Tree from Villers Cotterets forest, it was
carved by a Marine from the 5th regiment
/2nd Division, on July 17, 1918 after they
moved from Belleau Wood area to Soissons,
they debussed in the big forest in the
afternoon of July 17, 1918 and some of them
found the time to carve trees before to move
to the jump line, the same day by night, and
by the way, to keep the remembrance forever.
I asked Gilles how he had managed to secure this particular artifact. He just smiled and said it wasn’t easy. He added that it was particularly popular with former Marines, quite a few of whom, he told me, had visited him over the years. One had even made him an honorary member of the Corps. I noticed he was wearing a USMC T-shirt that day—not for my benefit, I believe, but because he owned a lot of them.
I inquired about Eugene Lee’s mess kit. Gilles said he’d tried to acquire it for his museum, but had been outbid by someone else. He thought he knew who the winner was, he added, but declined to furnish a name; for whatever reason, collectors of this ilk often seem kind of shadowy, not the sort of folk whose names you might drop casually. They don’t much like each other, either.
The next day, I was in Belleau. It’s a very small village, without any shops to speak of, though it does have a little museum dedicated to local history, and particularly to the First World War. I was told I needed to see this museum, and I was glad to get into it, since, like much of small-town France, it keeps odd hours, and not many of them; but by the time I did, I’d been in the area for several days, and there wasn’t much in it that I hadn’t seen before. I did, however, notice that many of the military artifacts therein were marked as being on loan from one Georges Bailly. I asked the curator for M. Bailly’s phone number; the French being not nearly as obsessed with privacy as Americans are, she gave it to me right away. (I may or may not have flirted with her a bit, first. Hey—it was France.) M. Bailly sounded a bit cagey at first, but when I dropped the name Eugene Lee, he invited me over.
Unlike Gilles Lagin, Georges Bailly did not have a museum in his house, or anywhere else; he was just a collector—and, he later acknowledged, a dealer. (In case you’re wondering, his last name is pronounced “by-EE.” And yes, I did ask him how things were at the Bedford Falls Savings and Loan; he had no idea what I was talking about.) A sharp, silver-haired man who looked more like a dealer of art than militaria, he stored his collection mostly in one very large room on the second floor of his house. Everything in it looked almost as good as new—not a trace of rust anywhere, at least not as far as I could see. He had as many Pickelhauben—those German spiked helmets—as Gilles Lagin had identification disks. Every one was different, too, each bearing subtle distinctions indicating rank, branch of service, state of origin, and so on. When I asked if I could take pictures, he looked suspicious, then anxious, and said non. I imagine he worried about thieves. His greatest concern, though, was moths; he’d recently routed an infestation, but not before it damaged some of his old uniforms, which otherwise looked pristine on their mannequins. It was a sad thing to see.
Throughout the room, he had sealed plastic tubs and small metal filing cabinets. From time to time he would open one up and show me a drawer or a tub filled with insignia, or identification disks, or other such artifacts, sorted and stored like with like. He tracked everything—many thousands of artifacts—on an extensive set of file cards; each individual item had a corresponding card. As much as he had, he knew exactly where all of it was.
I asked him about Eugene Lee’s mess-kit cover. Yes, he said, he knew all about it. Someone else had it; he heard they’d dug it up with a metal detector. Who had it? A shrug.
So, he asked me, did you really meet Eugene Lee? By this time, Mr. Lee had been gone for more than five years; he’d died on March 25, 2004, less than four months after I’d met him.
Yes, I said, I did.
“Do you know the name Joseph Winook?” he asked. I said I did, that Mr. Lee had talked a lot about his old friend. But how do you know about him, M. Bailly? He just smiled and pulled out a small box filled with index cards, flipped through until he found the one he was looking for, withdrew it, then opened a drawer filled with eating utensils and rooted around in it for a few minutes. Finally he pulled out a fork, looked it over for a few seconds, then gingerly passed it to me. It was dark with oxidation, but I could still read clearly the engravings on its handle:
117654
WNUK
The index card read, in part: “WNUK, Joseph F. Fork. Found 5 November, 1993.” M. Bailly was an excellent researcher; using nothing more than a fork bearing a serial number and one name, he was able to determine its owner’s date and place of enlistment (Philadelphia, April 27, 1917), the date he probably dropped it (wounded June 11, 1918), the term of his hospitalization, the fact that he’d been awarded a Silver Star, and much more. I, on the other hand, have never been able to find out anything about the man. But at least now I know how to spell his name.
Eventually, both William E. Lee and Joe Wnuk returned to the front. By then they were serving together in the 51st Company of the 5th Regiment; I don’t know if Joe had requested such a transfer so he and William could serve together, or if it had just worked out that way. They were sent east, to Lorraine, just in time for the great Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the last great battle of the war. The Argonne—another forest. A very dangerous place to be. They were glad to be fighting together.
“Where was Joe from, do you remember?” I asked Mr. Lee.
“He was from Pennsylvania. I was going to stop to his house after I was discharged,” he said.
“Did you get to do that?”
“No. No, I never did. He was killed the last night.”
