Captain Williams continues:
It meant work; hard, monotonous, and unrelenting, but never did men respond more nobly. From these first days in the Fall of 1917 when I saw men hitched to wagons and pulling like horses because we had none; through those terrible spring days of 1918 when the Germans were driving on toward Paris and these men scattered from the Pyrenees to the Argonne toiled day and night to make possible our defense; down through the armistice until the last man came home, in all my experience across the seas I never saw more faithful and conscientious effort. Brave deeds abounded in France but equal in spirit to any of them was the persistent devotion to his task, so vitally essential but lacking in personal glory, of many a man in this largest regiment in history.
Brave deeds, though, don’t always spare you the indignity of being forgotten. If not for Private Arthur Fiala, the last surviving veteran of the largest regiment in history, I would never even have heard of the 20th Engineers.
Which seems both odd and understandable. Understandable because you never really hear much about military engineers, unless you’re related to one or happen to live near a place that floods a lot, like the Mississippi River delta; odd because the 20th was so very large, and served throughout France, from the front up in Lorraine down to the Spanish border. And because they were, at the time, considered so important by the AEF’s high command. And because, quite simply, the war could not have been prosecuted without them. “All of the construction in the Service of Supplies were dependent upon lumber,” Davies writes, expanding upon Captain Williams’s introduction. “And the Front Lines required it for dugouts, trench construction entanglements, compounds for prisoners, bridges, and a great variety of other uses. Even coffin lumber was to be provided by the forest troops.” Good thing France still had a lot of trees.
The 20th Engineer Regiment was officially established on September 9, 1917, on the campus of American University, in Washington, D.C.—or, as it was known during the war, Camp American University. Unlike other regiments, which were established all at once and had an enlistment cap, the 20th Engineers grew and grew. “For several reasons, principally those of clothing and shelter, it was found impossible to recruit and train the entire regiment at one time,” Davies explains. Battalions were formed, trained, and shipped overseas in batches.
Arthur Fiala’s batch, the 26th Company, part of the 9th Battalion, shipped out for France, aboard the transport Mount Vernon, on March 27—just thirty-two days after he’d enlisted.
Somewhere in all that rush, the 9th Battalion of the 20th Engineers may have had an experience that, in America at least, was fairly singular to World War I. It was the last week of March, 1918. “We were supposed to go to New York to get on the boat,” Private Fiala recalled eighty-five years later. “We had two boxcars full of barracks bags, with all the equipment that we were supposed to have when we got to our destination in France.” He paused, then pounced: “It caught fire. And we think, I think it was sabotaged,” he explained.
Yes: sabotage. For surreptitious skullduggery on American soil, no other war can touch that one.
The Germans, you see, were no fools; from the moment war broke out in Europe, they understood that there was no chance America might enter the conflict on their side. At best, they hoped, the United States would sit it out; at worst, it would throw its enormous manpower, wealth, and industrial might behind the Allied cause. Even America’s muscular neutrality hurt the Germans: While all combatants’ ships were “quarantined” at American ports at the outbreak of war, Britain, with its vastly larger fleet, could spare them much more easily than Germany could. And though Americans were free to trade with all combatant nations, Britain’s tight blockade of Germany’s small seacoast effectively meant that the United States could really only trade with the Allies. This, in turn, led to a sense, in America, that an Allied victory was inevitable, which disinclined American bankers to lend money to the Germans. Ninety-nine percent of all American money sent to combatants before 1917 went to Allied nations; if it belied American “neutrality,” it was nevertheless good for business, since the United Kingdom spent fully half of its war budget in the United States. Of course, the fact that American banks loaned so much money to Allied nations made their victory all the more desirable to the United States, since, should they lose the war, all that money would be lost; so Americans loaned them yet more money, to enable them to buy more munitions. This vicious cycle was exacerbated by the fact that, at the war’s outset, Britain cut Germany’s undersea cable, which meant that all transcontinental news and information was conveyed to the United States through Allied channels alone.
