9
Hell, We Just Got Here
THIS NEXT STORY IS ABOUT—well, I’ll let you decide that for yourself. I’ll just say up front that it’s a bit . . . uh . . . you know what? I’ll let you decide that, too.
It begins around Veterans Day, 2003, when I came across an article in a small newspaper from a town in upstate New York, near Albany. The reporter profiled, in brief, a few local World War II veterans, then lamented that there were no longer any World War I veterans left in town, and that the only one in the area—which term, thankfully, he defined loosely—was one Eugene Lee, of Syracuse. He didn’t say much else about Mr. Lee, except that he was “no longer able to give interviews.”
Well. I won’t say I took this as a challenge, exactly, but I certainly wasn’t going to just accept such a statement until I checked it out for myself. I called the reporter, who reiterated the statement, telling me its source was one Jim Casey, whom he said was Eugene Lee’s close friend and sort-of gatekeeper. He gave me Mr. Casey’s phone number and wished me luck.
Jim Casey was a Marine Corps veteran (he had served in the late 1950s) who had sought out Mr. Lee some years earlier, having learned of his existence. Mr. Lee hadn’t any children; his closest relative, a niece, lived out West. So Mr. Casey befriended him, looked after him, visited him regularly. He told me that Mr. Lee could still hear and speak well enough, but that his memory was dicey—some days it was fair, some days much less so—and that he was prone to getting frustrated when it wasn’t working all that well. I said I understood, and that I would be willing to take a chance, drive up to Syracuse, and see what might happen. He said he’d check with Mr. Lee, then called me back a day or two later and told me to come on up at my convenience.
I made the trip on December 2, 2003, and met Jim Casey the next morning in a waiting room at Community General Hospital in Syracuse, where Mr. Lee lived in a long-term-care wing. Jim was a broad-shouldered, burly man with an easy smile and a handshake that was all business. After chatting for a few minutes he led me to Mr. Lee’s room: whitewashed and institutional, but filled with pictures and mementos. Hanging on one wall was a collage of photos from his 104th birthday party, which saw him surrounded by Marines in white gloves and dress blues, a splendid-looking group. That same day, he had been presented with a diploma from Liverpool High School in Liverpool, New York, from which he had dropped out in the spring of 1917 in order to join the Marine Corps. That diploma, eight months old now, rested atop a nightstand. Next to all the photos in the room—most of them eighty, ninety, a hundred years old, relatives, friends, a young man who bore a striking resemblance to his father—it looked jarringly white.
William Eugene Lee was a slender man; it would be hard for me to say just how tall he was, because I never saw him standing up. Throughout our conversation he sat in a wheelchair, wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt and, on his ears, a pair of fuzzy headphones, which were attached to some kind of hearing aid that looked like an old Sony Walkman. His hair was decidedly thinner than in those old photographs, and entirely white, but it was there. His speech was extremely halting; he was given to very long pauses, twenty or thirty seconds or more, sometimes two or three to a sentence. His discharge papers recorded his height as sixty-seven and a half inches, his eyes blue, his character excellent.
He was born on March 24, 1899, he told me, in the small town of Salina, New York, which is now a suburb of Syracuse. His parents were named Margaret and Norman; his father, he recalled, “worked for the Mohegan Company, as a meat cutter.”
“That’s a store chain,” Jim explained.
“Did he get to bring home meat from the job?” I asked.
“We would always eat good,” Mr. Lee said. He grew up in between a brother, Otis, and a sister named Nell.
“How did you come to join the Marines?”
“They was my favorite, from when I was a kid.” His childhood was a time of great glory for the United States Marine Corps, storming beaches in the Caribbean and Latin America, putting down insurrections that somehow threatened American interests (often, purely commercial interests); he would have read about them, or at least heard about them, often. He joined, he said, as soon as he was old enough. His papers show he was inducted at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on April 27, 1917, just three weeks after America entered the war; his actual enlistment probably took place in Syracuse a week or two before that.
