“The colored people did all the work,” Howard Ramsey had readily admitted. And it was unpleasant work, to say the least: What they were digging up was not pine boxes. The war dead, he recalled, “had been buried, you know, not in coffins or anything like that, just in the ground.” Many had decomposed considerably; and some had not, which was, perhaps, even worse. One civilian witness—a nurse, no less—called it “a gruesome, repulsive and unhealthful task.” (Howard Ramsey, you may recall, wrote his mother at one point: “I won’t . . . go into detail about this work as it’s something a woman wouldn’t enjoy.”) It would have been bad enough to have to do it in open, unhindered fields with no other hazards about; but the colored troops assigned to it didn’t have that luxury, since they were working on ground that had very recently hosted a fierce seven-week battle. In his account of the 805th PI’s Company L, First Sergeant Joseph A. Thornton (who had been given the honor of chronicling his company’s war even though he was an enlisted man—not to mention black) reports that, starting November 21—just ten days after the armistice—he and his men spent four months in the vicinity of Romagne and Cunel:
This area was to be cleared of the debris of the war. Clothing, rifles, machine guns, shells, cannon, and in fact all of the implements of warfare were to be found in this area.
The men were cautious, but it was inevitable that some of them should be injured. Pvt. Fred D. Lytle had his hand mutilated by explosion. The cause will never be known, as the explosive was hidden in firewood used in Lytle’s quarters. Pvt. Robert Anderson and Pvt. Frank Sartin were severely burned by mustard gas from a leaky shell.
Getting gassed after the cessation of hostilities is bad enough; but imagine retiring in your bunk after a long, cold day of clearing live ordnance and dead bodies from a shell-shattered and barbed-wire-strewn forest—only to have your fire explode. You can understand why morale might be low.
And it was. The men assigned to “mortuary affairs” felt ostracized, reviled because they had been given such a detail. It wasn’t all in their heads, either; some white American soldiers told French townsfolk that the black men had been assigned this wretched work because they were already diseased. Resentment grew; bad things were in the air, a mood as poisonous, in its way, as the gas in those leaky shells. At one point, the Army, eager to calm tempers, even allowed the YMCA, for the first time, to bring in black women workers. It didn’t want six thousand angry colored troops on its hands. No one wanted to find out what that might look like—especially, I imagine, the 302nd Water Tank Train, including Corporal Howard Ramsey. Yet, to hear him tell it eighty-five years later, they very nearly did. The trouble, he said, started with one particular class of black soldier. “They had labor battalions and they had Pioneer Infantrymen,” he explained. “And they were the same group of people, except the Pioneer Infantrymen carried a rifle.”
It isn’t clear which PI regiment he meant. Most records seem to indicate that the 813th, 815th, and 816th PI regiments all worked on the cemetery at one time or another; a contemporary magazine account also mentions the 806th and—yes—the 805th. (That account calls the work “a task which seemed too sacred to leave to German prisoners”; I’m sure the men actually doing it would have gladly passed the honor on to the Germans.) Curiously, there’s almost nothing in the Bearcats’ history about it; Bliss writes only that “two of the 805th Pioneer Infantry companies had the honor of helping build” the cemetery, and never gets any more specific about it. So I don’t know who, exactly, was involved in what Howard Ramsey witnessed there. I wish I did.
“So, they decided that, after the war and all, these guys don’t need any guns,” Mr. Ramsey told me that day in October, 2003, sitting at his daughter’s kitchen table in Oregon. “So the major they had took their guns away from them. Said, ‘You don’t need guns.’ . . . They had two big units, with two, three thousand colored troops . . . So when they took the Pioneer Infantrymen’s guns away, that made them a labor battalion.” Those rifles meant a great deal to Pioneer Infantrymen. As Colonel C. B. Humphrey, commander of the 805th PI, explained in a report he wrote in 1920: “The fact of their being equipped with arms did not impede their work in the slightest, and, at the same time, vastly increased their Morale, as it made them feel that they were soldiers and not slaves.” These were men who were but one or two generations removed from slavery to begin with; it was not an abstraction to them.
