The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “Oh, all the time. Mostly at night.”

  “And what would you do to take cover?”

  He laughed. “Just roll up the blankets. That’s about all we could do, you know.”

  After a while, he said, they stopped putting on their gas masks; none of the shells, to his knowledge, had ever contained gas. Still, he recalled, “it was tough to get sleep. Because every so often it was ‘abandon ship!’ We’d have to get up and get going.” And in addition to that, he told me, “we used to get bombed every so often”—that is, by aeroplanes. It was an experience that, strangely, he appreciated. “About the only excitement we have is running for the cave or cellar when Jerry flys over,” he wrote in that November 3 letter. “We occasionally see an air battle for aeroplanes are quite common here. Of course the anti-aircraft guns always open up and drive back any enemy plane.”

  Dramatic as that all is, the most memorable stories Howard Ramsey told me that day, and when I visited him again two years later, concerned things that happened between November 11, 1918, when the bombing and shelling stopped, and the following summer, when he left France aboard the USS Luckenbach (which, on a previous crossing, had carried Art Fiala home). One takes place just a few days after the armistice, when Private Ramsey was approached by a couple of officers who ordered him to drive them, in his former water-tank truck, to Germany. The reason was never clear; perhaps they were just curious to see the place. So they all drove to Germany. But soon, for whatever reason, the officers lost their nerve. “They decided that we were in too far,” he recalled, “so we had to turn around. So we turned around, went back, and we came to the country called Luxembourg.” And then, somewhere in Luxembourg—he didn’t recall where, exactly, but the entire country is smaller than Rhode Island, so any guess stands a fair chance of being right—the officers had Private Ramsey stop the car so they could get out, perhaps to take some snapshots. “So we parked—I don’t know whether we got pictures or not—but we parked along the curb,” he said. “And I was waiting for these two officers to come back. Well, while I was sitting there, a little girl come up, a little girl with little blond curls. She jumped on the side of the truck, and sat down beside of me. She talked perfect English. And I found out from her, and I later verified it, that pretty much everybody in Luxembourg spoke English.

  “So this little blond girl,” he continued, “she sat there, and we visit back and forth. And finally she says, ‘Will you give me a souvenir? If you give me a souvenir, I will give you a souvenir.’” Perhaps she had never met an American before, and was hoping for something that might teach her just a little bit about that country across the ocean. Private Ramsey was flummoxed; “I don’t have any American souvenirs to give you,” he told the little girl. But then, he said, “I looked all through my pockets, and I had a penny.” It was the only thing he had to give, so he presented it to her; and she, in turn, pressed something into his hand. And then, he told me, “she jumped down off the truck and ran.” What she gave him, he explained, “was wrapped up, it was—like a little package, like this here.” He cupped his hands together tight. “So when I open it up, it was a lock of her hair. A lock about that long.” He held his two index fingers up, about three inches apart. “I still got it,” he said, and laughed. “Someplace, somewhere.”

  After that, Private Ramsey—he would be promoted to corporal in January, 1919—took up souvenir-hunting himself back in France. His favorite trophies, he said, were German helmets; sometimes he’d lead parties of several friends and acquaintances out into the field to scavenge for them. They were plentiful, apparently, because he even managed to send quite a few home to friends and relatives. “Tell you what,” he wrote his mother in March, 1919, “a Fritz helmet makes a nice flower pot. You might try it. But don’t think it was gotten in the mix, for you used to find them everywhere.”

  “I remember one time,” he told me, “I asked one of the other guys, ‘Come on, Joe,’ or whatever his name was, ‘Let’s go and get some helmets.’” So they went out and scavenged around; it turned out to be a productive afternoon. “Each of us got four, five, six German helmets,” he recalled. “And we came back, and one of our trucks came by. So we flagged him down, and we went around—the panel truck had a high tailgate, like this—we took these German helmets, and we threw them over the tailgate, and then climbed up to get in.” He paused, just a beat. “The truck was full of German war prisoners,” he said. “We never felt so damn foolish in our lives.”

