On almost every occasion, the presentation ceremony merited an article in the local newspaper, which is how I first learned of the program. Unfortunately, in many cases I read about it only in the honored veteran’s obituary. Many of them, it seemed, did not long outlive the occasion. (One, I would later learn, died the very next day.) There were even a few reported cases of men who, sadly, died before the presenting officials could reach them. Nevertheless, one day I went to the French Embassy’s official website in search of more information about the program, and there got my first big break in the search: a complete list of the American men and women—more than five hundred—to whom France had presented the Legion of Honor in the past five years, complete with their hometowns. It came out to twenty-four pages. I carried it around with me for days, reading the names over and over again.
Now, the program was already five years old by the time I heard about it, and most of those Legions of Honor had been awarded in 1998 or 1999; perhaps one person in twenty on that list was still living in 2003. There was no way to locate that one in twenty that didn’t involve having nineteen at least slightly awkward telephone conversations. And some were more than just slightly. One woman, for example, responded to my query by asking me why I wanted to talk to the man in question. “I’d like to interview him about his experiences in the war,” I explained.
“Well, you’re barking up the wrong tree—he’s dead!” she replied, and slammed down the handset.
A bit shaken, I tried to rephrase my inquiry for the next name on the list, but dialed the number before I’d taken enough time to think the matter through. Inquiring after the veteran in question, I stammered, “Is he, uh, still around?”
“No,” the woman replied calmly. “He died a little over a year ago. And for future reference, you might just want to ask, ‘Is he still living?’”
Good advice. I adopted that phrasing for future calls, posing that question again and again and again; and one day, I got a yes. And then another. Eventually, I would find quite a few veterans off what I came to think of as the French List.
William Edward Campbell was born in Mobile in 1893, left school at fourteen to work in a lumber mill, returned later to study law at the University of Alabama, and was working as a clerk at a law firm in Manhattan when America entered the war. He enlisted in the Marines, was sent to France, was shot and gassed at Belleau Wood, and returned to the front in time to see more battles before the war ended. He fought bravely: For valor he was awarded both the American Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Returning home, he went to work for a steamship company and, in short order, rose to become its vice president. But the war haunted him; he was plagued by depression and anxiety. Today we would recognize that as posttraumatic stress disorder; back then, to a proud and decorated ex-Marine, it was just a shameful, inexplicable weakness. But instead of turning to drink or some other form of self-medication, Campbell started to write. He wrote about the war, what he had seen and done, about those who had been killed and those whose lives had otherwise been destroyed. It came out in the form of a novel, the story of a fictional company of Marines, in which every man, living or dead, gets his own chapter to tell a story, short or long. He wrote under the pen name William March, and called his book Company K. When it was published, in 1933, it garnered tremendous critical acclaim; today it is as forgotten as the war itself.
The first Marine to speak in Company K is Private Joseph Delaney. The war has ended; he sits on his front porch with his wife, having just completed, he tells us, writing a book called Company K. “I have finished my book at last,” he says, “but I wonder if I have done what I set out to do?”
Then I think: “This book started out to be a record of my own company, but I do not want it to be that, now. I want it to be a record of every company in every army. If its cast and its overtones are American, that is only because the American scene is the one that I know. With different names and different settings, the men of whom I have written could, as easily, be French, German, English or Russian for that matter.”
I think: “I wish there were some way to take these stories and pin them to a huge wheel, each story hung on a different peg until the circle was completed. Then I would like to spin the wheel, faster and faster, until the things of which I have written took life and were re-created, and became part of the wheel, flowing toward each other, and into each other; blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending circle of pain. . . . That would be the picture of war. And the sound that wheel made, and the sound that the men themselves made as they laughed, cried, cursed or prayed, would be, against the falling of walls, the rushing of bullets, the exploding of shells, the sound that war, itself makes . . .”
Obscure as it is today, Company K is easily one of the best American war novels ever written, and one of the great war novels of modern times. Whenever I reread it I find, every few pages, something new and profound that stops me cold. And yet I always return, in the end, to Private Delaney’s wish to take the disparate stories of the men in his company and spin them together until they melt into a great collage that tells one tale of undeniable truth. And I wonder: Can I somehow do the same, all these many years later, with the detritus that remains in our midst?
When I discovered that actuarial table on the VA’s website I realized, to my astonishment, that I didn’t have just inanimate detritus to work with. I still had, in 2003, the same resource William March had had in 1933: the actual people who fought that war, lived through it, and returned home afterward to get on with the business of life as best they could. I didn’t know, at first, how many there still were, or what they might have to say; for a while, until I discovered the French List, their existence was, to me, nothing more than theoretical. But then, thanks to that resource and others, I did find one, and then another, and another. I had hoped, in the beginning, to find perhaps a half-dozen. Eventually I found several times that number. And every one of them had unique stories to tell, surprising, stunning, a few inconceivable, stories the likes of which I had never heard or read before, stories they hadn’t told in fifty, sixty years. Stories they’d never told. These men and women did more than pin things to a wheel; they built the wheel, and spun it, and showed me five or six different vantage points where I might stand and behold something entirely new in it. Like the individual Marines in Company K, each one told, at the last possible moment, a story that was complete in and of itself and yet also a part of some greater whole, composed of other stories and artifacts and observations accumulated almost at random. That greater whole is what you now hold in your hands: a mosaic that tells a story about the United States of America and the First World War.
