“What did you do?”
“Go up there and mixed them up,” he said, tumbling into a laugh. “Boy, you talk about jabbering!” He laughed harder.
I don’t know if that little stunt had anything to do with it, but the Wild West Division was shipped back home in March, 1919, earlier than most. Private William J. Lake was mustered out at Fort D. A. Rus- sell in Wyoming on May 5, and returned home to Montana. “How were you received there?” I asked him.
“Pretty good,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”
“Your mother was glad to see you?”
“Oh, you bet your life.”
“Were your brothers all there, and your sisters?”
“Yeah.” He confessed that he hadn’t written anybody very often when he’d been in the Army. “Boy, they got after me for that.”
“They were upset?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “They’d want to know where I was and what I was doing. And somebody wrote and told them—I don’t know who did—said I’d been wounded and I was in the hospital, and I wasn’t wounded and I wasn’t in the hospital. I don’t know why they did that.” He said he got a lot of letters when he was Over There, mostly from his mother and his sisters; he still remembered his address: APO 776, France.
He went back to work on the farm, got married, had a daughter, and moved the family to Puyallup, Washington, because he had fond memories of the area from Camp Lewis. His wife, though, missed Montana, moved back without him, and divorced him. He met another woman, to whom he was married for fifty-two years; they had a son and another daughter. He worked for a sash-and-door company in Tacoma, made doors and windows, but “I didn’t like it, so I come over to Yakima, and I’ve been here ever since.” That was in 1924. “First thing I done was pick apples,” he explained. Then he went to work somewhere firing a kiln to dry hops. He dug ditches for the government’s Reclamation Service. Worked on telephone lines and water gauges.
“What were you doing during the Depression?” I asked him.
“I wasn’t doing nothing,” he said.
“You weren’t working?”
“I did some, but not a heck of a lot . . . it was rough.”
At one point he ran into a fellow he knew who owned an apple orchard; he went to work for the man, harvesting apples, for five years. Later in life he worked in a warehouse, then drove a truck, hauling fruit. He finally retired at the age of seventy-five, and only then because he was in an accident and crushed two vertebrae in his back. When I met him, he’d been on disability for more than thirty years. His mother had died at age seventy-five; no one in his family, he told me, had lived to be much older than that. His longevity was a mystery to him. His only son died in his late forties or early fifties; his older daughter lived in Oregon. His younger daughter lived in Yakima, but he only saw her, he said, twice a year or so.
At one point he pushed himself out of his chair, walked over to a chest, opened a drawer, and pulled out his Légion d’Honneur. He smiled proudly, handed it to me: It is a very beautiful medal. He pointed out his stationary bicycle, said he rode it every day. He told me he walked, too, every day, to a certain street and back again. “If the weather’s bad I walk back and forth in the hall,” he said. He had visited, at their invitations, the governor of Washington and the commanding general at Fort Lewis; went out for breakfast or lunch every Saturday and Sunday, and occasionally during the week, too, with a couple of friends in Yakima, younger veterans. They didn’t necessarily stay in town, either. I could tell that was important to him. “Some of these people,” he said sadly, referring to his fellow residents, “never go out at all.” Not that he didn’t like the retirement manor, mind you. “They come in every morning and make your bed, and then they come in and vacuum the carpet and dust the furniture and clean the bathroom and everything and wash your clothes, and if you have to visit the doctor they take you to it, so what else can you ask for?”
If your father dies before your seventh birthday, you start working at the age of eight, get drafted into the deadliest war the world has ever seen, ride clear across the country on a train for six days with a case of the measles that you’re scared to tell anyone about, sail across an ocean with the same case of measles, spend weeks in an English hospital full of fellows who have lost an arm or a leg or a set of lungs or a face in that war you’re on your way to, arrive at the front just in time to see your beloved captain get killed, see lots of others get killed all around you, get so close to death yourself that it puts a hole in your coat and knocks the heel off your shoe and makes you vomit besides, see a buddy shot dead by a sniper while he’s sitting not a yard away from you, manage to return home somehow only to have to scratch and scrounge for work, marry a woman and have a child with her only to have her tell you she’s going home to Montana and then never return, marry another woman and have two more children one of whom dies young and well before you, have to continue to scratch and scrounge for work and often come up short throughout the Great Depression and still be working well into your seventies and only stop then because you have an accident and crush two of your vertebrae—really, what else could you ask for, ten days short of your 108th birthday?
