The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  John Babcock had hoped he would get sent across; “I wanted to ‘do my bit,’ as they called it,” he told me. And he got pretty close: When the boys in his Young Soldiers Battalion “were six months from being nineteen, they put them in D Company, and they trained them,” he explained. And then, as soon as they turned nineteen, “they shipped them back to France.” When the war ended, John Babcock was about ten weeks away from being sent to D Company.

  While he never made it to France, he did manage to get some fighting in, thanks to his highly decorated friend, Kinley. One time after the armistice, he said, “when we were in Kimmel Park Camp in North Wales and some of our guys got thrown out of a dancehall by the British, he says, Kinley says, ‘You know, we should go up there and clean them bastards.’ And so up we went, thirteen hundred strong.” A heated discussion ensued, and then “somebody picked up a bench and threw it through a window,” he recalled. “That’s when the old sergeant came out and said, ‘Don’t hit me, I’m an old man!’ Then he was socking everybody he could.” I laughed, picturing the scene with that music from The Benny Hill Show playing in the background. “This big sergeant major,” he continued, “a soldier like that”—he spread his arms wide to indicate a man of some size—“said, ‘Don’t you hit that old man.’ Someone hit him with a one-by-four alongside the jaw, crack!” He chuckled. “And I thought, ‘Well, this is no place for me.’ And I just kind of faded away and went back to camp. One of our guys had a bayonet thrust through his thigh. And they had us—in less than two weeks they had us on a boat back to Canada.” It seems Britain tired of that particular group of Young Soldiers. And I suspect it was mutual; when I asked Mr. Babcock if everyone onboard the RMS Aquitania with him seemed to be glad to be going home, he replied, simply: “Oh, hell, yes.”

  He was formally discharged on January 11, 1919. He returned to Holleford, enrolled at the same school he had left as a child, but dropped out again after a few months; “I decided I wasn’t going to make it through the entrance [exams] into high school,” he explained, quickly adding: “I graduated from high school when I was ninety-five years old. I’m considering now taking a college course.” Back in 1919, though, having left school again, he went to work “in the Adirondack Mountains in a lumber camp. And they gave Canadians a vocational training.” That training enabled him to get a job in Sydenham, “running a light plant . . . I’d read the meters.” After a while he moved west, to Saskatchewan, to work the harvest; and then in 1921, he told me, “I enlisted in the American Army, and came to Camp Lewis, Washington.” The same place where Bill Lake had gone through boot camp a few years earlier.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked him.

  “Well, hell,” he said. “I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t have a trade.”

  But with his three years in the CEF, he told me, army life came easily to him. “In a month I was a corporal,” he recalled. “And in another month I was a sergeant.” He liked America, decided to stay; after moving around the Northwest a few times, he landed in Spokane in 1932. Eventually he became an American citizen, which, at the time, meant he automatically forfeited his Canadian citizenship. I’m not sure how much thought he ever gave that fact.

  We visited for a few hours that day in Spokane; I never saw him or talked to him again, but I did keep an eye out for his obituary. Years passed, until, in May of 2007, I came across a different death notice, for a fellow named Percy Dwight Wilson, which stated that Mr. Wilson’s passing left exactly one living Canadian veteran of the First World War, a man named John Henry Foster Babcock.

  And here’s another difference between the United States and Canada: Just as soon as John Babcock achieved that status, he became quite famous throughout the land of his birth. Canadian journalists—newspaper, television, magazine, radio—descended upon Spokane, Washington, to interview him, and sometimes just to meet him. The government decided that, upon his death, he would be given a state funeral; he declined that honor, though he was happy to have his Canadian citizenship restored. Government officials, including at least one member of Parliament, visited him at his home. He received birthday greetings from the prime minister, the governor-general, and Eliza- beth II (who still retains the title of Queen of Canada for some reason). The honors continued to accumulate for several years, until he died in February, 2010, at the age of 109.

  Sometime during the first week of November, 2008, I was on a train riding from Montreal to Cornwall, Ontario, when I observed a couple of well-dressed, distinguished-looking older gentlemen sitting across the aisle; both had large red plastic flowers affixed to their lapels. I had seen quite a few such flowers while visiting Montreal, and wondered what was up, so I asked these two gentlemen about it. They were poppies, they explained, sold to raise money for veterans’ causes every year in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day: November 11. Veterans Day. Armistice Day.

