The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “I was born in Lebanon, Connecticut,” he told me at the beginning of our conversation that first day. “In a small town in which my grandfather Moffitt had retired from his manufacturing business in Providence in eighteen hundred and sixty-nine. My father was then nine years old. And across the road, a little bit away from ours, was another farm by the name of Cod, and that was my mother’s family. And my father married the daughter of the Cods.”

  “And what day were you born?” I asked him.

  “March sixth,” he replied.

  “And the year?”

  “Eighteen ninety-seven.” He must have sensed how odd that number struck me, sitting there in 2003, because at one point, he said: “You know, you hear about long-time memory and short-time memory. My long-time memory is good. I can remember names from back when I was in high school, and where I worked and who I visited; and I can’t remember what happened last week, maybe, or last year. Your short memory, at my age, gets weak. But my long-time memory is good. Yes, I can remember lots of things.”

  Toward the end of that day, after the strangeness had worn off, he conceded that perhaps he had fared better than many. “A lot of people do not retain their memory or their mind as they age,” he stated. “As you see, I have no problem in this. And my mind seems to be clear, and I keep up with things and world news.

  “And I read the paper,” he added, matter-of-factly.

  J. Laurence Moffitt: He never used his first name, Jesse. Years later, rooting around in old census records, I learned that he had been named for his paternal grandfather. The elder Jesse Moffitt had been born in Connecticut in 1828, and by 1850 was married—his wife, Maria, was a couple of years older—and living in Cumberland, Rhode Island, working as a hired hand on a farm owned by an elderly widow named Parmelia Peck. (Don’t you just love those old names?) The 1870 census counts him twice—once in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he is listed as being a machinist; and once in Lebanon, Connecticut, where he is noted as a farmer, with a net worth of $10,000. His farm, the record shows, was worth $6,000; Parmelia Peck’s had only been valued at $1,000. In just two decades, Jesse Moffitt had done quite well for himself, had achieved the American Dream, thanks, no doubt, to New England thriftiness, a lot of elbow grease, and perhaps a few other nineteenth-century values that we now think of as timeworn clichés and yet miss terribly.

  By 1900, Jesse’s son Edward was living and farming in the land of the Cods. He and his wife, Nellie, had four children, the youngest of whom, a three-year-old boy, had been named for Edward’s father. One hundred and three years later, that little boy, Jesse—though from now on we’ll call him Laurence, as he preferred—told me that his earliest memory was “being out in our yard and seeing my grandfather Moffitt, with a long white beard, in the yard of the barn, across the road from our house.” The old man still lived and farmed there, next door to his son’s in-laws, the Cods. Except they weren’t; as I also discovered while searching through those census records, they were, in fact, the “Cards.” This was Laurence Moffitt’s old Connecticut accent. Good luck finding anyone there who still speaks that way.

  Jesse Moffitt may have set himself up as a gentleman farmer in 1869, but his grandson and namesake grew up on a working farm, and he didn’t much care for it. “What kind of farm was it?” I asked him in July, 2003.

  “Milk and vegetables,” he said. “Dairy. We had about fifteen cows. And then there was, always, vegetables, carrots and onions and turnips that my father harvested and took into Willimantic and sold. And the milk was in cans and picked up daily by some organization . . . and of course we had our own milk.”

  “Did you work on the farm when you were a boy?”

  “I did, exactly, and hated it. I hoed and weeded rows of carrots and onions, turnips . . . it was no fun being on your knees all day long and pulling weeds.”

  He liked school much better—because it wasn’t the farm, and because, despite the fact that it was almost as rural and remote as the farm, he managed to see there a bit more of the world, the new. “In the country,” he recalled, “one-room country schoolhouse, whenever there was a car heard coming, kids were allowed to run to the window and watch the car go by.”

  As he said, he went into Willimantic, a town of some size (at least compared to Lebanon), for high school; then, after graduation in 1914, off to Hartford, where he worked in insurance. He was still there in early 1917, and might never have left were it not for a growing sense that his country was about to be drawn into the war that was tearing through much of the rest of the world.

  Eighty-six years later, he explained: “Germany had continued to sink ships, and including the Lusitania, which was a British ship. . . . And on it, there were two hundred Americans on it. And our president, President Woodrow Wilson, registered his complaint to the Kaiser, to Germany. And he got some response, but the sinking of ships by submarines continued through 1916 and ’17, so much so that the National Guard troops were what was called ‘called out.’ And obviously there was news of what Germany had been doing to us, and aroused the Americans. So the National Guard, the National Guard of Connecticut, and of other states, were called out. And when they were is when I joined the National Guard. Now I left my job in the insurance company and went and joined the National Guard. And then we were formed into a division, and Connecticut was the 102nd Infantry. From all of the companies, the National Guard companies in Connecticut, were formed into the 102nd Infantry.”