  He had a lot of funny stories, but of everyone I interviewed, Howard Ramsey also had the grimmest assignment after the armistice. While others were hunting deer in Germany, or relaxing at Aix-les-Bains, or being inspected by President Wilson, Corporal Ramsey and some unfortunate others were performing a duty that none of them would have requested. “We started a big cemetery in France,” he recalled. “We would take the bodies from the grave to this new cemetery.” He told me this very early in our first visit; in fact, it was one of the first things he said. Clearly, the experience had left quite an impression on him.

  When he said “take the bodies from the grave to this new cemetery,” he meant: exhume bodies from what were meant to be temporary burial sites, usually at or very near the spot where the deceased fell, a place typically marked by a wooden stake or the like, and labeled in some manner—the best bet would be to fix one of the deceased’s two identification disks to the stake—so that, when a party would return in the future to reclaim the remains, they might know whose remains they were reclaiming. Of course, since lines shifted and artillery fell everywhere, a lot of remains were lost before anyone could reclaim them; and even if they were somehow found later, whatever was left to identify them might since have been blown somewhere else. War produces a lot of corpses but doesn’t give you much time to deal with them properly.

  The “new cemetery” he referred to is now known as Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. It is the largest American cemetery in all of Europe, covering 130 acres; more than fourteen thousand Americans are buried there. That’s more people than lived in the town in which I grew up, in Westchester County, New York, which seemed like a pretty big place to me at the time. The cemetery is divided into eight sections, each of which are exactly the same size, perfect rectangles with perfect ninety-degree corners. Every row of markers—and you can imagine how many rows there are, with fourteen thousand graves present—is unfailingly straight and evenly spaced. The lawn is the most verdant and meticulously mowed I have ever trod upon; the cemetery is without a doubt one of the three most majestic human constructions I have ever beheld. Like the other two—Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building—its scale is difficult to imagine if you’ve never seen it, and difficult to grasp even if you have. I spent several long days walking through it—in that part of France, in late June, the sun sets at about 10:00 p.m.—and only managed to read a small fraction of the markers.

  The site of the cemetery was selected on October 14, 1918, almost a month before the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the last great battle of the war, ended; needless to say, nothing else happened until after November 11. Howard Ramsey seemed to indicate that he and others started working on it just a few days later, and I know, from his letters, that he continued to do so until July, 1919. Very early photos of the cemetery show wooden crosses; the white marble markers were installed later. Somewhere I came upon a book of a dozen or so postcards from 1919, each one illustrated with either a different photograph of some aspect of the cemetery’s construction, or a shot of the wreckage of the nearby village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. The book is complete; not surprisingly, none of the postcards were ever used. I’m not sure whose idea it was to print up postcards featuring scenes of the building of a massive new cemetery and the destruction of a quaint old village, but I doubt he was able to land a job at Hallmark after the war.

  One of the reasons Meuse-Argonne, and the other American military cemeteries of that era, turned out so well is that their construction was personally supervised by General P
ershing. In fact, he was onsite all the time; on Easter Sunday, 1919, Howard Ramsey wrote his mother that his camp had just been inspected by both Pershing and Secretary of War Newton Baker. “One time General Pershing came to interview us,” Corporal Ramsey told me eighty-four years later. “This convoy was bringing General Pershing to view this scene, he came up there. So we all lined up to the back. So here comes this person’s car, and another officer’s car, and another officer’s car, like that, four, five. And as Pershing went by, we were sending a salute. And Pershing was the only guy, the only officer in that whole convoy, that ever returned our salute.

