The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  One night, Empey offers some newly captured German prisoners a drink, and is surprised when one responds, “Thank you, sir, the rum is excellent and I appreciate it, also your kindness.” They strike up a conversation: “He told me his name was Carl Schmidt, of the 66th Bavarian Light infantry,” Empey recounts. “That he had lived six years in New York (knew the city better than I did), had been to Coney Island and many of our ball games. He was a regular fan. I couldn’t make him believe that Hans Wagner wasn’t the best ballplayer in the world.” Later, after an escort comes to take the prisoners to the rear, Empey confesses: “I liked that prisoner, he was a fine fellow and had an Iron Cross, too. I advised him to keep it out of sight, or some Tommy would be sending it home to his girl in Blighty as a souvenir.”

  It’s not all horror and drudgery and moral dilemmas. Empey writes entire chapters on the things soldiers do when they aren’t dodging bullets and artillery and poison gas, or being sent on suicidal missions, or trying not to become too fond of enemy prisoners. He discusses, at some length, tea and rum, cards and dice, inspection and drills and church services and parades, a musical play he and some friends write and perform for their fellow troops at a makeshift theater “situated corner of Sand Bag Terrace and Ammo Street.” They even, somehow, manage to print up elaborate playbills.

  But in war, even tales that begin happily often end in tragedy. At one point, after a particularly long and hazardous spell in the trenches, Empey’s unit is relieved and sent back behind the lines; then, to his great surprise and joy, he and forty other men are awarded leave time in England. They climb aboard trucks and travel overland for a couple of hours until they reach a rail station, where they wait for the train that will take them to the port of departure. When it arrives, five hours late, they are loaded onto boxcars, which take two days to reach the port. Before they can board their ship, though, they are stopped by an officer, who informs them that all leave has been canceled, and that they will have to get right back in those boxcars and return whence they came. “Beastly rotten, I know,” he says by way of consolation. “If you had been three hours earlier you would have gotten away.”

  Empey and the others, it seems, are needed for an attack that’s about to begin. “Seventeen of the forty-one will never get another chance to go on leave,” he tells us. “They were killed in the attack.”

  That, though, is only the beginning of this awful tale. For in the attack, Empey and his machine gun company charge across No Man’s Land and occupy a German trench that has already been shelled heavily. “I never saw such a mess in my life,” he reports:

  . . . bunches of twisted barbed wire lying about, shell-holes everywhere, trench all bashed in, parapets gone, and dead bodies, why, that ditch was full of them, theirs and ours. . . . Some were mangled horribly from our shell fire, while others were wholly or partly buried in the mud, the result of shell explosions caving in the wall of the trench. One dead German was lying on his back, with a rifle sticking straight up in the air, the bayonet of which was buried to the hilt in his chest. Across his feet lay a dead English soldier with a bullet hole in his forehead. This Tommy must have been killed just as he ran his bayonet through the German. . . .

  At one point, just in the entrance to a communication trench, was a stretcher. On this stretcher a German was lying with a white bandage around his knee, near to him lay one of the stretcher-bearers, the red cross on his arm covered with mud and his helmet filled with blood and brains. Close by, sitting up against the wall of the trench, with head resting on his chest, was the other stretcher-bearer. He seemed to be alive, the posture was so natural and easy, but when I got closer, I could see a large, jagged hole in his temple. The three must have been killed by the same shell-burst.

  I have only rarely come across a description of combat as graphic as this one. And I’ve never read anything like it from this period, a time when a certain genteel sensibility still reigned over the American consciousness. But Empey just shatters that sensibility; or at least seems entirely unaware of its existence. This passage, like many others in Over the Top, is more modern, in that sense, than most of what would be written on the subject for thirty or forty years afterward.

  This, though, is not even Empey’s most impressive accomplishment; that would have to be the fact that throughout the book, without diluting or minimizing the horror of what he sees and experiences, he manages to maintain a sense of humor and a tone just light enough to keep you from putting his book down and pouring yourself a stiff drink. To tell you the truth, I have no idea how he does it; but he does, even while telling this particular story. Taking the trench was easy, he reports, but holding it is another matter; three of his men are killed just trying to set up their machine gun. “One of the legs of the tripod was resting on the chest of a half-buried body,” he recounts. And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, he makes a discovery:

  Three or four feet down the trench, about three feet from the ground, a foot was protruding from the earth; we knew it was a German by the black leather boot. One of our crew used that foot to hang extra bandoliers of ammunition on. This man always was a handy fellow; made use of little points that the ordinary person would overlook.

  Despite being shelled and shot at throughout six straight days—all the while crouching among the unburied dead, watching “their faces become swollen and discolored,” while “the stench was fierce”—Empey managed to develop a strange fixation:

  What got on my nerves the most was that foot sticking out of the dirt. It seemed to me, at night, in the moonlight, to be trying to twist around. Several times this impression was so strong that I went to it and grasped it in both hands, to see if I could feel a movement.

  I told this to the man who had used it for a hat-rack just before I lay down for a little nap. . . . When I woke up the foot was gone. He had cut it off with our chain saw out of the spare parts’ box, and had plastered the stump over with mud.

