Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre. Better known as, simply, “Papa.” The most beloved and respected general in France.
Now that was a real get.
The First Shot for Liberty, by Osborne de Varila. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1918.
On October 22, 1917, Corporal Osborne de Varila, serving in the French town of Nancy with Battery C of the 6th Field Artillery, was given the honor of firing the first American shot of the war—fittingly, a 75-millimeter shell, millions of which had already sailed through the air of France during the past three years. Battery C expended a lot of energy wresting that honor from the rest of the 6th FA, all of whom wanted it for themselves; when told another battery was “out to steal the bacon,” a gunner cried: “Are we going to let them get away with it?”
“We’d be a sick lot of hounds if we did,” replies Corporal “Reddy” (on account of his red hair) de Varila. So he and the rest of Battery C haul their gun “through the storm and pitchy darkness, for a distance of three-quarters of a mile over an almost impassable country—a swamp pocked with mud-choked shell-holes.” And yet, when the moment is upon him—“I pulled the lanyard of the little spitfire, and America’s first shot of the war went screaming into German territory”—Reddy confesses that he is “filled with a thousand conflicting emotions,” though he doesn’t tell us what any of them were; back then, emoting was not on a man’s menu.
And de Varila, though only eighteen years old, is nevertheless all man. His prose is thoroughly marinated in testosterone. “I will concede that I come of a race of red-headed, freckle-faced fighters, and am proud of it,” he tells us on the very first page. In the 1870s, his father served out West in the US Cavalry, where “the Indians dubbed him, ‘Red the Brave.’” His paternal grandfather fought for the CSA under Stonewall Jackson; his maternal grandfather for the Union under U. S. Grant. “My mother was of Irish descent, and my father French,” he tells us. “Now, you need wonder no longer why I love to fight when the fighting is good. When you get a French and Irish combination, and breed it for several generations on the stimulating soil of the good old United States, you are bound to produce something that absolutely refuses to ‘let George do it,’ when there is a scrap on deck.” He continues:
I was fifteen years old when the Kaiser and his gang of international burglars set out to crack the safes of the nations of the world, and revive the chain-gang methods of the unholy old Roman Empire.
I wanted to get into it then, honest I did, although I had blossomed out in my first suit of long trousers, and was proudly wearing my first dollar watch.
His mother, though, wouldn’t let him go. But then, three years later:
The bottom dropped clean out of my education when Congress bucked up to the occasion and declared the United States at war with the German Empire.
Wow! Every fighting de Varila in the whole list of de Varilas seemed to rise up before me in spirit and announce:
“Now is the time to get in, my boy.”
That settled me; I determined to get into the scrap while the getting was good. I was eighteen then, and big for my age. All I needed was my mother’s signature to precipitate me into the biggest war in history. I packed my suitcase, went home and told my mother I was going to enlist in the United States Army.
She was game and didn’t even blink a tear. . . .
“You are a de Varila,” she said, “and I’d be ashamed of you if you didn’t want to go.”
So off her son goes to France, and pretty soon he and his buddies in the 6th FA are just about running the war:
It is true that the American gunners are the best in the world. They have a truer eye, a steadier hand and work more quickly and accurately than the artillerymen of any other nation. We demonstrated that after we had been on the front line but a few days, and when American batteries get going good over there, Germany is going to realize that the Yanks are on the job. American gunners are going to deliver the knockout to Von Hindenburg’s forces.
After firing that first shot, de Varila traffics in a fair amount of rather gruesome propaganda, like this tale:
In the little shell-torn village where my battery was quartered when we first moved up to the front line, lived a young French mother with her two-year-old son. Just before this son was born she was taken prisoner by some German cavalrymen, and sent to a hospital in Germany. When her child was born it was taken from her and returned two weeks later, with its sight destroyed.
“If your child had been a girl,” explained the brutish German surgeon, “we would not have done this. But we of the Fatherland must make sure that the French will never again take up arms against Germany.”
With her face full of woe and tragedy, the mother told me this story, and I swore vengeance against the Hun as the tale slipped from her trembling lips. Nestled in her lap as she gave me every detail was the living evidence of the crime—the poor little two-year-old who is doomed to go through life sightless because of German Kultur.
If the Germans hope to scare Americans by their campaign of frightfulness they are going to be badly fooled. Every time a Yankee boy comes in contact with one of these cases, it simply whets his desire to kill another Boche.
De Varila sees a good bit of combat, but spends the last weeks of 1917 in the hospital, he writes, with “a very bad case of frozen feet.” Then, in March of 1918, he tells us, “I got my first bad dose of gas. It was mustard gas too, one of the worst kind the devilish Boches send over. I was pumping away at my gun, when suddenly I felt a choking, stinging sensation, and then I passed out like a baby hit with a brick.” He wakes up in a hospital, “blind as a bat. When I discovered there was something the matter with my eyes I was so mad I almost foamed at the mouth.” His war is over.