  They were veterans themselves; I noticed one had some sort of military decoration pinned to his jacket near the poppy. We talked a bit more, and then for some reason I told them that I was American, and that I had once met John Babcock. They—these proud, dignified, accomplished old men—suddenly looked at me with awe, then admiration, and started talking effusively, something I couldn’t have imagined (much less expected) from two Canadians of such bearing. One of them told me he had served in Mr. Babcock’s unit, by which I think he meant the 146th Over-Seas Battalion; when I rose to leave the train a few moments later, he removed the poppy from his coat and pinned it on mine.

  II.

  My visit with 102-year-old Warren Hileman on June 10, 2004, was another singular experience. Like most of my interview subjects, he was quite hard of hearing; unlike the rest, though, he refused to wear his hearing aids. After a few minutes of shouting questions at him (with his caregiver repeating them, even louder and right in his ear), I came to understand that I was going to have to write them down on my legal pad and just hand that to him, instead. It made for an interesting conversation.

  Not that I’m complaining, mind you, because that conversation almost didn’t happen at all. When I learned of Warren Hileman’s existence, from an article in a small-town newspaper, I called up the Il- linois Veterans’ Home in Anna, Illinois, where the article had said he lived, and asked if he was capable of giving me an interview. He was certainly capable, I was told, but also disinclined; several television crews had shown up at the home with similar intentions, only to be turned away. Nevertheless, they said, if I happened to be in the area, I’d be welcome to come by and try for myself. I wasn’t anywhere near the area—Anna is in extreme southern Illinois, so far downstate that it’s only about a three-hour drive from Memphis—but I decided I’d take a chance, because Warren Hileman had a story that I knew no other living veteran could tell me. So I flew to Memphis and made the drive.

  I’m not sure why he decided to see me. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure he actually did. When I showed up at the Veterans’ Home I was directed to a sort of conference room and told to wait; a few minutes later, he was wheeled in. It seems possible to me that he wasn’t told what was going on until we were in each other’s presence, at which point it might have proven a tad awkward for him to just leave without talking to me. However it happened, I’m grateful that it did; and he didn’t seem to mind much, either.

  He was born, he said, on September 29, 1901. When I asked him where, exactly, he replied: “Well, as far as I can recall, I was born on one of Grandpa’s daughter’s farms . . . out about eight miles east of Anna.” He spoke quite deliberately, taking plump pauses here and there, often in the middle of a sentence. His voice was deep; you couldn’t tell, just by his accent, what part of the country he’d grown up in, but you could tell that it was rural. His discharge papers listed his height as five feet seven, but he seemed much taller than that, sitting down though he was. His facial features and torso created the impression that he had been stretched out at some point. It suited his voice, and vice versa. And that voice lent itself to r
ambling. Often, when I posed a question to him in writing, he would answer it and then just continue on talking, unraveling a string of anecdotes and details that were no less interesting for being, at times, not entirely relevant. For instance, after telling me where he was born, he continued:

  And there was a little country store out there where it used to be . . . And Dad rented it one time. And as you don’t know, though, back then in an old country store, wasn’t a lot of help. And transportation then wasn’t what it is now. The car back then was a curiosity. There was the old dirt road—you could tell when cars were coming right down a country road, you could see a big trail of dust. And in the wintertime, that’d become mud. And people would—first big rain all year, they’d put the car in the garage or someplace. Then they’d take the tires off the car and put them upstairs.

  When I asked him, out loud, what his father’s name had been, he stared at me for a moment and then said, with a chuckle, “We’re not communicating at all.” That was when I decided to start using the legal pad. I wrote the question down and slid it across to him; he read it, took another pause, and said: “Aaron.” He didn’t have many memories of the man, though: His father, who worked on a farm, was killed in an accident when Warren was very young. “His brother run over him with a thrash machine,” he explained. “The engine didn’t run over him, just the separator. Right on the rear wheel, run across his chest.”

  “How old was he?” I asked.

  “He was thirty-five years old.”

  “And how old were you?”

