “You can’t die without my permission,” Donovan asserted, “and I don’t intend to give it. I’ll take your pack, but you’ve got to hike.”

  With his commanding officer shouldering his pack, the boy limped down the road.

  “On a hike the Infantry will get through,” Father Duffy wrote in his journal at the end of the first day’s march. “There is never any doubt of that. They may be footsore, hungry, broken-backed, frozen, half-dead, but they will get through.”

  The problem, as the chaplain saw it, was the supplies. He accompanied the supply wagons, which stuck on the steep icy roads. “Again and again they came to hills where every wagon was stalled,” Duffy wrote. “The best teams had to be unhitched and attached to each wagon separately until the hill was won. Over and over the toil-worn men would have to cover the same ground till the work was done, and in tough places they had to spend their failing strength tugging on a rope or pushing a wheel. Wagoners sat on their boxes with hands and feet freezing and never uttered a complaint. The wagons were full of food, but no man asked for a mite of it—they were willing to wait till the companies ahead would get their share.”