In Philadelphia, the Marines assigned him to the 51st Company of the 5th Regiment. After only six weeks of training—much of it spent “on a rifle range there”—the 5th Marines boarded the USS Henderson and sailed off for France; it was June 14, 1917. General Pershing had himself arrived in France just days earlier. “We was thirteen days going across, I know that,” he said. “They had a lot of ships”—that is, destroyers, subchasers—“following us, so nothing happened until we got across.” He vividly remembered two things about the crossing. The first was that “they was giving the fellows a shot in the arm. I can remember it so well that there was one guy, he was watching, he thought they was giving him a big needle, and he jumped around. They took him out of the line, and put him back, back farther.” He laughed at that one. The other: “After we landed in Saint-Nazaire [France], we was onboard ship, they paid us fifteen dollars for payday . . . seems to me they paid us in gold. And one of the guys leaned over the ship, he had it in his pocket, and it slipped out. He lost that.” I laughed at that one.
But the day of my visit was not a good one for Eugene Lee’s memory. He began to get frustrated with himself only a few minutes into our conversation, started interjecting the phrase “How the hell was it?” into just about every answer. He still had a fair amount to say, but not nearly as much, I could tell, as he wanted to. So while he was able to impart some information to me, I had to fill in a fair number of gaps after we spoke, and in doing so I came upon a part of the story, a big part, that he didn’t even know about, that didn’t even happen until much later, years after he died.
“On the back of a truck,” Eugene Lee recalled, eighty-six years after the fact, “we went to this little town, and—how the hell?—we stayed in this little town, and we done some training there.” This would have been the early summer of 1917, shortly after the 5th Marines arrived in France. After a while there, “they put us in the trench up there at Verdun, I think it was.” He said “Ver-DOON,” offering me a brief glimpse of an archaic pronunciation (or mispronunciation) that was once, I imagine, quite common. “We didn’t do anything, just . . . I don’t know how long we was in them up there, them big trenches they had. And the next thing—the next thing, I guess, was they took us up . . . they moved us over there by truck. Then we started up the road and we met—there was one Frenchman coming back. He was all alone, but he come, he said: ‘Beaucoup Boche.’”
Beaucoup Boche: A lot of Germans.
Now: If you should find yourself at an Oktoberfest one day with an enormous beer stein in your hand, swaying to the deep and soothing tones of an oompah band, do not—please—address your fellow revelers as “Boche.” It is not a polite term. I don’t think Germans back then cared for it any more than they did “Kraut,” or “Heinie,” or “Blockhead,” or “Jerry,” or “Fritz.” If you’re wondering, the word is actually a shortened version of Alboche, which is itself a combination of Allemand, the French word for “German,” and caboche, slang for both “cabbage” (aka “kraut”) and “blockhead.” It was the favored French term for Germans, and the French hated the Germans back then. Deeply. The Germans, after all, had invaded their country twice in less than half a century, tore the place up, and appropriated lots of land and riddled it with concrete trenches and bunkers and gun emplacements to keep the French from taking it back.
Whatever bad things the Germans of World War I may have done, though—and they weren’t exactly humanitarians who invaded neutral Belgium to better spread a message of tolerance and love—it’s important to remember that they did not build death camps. They weren’t the Gestapo,
the SD, the SS, or the Einsatzgruppen. Maybe I draw this distinction because I know that in the east—Russia, Poland, the Baltics—the German Army of World War I actually served, for a while, as liberators of the indigenous Jewish population, who had been dealing for centuries with dehumanizing anti-Semitic statutes and murderous state-sponsored pogroms; maybe it’s because every account I’ve ever read of the legendary Christmas Truce of 1914 has the Germans courageously initiating it. Maybe it’s the stories that Arthur Guy Empey and Frank P. Sibley tell about Saxons deliberately firing over their enemies’ heads. Maybe it’s all of these things. One thing I can say for sure, though, is that my attitudes on the subject have been shaped, in part, by something Eugene Lee told me that day.