The last night: of the war. November 10, 1918. Twelve, maybe fifteen hours to go until the armistice. “During the night, as we crossed the river . . .”—the Meuse River—“. . . once in a while, they’d throw a shell over, it’d land in the river in back of us. It’s one of them that killed Joe,” he said. “The very last night.”
Tell me, what words can possibly do justice to the notion of a young man, freshly healed and back to fighting strength, being killed anonymously from a mile away by a lone piece of German artillery on the last night of the war? My mind, limited as it is, doesn’t know what to do with that, with the notion that, by the time the sun set next, the war would be over, yet somehow Joseph Wnuk wouldn’t be there to see it. I don’t know how to feel about the fact that, seventy-five years after his death, a scavenger dug the man’s fork up out of the earth, the ground where he might have died but didn’t, and now a collector, a man with no connection at all to Joseph Wnuk of Pennsylvania, keeps that fork in a drawer with scores of other forks and spoons and knives.
Do I even have the right to feel anything at all about a story told to me in the last months of his life by a man who survived Belleau Wood and the Argonne Forest, hunted deer and fed his hosts in occupied Germany, sailed home on the USS Leviathan (which, before it was seized by the United States in 1917, had been the SS Vaterland), marched in parades in Philadelphia and New York and Washington, returned to Syracuse, married his sweetheart, started going by his middle name, passed nearly half a century working as a traveling foreman for the Syracuse Lighting and Niagara Mohawk power companies, passed another forty years in retirement, and still carried with him, through all of it, through every month of those eighty-five years, the memory of that friend and of his death on the last night of the war? The pain, the grief, the indignation or cynicism or bitterness or relief or whatever—that all belongs to William Eugene Lee.
“You wrote a letter to his—Joe’s—mother after he was killed?” I asked him that day in Syracuse in December, 2003.
“Yes, I did,” he said.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told them how he was a great friend, and I was going to stop there.”
But he ne
ver could bring himself to make that trip.
10
We Didn’t See a Thing
WHO IS A WORLD WAR I veteran? It’s a simple enough question, I guess; the answer, though, at least in some cases, is not quite so simple. Take Harold Gardner.
In August, 2005, I drove up to Choconut, Pennsylvania (it sounds like it should be a subdivision of Hershey, but actually it’s just over the border from Binghamton, New York), to see him, having read about him in a newspaper article. He was 106 years and eight months old at the time, quite sharp and self-sufficient, still living alone in his own house, a slight fellow in wire-rim glasses, red plaid shirt, high gray trousers, and wide suspenders. Before and after we talked he scurried around the house, showing me this and that from his long life. There was a good-sized barn connected to the place, and he had it filled with lots and lots of large and elaborate machinery. He kept it all in fine working order, clean as the day it was manufactured; he was very proud of it, took the time to tell me what each and every machine or engine was and did. Or, I should say, he tried to. I didn’t understand a word.
He had grown up in Binghamton, started tinkering with things when he was eight or nine years old, and dropped out of high school in his senior year to go to work as a toolmaker and machinist; “dollars and cents was more important to me than that diploma,” he explained, though he quickly added that he regretted never having graduated. Then the country got into the war, and he ended up being drafted into the Army. He was supposed to be sent down to Camp Humphreys, in Virginia, for basic training, but his departure was delayed due to the influenza epidemic; “just shut the place down till they got straightened out with the flu, you know,” he explained.
Months passed. Then, one day, he got the call to report for duty at the armory, on Washington Street in Binghamton. “It was over thirty of us, I would say,” he recalled. “They gave us a blanket and socks and one thing or another and got us ready to go up. When we got up we got on the train, I had blankets and socks and all that stuff with me. Hadn’t gotten a uniform yet.”
The train, full of anxious and excited new doughboys, sat in the station for a while. “There were three or four coaches,” Harold Gardner recalled. And then, “at, I guess, about half past nine,” he said, “one of the Army officers came on the train” with an announcement: “You boys can go home now. The armistice has been signed.”
That was it.
Except that, at first, nobody moved. “We couldn’t understand it at all,” he told me. They thought it could be a practical joke, that they might find themselves in trouble if they really did try to go home. “We found out the next day that the war was over,” he remembered.
“Did you keep your blanket and your socks?” I asked him.
“I still have the blanket,” he said.
And lest you think that was all the Army gave him for his troubles, they also sent him a check for his service. “One dollar,” he announced. “I never cashed it.” He still had it, too. Even showed it to me, proudly. From time to time, he said, the government would send him a letter asking him why he hadn’t deposited it yet, but he just ignored them; said he’d rather have a souvenir of his service in World War I than the dollar. I guess his attitude about money had changed since high school.
So: Was Harold Gardner a veteran of World War I? Are the blanket and socks and that check for one dollar enough? Or does none of it count because he hadn’t been issued his uniform yet?
In the course of tracking down, meeting, and interviewing World War I veterans—a process that occupied me for the better part of a decade—I gathered quite a few unusual stories. Many of them involve people whose service is not easily defined, or even categorized.