And that would be a fine place to end the story of Private William J. Lake of Yakima, Washington, but for the fact that about six months later, I unexpectedly found myself back in the vicinity, and went to visit him again. Visit: not interview. Because I hadn’t planned to be there much in advance, I had not brought along my video camera. I did, however, have with me a copy of The Story of the 91st Division, the existence of which I had only discovered recently. Though this was not a regular practice for me, I asked him to sign it, and he did, in a very shaky hand:
Bill Lake
362 M G CO
He was 108 years old now, halfway to 109, and while he himself didn’t look all that much older, everything around him somehow seemed to have aged in the interim, especially his shirt, the same one he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, a sharp plaid which had impressed me as crisp in October but which now, in April, looked worn and a bit ragged. You don’t think the mere sight of a shirt can make you feel sad, but it can.
He seemed a bit more tired at first, too, than he had been before, but as we started talking he perked right up. We discussed all manner of things, past and present, touching on something new here and there but mostly revisiting ground we’d covered the previous fall. At one point, he told me once again about how his father had gone off to look for land in the Indian Territory and returned just in time to die of pneumonia; and for some reason, right then, I decided to try again. “What,” I asked him, “was his name?”
“Richard,” he answered immediately. “Just like yours.”
And then, a few minutes later, when Mr. Lake started telling me again about his captain—how he’d been the first man to greet him upon his arrival at the front after six weeks in an English hospital with the measles; how he’d caught Private Lake’s hand when he went to sa- lute and shook it instead, cautioning, “You never know who’s watching”; how, at Camp Lewis, he’d told his men time and again, “I don’t want any cowards in my company; I can’t stand a coward”—I asked him for the man’s name. And again, he answered without even a pause: “Worsham.” Some days, I guess, you just get really lucky.
That night, I picked up my copy of The Story of the 91st Division and turned to the section in the back titled “Those Who Have Fallen”; it’s thirty-eight pages long, if that gives you some idea of how many men of the Wild West Division did not return from France. The list includes one colonel, two majors, and eight captains, the last of whom is listed as: Worsham, Elijah W. I opened my laptop and googled Elijah W. Worsham. There weren’t many hits, but the top of that short list was a page on someone’s genealogical website that contained the transcript of a letter sent by Worsham’s replacement, Captain Ray W. Hays, to one William R. Heilman, a childhood friend of the late captain’s back in Evansville, Indiana, who had inquired after him.
It is not dated, but Hays does specify that he is writing from “Oostletern, Belgium”—probably Oostvleteren—which would make it sometime around the end of the first week of November, 1918. Captain Hays writes:
While Captain Worsham was in command of the machine gun company, I was one of his officers. Since his death I have had the honor of commanding his company, and it is his company, known universally as Captain Worsham’s company, and not the machine gun company. Inspired by his ideals and teaching, I am trying to run the company as he did, but no one can take his place.
We first went over the top at Rendevous de Chasse and the first day advanced about ten kilometers. We met with stiff resistance at Ejenonville [Épinonville] the next morning, and it was largely due to the Captain’s courage, tactics and machine gun company that our division held out while divisions on our flank were forced back.
During the two days of fierce fighting we advanced some eight kilometers, until, on the 29th, we were held up. A small town, by the name Gesnes, seemed to be the point of resistance, and about 3 o’clock in the afternoon of September 29 the battalion to which we were attached was ordered to take the town. The magnificent manner in which it was charged and taken will never be forgotten by the surviving participants. Led by our Captain, we followed the assault wave, and, under his direction, mounted our guns on a ridge commanding the town, where we could use direct fire over the heads of our own troops.