“Well,” Howard Ramsey continued, “these colored guys didn’t want to be called a labor battalion; they were Pioneer Infantrymen. So they mutinied. And I mean mutinied! They all had rifles. Of course, they’d taken our rifles away from us. So we were going to fight a war, a race war. So we went all over the battlefield, and we got any kind of a gun that we could find that had matching ammunition. So we’d take back this gun, take it back, clean up the gun, and get ready for this war that we were going to have. And the ammunition. After everything was settled, we were supposed to throw these guns away, or get rid of them. I never did. I brought mine home . . . It was a German Mauser or something like that.” He said his son-in-law still had it.
He smiled from time to time as he told the story—not because he thought it was amusing, I believe, but rather by way of saying: Look what I barely got out of. “I was there when a colored sergeant was cussing out a colonel,” he said. “White colonel, you know. And the colonel wasn’t doing anything about it. And another guy and I, we walked down, we just wanted to give the colonel some support.” He laughed. “And he told us, he said, ‘You get back.’ He says, ‘I’m fine. If I need your help, I’ll call on you.’ And that was as close as we got. But there could have been a real race [war], because these guys were shouldering their rifles.”
I asked Howard Ramsey if he had been surprised to see all of this transpire. “Oh, you better believe it,” he said. What he didn’t say, but which became obvious in hearing him tell of it, was that he’d also been terrified. “We went out on the battlefield, we got any kind of gun we could find—Springfield, Enfield, Mauser, one of these English guns,” he said. “There were only, I think, about two hundred of us, or something like that. They’d win in a walkaway.” Maybe so; but should black troops draw any white blood in a “race war,” there could have been no “winning” for them beyond that. Retribution would have been swift, irresistible, merciless. In the end, other black troops would have been called in to bury them.
Howard Ramsey was no Southerner—in fact, he had grown up in the West and Pacific Northwest—and yet his attitudes on race were not, let us say, terribly enlightened. For one thing, in witnessing what he did that day, he perceived not unrest among fellow soldiers, but the advent of an all-out “race war”—and scrambled to arm himself and his fellow white men. For another, in his letters home from France, he refers four times to African American soldiers simply as “the niggers”; a fifth time he calls them “colored fellows,” which just shows you that he knew better. The second time I saw him, two years after our first visit, I asked him what had been his impression of the black soldiers he’d worked with. He was 107 at that point, and a great deal more frail than he had been at 105; his memory was failing. But this much he remembered: “We didn’t like them.” He said it twice, actually.
“Why not?” I asked.
He laughed. “We was white troops.”
Even so, however unknowingly, Mr. Ramsey told me a story—otherwise lost to history—about the birth of the modern civil rights movement, a tale of black men standing up for themselves, speaking out against an order that consigned them to the grimmest work one can imagine while white troops were kept at a safe and sanitary remove, responsible only for driving the trucks. (He himself told me, during our second visit: “The black troops, they decided they weren’t going to handle the bodies anymore.”) Even just to say no to a white man—much less cuss one out—would, back home, have meant a certain beating, and perhaps even a lynching, for any or all of them. And, in the years after the war—when terrible “race riots” would sweep thro
ugh Chicago, and Tulsa, and Omaha, and Rosewood, Florida, and dozens of other American towns and cities, a reaction against the new confidence and assertiveness whites perceived in black men home from the war—it did. But not that day, in Romagne, France, for those Pioneer Infantrymen who’d finally had enough. I wish I knew who, exactly, they were—them, and that white colonel who just stood there and let a black sergeant cuss him out, jeopardizing his reputation in order to defuse the situation.
The black narrative of that war, like the white narrative, is strongly biased in favor of combat, the Harlem Hellfighters and Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts and, now, Freddie Stowers. In his history, Emmett Scott devotes more than 150 pages to the exploits of the two colored fighting divisions, and only 13 pages to SOS troops, even though the latter comprised 80 percent of all the African Americans who served in France then. If that page count alone doesn’t illustrate Scott’s own prejudice on the matter, he starts the slender chapter about SOS thus:
War is not all “death and glory.” For every soldier who gets even a glimpse of the enemy or risks his life within range of shell-fire, there must, in all modern warfare, be from twenty to thirty men working at such commonplace and routine tasks as loading and unloading ships, building piers, laying railroad tracks, making roads, in a thousand other ways making it possible for the fighting men to get to the front, and for the necessary food, ammunition and other supplies to reach them. But what man would want to render such service?