I cannot claim that it is the complete truth; I doubt a complete history of that war has ever been written, or ever will be. It was too vast, and too strange, to be knowable in its entirety. And this is not a conventional history of it. This is a book about America’s experience of that war, at the front, behind the lines, and at home; how it infiltrated, influenced, shaped, and determined every last facet of life in the United States, no matter how small or seemingly removed; and how it continues to do so to this day, and perhaps always will, no matter how little evidence of that we think we can perceive, or how much we think we have forgotten. It is about the generation that fought that war—people who grew up without electricity or automobiles, who never left the county in which they’d been born until they were swept up in something that had previously existed for them only in the newspaper, something that carried them across an ocean to fight with and against soldiers from distant, exotic places, some of which they’d never even heard of; people who, having triumphed, came home and quietly set about trying to rebuild their lives. And were forgotten.
Most of all, it is about how much of that we can still find, and see, and hear, and touch, if we just open our eyes and understand where, and how, to look. Because it really is everywhere—even now that the last of the doughboys have left
us.
1
Wolves on the Battlefield
I’LL ADMIT: I was nervous. How do you talk to a 107-year-old man?
And I’ll admit: After that day—July 19, 2003—I interviewed many more World War I veterans, men and women ranging in age from 101 to 113 years old, and every single time I was nervous beforehand. But never as nervous as I was that first time.
I had never met anyone that old before. I didn’t even know anyone who had. I had no idea what to expect.
Well, that’s not quite true; I had a few ideas, all of which turned out to be wrong. For instance, for some reason I thought a 107-year-old man would live in a 107-year-old house filled with 107-year-old things. But that day, as I turned onto Anthony Pierro’s street in Swampscott, Massachusetts—a North Shore suburb of Boston—I could see right away that there weren’t any houses there even half that old. And his was downright modern. Strange, I mused: A man could be born in 1896 and yet live in a house with central heat and air conditioning, high-definition satellite television, and broadband Internet access.
“His” house was really his nephew Rick’s. Rick Pierro’s father, Nicholas, was Anthony’s baby brother. Nicholas was ninety-four.
I didn’t even know what a 107-year-old man might look like. In my mind I tried to add twenty-five years to the octogenarians I knew already, but I just couldn’t summon up such an image. The octogenarians I knew were spry and sharp, for the most part, but they also looked pretty old. Maybe they’d lived too hard and breathed in too much dirty Manhattan air, but I didn’t think any of their bodies could take on another quarter century without crumbling to dust.
Yet here was a man who could have been their father. I ran through a history-buff exercise in my head: Born in 1896. In 1896, Grover Cleveland was president. William Jennings Bryan ran to succeed him. Utah was admitted to the Union as the forty-fifth state. The Wright brothers were still tinkering around with bicycles. George Burns was born. The tallest building in the world was eighteen stories high. . . .
I had carried on like this right up until I pulled onto the street and took notice of the modern houses.
Rick Pierro answered the door, shook my hand, and led me into the living room, where another man sat upright, dozing on the couch; completely bald, he wore a bright green golf shirt under a dark blue cardigan sweater. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Rick walked over to him, placed his hand gently on the man’s shoulder, and leaned over to his ear. “Uncle!” he said loudly, rubbing the sleeping man’s shoulder. “Uncle! This man’s here to see you!”
The man opened his eyes, waited a moment for them to come into focus, looked at his nephew, then at me, then at his nephew again. “What?” he asked.
“This man came all the way here from New York to see you!”
Anthony Pierro turned to me again and smiled faintly. He looked about twenty-five years younger than I knew he was. “Hello,” he said, nodding his head, the same head that, in the distant past, he had tucked under his arms during a particularly severe artillery barrage, so that he might survive the day, and the war, and another eighty-five years.
When the French government was handing out all those Légions d’Honneur in 1998 and 1999, somehow they missed Anthony Pierro. Actually, the oversight was his; the French invited American World War I veterans to apply for the award, and while they did everything they could to get the word out, working with both government agencies and private organizations, the ultimate responsibility rested upon the veterans themselves. They had to apply for it, had to prove that they had served on French soil before the armistice and that they had not acquired a criminal record since then. Anthony Pierro certainly qualified, yet for some reason he hadn’t applied.