And so Germany turned to espionage and sabotage. It developed an extremely sophisticated network in America, working out of German government offices at 45 Broadway, near Wall Street in lower Manhattan. The city of New York, even then the most ethnically diverse place in the world, was the perfect place to host an international spy ring. Foreign accents wouldn’t stick out there; it had a large German and Austro-Hungarian population; and the rest of the city wasn’t particularly amenable to the Allied cause, either. Irish New Yorkers, for instance, had no desire to go to war in support of the hated British, while Jewish immigrants, many of whom had fled the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Russian Empire, weren’t exactly enthused to risk their lives for the czar. Even after America entered the war, it continued to be unpopular in New York; the city’s mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, was thrown out of office in November, 1917, for supporting it. Mitchel would go on to join the Army Air Corps, where he would fall out of a plane to his death during a training exercise, having failed to fasten his seat belt.
In America, German agents dabbled, mostly unsuccessfully, in early forms of germ warfare, spreading (or trying to spread) anthrax, poisoning livestock, spoiling crops. Some believe they tore up railroad tracks out West. Most often, though, they targeted munitions factories, and the ships that would carry those factories’ output across the Atlantic. After all, they knew none of that stuff was making it to Germany. Probably the most famous incident happened on July 30, 1916, when saboteurs blew up a railroad yard and munitions depot (and, in the process, nine hundred tons of ammunition bound for the Western Front) on the small island of Black Tom, off the coast of Jersey City. The explosion, which was later estimated as the equivalent of an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale, sent shrapnel and debris into the Statue of Liberty and blew out windows in Manhattan; it was felt in Philadelphia, and heard in Maryland.
The effect of all this activity was to create a sense of paranoia in an America that was completely unprepared for it. The Germans went from lingering beneath suspicion to being suspected of much more than they actually did; sabotage, and saboteurs, were now everywhere, even places they weren’t, which was almost everywhere. So I don’t know if German agents really burned Arthur Fiala’s railroad car or not. In the end, it really doesn’t matter: he thought they did. And his stuff was gone. All of it. “So when we got on the boat,” he told me, “all we had was a pack, our pack sack with a couple blankets and a mess kit. That’s all we had.” That, and the clothes on their bodies.
“There were eleven boats in our convoy. The first four days out on the ocean were beautiful. I enjoyed the ride. Then I got seasick. I was sick for four days. And in the meantime, they wouldn’t let us take our clothes off, so in case we got torpedoed, we had our clothes on. Well, and I was seasick for four days, and I decided to try to get something to eat. And I went down, I got in the galley, and I got half of a grapefruit. And I ate that, and then I was going to get another one, and then the abandon-ship alarm sounded. We had to all go up on deck. They thought we were going to be hit. Well, it so happened there wasn’t any, uh . . .”
“U-boats?”
“U-boats, that’s it. What came to meet us was subchasers. Oh, are they beautiful! . . . They’re narrow and slick, and boy can they travel! They were, see there were eleven boats in our convoy, and they were, they were just running bet
ween our boats.”
“Pretty,” Deb said. She’d served four years in the Navy herself.
“Pretty sight,” her grandfather concurred.
The Mount Vernon landed at Brest on April 8, 1918. Their timing wasn’t great. “When we landed, they marched us uphill about three miles,” Private Fiala recalled. “So they said plunk these [packs] in the barracks. But we got up there, there was no barracks. There was nothing but a field with pup tents. And it was pouring, it was all mud. We couldn’t sleep. Well, good thing, we were called out to go back down to the boat. And we worked there, we unloaded boats all night. We were pooped out. Then they took us back up this hill. And then the next day we were loaded on a train. Looked like boxcars. No seats in there, just lay down like a dog. And I don’t know, over two or three days we were on, across France. Slow train!” Boxcars in France back then were labeled “40-8”—that is, forty men per car, or eight horses.