  “So you joined up because you knew that America was going to go to war,” I said, “and they needed soldiers?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he replied. “And when I went home and told my mother I joined the Army, after she got over the shock, she said ‘Well, I’m thankful you didn’t join the Navy.’ Because at that time it looked like it was to be a naval war. Well, she was wrong.”

  There were actually 139 Americans on the Lusitania, 128 of whom went down with the ship on May 7, 1915. Not quite 200, but plenty; and despite certain mitigating circumstances—that Germany had warned Americans against booking passage on the ship, had gone so far as to take out ads in American newspapers warning that they might well sink it, that “travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain and her allies do so at their own risk” because, Germany rightfully suspected, passenger ships like the Lusitania were sometimes being used, secretly and against the laws of war, to ferry arms and ammunition through U-boat-infested waters—Americans were outraged. Many called for war with Germany.

  Many others, though, called for restraint—most importantly among them, President Wilson. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” he said. “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” Instead, working through diplomatic channels, he secured promises that Germany would ease up on its campaign of submarine warfare.

  Which it did, for more than a year; some historians have argued that doing so cost it the war. By early 1917, the Allied blockade, unchecked by German U-boats, had brought Germany close to starvation. Desperate, the country’s leaders concluded they had no choice but to do what they could to curtail the Allies’ advantage. So if American merchant ships, sailing under flags of neutrality, were going to continue supplying the Allies with the food and arms Germany no longer had access to, Germany decided it would have to start sinking those ships, even though they knew it could mean war with America.

  Which it did, especially once British intelligence shared with Washington a cable it had intercepted from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, intended for Germany’s ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, instructing the latter to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for Mexico to enter the war on Germany’s side, in exchange for the return to Mexico of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona once victory was secured. That note—now remembered, with great notoriety, as the Zimmermann Telegram—was a response to the growing understanding that Germany and America would soon be at war with on
e another. So was Laurence Moffitt’s enlistment, right around his twentieth birthday, in the Connecticut National Guard. Two months later, war having been declared, the Connecticut National Guard was nationalized and converted to the 102nd Infantry Regiment of the 26th Division, the “Yankee Division.” Mr. Moffitt was then a private. “Or as we used to call it,” he told me, “a ‘buck private.’”

  The Yankee Division, or “YD” as it was known by those who served in it, arrived in France on October 9, 1917. With them was one Frank P. Sibley, a reporter for the Boston Globe. When the division was mobilized, the Globe, the largest daily newspaper in New England, hit upon the idea of sending a reporter along just to cover its actions. Sibley had gone to the Mexican border with Massachusetts National Guard troops the previous year, and he was, you might say, a real booster. So eager was he to go overseas with the division that when the War Department denied him accreditation—the Globe’s request was apparently so novel that no one in Washington knew what to make of it—Sibley went anyway, without any credentials at all. “My mission,” he writes in his 1919 memoir, With the Yankee Division in France, was “to keep the families at home informed of the experiences of their boys in France. The Boston Globe was thoroughly protected by news services, by special correspondents, and by every obtainable agent, as to the progress of the war as a whole. I was to write only what was happening to the New England boys.” It’s safe to say that Sibley actually considered himself one of the troops, referring to them, unfailingly, as “we” rather than “they.” He even claimed credit for coining the name “Yankee Division.”

  And he advocated for the YD tirelessly. He surely felt they needed it; according to Sibley, the YD was probably the most embattled, underappreciated, and maligned outfit in all of the American Expeditionary Forces. “The Twenty-Sixth . . . did not stand well with the American higher command,” Sibley writes. For example, when the YD was pulled out of the Chemin des Dames Sector in March, 1918, he says, “Misgivings were heavy upon us . . . because of what we were sure was mismanagement of us and prejudice against us.”

  Suspect as that sentiment sounds today, Sibley may actually have had it right. And this is where the story gets a bit strange.

  There were a lot of big egos in the AEF, and the big ego at the top of the YD—General Clarence Ransom Edwards—didn’t get along with some of the Army’s other big egos, including the biggest of them all, General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing. Edwards was fifty-eight years old when America entered the war, a West Point graduate and career soldier who had served in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection; his last posting had been as commander of all American troops in the Panama Canal Zone. When Wilson declared war on Germany, Edwards was hastily recalled to the States, promoted to major general, and put in charge of the nascent 26th Division.

  Edwards had a reputation for being sharp-tongued, which may account for his unpopularity. He was also, apparently, pretty full of himself, which probably didn’t help. In his memoirs, Major General William Lassiter, who also served in France and later became commander of all American troops in the Hawaiian Department, called Edwards “the most egocentric person I have ever known. He thought so much and talked so much about himself that his job always became a secondary consideration. . . . He spent his time criticizing all and sundry in the hierarchy above him and making his men feel they were not being given a fair share.”

