I never could get him to tell me anything about his parents’ time as slaves; I got the impression that they hadn’t spoken of it all that much. But they had certainly been beneficiaries of Reconstruction while it lasted, marrying, buying that farm, and, whether or not they managed to prosper, at the very least being in command of their own lives. Moses was the youngest of nine children, born after a quarter century of marriage, when Nancy was forty-four and Morris nearly sixty, or maybe sixty-three. He may have been the baby, but he was not spoiled. He went to work on the farm at a very young age, even as he went to school, which he left, he told me, only when he was “good and grown.” He stayed there even after he was married, at the age of twenty-five, to a nineteen-year-old woman named Fannie Lou Marshall. And then, just three months later, he was in the Army. “I didn’t join,” he explained. “They just—they drafted me.” And quickly put him on a train. “Camp Funston, Kansas,” he told me. “Way up yonder.”
Someone at the draft board must have seen something in Moses Hardy, because he was put in a special kind of regiment, somewhat different from the labor battalions that caught the vast majority of black draftees. It was known as a Pioneer Infantry unit—the 805th PI, a freestanding regiment. The term “Pioneer Infantry” fell out of use long ago; these days, they’re known, at least in the United States Army, as combat engineers—soldiers who build things, like bridges and railroads, that their army needs, while destroying similar things that the enemy needs. I once came across a quote from an officer in such a unit in the AEF, who explained that Pioneer Infantry “did everything the infantry was too proud to do, and the engineers too lazy to do.” And they did it all right up at the front, often following very closely behind advancing combat troops. There were white PI regiments and colored PI regiments, and because they worked so close to the enemy, all of them were issued rifles and gas masks, just like regular infantry. Outside of the 92nd and 93rd Divisions, PI regiments contained the only armed African American troops in France; the vast majority of black soldiers in the AEF were SOS, service troops, and thus issued not so much as a slingshot. Those rifles meant a great deal to the men of the colored PI regiments—more, perhaps, than many of their white commanders understood. “Oh, it was long,” Moses Hardy recalled, fondly. “Yeah, it was a long rifle.”
“Did they teach you how to shoot?” I asked him.
“I already know how to shoot when I went to the Army,” he replied.
“How did you know?”
He looked at me quizzically. “Shoot a gun?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “How did you know how to shoot a gun?”
He stared at me for a moment, perhaps in disbelief. “I come up on a farm!” he declared. “I knowed how!” A friend who had come along for that visit laughed out loud at my urban ignorance; she was from Alabama, and knew better.
Mr. Hardy didn’t have much to say about Camp Funston—named for Pershing’s superior who had died suddenly, opening the way for Black Jack to take command of the AEF—except: “That’s where I got my clothes and everything.” I asked him how long he was there. “Oh, it wasn’t no time,” he told me. “They sent us right on.” For the record, it was a bit more than two months. They boarded trains on August 27, 1918, and made a stop at, curiously, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, where the troops paraded through a town; and then at Camp Upton, on Long Island, where they were outfitted before moving on yet again, this time boarding a train at 2:00 a.m. Mr. Hardy did not speak of any of this, only of reaching the train’s destination, Quebec (which he pronounced “QUEE-bec”) City, and boarding a transport ship, the Saxonia (which he pronounced “Sax-OH-nee”). “We went over from Quebec, Canada, to Liverpool, England,” he told me. “We stayed there for a while, and then we crossed the English Channel, and then we got in France.”
“And what did you do over in France?” I asked him.
“They drilled us,” he said. “They drilled us.”
“Did you go into battle?”
“No, we didn’t get into battle. They just drilled us all the time, so if they needed us, we’d know.”
“What was the drilling like?” I asked him at one point. “What did they make you do?”
“We did a lot of walking,” he said. “Walking. And then they had us use our rifles and everything. That’s what training was for—we used our rifles, so when they needed us on the front, we’d know what to do.”
“Did they make you carry a heavy pack?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding.