At exactly 11:00 a.m. on the morning of November 11, 1918, somewhere in the Meuse-Argonne sector, he recalled, a German soldier “come out waving a white flag, and he started walking down, and our officer went out to meet him. When they got there, all of a sudden, all the German soldiers come running down, and our fellows—well, we got up, and they got mixed up talking to—some could speak our language, and a lot of our fellows could speak German, so we had a great time changing, trying to talk. And they showed us pictures of their family, you know, and we had a great time to celebrate . . . swapping souvenirs.”
A couple of weeks later, “after the armistice,” he explained, “we had to follow the Germans back.” That is to say, the 5th Marines were part of the Army of Occupation, which was established by the terms of the armistice; they were stationed in the German Rhineland. “We had to follow them back, and in a little town, we stopped for Thanksgiving, and had our Thanksgiving dinner there. It’s a little, little place. I forget the name of the place.”
“Where did you stay when you were in Germany?” I asked him. “Did you stay in somebody’s house?”
“Yes, lived right in the house,” he replied. “There was so many men to a house. There was two in our house. We each had separate rooms, bedrooms, beds to sleep in.”
“Do you remember the name of the German family that you stayed with?”
“Yes, I did. I did, but I’ve forgot. It was something like Horteig.”
“Did you go hunting when you were in Germany?” Jim Casey had told me that Mr. Lee had hunted back home before he’d enlisted.
“Yeah, we could hunt,” he said. “The only thing was we wasn’t supposed to shoot was deer. But they had wild boar, anything else you wanted to shoot.”
“So what did you shoot?”
“I shot a deer up there.” He laughed, and I did. “I left it there and went back down and got a friend of mine. We brought it back down, and this, where I lived, the old man, he come out and took the deer. Let’s see, they invited us—the fellow with me—they invited us down for a dinner when they had the deer. We went down and had venison dinner, and we had the one meal after that. We didn’t go down [more often] because they didn’t get too much to eat, you know.”
“Where did the German families get their food?”
“The government allowed them so much each week, I guess.”
“The American government?”
“Yeah. Those German people, they were nice people, they were . . . At first we used to have to carry a weapon with us all the time. It wasn’t long after that we didn’t have to carry any weapons. The German people were good people, and we got to know them.”
“They were very friendly to the Americans?”
“They was, when we got to know them. They used to—before, you used to have to wash some underwear, when we was in France, we used to walk out in the stream and wash them and hammer them. Well, [in Germany] I had some dirty underwear, I was going to wash it, and when I came back, the German woman there, she had it all washed and clean for me. And I give her five francs. And Jesus, that was a lot of money to them.” He looked down at his hands.
“Were you surprised at how nice the German people were?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “No, because I knew a lot of German people where I lived, in Liverpool.”
“Did you hear a lot of bad things about the Germans during the war?”
“Oh, yes. I heard a lot of bad things. Something about, they threw some of them in the furnace.”
Later, Jim explained to me that Mr. Lee must have been confused by my question, confused in particular about which war I was referring to; that he was thinking I’d meant the Second World War, and that “furnace” meant “crematoria.” This was after the interview had ended, after I had packed up my equipment and thanked Mr. Lee and left his room and the long-term-care wing; he was asleep by then, I figured, or maybe having lunch. Whatever the case, I didn’t feel I could go back there and ask him the question that Jim Casey’s revelation had raised in my mind, which was this: Having heard, many years later, about the furnaces, how did you square that image with your fond memories of the German people from your time in the Army of Occupation?
I’m glad Jim Casey didn’t tell me what he did until we were well away from Eugene Lee’s room. I’m glad he didn’t do so because, if he had explained the “furnace” reference to me while I was still there, I would have asked Mr. Lee that question, would have done so reflexively. Because I would have wanted to know. Very much. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, until I had watched him wrestle with words and memory for a bit—something he did even after much simpler, more straightforward questions—that it’s a ridiculous question to pose to a 104-year-old man. I was thirty-six at the time, and I couldn’t have answered it.