  “We always thought about that—how funny that was,” he continued. “Yeah, Pershing respected us twice. Another time, we went out to pick up the troops, I forget how many each truck picked up, then we carried them over to the cemetery and let them out, and we went back to the cemetery after the ceremony and picked them up, took them back to the camp . . . [Pershing] had a platform made out where he’d go to talk, and it was over a bunch of trenches, empty trenches. But the trenches had been, you know, dug, but not filled—you know, no bodies in it. So to make this look nice so Pershing could look out over nice bodies, they stuck up planks. They filled these graves, these trenches in again, they put up a flag or a name, you know, so he’d look out over this, and it’d look nice. Soon as he left they dug the trenches up again. Oh,” he said, laughing, “I never got over that.” General Pershing’s involvement with the cemetery was hardly ceremonial; he spent the last quarter century of his life as chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, which oversees all overseas American military cemeteries to this day, and personally made a great many decisions regarding World War I cemeteries’ design and maintenance. One of those decisions was that it would not suffice for every unknown American soldier buried in France to be commemorated with a cross. “He said, ‘We know that a certain percentage of the identified dead buried here are Jewish, so that same percentage should be represented as Jewish among the unknowns’” with a Star of David marker, explained Phil Rivers, who was superintendent of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery when I visited. “World War I was the only war for which this was done. If you go to a World War II cemetery, all the unknowns are marked with crosses.”

  Like many beautiful things, the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery was the product of a hard, dirty, ugly process; in the beginning, Corporal Ramsey recalled, “there were no provisions made for going and coming. So I remember one night, it was cold, and we had no blankets, or nothing like that. We had to sleep—we slept in the cemetery, because we could sleep between the two graves, and keep the wind off of us, see?” Still, he was fortunate compared to some, and he knew it. The men of the 302nd Water Tank Train were chosen because they were truck drivers; “we hauled the bodies from the cemetery to the graveyard,” he said. And while the work was unpleasant—“these bodies had been buried, you know, not in coffins or anything like that, just in the ground,” he explained—there were others working there who had it far worse. “The colored people did all the work,” he confessed. “We didn’t have to handle the bodies or anything like that. They’d put them on a canvas, put the canvas in the box, and take the box and bury that.” All he and the rest of the 302nd Water Tank Train—every last one of whom were white—did was drive the bodies from one place to another.

  Of course, that was unpleasant, too. “I am now hauling dead bodies,” Howard wrote his mother at one point. “We go out on the old battle fields and colored fellows dig them up and we haul them in here to the cemetery. This is an enormous job and no telling when we will be thru. 15,000 more to bring in and we bring in between 200 and 300 a day.” In his next letter, he elaborated somewhat:

  During the war men were buried in small quickly made and rough cemeteries or out on the field. This was the best that these men could receive during the stress of battle. But now that the war is over these men are being put in a more fitting resting place. And this is partly our job. This is a large camp consisting of mostly truck companies and negro regiments. . . .

  I won’t write anymore or go into detail about this work as it’s something a woman wouldn’t enjoy.

  And as he wrote that sentence, he knew—having acknowledged it already in his last letter—that he and his buddies didn’t nearly have the worst of it. “I don’t know how we ever got the colored people to—” he said to me at some point, but never finished the sentence. He didn’t really need to.

  But I’ll get to that part of the story a bit later, when the time is right.

  Of all the men I’ve discussed in this chapter, Howard Ramsey was the only one who experienced what we typically envision when we say the word “war.” Reuben Law very nearly died of influenza on the trip across, but once he got to France he was far removed from the front lines. Jud Wagner got there just three weeks before it ended, too late, apparently, to make it to the front. Roy Tucker got there on the very day it ended. Homer Anderson never made it out of Pennsylvania. Harold Gardner didn’t get any closer than a seat on a train, a blanket, and some socks.