“How heavy was it?”
“Ninety pounds,” he replied matter-of-factly.
To hear him tell it, there wasn’t much to his time in France. As he remembered it, army life was mostly “drilling. That was all we had to do.” They drilled six days a week, he said; “they let us off some Sundays, just sit around the house, around the camp, that’s all. There was nothing to do.” On another occasion, he told me, “When we was in camp, we would be in the house . . . We wouldn’t sit out. We didn’t sit out. We sat inside the camp all the time.” He seemed to recall that other men left camp at times, but he never did. He did write letters, he said, and got one from his wife nearly every day. “And if I didn’t have time to write a letter,” he said, “I just wasn’t doing nothing.”
Well, not exactly nothing. There was the work for which he and the rest of the 805th were sent to France. And yet he either didn’t remember it or chose not to speak of it. But whatever that work was, it wasn’t drill; and it didn’t happen in camp. “Did you ever get close to the front lines?” I asked him.
“Pretty close,” he said. “I was close enough to hear the guns fight.” If things had gotten to that point, he believed, they would have been sent into battle themselves; but they never did.
“Were you in danger ever?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said, dismissively. “Not too much.” The worst of it for him, he seemed to think, was that “I got sick. One time.” Just that once, and he couldn’t remember what it was exactly that ailed him, but it made quite an impression on him nevertheless, because, he told me, it was the only time he was ever sick in his life.
It’s quite unlikely I would have ever learned enough about the 805th PI to question Moses Hardy’s minimized version of his service were it not for the regiment’s adjutant, a Wisconsin-born, Harvard-educated newspaperman and poet named Paul Southworth Bliss. I own a slender volume of his verse, The Arch of Spring, a collection of poems about trees that he published in 1932; my copy is inscribed by the author, “Merry Christmas to Maj. A. V. Wortman,” a nice reminder of a time when military men both read and wrote poetry without embarrassment. After the armistice, Captain (later Major) Bliss undertook to compile and publish a record of his regiment’s experience in the war, Victory: History of the 805th Pioneer Infantry, American Expeditionary Forces; as far as I know, no other PI regiment, colored or white, produced such an account. Bliss wrote much of it himself, but handed off individual companies’ histories to officers from those companies. Lieutenant Orlie E. Ooley (not a pen name, though it would make a great one), of Spencer, Indiana, begins his history of Company E with this high-minded introduction:
When in the course of a nation’s existence it becomes necessary to take up arms in defence of rights or principles, that defence often calls into service many types and colors of citizens. This was the case when the United States declared war on the German Empire and set about getting together a cosmopolitan army to defend the rights of Democracy and Humanity.
Lieutenant Ooley, like all of the officers in the 805th PI, was white; all of the enlisted men in the regiment were black. It was, in that way, thoroughly segregated. And yet, reading Victory, you get the strong sense that the 805th PI was different, somehow, and that credit for that, in large part, belongs to the regiment’s commander, Colonel Chauncey Benton Humphrey, a West Pointer who was recalled from the Panama Canal Zone in June, 1918, at the age of forty-six, and sent to Camp Funston. “The regiment awaited hi
s coming with interest,” Bliss writes. “He arrived July 23, tanned with three years in the tropics, a tall, powerfully built officer light on his feet as a cat, giving the impression of tremendous nervous energy.” From the beginning, his men idolized him.
And he, apparently, regarded them very highly in return. It was often the case in those days that white officers resented being assigned to black units; it was an insult, they believed, to be put in command of colored troops. C. B. Humphrey, though, appears to have taken on his command with eagerness and vigor, and no sense that his couldn’t be the finest regiment in the Army, period. Bliss tells us:
All that he asked of his officers and men was—perfection. His expression, “Why not Excellent?,” which often appeared on his memoranda to company officers, was the hammer with which he drove home his points. He asked that bricks be made—and somehow the straw was found.
In his first talk to his men he told them he wanted them to be “Bearcats.” It was a name that stuck. The regiment was known in Funston as the “Bearcat” regiment.