I still can’t.
Back to Beaucoup Boche.
“So we was going up the road,” Private Eugene Lee recalled eighty-five years and six months hence, “and we met the French people walking back, all the old people.” It’s a scene that was recounted by someone else who was with the 5th Marines that day—William Edward Campbell, writing fifteen years later as William March, telling the story as Private Jesse Bogan of Company K:
We came to a long hill shaped like a semi-circle and dug in against the protected side. Below us the Germans were shelling Marigny, a small town. We could see people running out of the houses, making funny gestures, and down the narrow streets, until they joined the line that filled the highway. Then we dug in on the off side of the hill and waited.
It was late May and the whole countryside was green and beautiful. Below us, in the valley, fruit trees were in bloom, pink, white and red, running across the valley in strips of color, and spotting the side of the hill. Then a haze settled over the valley, and gradually it got dark.
The Germans had quit shelling the town. It lay demolished below us. Lieutenant Bartlestone came up: “All right, men! Get your things together. We’re going in the wood when it gets dark.” Then he spoke to Sergeant Dunning: “The orders are to stop the Germans and not let them advance an inch farther. . . .”
“Well, anyway,” said Alex Marro, after the lieutenant had gone, “that’s simple and to the point.”
“What’s the name of this place?” asked Art Crenshaw.
“I don’t know,” said Sergeant Dunning. “What difference does that make?”
“I asked a Frenchman on the road,” said Allan Methot, “and he said it was called Belleau Wood.”
“Come on! Come on!” said Sergeant Dunning. “Get your equipment together, and quit chewing the fat!”
Belleau Wood. It’s hard to explain just what those words mean to a United States Marine. What “Valley Forge” meant to a former Continental soldier, perhaps. Except that now Valley Forge has been appropriated by all Americans; few who aren’t World War I buffs have even heard of Belleau Wood. Every single Marine has, though, and that little two-word phrase is as important to them as just about any other they know. USMC Commandant General James F. Amos told me that Belleau Wood “was the birth of the modern Marine Corps.”
You might recall Captain Emerson G. Taylor’s description, in New England in France, of Belleau Wood: “Shapeless fragments of what once were men hung in the jagged branches
of the trees, blown there by shells.” There’s a good chance that at least some of those fragments had once been Marines. By the time Captain Taylor arrived on the scene, they could have been up there for nearly a month; no wonder he, and the rest of the 102nd Infantry, “came to move and talk as when they know that ghosts are watching them.” To the living and already edgy, those woods—blasted to shards and reeking of decomposing corpses—must have seemed haunted.
Six weeks earlier, and for centuries before that, they were the private hunting grounds of a landed French family, a fine place to stalk deer and wild boar. But war is often like a roulette wheel, with battlegrounds being chosen by chance rather than strategy. In the case of Belleau Wood, that wheel started spinning a few months earlier and a few hundred miles to the east. On March 3, 1918, Germany and Russia—the latter in the charge of Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviki—signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending their part of the war, allowing the Bolsheviki to devote their attentions entirely to putting down the various anti-Bolshevik uprisings, which are now remembered collectively as the Russian Civil War. But the treaty also allowed the Germans to move nearly all the forces they had on their Eastern Front—most historians say the number was thirty-three divisions, roughly five hundred thousand troops—to the Western Front, which gave them, at long last, numerical superiority over the Allies. For the time being, that is. They believed, as did everyone else, that four million fresh American troops would be arriving in France sooner or later; as they saw it, their only chance to win the war would be to do so before the bulk of those American troops could get there. So the Germans, who had been fighting a largely defensive war since the fall of 1914, mounted a massive offensive—known to history as the Spring Offensive—just a few weeks after the treaty was signed, in the hopes that it might punch through the French and British lines.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 22