A tad artless, to be sure, but almost subtle compared to Gus Kahn and Egbert Van Alstyne’s “What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?”:
What are you going to do for Uncle Sammy?
What are you going to do to help the boys?
If you need to stay at home while they’re fighting o’er the foam,
The least that you can do is buy a Liberty bond or two.
If you want to be a sympathetic miser,
The kind that only lends a lot of noise,
You’re no better than the one who loves the Kaiser—
So, what are you going to do to help the boys?
The cover art for that sheet music actually says, in big red letters: “Buy a Liberty Bond!” Not in lieu of this song, of course. But still.
To its credit, though, for every musical guilt-trip it laid on the public, Tin Pan Alley produced dozens of wonderful pieces of light verse that people sang with pleasure for decades to come, like Charles McCarron and Carey Morgan’s “The Russians Were Rushin’, the Yanks Started Yankin’”:
The Russians were rushin’ the Prussians,
The Prussians were crushin’ the Russians.
The Balkans were balkin’ and Turkey was squawkin’,
Rasputin disputin’ and Italy scootin’.
The Boches all bulled Bolshevikis,
The British were skittish at sea.
But the good Lord I’m thankin’, the Yanks started yankin’,
And yanked Kaiser Bill up a tree.
And then there was the extremely popular song that posed, in its title, a question to the entire nation—a question that was both so catchy and so pertinent that long after the war ended, it lingered in the national consciousness: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?” They’ll never want to see a rake or plow / And who the deuce can parley-vous a cow? asked lyricists Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis.
The answers, as America would soon learn: Nobody. And ya ain’t.
With so many songs—so many clever songs, catchy songs, funny or heartbreaking or offensive or ageless songs—it’s strange to think that one of my favorite World War I songs is really none of those things. I heard it on wax long before I ever found a copy of the sheet music; it’s a beautiful-looking disk, with a big Victor label in deep bold blue, and perfect, shimmering grooves, as if it had never been played before I stumbled upon it. It was recorded in 1918 by a Brooklyn-born baritone named Reinald Werrenrath. Like so many recording artists of that era, Werrenrath is now completely forgotten, but he had a good career once upon a time in music halls and studios. Like most of his colleagues, he turned his attention to patriotic fare during the war years; I own another Victor blue-label of him singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on one side and “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on the other.
The first few times I listened to “The Americans Come!” (subtitled “An Episode in France in Year 1918”), I had no idea just what it was supposed to be. It’s an unusual song, sort of an aria in the form of a father and son talking to each other, with Werrenrath singing both parts (and not altering his voice a bit as he switches back and forth). Thanks to the phenomenon of copyright expiration, I offer it to you here in full:
[Blind Frenchman speaks to son:]
What is the cheering, my little one?
Oh! That my blinded eyes could see!
Hasten, my boy, to the window run,
And see what the noise in the street may be.
I hear the drums and the marching feet;
Look and see what it’s all about!
Who can it be that our people greet
With cheer and laughter and joyous shout?
[Son:]
There are men, my father, brown and strong,
And they carry a banner of wondrous hue,
With a mighty tread they swing along
Now I see white stars on a field of blue!
[Father:]
You say that you see white stars on blue?
Look, are there stripes of red and white?
It must be, yes it must be true!
Oh, dear God, if I had my sight!
Hasten, son, fling the window wide;
Let me kiss the staff our flag swings from
And salute the Stars and Stripes with pride,
For, God be praised, The Americans come!
The song’s composer and lyricist was a musician of some repute named Fay Foster. Her entry in the Biographical Cyclopedia of American Women, published in 1924, calls “The Americans Come!” “her greatest contribution,” “the great rallying song of the last Liberty Loan Drive,” a “stirring song, highly eulogized by Theodore Roosevelt and General Pershing. . . . When [famed Irish tenor] John McCormack entertained the heroes of the Château-Thierry, this song was the favorite, and he rendered it with the greatest feeling.”
I don’t know if any of that is true; to be sure, the song itself has an element of the fantastic. In France in the year 1918, fresh, unscathed, well-fed American troops were less likely to be greeted with cheer and laughter and joyous shout than with mute stares and hands too weak to clap. Many in the crowd—if there even was a crowd—must have been thinking about their own beautiful boys, brown and strong, who marched away four years earlier and were never seen again. “God be praised”? Maybe. “Where have you been?” Definitely. The soldiers at Château-Thierry would have known as much, too.
But really, none of that mattered. Whether they actually liked it or not, “The Americans Come!” wasn’t written for the men, brown and strong, at Château-Thierry. In fact, it was written for pretty much everyone but them.