And the Bearcats, it would seem, met his high standards. “Personally,” he wrote shortly after the war, “I consider that I had about the best Pioneer Infantry regiment in France. I saw all of them and inspected several.” Like Private Hardy—and, presumably, every other man in the regiment—Colonel Humphrey believed that the 805th would be used in combat should casualties at the front rise sufficiently; he even went so far as to have nearly a hundred of his men trained in what he called “machine gun work.” And though they never saw the inside of a trench, they were certainly put in harm’s way, sent to the Meuse-Argonne and assigned the unenviable duty of marching into sectors and villages that the Americans and French had just recaptured from the Germans in order to secure ammunition dumps and repair roads and railheads. What made this assignment unenviable was the fact that the Germans, who had held most of these villages for four years, were known for counterattacking after they’d seemingly been driven off; they regularly sent in planes to bomb roads and tracks—and especially ammunition dumps—they’d just lost. So Lieutenant Ooley discovered when Company E—which included a twenty-five-year-old private from Aberdeen, Mississippi—was sent “to Auzeville, a small village near Clermont, to work on a railhead. The camp,” he writes, “was a poor one, and many men were sent to the hospital with dysentery or fever.” Perhaps this was where that twenty-five-year-old private, Moses Hardy, became sick for the only time in his life. “It was also at Auzeville,” Ooley reports, “that Company ‘E’ received its introduction to ‘Jerry,’ as the German airmen were called. Here also they could hear the big guns on the front, some twelve kilometers away, and see the ambulances carrying back the wounded.” Moses Hardy heard those guns, he told me; he probably saw the ambulances, too, and wondered how many more would have to pass through before the 805th would be sent up to take the place of all those lost men.
After a week in Auzeville, Company E moved on to Varennes, a picturesque town best known as the place where Louis XVI was captured in 1791 while fleeing the French Revolution. There Company E “took up the repair of the roads and railhead,” Lieutenant Ooley reports, adding, coolly: “Here we were under nightly bombardment by Hun planes seeking to destroy the railhead and hospital, also the ammunition dumps between Varennes and Cheppy. Here Sgt. Hayden made his famous assertion that, ‘It’s a hell of a war where a fellow has to work all day and run all night.’” That’s “Sgt. Hayden,” you’ll note, not “Harry,” as white folks would have invariably referred to him back home in Bedford City, Virginia.
“They’d just fly overhead, way up—you couldn’t hardly see them, so far up,” Mr. Hardy recalled, and shook his head in response when I asked if they’d frightened him. He never mentioned being bombarded—only talked, indirectly, of seeking shelter “in the house” when German planes were heard or spotted. “We never did go take a good look out,” he told me. “We was just in the house.” They ducked German planes nightly for a full month, until, on November 7, they moved on to Saint-Juvin to repair the roads there. Four days later, the war ended. That occasion he remembered well, at least during our second visit. “When the armistice was signed, we was at near thirty miles to Germany . . . We was on our way to Germany, then,” he told me that day. I asked if he was glad to get the news; “Yeah, I really was,” he replied. So, he said, were his fellow soldiers: “They all jumped up and shot their rifles. And then there was a lot of hollering and going on.” The shooting, he added, went on “in the air and in the house.” He made sure to add: “I didn’t shoot none . . . hollered, that’s all.”
“Immediately the men began to celebrate by using their rifles and proceeded to fill the roof of their quarters with holes,” Lieutenant Ooley writes, by way of confirmation. “No thought of future rains entered their heads.” Which is surprising, because they’d already seen quite a lot of rain; Ooley describes their first week in France, at the end of September, as “a most miserable period . . . the men pitched pup-tents on rain-soaked fields, and slept in them with nothing but a blanket between them and the ground.” (“It was always raining,” Moses Hardy told me the last time I saw him; he, too, remembered it as “miserable.”) Such, I suppose, was the joy of the armistice.
