The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  The admixture of Biblical references and German boasting are typical of the lessons taught at German Sunday Schools, which play a great role in the war propaganda. The schoolmaster having done his work for six days of the week, the pastor gives an extra virulent dose on Sabbath. Sedan Day [a celebration of the great German victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71], which before the war was on the culmination of hate lessons, often formed the occasion of Sunday School picnics, at which the children sang new anti-French songs.

  Well, that explains those Gott Mit Uns belt buckles German soldiers wore as part of their uniforms: “God is with us.” Those were probably the single most-prized war souvenir for a doughboy. It was hard to get a German to part with one, at least while he was alive.

  Curtin would call that kind of tenacity mindless; the typical Prussian, he argues, is little more than a drone at the service of the Kaiser, his generals, and his ministers. “The German, with his cast-in-a-mould mind, does not understand the trait developed among other peoples of seeing things for themselves. He is unacquainted with originality in human beings,” Curtin explains. “The majority of Germans of all classes believe what they are officially instructed to believe, no more, no less. The overmastering self-hypnotism which leads the present-day German to believe that black is white, if it adds to his self-satisfaction, is one of the most startling phenomena in history.” Of course, a case could be made that, in publishing his book, Curtin was hoping to instruct the American people on what to believe about Germany. For instance, Americans should hardly be surprised, he tells us, that Germany had spies in the United States even before the war began: “Spying is just as essential an ingredient of Prussian character as conceit, indifference to the feelings of others, jealousy, envy, self-satisfaction, conceit, industry, inquisitiveness, veneration for officialdom, imitativeness, materialism, and the other national attributes that will occur to those who know Prussia, as distinct from the other German States.”

  He tries, at least, to end the book on an optimistic note:

  It is part of the Prussian nature to push everything to extremes, a trait which has advantages and disadvantages. It has resulted in brilliant achievements in chemical and physical laboratories, and in gout, dyspepsia and flabbiness in eating establishments. A virtue carried too far becomes a vice. In Germany patriotism becomes jingoistic hatred and contempt for others, organization becomes the utilization of servility, obedience becomes willingness to do wrong at command.

  I said he tries. Turns out there’s not much room for sunshine in The Land of Deepening Shadow.

  My Four Years in Germany was a tremendous hit. It catapulted a little-known judge/ambassador/Tammany operative into the stratosphere of celebrity, where the air can get a bit thin. He set out on a cross-country speaking tour, during which he fomented paranoia about all things German, including Americans of German descent; the low point was a speech he gave to the Ladies Aid Society of St. Mary’s Hospital in New York, titled “Loyalty and German-Americans,” in which he inveighed:

  We must disappoint the Germans who have always believed that the German-Americans here would risk their property, their children’s future, and their own neck, and take up arms for the Kaiser. The Foreign Minister of Germany once said to me “your country does not dare do anything against Germany, because we have in your country 500,000 German reservists who will rise in arms against your government if you dare to make a move against Germany.”

  Well, I told him that that might be so, but that we had 500,001 lamp posts in this country, and that that was where the reservists would be hanging the day after they tried to rise. And if there are any German-Americans here who are so ungrateful for all the benefits they have received that they are still for the Kaiser, there is only one thing to do with them. And that is to hog-tie them, give them back the wooden shoes and the rags they landed in, and ship them back to the Fatherland.

  You’d think that sort of talk would hurt book sales; it didn’t. Instead, a fledgling movie outfit run by four brothers named Warner turned it into a film (“I shall stand no nonsense from America after the war” was the pull-quote for the poster) and with it produced their first national hit. Shot in New Jersey, the film adaptation of My Four Years in Germany generated some controversy with its depiction of German atrocities in Belgium; it was also, somehow, both wooden and histrionic. Ticket sales were brisk nevertheless.

