The retirement home in which William J. Lake lived was, like Yakima, earth-toned and compact, but it was a pleasant place. His particular room, right up front, was large and bright; I don’t know if he got it just because he was nearly 108 years old and a World War I veteran, but I like to think so. A friendly attendant led me to it when I showed up, and even knocked on his door for me. Mr. Lake opened it himself, as I remember, grinned charmingly, and shook my hand. He had a great smile, understated and just a bit wry, and wore a pair of almost-comically-oversized aviator eyeglasses that seemed to accentuate his baldness somehow. And he was a small man, five feet six and a half inches tall in 1919, according to his discharge papers; the succeeding eighty-four years, and a stoop he had developed at some point in there, had shaved off a few more inches. Someone had told him I’d be coming, because he was dressed sharply, in a plaid cotton dress shirt and chinos with a solid crease. He had his citations all laid out for me, too: the grand, impressive Légion d’Honneur certificate; a Certificate of Congratulations from the Veterans of Foreign Wars; the large medal that the Boy Scouts or American Legion or whoever had presented to him; and a handful of smaller medallions. He seemed excited to talk to me; I got the impression that, despite all of those awards and honors, no one had actually asked him about his service in a long time. It was October 20, 2003.
I had to concentrate pretty hard just to hear Mr. Lake, since he spoke softly and had, besides, another one of those old-timey accents that are all but extinct now. In his case, it was a gravelly-old-prospector type of voice—he sounded a bit like the elderly Jack Crabb as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film Little Big Man. It was, at first, a jarring contradiction to his clean-shaven and ironed appearance. Adding to the dissonance of the atmosphere was his large recliner, also beige; it utterly dwarfed him, made him look like a child, sitting in it as he did slouched over to one side. Still, I stopped noticing all of it just as soon as we started talking.
“When were you born?” I asked him.
“October the thirtieth, eighteen ninety-five.” And there it was.
“And where were you born?” I asked.
“Missouri,” he said. Or, more accurately: “Missoura.”
“What part of Missouri?”
“Hannibal. Mark Twain’s old town.” On October 30, 1895, Mark Twain was in the midst of a worldwide lecture tour.
Actually, Mr. Lake added quickly by way of clarification: “Well, I was in New London, which is only ten miles from Hannibal.”
“What were your parents’ names?” I asked him.
“My dad’s name was . . .” He pursed his lips and looked off to one side for a moment. “My dad!” he said suddenly, seeming startled at the mention of the man, or, perhaps, the fact that he could no longer remember his name. I looked away for a moment, not wanting to embarrass him—or, if I’m being really honest, to catch a glimpse of what it must feel like to discover that you have forgotten such a thing.
“You know,” he continued, undeterred, “he died when he was very young. He went to Oklahoma and opened that Indian Territory for homesteading. And he got pneumonia and was home just a week when he died. Left my mom—a wife and seven kids.”
“And were you the youngest?”
“No, there was two younger than I, and then one brother and three sisters older than I was.” He was the last of them left, he said—not surprising, since his youngest brother, Graydon, had been born in 1899.
“What did your father do for a living?” I asked him.
“He had a ranch there in . . . Missouri, but he went to Oklahoma. That’s when they opened up that Indian Territory for land,” he said. His father, he explained, had gone on ahead to Oklahoma on his own to stake a homesteading claim, but had fallen ill there and hurried back to Missouri just in time to expire. “He just—he died,” his son recalled more than a century later. “And so we had a pretty rough time.” He was six years old then.
His mother, Emma, was left alone with seven children under the age of twelve; the youngest was still a baby. So she did what people did in those days, if they could: she farmed her children out to kin. “I stayed with my uncle and aunt for a while,” Mr. Lake told me. “Some of our relations took at least one of us, because our mother couldn’t do it. Our granddad [also named William J.], my mother’s folks, they built us a house—they had a big son, they built us a house, and then we lived there. But then, soon as I got big enough to work, I had to go to work quick. There was nothing else to do.”
“How old were you when you went to work?” I asked him.
“I think I was about eight years old when I started working,” he replied.
“What kind of work did you do, at first?”
“Well, I would drive and shoe the horses . . . I drove—well, the most horses I ever drove was eight, eight horses at one time. Plowing and just doing things like that. In Montana.” And here’s where the chronology gets fuzzy for a bit, because at some point—1915 or 1916, as he recalled—the family moved from Missouri to Montana. “Some of our relations was out there,” he explained, “and they was talking about the difference in the two states.” Apparently, the relations convinced them to make the move, which they did when Bill was nineteen or twenty years old. That doesn’t mean that he really didn’t start working at the age of eight, but I suspect he didn’t leave school then, because the 1910 census records fourteen-year-old William J. Lake’s occupation as “None.” The family was living in Saverton, Missouri, then, a little town on the Mississippi just eight miles downriver from Hannibal; they are listed as working a home farm. I’m sure young Bill had to do a lot of work around that farm, and quite possibly more elsewhere. I don’t doubt he started doing so at eight years old.