  During the next two or three days, before we were relieved, I missed that foot dreadfully, seemed as if I had suddenly lost a chum.

  Empey’s sense of humor comes in particularly handy when he reflects on the subject of military discipline. It was, to say the least, draconian; Jefferson Davis once famously declared that the poorest use of a soldier is to shoot him, but a half century later, the British Army still hadn’t caught up with the late Confederate president. If you need another reminder of how much things have changed since World War I, consider this: Men could be, and often were, shot by their own for any number of offenses, including, but not limited to, by Empey’s account, “desertion, cowardice, mutiny, giving information to the enemy, destroying or willfully wasting ammunition, looting, rape, robbing the dead, forcing a safeguard, striking a superior, etc.” (In one notorious instance that came to light after the war, a cat, which had taken to scurrying back and forth between the lines in search of food, was shot as a spy by the French after some German soldiers strapped a collar, bearing a note with greetings in pidgin French, around its neck.)

  And if you weren’t put in front of a firing squad, you might well have ended up wishing you had been. As Empey tells us, in cases where “there is a doubt as to the willful guilt of a man who has committed an offence punishable by death”—say, if he wasted ammunition by accident, perhaps due to poor aim—he was often sentenced, instead, to spend sixty-four days in a front-line trench, ineligible for relief, and bound “to engage in all raids, working parties in No Man’s Land, and every hazardous undertaking that comes along. If you live through the sixty-four days,” Empey says, “you are indeed lucky.” And for “repeated minor offences,” one could draw what was officially known as “Field Punishment No. 1,” for which, Empey recounts, “a man is spread eagled on a limber wheel, two hours a day, for twenty-one days”—and also, in what seems like an afterthought, restricted to a diet of water, hard biscuits, and something called “bully beef.” The unofficial term for Field Punishment No. 1 was “crucifixion,” and the British, it seems, dol
ed it out about as liberally as the Romans had.

  Executions were shockingly common, too, especially for the crime of “cowardice,” whose broad definition embraced everything from hesitating before going “over the top”—that is, climbing up out of a trench and charging into No Man’s Land—to what, in the next war, would come to be regarded as “shell shock.” In the 1980s, what had once been a capital offense was officially reclassified as posttraumatic stress disorder; but it wasn’t until 2006 that the British Army began apologizing to the descendants of soldiers executed for a transgression that is now universally recognized as a psychiatric syndrome.

  That was nine decades too late for Arthur Guy Empey, who was, as he writes, once awakened at 2:00 a.m. by a regimental sergeant major, with orders for the sleeping man to get dressed and equipped and, without a word, follow him out into the rainy night. Empey is led to a barn and told to sit there in silence. There are men there already, sitting in the darkness, and while they wait quietly, more are led in, until there are a dozen of them in all, none of whom Empey recognizes. They are then led out and marched for an hour until they find themselves in a courtyard, standing before four stacks of rifles. “Men, you are here on a very solemn duty,” an officer tells them. “You have been selected as a firing squad for the execution of a soldier, who, having been found guilty of a grievous crime against King and Country, has been regularly and duly tried and sentenced to be shot at 3:28 a.m. this date.” The officer informs the firing squad that one of the twelve rifles has a blank cartridge in it, but that “every man is expected to do his duty and fire to kill.”

  “My heart was of lead and my knees shook,” Empey confesses. “After standing at ‘Attention’ for what seemed like a week, though in reality it could not have been over five minutes,” the men hear whispers and footsteps, and then, against a far wall, Empey spots “a dark form with a white square pinned on its breast. We were supposed to aim at this square.” Empey, though, decides to aim at a white spot on the wall, instead. When he fires, he tells us, “I could see the splinters fly. Someone else had received the rifle containing the blank cartridge, but my mind was at ease, there was no blood of a Tommy on my hands.” When it is all over, the men are ordered to “return, alone, to your respective companies, and remember, no talking about this affair, or else it will go hard with the guilty ones.”

  “We needed no urging to get away,” Empey says. He never learns the dead man’s name, nor the offense for which he was sentenced to die; and, as a compassionate gesture, the army that executed the unfortunate soldier will tell his family even less. “In the public casualty lists,” Empey tells us, “his name will appear under the caption ‘Accidentally Killed,’ or ‘Died.’”

  And perhaps, in the end, he wasn’t much worse off than his friends still in the trenches; odds were good they would get shot, too, or shelled, or gassed, or find some other way to die before they could make it back home. In one of the finest memoirs of that war, Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That (first published in 1929), almost every fellow soldier Graves mentions somewhere—officers and enlisted men, aristocrats and commoners, in scores of anecdotes that occupy pages or merely half a sentence—is, in the end, killed at the front. It is so common an experience, really, that at a certain point it starts to feel like Graves only mentions their deaths as a way to punctuate the end of a sentence; you get the sense that everyone who served in the trenches long enough arrived at the understanding that he would probably not live to see the war’s end. Graves, a lieutenant in the British Army, barely did himself; he was wounded so badly at the Somme that he was not expected to live, and his colonel wrote his parents and told them he had died. It was only after his aunt accidentally came across him while visiting someone else at the hospital where he was recovering that Graves’s family discovered the error.