In those days, songwriters were often journalists as well as entertainers. And like so many newspapermen back then, the men and women of Tin Pan Alley, in reporting the news—or at least the news as they wished to report it—actually shaped it. And that was just to start. What they really did, in the end, was create their own reality. Fifteen years before Hollywood would successfully begin doing the same thing, songwriters told Americans who Americans were, what they were like as a people, and what kind of country they lived in—all in the context of this war they’d been swept into. And they did it so well that almost everyone else—mothers, wives, and sweethearts; John J. Pershing and Theodore Roosevelt; even the boys Over There—played along, no matter what they really believed as they lay in bed at night, hoping for sleep. They embraced the fantasy, forced themselves to ignore those prickling suspicions that it wasn’t real, and to believe that every doughboy had someone—a mother, wife, sweetheart, child, or all of the above—who was sad to see him go, who pined for him, prayed for him, sent him a letter every day, awaited his safe return; that those men who couldn’t fight gave all they had to give, and then found a way to give even more; that mothers were all proud to send their sons off to war, that wives were all bereft but making do, that sweethearts all stayed true, that children all remembered daddy every day; that German Kultur was no match for American grit, that the Hun was but a grim clown easily licked by simple country boys and savvy street urchins, that doughboys were going to march right into Berlin, grab the Kaiser by the ear, and make the man pay in all kinds of devilish ways; and that it would all be over soon, that the boys would be right back and none the worse for wear, that we’d all have a splendid time and even go to a Yankee-Doodle Wedding or two, that everything would be just as it had been.
So despite its many and sometimes grievous sins—I’ll get to those a bit later—I have to give Tin Pan Alley its due. As much as bullets and shells, rifles and bayonets, barbed wire and big guns, aeroplanes and mustard gas, trenches and U-boats—as much as anything, really, except the men and women who fought it—songs were World War I. Don’t get me wrong: I am certain that songwriters and publishers always had at least one eye on the dollars. But I think they also recognized that the news was handing them a rare opportunity to do well by doing good, and they didn’t want to miss it. I have to believe that’s why more songs were written abou
t the First World War than about any other event in history.
Except Christmas.
Maybe.
5
The People Behind the Battle
HOW DO I PUT THIS? If you spend enough time around the, uh, superannuated, you come to recognize certain portents that don’t bode well for their continued longevity. For instance, a fall followed by a broken hip is usually bad news; otherwise-relatively-active men and women are suddenly rendered bedridden, and that kind of state can kill you any number of ways. The need for surgery is an ill omen; folks that age rarely come through a serious operation just fine. In fact, any kind of major change or minor illness can prove calamitous to the very elderly. (I don’t deal with them particularly well, either.)
I say all this by way of explaining why I was so nervous during the three-hour drive up the western shore of Lake Michigan from Milwaukee to Kewaunee, Wisconsin, to meet 104-year-old Arthur Fiala. It was September 6, 2003, just two weeks since I had first made his acquaintance over the telephone, but in that short time the following things had happened: His wife of sixty-seven years suddenly died; he moved out of the farmhouse he had lived in for fifty-four years and into a local nursing home; and he contracted pneumonia. I felt like I was racing the grim reaper, and I didn’t like my odds.
I’d found Mr. Fiala through both the French List and Google, but if I hadn’t called his house exactly when I had, I might never have gotten to talk to him at all. As it happened, his granddaughter, Deb, was visiting that morning, and Deb was the only person who ever answered the phone in that house; Art Fiala and his wife, Adeline, were both too deaf to use it anymore. I got to talk to him a bit that morning anyway, then immediately booked tickets to Wisconsin.
To get to Kewaunee, I drove a couple of hours north to Green Bay (stopping in Sheboygan for a breakfast bratwurst), turned right on Route 29 (also known as the World War I Veterans Memorial Highway), and drove about thirty miles, past hamlets with names like Poland, Pilsen, and Krok (and a billboard for a bison farm named the Spunky Buffalo), until I reached the water: Lake Michigan. I know it’s a lake, but in Kewaunee, it might as well be the ocean. The nearest landfall, in northern Michigan, is more than fifty miles east, well beyond the horizon. Kewaunee even has its own lighthouse, which from a distance looks like a little dollhouse sitting atop a pier. The town itself is quaint enough, possessed of an old-country feel; I soon learned that just about everyone in it was of Czech descent. Most of them couldn’t believe I had no idea what a kolache was. (In case you’re not Czech: It’s a type of pastry.)
Arthur Fiala had taken up residence in a low, nondescript modern brick building on the outskirts of town. I met Deb in the lobby and followed her to her grandfather’s room. The man didn’t look good, lying there in a plaid shirt and gray chinos and enormous black eyeglasses, an oxygen hose hooked up to his nose. He seemed to be shrinking, withering within his own clothing. I soon discovered, though, that he was quite spunky—much more so, I imagined, than those ill-fated buffalo.
“I was out of a job, and I made up my mind, I decided to join the Army,” he asserted before I had a chance to ask him any questions. Sick as he was, he remembered why I’d come and wanted to get right to it.
He was born in Kewaunee on February 17, 1899 (at least he thought so; the 1900 census says it was 1898). According to tradition, the family name was originally spelled “Fijala,” and Arthur’s father, Charlie, had been born somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, during the middle passage of their immigration from what is now the Czech Republic. Charlie himself had told the census taker in 1900 that he’d been born in America in 1869, and listed his parents’ birthplace as Bohemia. (His son later revealed that Charlie had lied about where he’d been born, afraid his employer, the post office, might fire him if they knew the truth.) Arthur’s mother, Mary, was born in Wisconsin in 1872; her father was a German immigrant, her mother, depending upon the census, born in either Wisconsin or Bohemia.
