The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sometimes it was, ’cause that’s some pretty rough country to go over.”

  I asked him if he got used to it at some point. “Well, you kind of get used to it,” he told me, “but it’s pretty scary, I’ll tell you, because you don’t know when you’re going to get it.”

  “How did you cope with that?”

  “Well, it kind of bothered me at first, but I got used to it—well, as near used to it as I’d ever get, because you’d hear bullets hitting off, zipping all around . . .”

  “What would you do when bullets were zipping around? Would you hit the ground, or would you just keep on your way?”

  “No,” he said, “I just kept going.”

  “So you really just had to be very lucky?” I posited.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Very lucky, that’s true.” One night, he told me, “a piece of shrapnel just missed my left arm,” while another one tore through his coattail, he said, “about two inches from my back.” If it had hit him, he reckoned, “I’d have been gone . . . that’s how close I come to getting it.” The following night—“I was just standing there,” he explained, “waiting for something, I guess, I don’t remember what it was”—he had a close encounter with a German bullet. “It was either machine gun or rifle,” he told me. “Whichever it was, I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. But it hit the heel on my shoe.” And tore it off. He got off a few shots himself—some at a low-flying German aeroplane, others at an enemy gunner—but he didn’t believe he’d hit either.

  Another time, he recalled, “I got a little gas”—that is, mustard gas, not the kind we all get from time to time. “Not enough to do any harm, really,” he told me.

  “What kind of effect did it have on you?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, “it makes you sick. It makes you feel terrible.”

  “You threw up?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Did you lose your voice?” I asked, thinking of Laurence Moffitt.

  “No,” he said, “we had gas masks, so we wore them all the time.” Everyone in his company was exposed to gas at some time or other. “Some of them got it pretty bad,” he said. “But I didn’t . . . It could have killed me, but I didn’t get that much.”

  I asked him what it was like at the front when there wasn’t any shooting going on. “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t very often. Up at the front there was shooting all the Goddamned night.”

  “How did you handle the stress?” I inquired at one point.

  “Well,” he replied, “I took it the best way I could. I just—I know it was going to happen, so what could you do?” Just two options, really: adapt somehow, or break. Plenty of men, sadly, broke.

  “They called us one day,” he remembered, “a couple of us, and they had what they called a paddy wagon. Some guy lost his mind, and they had to take him to—I forget where it was they took him to. And they said, ‘You don’t know what he’s going to do.’ One of us had a loaded rifle, the other didn’t. And they said, ‘If he gets out of hand, kill him.’”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Thank God we didn’t have to do it.”

  “He just cracked?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. They put him in a padded cell. I never did hear any more from him. But boy, I was glad I didn’t—one of us had a loaded rifle, the other one didn’t, and we just . . .”

  “You didn’t know which one had it?”

  “No.”

  “They told you both to shoot him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he shell-shocked?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “I think that’s what did it.” He said he knew of several cases, but that this was the only one he’d encountered personally.

  “Shell shock” is just a phrase, of course; “battle fatigue” may be more accurate. There were any number of things that might make a man crack after being at the front for a while. Some of them, like bullets, were utterly random; shells, at least, gave you a little bit of notice. “You could tell by the way, the sound of the artillery, you could tell pretty close to where it was going to land,” Mr. Lake explained. Still, he recalled, “you just never knew when you was going to get hit. But I was lucky, as I said,” he mused. “Now, another guy and I were sitting on a bank.” He paused, lowered his chin, pursed his lips; his voice dropped. “And a sniper shot him instead of me.”

  I looked at him for a moment. “You were sitting next to each other?”

  “Yeah. No more than two feet apart. And he picked him instead of me. He killed him, of course.” They had been sitting on a little dirt rise, near a trench. And this, I’m pretty sure, is the reason Bill Lake kept saying he was lucky. “They picked him instead of me. I was lucky, that’s all . . . we were sitting there side by side and he picked him instead of me.”

  We were quiet for a moment. “They got him,” he assured me. “They found him, they found the sniper.”

  “Oh?” I said. “They killed him?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “They didn’t take him prisoner, not a sniper, no. He was up in a tree when they found him, and they let him have it. And he fell out of the tree, dead. And that’s all there was to it.”

  He said it with aplomb; the passage of eighty-five years had not dulled his sense of righteous outrage. There was a very hard feeling about snipers then, even though everybody used them. “They didn’t take a sniper prisoner,” he explained. “They was dirty. They would shoot you in the back as soon as they would in the face, you know. They didn’t care as long as they got you. But they got him, of course.” He told this story several times over the course of our two-hour conversation, and though he never had anything new to add, he kept returning to it: They picked him instead of me.

  Like almost every other World War I veteran I interviewed, William J. Lake was stoic; if thoughts like those plagued him, he didn’t let on much, besides revisiting the incident again and again. But he saw plenty of people get it, as he said, and knew of many more. The buddy who had enlisted with him in Montana was killed in a railroad accident even before the division shipped out for France. Also with him in Camp Lewis, he recalled, were “three guys from Salt Lake City . . . they went home and got married [before shipping out].” His voice dropped again. “Every one of them got killed.”