  The Somme lasted four months and claimed more than a million casualties. Nearly twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on the first day alone, their army’s worst day in history. The battle had been planned by the Allies for months, and the buildup was massive. Empey describes a “never-ending stream of men, supplies, ammunition and guns pouring into the British lines.” When massive howitzers would pass, he writes, “a flush of pride would mount to my face, because I could plainly read on the name plate, ‘Made in the U.S.A.,’ and I would remember that if I wore a name plate it would also read, ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ Then I would stop to think how thin and straggly that mighty stream would be if all the ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ parts of it were withdrawn.”

  Ten hours before the battle promptly commenced, at 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, Empey and nineteen other men volunteered for a nighttime mission: They were to sneak across No Man’s Land, raid an enemy trench at a certain point in their front line, snatch up a couple of German soldiers, and bring them back to British lines, where the Germans would be interrogated for intelligence purposes. Specifically, the British command hoped to learn the precise location of a couple of German machine guns that British artillery had failed to silence. HQ presented it as a straightforward exercise, but Empey wasn’t so sure: “I had a funny sinking sensation in my stomach, and my tin hat felt as if it weighed about a ton,” he tells us. His commander’s instructions didn’t do much to raise his spirits:

  “Take off your identification disks, strip your uniforms of all numerals, insignia, etc., leave your papers with your captains, because I don’t want the Boches to know what regiments are against them . . . and I don’t want any of you to be taken alive. What I want is two prisoners and if I get them I have a way which will make them divulge all necessary information as to their guns. You have your choice of two weapons—you may carry your ‘persuaders’ or your knuckle knives.” . . .

  A persuader is Tommy’s nickname for a club. . . . It is about two feet long, thin at one end and very thick at the other. The thick end is studded with sharp steel spikes, while through the center of the club there is a nine-inch bar, to give it weight and balance. When you get a prisoner all you have to do is just stick this club up in front of him, and believe me, the prisoner’s patriotism for Deutschland ueber Alles fades away and he very willingly obeys the orders of his captor. If, however, the prisoner gets high-toned and refuses to follow you, simply “persuade” him by first removing his tin hat, and then—well, the use of the lead weight in the persuader is demonstrated, and Tommy looks for another prisoner.

  The knuckle knife is a dagger affair, the blade of which is about eight inches long with a heavy steel guard over the grip. This guard is studded with steel projections. At night in a trench, which is only about three to four feet wide, it makes a very handy weapon. One punch in the face generally shatters a man’s jaw and you can get him with the knife as he goes down.

  Then we had what we called our “come-alongs.” These are strands of barbed wire about three feet long, made into a noose at one end; at the other end, the barbs are cut off and Tommy slips his wrist through a loop to get a good grip on the wire. If the prisoner wants to argue the point, why just place the large loop around his neck and no matter if Tommy wishes to return to his trenches at the walk, trot or gallop, Fritz is perfectly agreeable to maintain Tommy’s rate of speed.

  I cannot even imagine the reaction of the typical American who read these words in the summer or fall of 1917; certainly, persuaders, knuckle knives, and come-alongs were never featured on the British fundraising and propaganda posters that somehow, despite the official American posture of neutrality, managed to make their way onto walls throughout the United States. It was a bloody war, to be sure, but a civilized one, conducted under the time-honored codes of chivalry—wasn’t it?

  Back in the trenches, Empey and his fellow volunteers, equipped additionally with four hand grenades apiece (“these to be used only in case of emergency”), their hands and faces blackened to help conceal them in the light of German flares, or “star shells” (“In a trench raid there is quite sufficient reason for your face to be pale. If you don’t believe me,
try it just once”), go over the top and slowly crawl through No Man’s Land, communicating with each other through a series of coded taps. After about a half hour, they arrive at the Germans’ front trenches, or, more accurately, at the barbed wire just in front of them. “Then,” Empey says, “the fun began.”

  I was scared stiff as it is ticklish work cutting your way through wire when about thirty feet in front of you there is a line of Boches looking out into No Man’s Land with their rifles lying across the parapet, straining every sense to see or hear what is going on in No Man’s Land. . . . There is only one way to cut a barbed wire without noise and through costly experience Tommy has become expert at doing this. You must grasp the wire about two inches from the stake in your right hand and cut between the stake and your hand. . . .

  During the intervals of falling star shells we carried on with our wire cutting until at last we succeeded in getting through the German barbed wire. At this point we were only ten feet from the German trenches. If we were discovered, we were like rats in a trap. Our way out was cut off unless we ran along the wire to the narrow lane we had cut through. With our hearts in our mouths we waited for the three-tap signal to rush the German trench. Three taps had gotten about halfway down the line when suddenly about ten to twenty German star shells were fired all along the trench and landed in the barbed wire in rear of us, turning night into day and silhouetting us against the wall of light made by the flares. In the glaring light we were confronted by the following unpleasant scene.