The Bearcats enjoyed a rather distinguished postwar career, with visits from American generals, congressmen, and other dignitaries. In the spring of 1919, still in France, they put together a baseball team (the players all enlisted men, the coach a captain from Birmingham, Alabama) that beat all comers. And on June 4, 1919, while stationed at Brest on their way home, they were inspected by General Pershing himself. Pershing, Major Bliss writes, “wanted the men sent home erect, vigorous, well-clad.” “He’d come on, check with us,” Moses Hardy remembered eighty-six years later. “Have us all in the line and check with us.” The general, Private Hardy recalled, “looked nice. He looked like a nice man.”
“Did he talk to you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “No. It wasn’t right for him, to talk to him. He just have us all in a line and inspect us, that’s all.”
That’s all. Were it not for Lieutenant Ooley, I wouldn’t have known that Private Hardy had come under fire every day for a month; were it not for Major Bliss, I wouldn’t have known much at all about what the 805th Pioneer Infantry did in France, nor that sixty-one of them—including seven privates and one corporal from Company E—died doing it. Neither Bliss nor Ooley, though, told me what I regard as the most remarkable thing about the 805th. Mr. Hardy hinted at it while telling me about how the Bearcats sometimes staged plays; “they were good plays,” he recalled. “I enjoyed them.” There were concerts, too—“all kinds of playing, all kinds of music . . . couldn’t name them all. It was in a very big room.”
“Were they just for black soldiers?” I asked him. “Or were there black and white?”
“All mixed together in there,” he said. “All of us in there together.”
“Did you sit together, or did you sit separately?”
“Sit together. No different in there. Go in there, if you could get in there, you could sit anywhere you wanted to.”
“Is that right? So you could sit right next to a white soldier?”
“Oh, yeah. No difference there.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just—you were in the Army. There’s no difference in the Army.” Yes, he did concede that “officers didn’t sit with us.” And since all the officers were white and all the enlisted men black, the men were segregated in any event. But when I asked him, “Did black soldiers and white soldiers get along with each other?” he said: “Oh, yeah. They got along nice. See, there was just one there. You didn’t need to separate. There was nothing, ever.”
Now, we know, of course, that that wasn’t true. And maybe it’s just a reflection of his personality, of the mindset that helped enable Moses Hardy to survive to within one month of his 114th birthday; but I don’t think so, not entirely, anyway. Maybe it was the openness
of France, or the experience of ducking German planes together; maybe it was being away from home, or serving under the command of Colonel Humphrey. Maybe it was the nickname “Bearcats,” or the undefeated baseball team, or the Enfield rifles everyone was issued. Whatever it was, I can’t but imagine that something special existed within that regiment. Major Paul Southworth Bliss still had enough of it in him, several months after they were all discharged and sent home, to write that the 805th was “undoubtedly the greatest colored regiment in the history of America.” Maybe you discern paternalism in those words; I just hear pride.
Remember Corporal Howard Ramsey of the 302nd Water Tank Train, the fellow who was given a lock of hair by a little blond girl in Luxembourg in exchange for a penny right after the armistice? I started to tell you a story about him a couple of chapters ago, then stopped and said I’d finish it at the appropriate time.
Well, this is it.
Very shortly after the armistice, the 302nd Water Tank Train was, you may recall, assigned to help build the new Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, which would eventually contain the graves of more than twenty-three thousand Americans killed in that last great battle of the war. Corporal Ramsey and the rest of the 302nd shuttled bodies—some two hundred to three hundred a day—from the battlefield, where they had just been disinterred, to the cemetery, where they would be reinterred. And that, Mr. Ramsey pointed out to me when I visited him in 2003, was all they did. “We didn’t have to handle the bodies or anything like that,” he’d said. “They’d put them on a canvas, put the canvas in the box, and take the box and bury that.” By “they” he meant “the colored people,” and by “the colored people,” he meant black troops in the AEF. Six thousand of them.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 35