The overwhelming majority of African American men drafted into the AEF were never given that choice. They were, however, given a uniform, and a passage to France, and an essential, if not always dangerous, job to do. And whether or not, like Pioneer Infantrymen, they also got rifles and gas masks and, like a few now-forgotten Pioneer Infantrymen in the town of Romagne, a chance to step forward and demand they be treated with dignity—many came home with a taste for it. Just as James K. Vardaman had feared they would.
Even so, I am obliged to tell you that this particular story does not have a happy ending. Another thirty-five years would have to pass before the United States Supreme Court would even begin the process of undoing what it had done in Plessy. In that time, there would be those “race riots,” in which hundreds of African Americans would perish. Hundreds more would be lynched (seventy-six in 1919 alone). Henry Johnson would descend into alcoholism and possibly drug addiction, grow estranged from his family, and die, broke and alone, in a VA hospital at the age of thirty-two. Needham Roberts would hang himself. George Johnson, traumatized by his brother’s mistreatment in the Navy and who knows what else, would decide he couldn’t even stand to think of himself as a black man anymore.
Despair, though, isn’t racist; many white veterans succumbed to it, too, among them Major Paul Southworth Bliss of the 805th Pioneer Infantry. In “The Arch of Spring,” he had written:
Life comes prancing,
Shot with glee,
Head flung back,
And high of knee;
Death goes down side
Lanes, back stairs,
Life comes up wide
Thoroughfares.
Eight years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1940, sitting alone in his room at Kansas City’s YMCA, he picked up his army sidearm and shot himself. “I greatly regret doing this,” he wrote in the note he left, “but my nerves have snapped and it is impossible for me to go on.” Some thoroughfares, it seems, get shelled to the point where no one can repair them, not even a Bearcat.
Fortunately, Private Moses Hardy’s road remained passable, and led him back to Aberdeen, Mississippi, where he reunited with his wife, started a family and a church Sunday school, worked his farm and drove a school bus and sold health and beauty products door-to-door, and lived on another eighty-seven years. The first time I met him, in 2003, I couldn’t help but run the numbers in my head: The man was already seventy-one years old when Freedom Summer came to the Hospitality State.
“A lot has changed in Mississippi for black people since you were young,” I said to him. “Did you ever think you’d live to see that?”
“No,” he said.
“Do you think things are better now than they were when you were young?” I asked—worried, as the words were departing my lips, that it sounded like a stupid question.
But Moses Hardy, at least, didn’t seem to think so. “I can’t tell,” he replied. “Might be, and might not be.”
13
L’Ossuaire
THERE’S A REASON it became known, even before it ended, as the World War. Yes, it started out as the Great War, and some still call it that. But for many, “great” just didn’t do the thing justice. Other wars had been broad in scope; this one was ubiquitous. There was action in Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda; Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Anatolia; Polynesia, Samoa, Guam, New Guinea; East Prussia, Galicia, Transylvania, Latvia. Naval battles were fought off the coasts of China, India, Chile, Denmark. Men shot at each other on the veldt, in the jungle, across the desert, atop mountains; killed and died in the snow-covered Italian Alps, mosquito-infested African swamps, ice-encrusted Siberian harbors, and the clear blue waters of the Red Sea. It really did scar the entire planet.
But if you know anything at all about the World War, you know that one country in the world, more than any other, was consumed by it.
Battles—epic, heroic, iconic battles—were fought in Belgium, Russia, Turkey, Italy. But France—France was a battle. And it never let up for a single day in more than four years. Elsewhere, sections of cities or towns may have been badly damaged, a village largely destroyed; in certain parts of France, just about every settlement was entirely destroyed. Some would eventually be rebuilt where they had stood, others on a different spot not too far away. But many—often within a matter of hours—simply ceased to exist, forever.