“Then,” he told me, “we landed in a little town called La Cluse. And that was in the foothills of the Alps mountains. Here, I’ve got to tell you one thing about that: See, when we got there, we found out that our carload of food was lost. We were hungry, hungry as hell! So I thought, I’ll take a walk uptown, and maybe I could buy something. I didn’t have much money, but I found some figs.” It was the first break he seemed to catch in a while. He even got a chance to laugh. “There was a Frenchman walking ahead of me,” he said, “and he stopped by a big tree to take a pee. And while he was taking a pee, there was a woman coming down the street, and he was holding it in one hand and tipping his hat with the other hand. That was the first thing that struck me as funny.”
Later that day, the cook managed to find some beans. “Boy, that tasted like ice cream, I’ll tell you. That was good. Piece of bread and some of those beans.”
The men marched another three miles up to a plateau, where they pitched camp by a creek. “And we didn’t have our clothes off for nine days; we pulled off our clothes and jumped in the creek to wash off. And then a lot of the boys started fires around and everything.” It was, after all, still cold up there. That night, they pitched tents and slept; in the morning, they awoke to snow. “Snow, snow, snow, everywhere . . .we had no extra stockings, no nothing. Well, it snowed so damn hard we couldn’t, we didn’t know where to sleep. And there was a farmer up there, he let us sleep in the barn. So we all—can you picture two hundred and fifty guys—”
“No!” Deb said.
“—sleeping in a barn. Like sardines!” He added: “And by God, you know, nobody caught a cold.”
Eventually, someone tracked down that boxcar full of food, but trucks couldn’t make it up to camp in the snow, so 250 men had to trudge down the mountain and carry it back up by hand. Dinner that night was beef stew. “They gradually got a kitchen going and everything. And do you know what we were up there for? We were up there logging. We were making products, wood products, to be shipped to the front.”
“Like what kinds of things?”
“Well, logs, railroad ties, camouflage poles, all kinds of stuff like that . . . There was about half of them guys in that outfit that were real lumberjacks. And we younger guys, we would go up in the woods, up in the woods in the mountains, and they would cut the logs down, and then we younger guys would chop the limbs off. They called us, we were ‘swampers’ . . . Well, anyway, then, here’s the part: One day we were going down the mountain with a team of horses, there was about seven of us on the wagon, and the horses got wild and they jumped, they went off the side of the mountain. And we all went down the mountain. And lucky thing there was enough trees there to stop us. But anyway, I got, we all got hurt. I broke my wrist . . . so I didn’t, I couldn’t do anything for a while. And when my wrist got better, they gave me a job, to work around the kitchen.”
And that’s how Private Arthur Fiala became a cook.
It was a lucky break, as it were. Logging was dangerous work in peacetime; in war, with its accelerated pace and increased demands, it became very dangerous. “In the beginning, when we were there, they used to cut logs up in the mountains,” Art Fiala explained to me. “And they would slide them down the mountain, and they would peel them, you know, so they were slippery. And a personal friend of mine, he got killed from a log, yeah, knocked him down. We had about eight guys I think got killed, died in the outfit . . . And one guy,” he declared, “one guy was murdered. Somebody, we found one of our men under a bridge with a hole in his head. Somebody hit him.”
Some of the men in his outfit were felled not by logs, but by disease, which, despite great medical advances since the last big war, still killed thousands of Americans in uniform during World War I. It even, almost, managed to kill Art Fiala.
It started in the kitchen. “For some reason or other,” he recalled, “the ventilation was bad in that camp, and I got pleurisy.” Pleurisy: an inflammation of the pleura, which line the lungs. Often caused by infection. It can make breathing very painful. It can also kill you any number of unpleasant ways. It’s one of those diseases you don’t hear about anymore; today it can be cured by a visit to a doctor’s office and some over-the-counter drugs. Not then, though.