  Whether Laurence Moffitt, the last surviving member of the YD from World War I, felt this way, I do not know; he certainly never hinted at it. He was, to be sure, extremely proud of the association—for many years after the war, he even had a special license plate on his car, YD29—and, while most of that is probably the pride any soldier feels for his unit, I suspect that some small part of it may be due to a special distinction the YD held during that war, one for which General Edwards was entirely responsible.

  Edwards, you see, decided that he wanted his 26th to be the first full division to serve in France. Trouble was, there were three full Regular Army divisions—the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd—with seniority over his, and Edwards, likely not helped by his reputation, couldn’t seem to secure the orders that would realize his ambition. So, in September, 1917, Edwards just shipped the entire 26th Division, some twenty-five thousand men in all, to France anyway.

  Without orders.

  The Army was not impressed. The French, however, were. Everyone seems to agree that the YD and the people of France fell in love with each other quickly. As the first full US Army division in France, they were a symbol of hope as much as anything else. By the time the YD arrived in France that fall, the French had endured more than three years of fighting on their own soil—thirty-eight months of unstanched hemorrhaging, of dead sons and husbands, of blasted houses and farms, of destroyed villages, of colossal battles, some of them the greatest in history. Yet despite it all, in three years the battle lines had scarcely moved. The Germans had snatched up a fair chunk of France back in August and September of 1914, the first two months of the war, and had managed to hold it ever since. It wasn’t easy, or cheap; the French, under orders to attack constantly, did just that. In the process, they managed to kill many Germans, and to lose just as many of their own. The war was an extremely deadly stalemate. The French, exhausted, depopulated, living in occupied ruins, nevertheless retained their anger and their pride. They swore they would never surrender to the hated Boche. But how could they prevail?

  Then, in the spring of 1917, the news: Millions of Americans would be coming soon. Or eventually, anyway. It took months for them to even start showing up; for many French men and women, the soldiers of the YD were the first physical indication that yes, this really was going to happen, that the war might just end someday. “The vast majority [of French] . . . welcomed the Americans as saviors. They looked on our men as crusaders, who had left their homes to fight for an ideal, as the force which was destined to cause the triumph of right and justice,” writes Emerson Gifford Taylor in New England in France, the definitive history of the YD in World War I, first published in 1920. Taylor, as it happened, was Laurence Moffitt’s captain. “A Yale man,” as Mr. Moffitt recalled. “A good man.” One time, he told me, “I was on what we called kitchen duty, and the only phone in the regiment, our company phone, was on a post in the kitchen. And a call came in for Captain Taylor. . . . So I stepped out of the tent and I yelled to Captain Taylor, ‘Telephone!’ And he very kindly says, ‘You don’t yell to a captain, to an officer. You come up and salute and you give your message.’”

  Captain Taylor had already made a name for himself as a writer of Victorian grippers like A Daughter of Dale and The Upper Hand. Yet if he had a weakness for purple prose, he didn’t overstate the level of hospitality with which the YD were greeted almost everywhere they went in France. Laurence Moffitt told me he often visited French homes when he was Over There. “They had you for dinner?” I asked him.

  “That’s right, they did,” he replied. “They were quite cordial to us.”

  “The women-folk liked the Yankees well,” Taylor writes in New England in France. “How about the girls?” I asked his corporal—he hadn’t stayed a buck private for long—eight decades later.

  “A buddy of mine dated a couple of French girls,” Corporal Moffitt told me. “And I kept in touch with one of them . . . and she wrote beautiful love letters to me . . . and I kept it up by letter for a while after I came home.” Until, that is, he met the woman who would eventually become his wife of seventy-five years; then, he said, “I basically discontinued it.”

  The YD spent their first four months abroad training under the French, and, apparently, learning a great deal. “The Yankees had the sense to appreciate the French officers who formed their mission,” Sibley asserts. “And it was largely because the Division was capable of learning from them that their fine record was made.” Taylor, for his part, credits “the generally rapid and satisfactory progress of the troops” to “the tireless and intelligent assistance of th
e French.” By the first week of February, 1918, they were deemed combat-ready, and put into action in the Chemin des Dames Sector. Among the many French soldiers serving there at around this time was an artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus. Yes, that Alfred Dreyfus. Of L’Affaire.

  Chemin des Dames was a line in the northern Champagne region that had been the site of brutal fighting for several years; in the spring of 1917, when America was just entering the war, the French Army took so many casualties there (due, in large part, to the ineptitude of then commander in chief Robert Nivelle) that it was beset by large-scale mutinies afterward. By February, 1918, though, it was relatively quiet, with both sides mostly taking shelter in underground bunkers and quarries. (The Germans had occupied their defensive positions there for so long that they had actually electrified their bunkers; you can still see their wiring today.) The YD stayed at Chemin des Dames for about six weeks, scratching out impressive graffiti (also still visible) on the subterranean walls; then they were shipped to the Toul Sector, another “safe” area, to further their education. And it was there, in the town of Seicheprey, that they—and by extension, the AEF—had their first major encounter with the German Army.