In much of the country, the landscape remains altered even now. In some areas, just about every patch of woods is riddled with trenches; narrow but deep, twisting sharply this way or that every ten yards or so (to prevent enfilading fire should the enemy make it into your trench), dappled with leaves and pocked with branches and roots, you might take them for dry creek beds but for the fact that they intersect, at fairly regular intervals, with other narrow, deep, jagged depressions. Near Verdun I walked through a section of forest—just one of many in that part of the country—where the grassy floor undulates so much that there doesn’t remain even a square yard of flat ground: shell holes. Here and there you will find massive craters, some the size of a large amphitheater. Desperate to break the stalemate, both sides took to tunneling beneath No Man’s Land, carving out large chambers under the enemy’s trenchworks, packing them with explosives, scurrying out and then, at a predetermined hour, detonating them. Someone thought to film one such event, the detonation of forty thousand pounds of ammonal (a particularly nasty explosive) by the British Royal Engineers’ 252nd Tunneling Company at Hawthorn Ridge, near the village of Beaumont-Hamel, at precisely 7:20 a.m. on July 1, 1916. It was the start of the Battle of the Somme, but the footage—somehow more terrifying for being silent—makes it look more like the end of the world. The blast left a crater 80 feet deep, 450 feet long, and 300 feet wide. Eight minutes later, the Royal Engineers set off another mine, this one packed with forty-eight thousand pounds of ammonal, south of the village of La Boisselle. That hole, now known as the Lochnagar Mine, is even larger; it has been preserved as it was, and is a tourist attraction today. When I visited I saw a couple of men parked nearby in tiny trailers, selling World War I artifacts.
After a few such blasts everyone, out of necessity, became very good at listening in and detecting each other’s tunneling efforts. Thereafter, they usually knew when and where the other side ceased digging, giving them plenty of inadvertent warning to evacuate the targeted area. These colossal explosions, then, spectacular and fearsome though they appeared, did not claim all that many lives. Still, neither side stopped tunneling.
The average World War I soldier spent
an awful lot of time below the surface of the earth. There were those trenches, to begin with—fire trenches up front, support trenches in the rear (not too far in the rear, though—maybe two or three hundred yards at the most), and the communications trenches that ran in between the two. No one knows how many miles of them were dug in France between 1914 and 1918; many thousands, at the least. The typical fire trench was about twelve feet deep when freshly dug; rain, water seepage, and bombardment filled them in pretty quickly, though, and they required almost constant maintenance. Then there were dugouts, earthen basements (minus a house) where men who were lucky enough to have access to them might seek shelter during a bombardment or, if they were off the front line, sleep a bit. Dugouts were scarcely more habitable than trenches. Both were always wet (the water table in much of France was rarely very deep), riddled with rats and cooties. You had to be pretty tired, or frightened, to spend much time in a dugout; at least in a trench you could look up at the sky. The British and French carved their dugouts about a dozen or so feet beneath the surface. The Germans often burrowed two or three stories for theirs, even outfitting them with concrete stairways.
The Germans seemed to have a special affinity for subterranean life. In some areas, like the hills of the Argonne Forest and the heights above the Meuse River, they built large underground hospitals and convalescent wards, linked and supplied by an impressive network of tunnels. Both sides took shelter for months at a time in the old mines that lined the Chemin des Dames, but the Germans actually electrified theirs; you can still see the wiring in them today. If you walk around certain areas, you quickly come to understand that the Germans brought to the war a distinct technological edge. They ran electrical lines through just about every place they went, and laid countless miles of narrow-gauge railroad track, too. Most of it is still out there; the track, at least, has aged quite well. So have their trenches, many of which were fortified with concrete—no mistaking any of them for a dry creek bed. The French, on the other hand, were not allowed to build concrete trenchworks; concrete implies permanence, and the French were always supposed to be pushing forward, attacking until they had driven the invader from their country. To use concrete, the high command believed, would be bad for morale. The poilus—slang for French infantrymen (poilu literally translates as “hairy one”)—crouching in those dirt trenches might have disagreed.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 36