  Knowing that the movie would be coming out in mid-1918—and also, perhaps, that the war might not last much beyond that—Gerard scrambled to follow up with another book. Face to Face with Kaiserism is like My Four Years in Germany without the autobiographical material, giving the author more pages wherein to lay Germany and Germans to waste verbally, which he does with vim:

  The German to-day is essentially practical, cold, cynical and calculating. The poetry and the Christmas trees, the sentiment and sentimentality, remain like the architectural monuments of a vanished race, mere reminders of the kindlier Germany that once was, the Germany of our first impressions, the Germany that many once loved. But that Germany has long since disappeared, buried beneath the spiked helmets of Prussianism.

  And then there’s this:

  It has been at all times the policy of the German autocracy to keep the people of Germany from amusing themselves. I know of no class in Germany which really enjoys life. . . . The houses are plain and, for the most part, without conveniences of bath rooms and heating to which we are accustomed in America. Very few automobiles are owned in Germany. There are practically no small country houses or bungalows, although at a few of the sea places rich Jews have villas.

  Hence the Jews’ aforementioned “gentle instincts.” As for the rest of Germany, their lack of toilets, cars, radiators, country houses, and board games presumably drove them to the crazed impulse to conquer the world, and the delusional notion that they might just get away with it.

  Needing to set Kaiserism apart from Four Years, Gerard decided to focus on what set America and other “good” nations apart from Germany—namely, democracy. There is no equal anywhere in Germany’s omnipotent autocracy to President Wilson, Gerard notes, because an autocracy cannot produce men who can temper strength with compassion. Only a democracy can do that. Which is why, of course, America was fighting to Make the World Safe for Democracy.

  It didn’t help. Gerard’s second book didn’t sell nearly as well as his first. It did, however, popularize the word “Kaiserism,” quite possibly the best neologism that war produced. It almost makes you wish there were still a Kaiser somewhere so you could casually drop it in conversation from time to time.

  The Soldiers’ French Phrase Book. Chicago: Felt & Tarrant Manufacturing Company, 1918.

  Remember all those songs about France? “And He’d Say Ooh-La-La! Wee-Wee!”? “Oh! Frenchy”? “You’ll Have to Put Him to Sleep with the Marseillaise and Wake Him Up with a Oo-La-La”? (I may have left that last one out before; it’s a bear to type.) Everyone Over Here, it seems, was terribly excited at the prospect of millions of Red-Blooded American Boys going Over There. What fun they’d all have! Strolling through the City of Light, eating delicate pastries, drinking bold wines, wooing les belles femmes—doing pretty much everything but crouching in muddy trenches, taking the occasional shot at the Hun, and trying hard not to die in the process. No one back home much cared to think about that aspect of the Expedition. And can you blame them? Those were their boys out there, their sons and husbands and brothers. Newspapers didn’t want to write about it if they could possibly avoid it; bad for morale. The Army didn’t disagree—it sometimes told newspapers what not to print, and more often just withheld certain information. Not many went looking for it, either.

  Instead, almost everyone chose to focus on the less-hazardous elements of the adventure, conjuring scenes of their Johnny, who’d never left Gage County, Nebraska, before, suddenly in the midst of the most exotic and civilized country in the world, a place where they didn’t even speak English. Can you picture Johnny t
rying to order eggs in one of those fancy cafés on Rue de something-or-other? Would he just crow like a chicken until they figured out what he wanted? Sure, that had worked for Art Fiala, but you couldn’t count on it hitting every time.

  And so, on page 32: Apportez-moi deux oeufs à la coque mollets. “Bring two soft boiled eggs.” For hard-boiled, say à la coque durs. Those are your two options, according to Messrs. Felt and Tarrant. Of course, even if you’re not in the mood for eggs, they’ve got you covered. “Waiter, bring the bill of fare.” “Bring me some fresh bread and butter.” “Bring some meat right away.” “A rare beefsteak.” “I should like some veal chops.” “With cauliflower or cabbage.” “Where is the cheese?” “Have you wine or cider?” (Hello—it’s France.) “Give me a glass of water.” “I will now take a cup of coffee.” And, of course: “Bring me some stale bread and milk.” Ah, haute cuisine. Don’t forget, as you sit down, to declare, “I am ravenous,” or “I have a great appetite.” And if anything looks fishy after “Give me the bill,” feel free to break out “There is a mistake in the addition.”