And I imagine it was a hard life for all of them, too, since they did eventually move all the way to Montana, no small undertaking, and “leased a farm out there,” as Mr. Lake remembered nearly nine decades later. “Hay and grain,” he explained. “A small one. No corn, too cold for corn. The season was too short for corn.” He added: “That’s where I was when I went into the Army.”
“When did you end up joining the Army?” I asked him.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I wanted to join the Army, but Mother said don’t do it. She said maybe it’ll blow over, so I went to work. But then I was drafted.” This, he told me, was in the fall of 1917, about six months after the United States entered the war. Almost exactly, as it happens: His service record shows he was inducted into the Army at Livingston, Montana, on October 4 of that year. “Yeah,” he said, “my mom—I wanted to enlist, but she talked me out of it . . . She said, ‘Well, maybe the war will be over soon, and maybe you won’t have to go.’ But—there was four of us boys, and I’m the only one that went.” He explained: “My oldest brother, apparently he had, he was farming and he had a daughter. And my other two brothers—they, of course, I mean they was drafted, but neither one of them passed. I was the only one that did.”
“Is that right?” I asked. “They didn’t pass the physical?”
“I don’t know why,” he said, still sounding genuinely perplexed. “But neither one did.”
The Army put Bill Lake on a train in Livingston and sent him west, to Pierce County, Washington. There, about ten miles from Tacoma, they were building a new training base for sixty thousand soldiers: Camp Lewis, named for explorer Meriwether Lewis, whose Corps of Discovery had passed through the general vicinity on its way to the Pacific Ocean more than a century earlier. Today, Fort Lewis is the largest military installation in the Pacific Northwest; it is said to be the most requested posting in the United States Army.
In the fall of 1917, men from eight states—Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming—and the territory of Alaska streamed into Camp Lewis to be gathered into a new division, the 91st, nicknamed from its conception the “Wild West Division.” Its symbol was a pine tree. The 91st was the highest-numbered white division in the Army at the time. The two colored di
visions were the 92nd and 93rd. The Army used a system of ordinal numbering that had some logic to it, but not much. Single-digit divisions were Regular Army; 26 through 42 were regional National Guard, starting in New England and moving, as the digits rose, south and west—at least until the high 30s, when they spiraled hither and yon, culminating in the 42nd, which comprised National Guard troops from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia; and the last stretch, 76 through 91, being draftees, once again starting east and moving west, ending at Camp Lewis with the 91st. There were a lot of unused numbers; I don’t know why. I have heard it speculated that these were “ghost divisions,” used to intimidate and mislead the enemy. Perhaps.
But back to Camp Lewis, still under construction when a farm hand from Montana showed up, just days before his twenty-second birthday. “It’s the most beautiful place on earth,” Mr. Lake opined eighty-five years hence. “When we was there, it was all wooden barracks. We had to sleep in tents for a few days till they got our barracks finished. Now it’s all brick buildings.” He was put in the 362nd Infantry Regiment—composed entirely of Montana men—and assigned to the Machine Gun Company.
The term “Machine Gun Company” brings to mind the image of a trench full of doughboys firing Tommy guns at the Hun, and in fact the Thompson submachine gun—that icon of gangland Chicago and the FBI’s Most Wanted list, with its distinctive drum magazine and wooden stock and grip, which became notorious after the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929—was developed for use in World War I by a retired Army colonel named John T. Thompson (his middle name, Taliaferro, was the same as Booker T. Washington’s), who had served in the Spanish-American War with a young lieutenant named John Henry Parker, a man whose supreme faith in that weapon ultimately earned him the nickname Machine Gun. If the name “Machine Gun Parker” sounds familiar, it’s probably because twenty years later, as a colonel, Parker would be commanding the Army’s 102nd Infantry Regiment when they came under attack by German Stosstruppen at a French village called Seicheprey. It really was a small world.
Colonel Thompson’s weapon—its original nickname was the “trench broom”—came along a bit too late to be used in the war, but it’s interesting to think about what it might have done had the armistice not preempted its career in the military. It was truly revolutionary: relatively small and light, it could be fired by one man from a standing position, and reloaded in mere seconds. The machine guns of the war—Vickers and Hotchkiss and Browning and Maschinengewehr and all the rest—were large and heavy and, whether cooled by water or air, prone to overheating and jamming. Cumbersome affairs, they were mounted on tripods or sledges, and thus could be fired only from a prone position. They were belt-fed and required entire crews to operate and maintain; the nature and demands of the weapon rendered those crews less mobile than regular infantry, which is why machine guns were often corralled into their own companies or battalions, which were distributed strategically. Unable to relocate as easily as regular infantry, they had to dig in, construct defenses, and camouflage themselves as best they could, which often was not very well at all. In one of those odd little quirks of war, operating a terribly intimidating weapon left you terribly vulnerable, too.
This was Private William J. Lake’s assignment.