  “Every one of them?” I asked.

  “Every one of them got killed,” he repeated, twice. “Well,” he continued, “I didn’t even have a girlfriend, but if I had, I never would have done that.”

  “You wouldn’t have married her before you went?”

  “No. I would not have married anybody. No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you think: too much pain. You didn’t know if you were going to get back or not.” He added: “Well, see, I didn’t even have a girlfriend, so that was all right.”

  He told me that men in his company were killed just about every day; and he saw a lot of death on the other side, too. “We killed so many of them,” he said. “They had concrete bunkers in there . . . but we fixed that and just—I don’t know how many got killed, I was told but I don’t remember how many. Just completely wrecked it, demolished it.”

  “With artillery?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “with artillery. We had six- and eight-inch artillery. They started in at, I think it was six o’clock in the evening, and kept it up all night. And that was it.”

  “And that was it. They destroyed the bunker.”

  “Just completely destroyed it. And I don’t know how many it killed. I was told, but I can’t remember how many it was, killed and wounded. I saw a lot of dead ones and a lot of wounded.” He shook his head and pursed his lips.

  “A lot of dead and wounded Germans?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And that’s what ended the war.”

  I wish I could tell you that things got better for the Wild West Division after those awful first four days at the Meuse-Argonne. But they didn’t. The enf
ilade fire kept coming; the shells kept falling. New plagues started coming around, too. “Many men were suffering from diarrhea due to exposure . . . without warm food or overcoats and blankets,” the divisional history—which is supposed to be a positive recounting—reports. “Most officers and men had raincoats, and some had found German blankets in dugouts. The men built shelter from small-arms fire by excavating the northern edges of shell-holes. But they were observed by hostile planes and subjected to heavy fire (shrapnel and shell) from German artillery. . . . Although many casualties resulted, the morale was undisturbed.” I guess that last clause was the positive part.

  The divisions on their flanks—the 35th on the left, 37th on the right—never could seem to catch up with the 91st, or even get within a couple of miles of them, so the Westerners continued to get hit—hard—from three sides. Often men would seek shelter in safe spots called splinter-proofs, only to learn, the hard way, that they were neither safe nor splinter-proof. The 362nd, the history records, “suffered heavy losses because of lack of overhead shelter.” The farther they advanced, the stronger the German defenses became. By October 4, the 91st had been battered so incessantly that they—as well as every other division in the First Army’s V Corps—were relieved and ordered into reserve. Their corps commander took pains to write to the 91st: “This relief results solely from a realization by higher command that your Division has done its full share in the recent success, and is entitled to a rest for reorganization.” Two days later, higher command, realizing it couldn’t spare the entire division after all, ordered half of it—the 181st Brigade, which included the 362nd Regiment—back in to fight alongside their replacements, the 1st Division.

  It was apparent from the start that the Meuse-Argonne wasn’t going to be another Saint-Mihiel. The terrain alone would have made it a much more difficult fight, but that terrain was nothing compared to the heavy German fortifications. If the doughboys had hoped they might hit some weak point in the enemy’s defenses going forward, a critical soft point that would start the process of bringing the whole thing crashing down before them—well, they were disappointed. It seemed, in fact, that the farther they managed to advance, the fiercer the resistance they encountered. Every step they took forward brought them closer to the Germans’ ultimate line of defense; every step the Germans took backwards brought them closer to the point where they would no longer be able to take any more steps backwards. Rather than just give up in the face of that prospect, the Germans threw more and more reserve divisions into the fight, working feverishly by night to rebuild those defensive points that had been damaged or destroyed during the day’s fighting and to strengthen those that hadn’t. Doughboys would push off in the morning fog expecting to build on gains they had made—often at great expense—the day before, only to find themselves fighting to take the same ground all over again. Soon, a very hard feeling developed toward all German soldiers—not just snipers. “Everybody hated them,” Mr. Lake told me at one point; “that’s just the way it was.” I’ve read, here and there, reports of newly captured German prisoners at Meuse-Argonne being executed rather than sent back behind the lines. There were reasons the French hadn’t attempted a major offensive in the area in years.

  On October 12, 1918, the 181st Brigade was pulled from the Meuse-Argonne for good. By then, the divisional history reports, the 91st had suffered 25 percent casualties. They had also advanced farther than just about any other division in that first phase of the offensive; liberated a number of villages and farms; and captured more than twenty-three hundred prisoners and, the divisional history notes, the following “hostile material”:

  440 Machine Guns

  24 Field Guns, caliber 77

  1 Field Gun, caliber 105

  6 Field Guns, caliber 150

  5 Minnewerfers [sic; a Minenwerfer was a short-range mortar]

  500 Rifles, Mauser

  266 Rifles, Luger

  46 Pairs Field Glasses

  1,105,000 Rounds Rifle Ammunition

  963,000 Rounds Machine Gun Ammunition, in belts

  12,000 Rounds Field Gun Ammunition, Caliber 77

  1 Tank

  5,000 Hand Grenades

  None of which the Germans could spare at that point.