  Over the years I have picked up a number of these dictionaries; I can only imagine how many thousands were published and then given to soldiers or, more likely, sold to their loved ones, who may or may not have passed them along to an actual doughboy. Some, like First Lessons in Spoken French for Men in Military Service, are as dry as their titles, offering little more than grammar lessons and basic vocabulary; not a great way to learn a foreign language, at least in my experience. Others, like the Gordon-Detwiler Institute’s Soldiers’ French Course, combine the dry stuff with phrases, many of which are strangely specific: “I shall give him a neck-tie.” “You perceive the clamor of the street.” “They will visit us the day after to-morrow and will come in the new automobile.” “He has a longer right arm than left.” “You punish the wicked and the culprits.” “Have you paid the customhouse duties on these hats?” “They will start on the way to pass the winter in Cuba.” “She will sell her jewels and give the amount of money to the Red Cross.” “Is Philadelphia far or near from here?” “Your collar-bone is dislocated.” “You have saved my life.” Sadly, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine scenarios where those last two, at least, might have proven useful.

  I don’t know, though, if all these books were about practical French as much as aspirational. (Certainly, it’s pretty aspirational to imagine you’ll be able to ask someone in Verdun for directions to Philadelphia.) When you’re young and male and dropped into a foreign country, you tend to pick up the language on the fly—trying to get something to eat, maybe, or to drink, or to chat up a pretty girl. Or to find shelter during an artillery barrage, although I imagine hand gestures and facial expressions would probably do in that situation.

  Still, it must have been fun to imagine that you might need all of those restaurant expressions from The Soldiers’ French Phrase Book, or many of the others it taught, like, “I shall be in London next week,” “Paris is as beautiful as Chicago,” “What do you say, Miss?,” “I give you full authority to do as you please,” “The captain fell from his horse,” “You have my sabre,” “Long live France!,” “Long live America!,” and “You will always be in my memory.”

  And, lest you suspect these books were entirely impractical, there is also: “Tell him the colonel asks for him,” “We had a narrow escape,” “He has been wounded in the chest,” “A piece of shrapnel broke his ankle,” and “A bullet pierced his lips.”

  A Yankee in the Trenches, by R. Derby Holmes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1918.

  Like Arthur Guy Empey, Bostonian Robert Derby Holmes sailed off for England and enlisted in the Army there well before America entered the war. Empey did it, he tells us, out of anger at the sinking of the Lusitania and a desire to show the Germans what was what; Holmes, on the other hand, explains he joined up because he was afraid of missing out on what was clearly shaping up to be the greatest event of his lifetime. “As the war went on,” he tells us in the opening pages, “it became apparent to me, as I suppose it must have to everybody, that the world was going through one of its epochal upheavals; and I figured that with so much history in the making, any unattached young man would be missing it if he did not take a part in the big game.”

  Holmes and Empey cover much of the same ground: Tommies, trenches, cooties, army food. And each, independently, describes a rather striking phenomenon:

  Daylight movements in No Man’s Land are somehow disconcerting. Once I was in a trench where a leg—a booted German leg, stuck up stark and stiff out of the mud not twenty yards in front. Some idiotic joker on patrol hung a helmet on the foot, and all the next day that helmet dangled and swung in the breeze. It irritated the periscope watchers, and the next night it was taken down.