Take, for example, Henry Roy Tucker, whom I found off the French List. Mr. Tucker—he went by Roy—lived in Toccoa, a small town in northeastern Georgia that I knew, from my childhood obsession with the Guinness Book of World Records, as the home of Paul Edward Anderson, who was the world’s strongest man through much of the 1970s. (It’s also the birthplace of DeForest Kelley, of Star Trek fame, but since he wasn’t in the Guinness book, I didn’t know that back then.) Roy Tucker had been born in Alapaha, Georgia, on May 9, 1897, left school after the fifth grade, went to work on his father’s farm, married at twenty, and was drafted at twenty-one. The Army assigned him to Company F of the 28th Infantry, 1st Division, which was already in France, having been one of the first divisions to go across in 1917; he was to be a replacement, a stand-in for someone who had been shot or gassed or blown up. He went through basic training in Atlanta, got terribly seasick while going across on the Leviathan—“about three days I’d like to have died,” he told me—and was greeted, when he arrived, by the worst sight of his life: “The first thing I saw when we got off,” he recalled, “there were dead horses and dead men littered around there. Dead to beat the band . . . I don’t remember how many. There was a lot of them there, though. They had been fighting all that morning, when I got there.”
I visited with him in September, 2003; he was a small man in a brown cardigan sweater and red plaid shirt, large glasses, fine white hair. He had a very gentle, peaceful air about him; he and his daughter, Cassie, bore a striking resemblance to one another. She prodded him along, pointed him in the direction of the stories she had heard growing up, repeated my questions loudly as necessary. She helped him remember the name of the minister who had officiated at his wedding in 1917—it was Stallings—then helped him remember that Reverend Stallings’s son had served with Roy Tucker until the younger Stallings came down with influenza. It was implied, though never confirmed, that it had killed him.
One of his favorite stories involved the night that he had been on guard duty when a motorcycle and sidecar came roaring up. He paused, smiled. Who was it? I asked him.
“Pershing,” he replied. “Came out of his sidecar, rolled up there, talked to us all a good while.”
“What did you say?”
“I don’t remember now, it’s been so long . . . Nice old man though, he sure was.” Pershing had been fifty-eight years old at the time—nearly fifty years younger than the man now telling me that story.
Mr. Tucker had liked the Germans, too, at least those he’d met when he was there as part of the Army of Occupation. “They were just as nice as anybody you’d ever seen in your life,” he recalled. “When we camped in this little town here, maybe a week or ten days, and then they’d transfer us to another town, and another town, and there’s people that were there, from over there, that would invite us back over to have dinner with them.”
I suppose he never put together in his mind those fine dinners and all those dead soldiers and horses he’d seen that first day, though both were, of course, the work of Germans. Maybe he was disinclined to bear a grudge, since he was spared the fate of those corpses. He attributed his good fortune to God, but timing deserves some of the credit, too: As it happened, he arrived in France on November 11, 1918. “The armistice was signed that morning,” he explained.
I wonder if Henry Roy Tucker, having just gotten there that very day, understood, entirely, what that meant. We know now, of course; we regard November 11, 1918, as the day the Great War ended, even though, technically, the peace treaty was not signed until the following summer. Few people know the month and date the Treaty of Versailles was effected, much less the time, but everyone knows the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. I expect, as years went on, that date grew to mean a great deal to him. And even though he arrived, technically, after the armistice took effect, eighty years later, the government of France decided to give him a pass when they evaluated his Legion of Honor application. He was in uniform on French soil as of November 11, 1918: That was good enough for them. No matter that, unlike all those dead men and dead horses that greeted him, he never stood a chance of becoming a casualty of war.
His family, though, was not spared. Roy Tucker’s brother, Quincy, was too young to be drafted, but his sister, Lillie,
was married to a fellow who went off to France. He returned just fine; or so it seemed at the time. Turns out, Cassie said, he “brought her a disease back from overseas, from the First World War. That’s what killed her.” The way she said the word “disease” left no doubt as to what, exactly, she meant.
“She was a beautiful woman,” her niece mourned. “Oh, she was pretty.”
In November, 2005, I went to Smith Center, Kansas—so-named because it sits just a few miles away from the geographic center of the continental United States—to meet 106-year-old Albert “Jud” Wagner, who had served in the Marines in World War I. Mr. Wagner’s son, Junior, was also a Marine Corps veteran, in his case from the Second World War; when we spoke on the phone, Junior told me I was welcome to come see his father, though he wasn’t sure the interview would prove fruitful for me. Undaunted, I traveled to (literally) the middle of the country, confident that I could get a good interview out of Jud Wagner. I couldn’t. He was able to give me the basic facts of his youth—when and where he was born, his parents’ names, his siblings’ names, where he went to school, what year he graduated—but very little beyond that. He was working on the family farm when he decided to enlist; “everyone else was,” he explained. He chose the Marines because “it was a good outfit,” went through basic training in Quantico, Virginia, and then shipped out. According to his discharge papers, which his son sent me later, he arrived in France on October 21, 1918, three weeks before the armistice, but never saw combat. He did, however, serve in Germany from December 12, 1918, until August 6, 1919, as part of the Army of Occupation, though he could give me absolutely no details about that—or anything else.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 24