We had some wonderful targets, but were subject to direct observed artillery fire, front and flank, the flank organizations having failed to gain their objective.
After getting my guns in action, I found the Captain firing a machine gun, the crew of which had become casualties. Under the cover of the gun he was firing and three others from my platoon, I removed the remainder of the guns forward to escape the heavy enemy barrage.
Then I rejoined the Captain. Shortly he gave the order to cease firing, our troops having advanced so far that it was dangerous to continue to fire over their heads.
We continued to observe, waiting for dusk to advance. I left the Captain to give orders to one of my gun crews. When I found him a few moments later he was dead, shot with a rifle bullet. He had started forward, field glass in one hand, rifle with fixed bayonet in the other.
We advanced with leaden hearts and heavy feet to help reorganize and consolidate the line for the night, because that is what he would have had us do. It was two or three days before the body was recovered and laid to rest in a grassy meadow in the Forest of Argonne, beside that of one of his Lieutenants, who gave his life the same day.
He was your dear friend, you say. To us he was more—peerless leader, boon companion, comrade, instructor and friend. We mourn his loss in a way that words cannot express. His men and officers loved him as he in his whole-hearted way loved them. The fateful German bullet cost the army a valiant leader and officer, a true soldier in every sense; robbed the government of a valuable citizen, and deprived all who were privileged to know him in the future society of a beloved friend and always cheerful companion.
Pardon me, sir, for so much detail about an action that I was in, but I loved and admired the “Old Skipper,” as he will always be to us, that it is a relief to talk to one who, likewise, knew and loved him. I dream of him by night and think of him by day, and always, in my plans for his company, I wonder if he would approve of my actions were he here. Most of my military education, all my machine gun experience, was received from him, and perhaps his invisible hand is still guiding me in my effort to take his company home as he would have taken it.
Even your high regard for Lige Worsham, the citizen, would have been increased had you known the Captain E. W. Worsham that I knew and served under. He understood men and by his own high ideals brought out the best in them. I truly sympathize with you in the loss of a friend,
Sincerely yours,
Capt. Ray W. Hays
M.G.Co., 362 Inf., A.E.F.
Elijah William Worsham had been captain of the football team at Purdue, and later moved to Seattle, where he’d started a brokerage firm. He was thirty-one years old when he died, and was buried at the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery. His marker there mistakenly records his date of death as September 26, 1918.
I left Bill Lake that afternoon in April, 2004, with a promise that I would come see him again in July, when I planned to be back in the area. I told myself that I would be sure to bring my video camera the next time. And I did.
But I didn’t get to interview him again; in June, he went into the hospital to have surgery for a perforated ulcer, contracted pneumonia post-op, and died. His obituary got his unit wrong, but it did mention the name of his daughter who lived in Yakima, something he never had. In July, passing through town as expected, I called her—her name was Pat—and asked if I could stop by.
She hadn’t known about my visits with him, and I got the sense, in talking with her briefly, that they weren’t exactly distant but weren’t exactly close, either. She showed me his original discharge papers, gave me an official copy someone had requested decades later, perhaps in support of a pension application. I told her in general terms about what we’d discussed; and then I mentioned how he couldn’t remember his father’s name the first time I’d visited him, but that the second time, when I’d asked again, he’d replied, without hesitating, “Richard, just like yours.”
She raised a hand to her mouth, stared at me for a moment. “I never knew his name,” she said. She was then seventy-three years old.
We took a moment to go through the names of her father’s mother and sisters and brothers, just to make sure I had gotten them all right. And then I asked her if she knew why her father’s two younger brothers—Downing, who was twenty years old in 1918, and Graydon, who was eighteen—had been turned away when they’d tried to enlist. She told me that she didn’t. But she did know, she said, that Downing had taken it very badly: He went home afterward and killed himself.