  Even so, that war was very important to all of them. It was such a significant event in their lives, in fact, that they were all willing to take the time, eighty-five or so years later, when they must have known well that their remaining days were few, to discuss it with me. More than just willing; they were eager to share these old stories with someone one last time. Most of them hadn’t been told in fifty, sixty years. Some of them had never been told before. These men had lived entire lifetimes—long lifetimes—since the events they recounted to me had transpired; in some cases, the war had occupied very few days of their existence. And yet, something about it carved in them a furrow so deep that for the remaining eight or so decades of their lives, they needed, now and again, to run a finger of memory through that groove, to feel it again for a few minutes, an hour, two hours. You might suspect, in Howard Ramsey’s case, that it was about having been shelled and bombed from the air; but having visited him twice and spoken with him for several hours, I think for him it was more about building that cemetery, seeing thousands and thousands of corpses laid out, and moving them from the sites of their deaths to a burial ground of enormous scale. For Reuben Law it was, perhaps, about the wounded he saw at that hospital, and what he encountered every time he had to clean out an ambulance after transport or a truck that had come under fire, and those who had boarded the Corona with him but never disembarked. For Homer Anderson, I’d guess, it was about being up in those balloons and seeing, from that height, the great works of war spread out all around him: cantonments, camp sites, shooting ranges, trenchworks, maneuvers, other balloons. For Jud Wagner, I imagine, it was getting close enough to have a loaded rifle in his hands, a gas mask slung around his neck—close enough, maybe even, to hear the big guns—but not, at the last, sent into the fight. For Roy Tucker, I know, it was about those piles of people and horses that greeted him upon his arrival in France, all of them, as he said, dead to beat the band. And for Harold Gardner, I believe, it was about that feeling I imagine he experienced as he sat on the train that morning, that mix of fear and thrill and anxiety, not the same as but not altogether different from what you probably experience at that moment when the roller coaster car you’re sitting in pauses for just an instant at the apex of that first great rise, the one you’ve just spent three whole minutes ascending, passing every slat of track with a clack-clack-clack: Here we go.

  I’d say that makes him a World War I veteran. That, and that $1.00 check.

  11

  Loyal, True, Straight and Square

  IN 1880, THERE WERE fewer than fifty million people living in the United States of America.

  Between 1881 and the start of World War I, some twenty million more would arrive as immigrants.

  Historians and others regard this period as the golden age of immigration, a time when so many came and so few were turned away. Not all were welcome; Chinese and Japanese, for example, were barred entirely. And not everyone in America
welcomed those who were admitted. Often, the new immigrants were most fiercely spurned by first-generation Americans, the children of immigrants. Their resistance to the newcomers took many forms, from boisterous rallies and incendiary pamphlets to employers and landlords who refused to hire or rent to Irish, or to Germans, or Jews, or Italians, or Poles, or Greeks, or Bohemians, or Norwegians, or Russians, or Hungarians, or, maybe, to all of them. Still, if you wanted to come to America back then (and you weren’t Chinese or Japanese), chances were very good that America wouldn’t make much of a fuss about letting you in.

  Once you got through the gates, though, you faced immediate and unrelenting pressure to conform, to assimilate, to stop being whatever you used to be, and all that entailed, and start being American. Proudly, fervently, and only American. Even Theodore Roosevelt, that great progressive, had no use for what he (and many others) called, derisively, “hyphenated Americans.” He insisted that immigrants should start speaking the language as soon as they arrived; “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or to leave the country,” he once told a newspaper. On another occasion, he declared: “It is our boast that we admit the immigrant to full fellowship and equality with the native-born. In return we demand that he shall share our undivided allegiance to the one flag which floats over all of us.” Most did, and gladly.

  But even those immigrants who undertook Americanization with zeal, who anglicized their names and mastered the English language quickly and adopted western clothing and slang and attitudes and became more patriotic than most natives, had to contend with a society that saw nothing wrong with mocking them at every turn. Back then, American humor was, essentially, ethnic humor; the most successful vaudeville comedy acts were ethnic acts, in which the players assumed exaggerated accents, acted out stereotypes, and mangled the language. It was tremendously popular, even with immigrants in the audience who didn’t happen to be among the groups being made fun of at that particular moment. And, strange as it may seem, even the objects of derision sometimes appreciated it; perhaps they were being mocked, but at least they were being acknowledged. They were represented.