At least Over There. He does regain his sight after six days, but is nevertheless deemed unfit for the front. Instead, he is sent home, a war hero, to campaign for the Third Liberty Loan drive. He’s ripe for the new challenge, having already told us, a hundred or so pages earlier: “The food improved wonderfully after the raising of the Second Liberty Loan over in America. The folks at home must back us to their last cent if we are to win this war. Money talks harder right now over in France than at any time in the history of the world. There must be a constant stream of cash from the pockets of Americans if we are to keep men and munitions pouring into the fighting zone.” He ends his tale with another appeal:
I am happy that I played my little part in this big war by firing the first shot for liberty. I think it was fitting that I should be sent to Philadelphia, the birthplace of liberty and the shrine of that wonderful old relic, the Liberty Bell. Every man-jack of us who came over is going back to put in more blows against the Hun. We feel that it is our duty to do this, and besides the fascination of war has its grip upon us.
In Philadelphia I met the best girl in the world, and now I have her to fight for as well as my country when I return to France. The Hun peril is a real one, as every American will soon realize if they do not put their full weight into this war. The boys over on the other side are getting splendid treatment, and since the putting over of the last two Liberty Loans there has been plenty of food and clothing. The Yank who fails to get into this war with both feet is losing the opportunity of his life. I will not rest content until I am fighting with my battery again over there in France on the front line. It is my burning desire to send over many more shots for liberty into the Boche trenches.
Sadly, that desire wasn’t the only thing burning within him at that point. According to an old clipping I found from the San Francisco Call, Corporal de Varila “died on June 4, 1920, at a government hospital from the effects of mustard gas.” He was twenty-one years old, and left no will. The short article, dated October 26 of that year, reports that his mother, Clara de Varila of 224 Bartlett Street, filed a petition in San Francisco’s superior court to claim her son’s estate. It was, the anonymous reporter noted, “valued at less than $300.”
Home Reading Co
urse for Citizen-Soldiers. War Information Series, No. 9. Washington, D.C.: The Committee on Public Information, October 1917.
On April 13, 1917, just one week after the United States declared war on Germany, President Wilson issued Executive Order 2594, establishing the Committee on Public Information, “to be composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and a civilian who shall be charged with the executive direction of the committee.” The civilian Wilson chose was George Creel, a reporter for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. Reporters are supposed to be objective, more or less; not George Creel. “An open mind is not part of my inheritance,” he once said. “I took in prejudices with mother’s milk and was weaned on partisanship.”
That mindset made Creel the right man for the job. The Committee on Public Information was, quite simply, a propaganda bureau. And, as those things go, perhaps a relatively benign one; unlike some other American institutions of that time, its stated primary objective was not ginning up anger at and suspicion of America’s enemies, real and imagined, and disseminating what Creel called “hymns of hate.” Rather, it purported more often to accentuate the positive—sometimes going so far as to fabricate it, but still. As Creel wrote in his 1920 memoir, How We Advertised America, “In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”
The Committee pitched stories and press releases across the country and around the world, published its own daily newspaper, called the Official Bulletin, produced feature-length motion pictures with titles like Pershing’s Crusaders and America’s Answer (to the Hun), and got some of the most prominent artists of the day, including N. C. Wyeth, James Montgomery Flagg, and Howard Chandler Christy, to design posters promoting enlistment, bond drives, food conservation, and other such initiatives. Perhaps most impressive, Creel recruited and trained some seventy-five thousand volunteer “Four Minute Men,” who traveled the country giving speeches on patriotic subjects, talks that lasted no more than four minutes, which was believed, at the time, to be the average American’s attention span.
The CPI also published two different series of (usually) free booklets—the Red, White, and Blue Series, for civilians, and the War Information Series, for servicemen. The two series deal with similar issues—mostly the whats, hows, and whys of the war—though the latter’s execution is somewhat less artful, which makes it a much better read.
From No. 11, The German War Code: “The German war code abounds in evidences of unfairness and gross partisanship and appears to have been intended to inculcate hatred in the hearts of the German army against their enemies.” (How dare they!) “German army officers are warned against being misled by the excessive humanitarianism of the present age, which the German manual says has too often degenerated into ‘sentimentality and flabby emotion.’”
From No. 15, Why America Fights Germany: “We are in the war because we had to go in unless we were entirely blind to our own honor and safety, and to the future happiness of the whole world.” Clearly, the CPI—in this case, author John S. P. Tatlock, Professor at Stanford University—was not given to understatement. Nor to underselling; that particular sentence is boldfaced. So are many others, like “The net of German intrigue has encompassed the world,” “All-Democracy is now waging a supreme struggle against all-Despotism,” “Mercy and justice through all the world are at stake,” and the curiously familiar “We must fight Germany in Europe that we may not have to fight her in America.”