15
Wasn't a Lot of Help
Three stories.
I.
ON JULY 20, 2004, I left Yakima and drove two hundred miles to Spokane to visit with a man who was, I already knew, different from any other veteran I had interviewed, or planned to. His name was John Babcock, and he had served in the CEF: the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Now, like many Americans, you may regard Canada as a very large fifty-first state, or perhaps America Lite. Block out the weird spelling (“humour,” “centre,” “grey”), odd nomenclature (z = “zed”; bathroom = “washroom”; macaroni & cheese = “Kraft Dinner”), funny-looking currency, clean city streets, bilingual highway signs, excellent public transportation, ubiquitous Tim Hortons doughnut shops, and even more ubiquitous national symbols—I once bought a dozen eggs and found a tiny maple leaf stamped on each one—and you might not be able to tell the difference. But make no mistake: Canada is not the United States of America. Its entire identity, it often seems to me, is based upon this fact.
Canada’s so-very-not-American-ness goes all the way back to the American Revolution. Before that little disagreement, the big chunk of North America up yonder was overwhelmingly French, at least ethnically; Britain had seized New France from old France some years earlier, but there still weren’t all that many Britons living up there. After the Revolution, the 20 percent of the population of the Thirteen Colo- nies who had harbored Loyalist sympathies during the rebellion found themselves in a rather awkward position vis-à-vis the other 80 percent. Many Loyalists, who had been among the more affluent American colonists, now found themselves, shall we say, relieved of their property. Others were harassed and menaced by Yankee Doodle ruffians.
Canada—still British—beckoned.
It is estimated that around one hundred thousand Loyalists fled across the new northern border after American independence was secured. This is why, today, Anglophone Canadians sound much more like Americans than Englishmen. It is also why being not-American is still terribly important to Canadians. And, most important to
this story, why Canada remained a part of the British Empire well into the twentieth century. What that meant in 1914 was this: When England declared war on Germany at 11:00 p.m. on August 4 of that year, Canada necessarily went to war, too. If there was a lot of opposition to that state of affairs, I don’t know of it. Canada, after all, was the good child, the one who didn’t rebel.
They didn’t have much of an army on August 4, 1914; the entire country had fewer than eight million people in it at that point, and hadn’t faced a serious threat in a century. By the end of the war, though, more than half a million Canadians had served in uniform. The great majority of them were volunteers; Canada didn’t even have a draft until 1918.
Canada’s war got off to a rough start. Newfoundland’s lone regiment—Newfoundland wasn’t technically part of Canada until 1949, but it was close enough—was sent to Gallipoli, a notorious meat grinder; and CEF troops were present at Ypres (which Canadians, like the British, still pronounce “Wipers”) in the spring of 1915 when the Germans unleashed their first large-scale chlorine gas attack. The Canadians got hit particularly hard, taking thousands of casualties at Wipers; a couple thousand of them died there.
Nevertheless, the following winter, back in Ontario, John Henry Foster Babcock made a spontaneous decision, one evening, to enlist.
He was fifteen years old.
All of the veterans I interviewed looked younger than their actual age, but none of them looked younger than John Babcock; he looked like he was about seventy. And a youthful seventy, at that. He resembled Mr. Tate on the TV show Bewitched: thick white hair brushed straight back, trim mustache, bulbous nose. On the day I stopped by, he was wearing an off-white polo shirt over a bright white T-shirt, and dark pants. While we talked, he sat in a dark red armchair; his wife, Dorothy, hovered nearby and offered up a detail or two when he was slow to recall them, which was rare. They had an easy, playful rapport, the kind you hope you’ll have with your spouse at that age, or any age. I was surprised to learn that Dorothy was actually his second wife; they had met in 1976, when she’d cared for his first wife, Elsie, in the hospital as Elsie lay dying. John had been married to Elsie for forty-four years.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 43