  The battle would continue, without the 91st, right up to the very minute the armistice took effect. The Americans never stopped pushing forward; it never got close to anything you might call easy. In the end, 26,277 doughboys would die there, including 1,019 from the Wild West Division. Another 95,786—including 3,916 men of the 91st—would be wounded. When Palmer called it “Our Greatest Battle,” he wasn’t merely employing hyperbole: More Americans died at the Meuse-Argonne than in any other battle in the country’s history, before or since.

  The Germans, with their terrestrial advantages and extensive fortifications, gave up a lot of territory during the six weeks between the offensive’s beginning and the armistice. They lost about as many men as the Americans did, too, and they really couldn’t spare them. They were down to reserves by then, whereas the Americans had hundreds of thousands of unused troops on French soil, and another two million just waiting to cross the Atlantic. The great gamble the Germans had taken with their Spring Offensive had failed them, and then broken them. Many historians believe the Meuse-Argonne Offensive dealt Germany its coup de grâce. Private William J. Lake, who was there, certainly thought so. “At Argonne Forest,” he told me, “the Germans were on one side and the French were on the other, and they said they couldn’t drive the Germans out. And we drove them out.” He understood why the French had been unable to do it on their own: The German prisoners, he said, “the ones we had, was in pretty good shape”; but the French soldiers he saw, “they was pretty ragged. They’d been in pretty bad shape.” The difference, he must have believed, had to be the AEF. As he told me, more than once: “We ended the war. In fact, our division ended the war.”

  I’m not sure how many historians would sign on to that statement; but with everything he saw and did Over There, you could certainly understand why Bill Lake might think such a thing.

  The Meuse-Argonne was not the end of the Wild West Division’s war. After they were pulled out of that sector, they were sent up to Belgium—a rare assignment for doughboys in that war—where they were given more than four thousand replacement troops and then put back into the field on October 31, alongside British, Belgian, and French units, and the American 37th Division, which had fought on their right flank at the Meuse-Argonne. I’m not sure how it came to pass that these two American divisions were sent up to Flanders—I’ve seen it speculated that Foch wanted a token American presence at that northernmost offensive, for some reason—but I imagine they found it a preferable site for fighting: it had been blasted all to hell over the course of four years, but at least it was flat and open. Private Lake certainly found it less exciting; the only thing he had to say about Belgium, eighty-five years later, was that that was where he was when he got word that the armistice had been signed. “We was on our way up to the front,” he recalled, “not talking, no smoking, no noise of any kind, and a guy come along and stopped us and said you could talk and you could smoke and do what you want to do. And he says there’ll be another runner along in about a half an hour, and he didn’t say what he was going to do. And this guy come along and told us the armistice has been signed, and that was it.”

  In fact, in the last twelve days of the war, as part of the Ypres-Lys Offensive, they helped drive the Germans back across the Scheldt River, and liberated nine towns and villages, all of which cost them another 929 casualties, including 215 killed. Not an easy stretch by any measure—except, perhaps, compared to what they had been through earlier that fall.

  It all stopped suddenly on that November morning when that runner came along and told them the armistice had been signed. “Oh, it was just like you had a fit, I’ll tell you for sure,” Bill Lake recalled, meaning that in the good way. “Everybody was so happy.” After that, he said, “
we stayed in Belgium until I think it was the first of the year, and then we went back to France—doing nothing—but they kept us there. And they had the Army of Occupation, and we was supposed to be in that, and they changed it; otherwise I’d have been over there for another six months. But they had us doing nothing. . . . Just relaxing.” Not that he was complaining.

  “They must have had you doing something during the day,” I said.

  “Well,” he offered, “we drank a lot of wine.”

  Someone high up must have decided that the 91st had had a really rough time of it, because they weren’t assigned any duty at all, not even the guarding of prisoners. The divisional history confirms Private Lake’s recollection that the 91st did time after the armistice in both Belgium and France; it reports lots of rain and uncomfortable billets, neither of which he mentioned. He did meet French women, he told me, but added: “I couldn’t understand their language, so . . .”

  “Did you try to talk to any of them?” I asked him.

  “I tried to,” he said, “but it didn’t get very far. We had a translator tell me what they said.”

  “Were they friendly?”

  “Yeah, most of them were, yeah.”

  “Were they pretty?”

  “Some of them. And some of them looked like old men. You see,” he explained, “the French drink a lot of wine, but they heat it. That takes alcohol out of it. And they drink so much of it that their dang teeth just all fall out.”

  “Is that right?” I asked.

  “That’s the way it was,” he asserted.

  On one occasion, he told me, a Sunday morning, he and some buddies found themselves in a little town in France where, he said, “they wore wooden shoes—everybody wore wooden shoes.” That morning, he explained, they came upon the town’s church during Mass; all the wooden shoes were lined up outside. He grinned. “You know what we done?”