  Either the German-boot-with-German-leg-inside-it-sticking-up-out-of-the-ground motif was a widespread urban legend on the Western Front, or it really happened, and often. Horrible as that image is, Holmes outdoes it with a tale he shares about a night he was sent on patrol down to a sloping riverbank:

  Sliding gently through the grass, I kept catching my feet in something hard that felt like roots; but there were no trees in the neighborhood. I reached down and groped in the grass and brought up a human rib. The place was full of them, and skulls. Stooping, I could see them, grinning up out of the dusk, hundreds of them. I learned afterwards that this was called the Valley of Death. Early in the war several thousand Zouaves [French or French Colonial infantry dressed in old-timey North African–style uniforms comprising open tunic, baggy pantaloons, sash, and fez] had perished there, and no attempt had been made to bury them.

  One thing Holmes discusses that Empey doesn’t is the proliferation of other Yankees in the trenches prior to 1917; Empey doesn’t quite imply that he was the only American there, but he never mentions, even in passing, that he wasn’t. Furthermore, to hear Empey tell it, Tommy’s only complaints about the war are the mud and the hours; he’s long since gotten used to cooties, rats, and army food, and only gripes about them anymore with a grudgingly affectionate twinkle in his eye. Holmes, however, bravely reveals that many English weren’t all that happy to be in Flanders just then:

  Some of the opinions voiced out there with more frankness than any one would dare to use at home would, I am sure, shock some of the patriots. The fact is that any one who has fought in France wants peace, and the sooner the better. . . .

  I should say offhand that there was not one man in a hundred who was fighting consciously for any great recognized principle. And yet, with all their grousing and criticism, and all their overwhelming desire to have it over with, every one of them was loyal and brave and a hard fighter.

  If that passage made readers uncomfortable, it didn’t hurt sales; for a time, A Yankee in the Trenches appeared on bestseller lists right alongside Over the Top. Little, Brown ran ads for the book featuring a glowing blurb calling it “the most entertaining war book that I have read, and I have read many.” The blurb’s magnanimous author was Arthur Guy Empey.

  The Chicago Daily News War Book for American Soldiers, Sailors and Marines. Chicago: The Chicago Daily News Company, 1918.

  It’s pocket-sized—a bit broader in area than a checkbook, and about as thick—but somehow the Chicago Daily News managed to cram 192 pages into such a small package, and a minor encyclopedia’s worth of information into those 192 pages. Here’s just a sampling: fully illustrated guides to American, French, British, and German military insignia, both army and navy; American, British, French, German, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Italian, Austrian, Australian, Polish, Portuguese, Belgian, and Scottish headgear—army and navy, officers and enlisted men, regular service and special details; Allied and German aeroplanes; codes and signals; knots and splices; rifles and bayonets; American, French, and German map symbols; and French road signs. There are intricately detailed two-page maps of the Western Front, Europe, the United States, and, most important, Paris; a list of Paris hotels, organized by price; t
utorials on the French “75” gun, the metric system, French currency, methods of finding true north and measuring the distance to the horizon, getting your bearings, and “German Poison Gasses”; a three-year calendar; French–English and English–French dictionaries; selected German phrases, including “Surrender!,” “Hands up!,” “Drop your rifles!,” “No talking,” “Give me your pay-book, your diary, your note-book,” “How many machine-guns are there in this trench, and where are they placed?,” “Don’t shoot,” “I am badly wounded,” “Please carry me,” “Take me to a hospital,” “I am cold,” “I know nothing about that,” and “I am an American”; and, of course, a selection of American war songs. And the “Marseillaise.” And directions for doughboys to the Paris and London offices of the Chicago Daily News, “where all the facilities of reading and writing rooms are at their service.” And if you don’t much care for the Chicago Daily News, “the leading American newspapers are on file” there, too. How much would you expect to pay for such a resource? Put that wallet away. “The national uniform,” the title page declares, “is in itself an order for a free copy of the book.”

  It’s an impressive little volume—truly, I think, the kind of thing that makes you want to enlist if you haven’t already. That may explain how it scored forewords from Secretary of War Newton Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. It also received an endorsement—printed in both English and French—from no less than the head of the Supreme War Council, the newly created Allied central command, who signed his name, simply: “Joffre.”