Wherever he was born, Charles Fiala grew up in Kewaunee and worked there all his life. “When my dad got married, he was lighting streetlamps in Kewaunee for fifteen dollars a month,” his son told me. “And then he got a job delivering groceries. Then he took an exam for a mail carrier. Rural. And he passed that, and he spent the next thirty years as a mail carrier.”
“How did he get around?” I asked. “Did he have a horse and carriage?”
“Yeah,” he said, “when he got that job, he had to buy a couple horses, a buggy, a cutter [a type of sleigh], and feed his animals, and feed our family, all in one.”
Charlie’s youngest child, Arthur, went through all of his schooling right there in Kewaunee. “Did you work also while you were in school?” I asked him.
“Not that I know of,” he replied.
“So, then, you were telling me that you were looking for a job; this is how you came to go into the Army?”
“Listen,” he said, “I got something to tell you first. I was in high school. And the principal was a dirty devil. And he asked me a question in algebra one day, and I didn’t know it. He said to me, ‘Art, if I were you I would pick up your books and go home and help your father earn a living.’” And he did. At least, he went home and never returned to school. He was fifteen or sixteen at the time, and wasn’t too terribly upset about it. To hear him tell it, he had been granted parole.
“A neighbor of mine,” he told me, “was a captain on a boat, and he offered me a job on the boat. And I went from Kewaunee to Milwaukee in a boat. And it was rough, and I was seasick the whole trip. When I got to Milwaukee, I jumped off the boat and went to Chicago. I had some relatives down there. And there I worked for a while. All I could tell, I don’t. I can’t tell you all the damn stories.”
But he told me quite a few of them: How he left Chicago and headed up north, back to Wisconsin with a buddy, where they lived in a farmer’s granary for a while and trapped. Eventually he made his way to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he got work as an inspector at a Nash automobile plant—a good job, especially for a teenaged high school dropout. A much-coveted job, apparently. “One day a guy came up to me,” he recalled more than eighty-five years later, “and he said, ‘Don’t come to work tomorrow.’ He said, ‘There’s nobody going to come tomorrow.’ And I stayed home.” The fellow, he later learned, had been jealous of young Fiala’s position, and had told the foreman that day that Art was actually trying to foment a strike. “And when I came back to work the next morning,” he said, “the foreman kicked me out of the plant. I didn’t have enough sense to talk up.”
And he added: “That’s when I joined the Army.”
We spend so much time these days celebrating our men and women in service as selfless heroes—which, often, they are—that we fail to consider the fact that many of them joined up not, primarily, out of a sense of duty, but because it made good economic sense. If you can’t find other work, the Army offers you a steady paycheck, free room and board, medical and dental care, transportation, and even a natty wardrobe. It also offers the promise of travel and adventure. Sure, these perks all come with the chance that you may be killed or maimed, but the possibility of being shot to death is better than the certainty of starving to death. Besides, those threats always seem remote at the enlistment center.
None of that, though, has any bearing on the fact that Private Fiala served honorably in France. Eighty years later, that service was recognized with the Legion of Honor. Mr. Fiala earned that medal. It doesn’t matter that he enlisted, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, because he needed the work. As far as he was concerned, that fact only made his story more interesting; perhaps that’s why he led off with it.
He told me he went to a recruitment center in Green Bay; they must have sent him to Columbus Barracks, Ohio, because that’s where his discharge papers say he officially enlisted, on February 23, 1918. “Now, hear,” he said. “When I enlisted, I didn’t tell the recruiter what branch of service I wanted to get into. I said, ‘That’s up to you.’ I said, ‘G
et me into an outfit that goes over to France quick.’ And he put me into an engineer outfit, the 20th Engineers. And we had two weeks’ training . . . that was it.”
They were in a hurry. The 20th Engineers was a special unit; though technically a regiment, it was not attached to any division, and in fact, by the end of the war, it comprised some thirty thousand soldiers, more than most divisions. A great many of them—perhaps a majority—were lumberjacks. The 20th was charged, primarily, with providing the AEF with the timber it needed. And it needed a lot. Urgently. According to Alfred H. Davies, who wrote and published Twentieth Engineers, France, 1917–1918–1919 shortly after the war, one of General Pershing’s first cables from France called for lumbermen, saying that to send over infantry divisions before a good timber operation could be established would be fruitless. “If an army of the size contemplated was to be put at the front,” wrote regimental chaplain Captain Howard Y. Williams in a foreword, “docks must be built; railroads laid; barracks, warehouses, hospitals, bakeries, refrigerator plants, and power plants provided; and trench timbers, dug-outs, and barb-wire stakes furnished. The basic factor in all these necessities was lumber and the Twentieth Engineers, detailed to this task, more than met their tremendous responsibility.”
The Last of the Doughboys Page 13