“How did you end up in a machine gun company?” I asked him in 2003.
“Well, that’s where they put me!” he said. “So that’s where I was.”
“Did you have any experience with guns before?”
“Well, just rifles and shotguns, is all. There, of course, we had to practice. Do a lot of shooting with the rifles at different distances, and the machine gun. They had, there at Camp Lewis—well, now they call it Fort Lewis—they had a Colt, which is a very light machine gun, but I was shooting and I forget how many yards I was shooting, but I got forty-five out of fifty shots out there at I think it was three hundred yards, I think is what it was if I remember right. And then we had the Browning, which was a water-cooled gun. And that was fast—three hundred shots a minute.”
“Did you prefer that to the Colt?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You liked it better?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “A lot better. It was a heavier, a bigger machine. And it was faster; I think it was three hundred shots a minute, or something like that. Terrible.” The Browning sat on a tripod and was belt-fed; “they had targets,” he recalled, “which I had to practice on all the time—rifle and machine gun both. And I done pretty good.” Once he got to France, though, he was assigned not to fire the gun, but to run back and forth from the nest to a depot behind the lines to fetch ammunition for it, which was quite possibly the most dangerous job in the crew. But I’ll get to that a bit later, because first there’s the story of the thing that happened to Bill Lake even before he made it to France, the thing that seemed pretty awful to him at the time but which might just have saved his life.
Private Lake and the rest of the Wild West Division trained at Camp Lewis, he told me, for nine months before they boarded trains for Camp Merritt, New Jersey, whence they would head up to New York and ship out for France. According to the unnamed author of The Story of the 91st Division, published in 1919, the land portion of the trek took about six days. It was early summer; they traveled through a lot of areas that were probably quite hot at the time, and I doubt there were showers on those trains. Nevertheless, it was a spirited journey:
On their trip across the continent, the soldiers from the Far West had an excellent opportunity to acquaint themselves with the patriotic unity which ultimately was to bring about the defeat of Germany. After witnessing demonstrations from coast to coast, the men of the 91st felt that they were backed by an undivided nation. The motherly gray-haired old woman standing in front of her little cottage on the broad prairie of Montana, alternately waving a flag and brushing away the tears she could not restrain, contributed as much to this feeling as did the impromptu receptions tendered the men in the great cities through which they passed.
The journey also gave many citizens, especially in the East, a better conception of the high quality of manhood the West was contributing to the United States Army.
If it sounds like the men of the 91st had a grand old time crossing the country by rail, Private William J. Lake, at least, did not. He was sick the whole way across; was sick even before he left Camp Lewis.
“I got the measles,” he explained.
Eight and a half decades later, that continued to mystify him: “I don’t know where I got them,” he told me. “Still don’t know where I got them!” No one else seemed to have them; there was no word of measles in the camp, or on the train. Not even from him: Bill Lake traveled six days on a hot, crowded troop train, from Washington to New Jersey, sick with measles—and never told anyone. “I didn’t say anything until we got on the boat,” he confessed. “I was out on the water.” The boat, he recalled, was the Empress of Russia, a British/Canadian mail ship that was used as a troop transport during the war.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked him.
“Because I know if I did,” he said, “and it leaked that I did have something, I might be out of the company or something, and I didn’t want that, so I didn’t say nothing.” He smiled, and then laughed.
Eventually, out at sea, he told his captain. “I was laying down,” he recalled. “He came around, he says, ‘What’s the matter?’ I says, ‘I don’t feel good.’ He sent the doctor down there, told me I had the measles. Still don’t know today where I got them.”
“Nobody else had them?”
“Nobody else had them far as I know. So they put me in the hospital on the boat, hospital room . . . and then they got over there”—that is, Liverpool, where the 91st disembarked before shuttling across the Channel to France—“and they left me [in a hospital] over there for six weeks. Wanted to be sure I was all good before I went back to the company.”
“Six weeks?”
“Yeah. And they’d be
en in two battles before I got there.”
That last bit is not quite accurate: The 91st Division—minus Private Lake—arrived in France in late July, 1918, and proceeded directly to “its training area in the Department of Haute Marne,” the divisional history reports, where “the nature of the terrain could not be surpassed for training troops in the open warfare in which they were to participate later. . . . The entire month of August was passed in this area while the Division received its final training. Incessant drilling, long marches and frequent exercises were the schedule for the entire Division.” In early September they moved over to Saint-Mihiel, but were held in reserve until that offensive ended, at which point they moved again, to Meuse-Argonne, where they were assigned to a central place in the line, between the 35th and 37th Divisions, near the village of Cheppy. And it was from there that they were sent forward at 5:25 a.m. on September 26, 1918, the start of the offensive. Private Lake arrived at the front on September 29. He missed out on a lot of training that might have proven useful to him at some point; but he also missed out on his division’s first three days of battle, and, though he probably didn’t feel this way at the time, the historical record shows that those were good days to miss.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 40