From No. 13, German Militarism and Its German Critics: “Some of the characteristics of Militarism are in evidence in all European countries . . . but in no other is the adulation of the soldiery so pronounced as in Germany . . . in no other is Militarism either so exaggerated or so objectionable.” I’m not sure if that means America chose the right country to go to war with, or the opposite.
From No. 14, The War for Peace: “The Allies cannot concede peace until they conquer it. When they do so, it will be permanent. Otherwise they fail.” This cryptic statement was authored by the president of the New York–based League to Enforce Peace, one William Howard Taft. Before he landed that job, Mr. Taft had been, interestingly, secretary of war. Oh, and then president of the United States, at least until he lost his bid for reelection to Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
The first book in the series, The War Message and Facts Behind It, presents the text of President Wilson’s April 2, 1917, address to Congress, complete with annotations. When Wilson declares, “We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people and shall desire nothing so much as the early reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between us,” the booklet’s editor—one Guy Stanton Ford, director of the CPI’s Division on Civic and Educational Cooperation—notes: “There are now two Germanies—the old, noble, idealistic Germany; the new, hard, materialistic nation, created by Prussia. Americans would fain love and recall the former.” And when the president insists, “The right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,” Ford contrasts Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address (“With malice toward none, with charity for all”) with choice tidbits from a diatribe from Friedrich von Bernhardi—“German lieutenant general, and acceptable mouthpiece, not of the whole German nation, but of the Prussian military caste which holds the German nation in its grip”—including “Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war,” and “The idea is presumptuous that ‘the weak nation is to have the same right to live, as a powerful and vigorous nation.’”
So No. 9, Home Reading Course for Citizen-Soldiers, is a bit of a departure—kind of an Over There for Dummies:
In order to make good in the National Army you must, first of all, fit yourself to carry with credit the simple title of “American Citizen-Soldier”—one of the proudest titles in the world. This means that you must develop in yourself the qualities of a soldier. The more quickly and thoroughly you cultivate them the greater will be your satisfaction and success.
The three basic qualities, it tells us, are Loyalty, Obedience, and Physical Fitness, and it ruminates at length on all three. Then there are the three soldierly qualities of Intelligence, Cleanliness, and Cheerfulness; and, finally, the three qualities of battle: Spirit, Tenacity, and Self-Reliance. It’s a very high-minded list, and indeed, the whole booklet is quite so. In the very first of its thirty lessons, it teaches the reader that a fundamental tradition of the American Army “is that of fighting fairly and treating even the enemy with as much humanity as his own conduct will permit. As for slaughtering or enslaving the civilian population of captured territory, attacking prisoners, or assaulting women American soldiers would as little commit such crimes in time of war as in time of peace.”
There are lessons on army insignia, staff branches, and fighting arms of the service, what to expect of camp life, “The Army System of Training,” drilling, guard duty, army courtesy, European warfare, cleanliness, health, equipment and arms, organization, discipline, teamwork. There’s an entire lesson, two pages in length, on marching and the care of feet. (“Keep your feet scrupulously clean. A foot bath can be taken, when other facilities are not at hand, by scraping a small depression in the ground, throwing a poncho over it and pouring water into this from your canteen. Even a pint of water will do for a foot bath. You can bathe all over by making or finding a depression of suitable size and using your poncho as for a foot bath.” I wonder if anyone ever actually took a full-body poncho-bath, and, if so, how that worked out.) There’s the obligatory lesson on “Why We Fight,” and one on “Some National Traditions.” A section on “The Bearing of a Soldier” breaks it down to ten categories, from heels to head. Lesson No. 23 presents a checklist for “Getting Ahead in the Army.” (Number 9: “Ability to sketch and read maps.”) A considerate addition, I think.
And Le
sson 11, “Playing the Game,” includes a section titled “Making Use of Spare Time,” which begins:
The use that a man makes of his time off duty is a good test of his character and of his capacity for growth. The good soldier is self-restrained. Don’t spend your time repeating indecent stories. They add nothing whatever to your standing, either with the men to whom you tell them or with your officers. Avoid boisterousness, vulgarity, and profanity.
That doesn’t mean at all that you should keep yourself in the background or that you should fail to be a good “mixer.” Let your personality stand out. Broaden your influence by every proper method. But use your personality and your influence to help the men in your own squad and company carry on their work and prepare as possible for the big task ahead of you.
That image—of eighteen- or twenty-year-old boys arriving at boot camp, being handed a copy of Home Reading Course for Citizen-Soldiers, perusing to this section (page 25, if you’re looking for it), and really drinking it in—is enough to make you wish that somewhere, at some point, everyone would be issued a handbook that would spell these things out for us. I can’t think of a better use for a printing press than that.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 21