“I was sick,” he told me, nodding gravely over the din caused by the machine that was pumping oxygen into his nose. “And I called the doctor. He came down, he looked at me, just put his head in the tent. He never touched me. He left a couple of aspirin tablets. That’s all I got.” He was sitting up now, looking disgusted, but lively.
“Well, here’s the point,” he continued. “On the edge of town, there was a woman living. She had about three little kids. She was taking care of a railroad crossing, I don’t know what she had to do. She found out I was sick, she come to the tent, she brought hot tea to me. That woman never failed,” he said emphatically. “Until I got well, she came in three times a day. And one day, one day she came with a plaster, plastered my chest even.” His hands mimicked the act across his chest. “She was good.”
“How nice!” Deb said.
“I’ll never forget, never forget her,” her grandfather asserted. “I give her a lot of credit. And here’s the point: One day, one day I heard we were going to break up that camp. So at ten o’clock at night, when everybody was supposed to be in bed, I went to my kitchen. I took a flour sack; we used to get those tins of bacon, like that, like the big tin. I took, I gave her a can of that bacon, I gave her flour, sugar, coffee, all I could carry on my back. And I brought it to her that night. I woke them up at ten o’clock at night. Oh,” he said, nodding his head earnestly, “you’ve never seen any happier people. They deserved it.” Staples—not to mention luxuries like bacon—were scarce for civilians in France.
Laurence Moffitt had said that the men of the Yankee Division ate very well in France, many of them better than they’d ever eaten at home, and Art Fiala agreed, especially regarding the men in his outfit. Except, he admitted, once.
“One day, a couple of the boys, we decided we were going to take a trip, a trip uptown,” he told me. “And maybe have a little fun for a change, see? And I didn’t get back to camp to make supper. And when I got back up . . . my kitchen was all ripped to hell. They were, guys were hungry and broke in the kitchen and opened up all kinds of cans and all kinds of stuff. And the sergeant that was in charge of the camp, he come up to me and he says, ‘You’re fired!’ On account of what I did, see.
“Well, the next day,” he continued, “a motorcycle with a sidecar came down and picked me up and took me back to camp. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, now I’m in for it. I’m going to get hell!’ But when I got back to camp, I was greeted with open arms! And all the officers come up to me and said: ‘You’re promoted to officer’s cook!’”
He smiled.
Art Fiala spent the rest of the war as a cook—at La Cluse, and Nantua, and in la Forêt de Meyriat. Though he, and the rest of the 20th Engineers, were behind the lines, the war managed to reach them anyway, this way or that. “One thing I never forgot,” he told me, “in one camp, o
ne of them camps where I was cooking, we got some casualties came there. And one guy come up to me and asked me if I could give him a job in the kitchen. And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll give you a job in the kitchen.’ He was the principal from a high school.” Considering his experience with his own high school principal back in Kewaunee, he must have enjoyed that.
All in all—unless you counted that broken wrist, that bout with pleurisy, and those long, soggy, exhausting first weeks in France—it sounded to me like Art Fiala had had a pretty good time Over There. He enjoyed the work (especially making pancakes), was well liked, well treated by his officers, and well fed. After the armistice, he was transferred to a camp in Bordeaux, where he only had to cook every third day. He scaled fences and hopped trains for free with his buddies, was once sent down to the Spanish border in a car to deliver food to some big shot, and enjoyed the company of French women more than he cared to discuss with me in detail, at least with his granddaughter around. “My wife used to throw that up to me all the time,” he said with a hint of mock exasperation. “Say, Debbie, you haven’t got that card there from that girl, have you?”
“No,” she said.
“I got a card from a girl from France,” he explained to me. “She said, ‘We’re all thinking about you, we all like you,’ or something like that. I don’t know. I wish,” he said to Deb, “you would have had it.”
“Well, I found it,” she replied, “and then Grandma got mad.”
“So tell me about meeting the girls over there,” I said to him. “What was that like?”
“They were, they were pretty nice,” he said with a big smile.
“Where did you meet them?”
“I don’t know.”
The Last of the Doughboys Page 14