But in early 2003, someone at a local veterans’ organization discovered the oversight and contacted the French Embassy, which hadn’t awarded any World War I Légions d’Honneur in a few years and hadn’t expected to award any more. Delighted, the embassy dispatched an attaché up to Swampscott, staged a little ceremony, and presented France’s premier honor to a man who was one of the last living participants in what is arguably the worst thing that has ever happened there. A reporter wrote the affair up for a local weekly newspaper; a couple of months later, I came upon this article and hurriedly reached for the telephone.
In several years of interviewing extremely old men and women, my routine scarcely changed. I would show up at the subject’s home or apartment or room and introduce myself to them and their child or grandchild or niece or nephew or old family friend or caregiver. Immediately after that, I would start setting up, a process that involved figuring out where the subject and I would sit; opening as many blinds, and turning on as many lights, as possible; unfolding and positioning a tripod; and fixing a mini DV camcorder to it. (For the first half-dozen or so interviews, until I came to trust my camcorder, I also set up a regular analog tape recorder, complete with two handheld microphones, and ran it simultaneously.) When everything was in place, I sat down, pressed the record button, announced the date and the location, and, every single time, started with the same question.
“What’s your name?”
“My name?” this particular 107-year-old man said in response. “Well, it’s a simple name: Anthony Pierro.” He spoke these last two words with strength and clarity and pride, stressing every syllable of his surname equally. I laughed softly, in wonder at the whole thing.
“Where were you born?” I asked.
“I was born in Italy,” he said. “Forenza, Provincia di Potenza.”
“And what day were you born?”
“Ahh,” he said, shaking his head in exasperation. “Doggone if I can remember.”
“February fifteen,” his nephew called out. “Eighteen ninety-six.”
“Eighteen ninety-six?” I said.
“That’s what he says,” Anthony Pierro replied. “He knows more than I do.”
One thing you quickly learn in doing this kind of research is that for most of human history, record keeping has been neither an art nor a science but merely something that most people didn’t want to be bothered with. We assume, for instance, that for every living person—or at least, for every living person in an industrialized country—there is a birth certificate. This, however, is not true, and in 1896 it was quite far from true. Back then, there was no centralized, standard method of recording births; how your birth was recorded—if it was recorded at all—was determined by where you lived, who your parents were, and quite possibly what church they attended. The state of Louisiana, for example, didn’t start keeping birth records—or, for that matter, death records—until 1918; and since very few towns or parishes in Louisiana recorded them, either, if you want to find or confirm a specific date of birth for someone born in Louisiana before 1918, your best bet would be to hope that they were a baptized Catholic, since Catholic churches in Louisiana typically (though not always) listed a date of birth on their certificates of baptism, and typically (though not always) kept a copy of those certificates for their records. Of course, sometimes those churches moved and in the process misplaced or lost or discarded their old records, and sometimes those churches and everything in them burned to the ground or washed away in floods or just crumbled with age. And sometimes those certificates didn’t get lost or tossed out or burned up but simply fell apart or faded over the decades to the point where they appeared to be merely blank pages.
In 1896, few of the nation’s forty-five states—very few—recorded all births within their borders. If you weren’t in one of them, maybe your county or your city or town did, though probably not; and maybe your church did somewhere, though again, the odds are against it. Maybe your parents recorded it in the family Bible, if they had one. If they didn’t—and if their church or town or county or state didn’t record it, either—well, then, everyone just did their best to remember what day of what month of what year you were born on, at least until they could tell you and you could assume the burden of
remembering for yourself. I like to think that they (and you) usually did a pretty good job, although sometimes one has to wonder. When I was a child, I believed, as did everyone else in my family, that my paternal grandmother had been born in Stamford, Connecticut, on December 23, 1899. But after she died, in 1990, someone managed to dig up a birth certificate—apparently Stamford, Connecticut, did keep these records back then—and we discovered, to our astonishment, that she was actually born in 1898. On December 26.
In other words: It’s all a mess. And Italy certainly wasn’t any better in 1896, at least not as far as record keeping is concerned. So it’s understandable that Anthony Pierro might be confused about his own birthday. His brother and nephew believed he was born on February 15, 1896. Other researchers have claimed it was February 12, or 17, or 22 of that year. No one, though, disputes that he was born Antonio Pierro in Forenza, Italy, in February, 1896.
Italy had only become a unified nation in 1873; though it had a glorious distant past, in 1896 it was, like the United States, a largely rural, agricultural country with pronounced regional divisions. It was a center of the arts, of course; the same month that Antonio Pierro was born in Forenza, Giacomo Puccini premiered his grand opera La Bohème at the Teatro Regio in Turin. But Turin was a different Italy than Forenza. It was industrial, cosmopolitan, rich. In Italy, it was the exception. Forenza—rural, agricultural, poor—was the rule. It was also, like thousands of other poor towns throughout Italy and the rest of southern and eastern Europe, increasingly sending its own off to America. One of them was Antonio Pierro’s father, Rocco. Or, as his son always said the name, even when he was well over a century old: “Rrrrocco!”
The Last of the Doughboys Page 2