  “I was three years old. And my sister was five. And I think the baby was eleven months.” A month later, I would hear a somewhat similar story from John Babcock; that world, in a lot of ways, was a more dangerous place than ours is today. Mr. Hileman made this same point rather colorfully a minute or so later, while telling me about his grandfather’s farm. “Grandpa bought land for twenty-five cents an acre,” he recalled. “The old barn is still standing—it’s got hand-built walls. And it’s been there over a hundred years, but dry rot is getting into them walls.” At one time on that farm, he recalled, “there was five buildings, and all built out of hand-hewn logs. You ever see what they call a broadaxe?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You ever tried using one?”

  “No.”

  “You had to be a little careful with one,” he said. “If you didn’t watch what you were doing, you’d chop your foot off. And Uncle John, he had a guy that’d give him railroad ties . . . and he was hewing away! And he just set his broadaxe down beside the log, sat down on it, took his shoe off, took his sock off, shake it like that . . .” He mimicked the motion of shaking out a sock; a wry grin spread over his face and then dissolved in a laugh. “Three white toes fell out,” he said.

  After his father died, Warren Hileman told me nearly a century later, his mother, Alvena, “got married again before too long.” She had moved in with her late husband’s father and was working as a farm hand; and her father-in-law had a single son at home. “She married a Hileman the second time,” her son recalled, a practice so old it’s actually mandated in chapter 25 of Deuteronomy; they call it Levirate marriage. “And she’s buried at Mission Chapel,” he continued. “That’s down there—you know where St. John’s Church is?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “I thought everybody knows where St. John’s was,” he said. He was a funny fellow and had a lot of funny stories—like the time, when he was three years old and ran excitedly to see his first cow, and the cow hooked one of its horns under his suspenders, lifted him off the ground, and thrashed him about. He was even funny, sometimes, in talking about his military service, although, knowing a bit beforehand about where he had served and when, humorous anecdotes were not what I had expected to hear that day. You see, Warren Hileman enlisted at the age of seventeen and was assigned to the 27th Infantry Regiment, one of two Army regiments in the American Expeditionary Forces that were given a special assignment. They fought overseas—but not in France. Or Europe.

  “I’m a World War I veteran,” he said, when I first asked him about his service. “And I served in a place that a lot of people . . .” He paused for a moment, perhaps contemplating how he might finish that sentence.

  He never did. Instead, he just said: “Siberia.”

  And that’s why I went all the way to Anna, Illinois, on the off chance that he would grant me an interview: Warren Hileman was the last surviving veteran of the AEF Siberia, a chapter in American history as strange as it is now obscure.

  The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in March, 1918, took Russia out of the war against Germany; but Russia was still quite far from peaceful at that point. The Bolsheviki, who had made that peace with the Germans several months after seizing power in the October Revolution, had allied themselves with various leftist, pro-revolutionary, and anti-czarist groups, collectively calling themselves the Workers and Peasants Red Army, more often known as the Red Army or, simply, the Reds. But the Reds didn’t yet have control over the vast expanse that was (and is) Russia; there were still a great many groups, organizations and individuals, united by little more than their hatred of the Reds, fighting together in a loose confederation known as the White Army—or the White Guard, or just the Whites. The Reds and the Whites fought each other in a savage civil war that raged for years and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The Reds executed many innocent civilians as “enemies of the people”; the Whites slaughtered many innocent civilians, too, including lots of Jews—to whom some Whites, being steeped in centuries of good old-fashioned Russian anti-Semitism, assigned blame for the whole revolution—in some of the worst pogroms the country had ever seen, which is saying quite a lot. The Whites played on the West’s fear of the Reds (not hard to do) and the Allies’ desire to reopen the Eastern Front and draw German troops away from France and Belgium (also not hard to do), and quickly lined up French, Italian, and especially British support. The British, in turn, were quite keen to draw the Americans into the effort. President Wilson and Secretary of War Baker, though, weren’t particularly interested at first; while they weren’t terribly fond of the Bolsheviki—who had, after all, made a separate peace with the Germans—they didn’t see Russia as their fight. Nevertheless, the British kept trying, and in the summer of 1918, they conjured just the right combination of incentives.

  The first was essentially financial. When America entered the conflict in the spring of 1917, it started shipping war materiel—everything from guns and shells to locomotives and boxcars—to its new ally, Russia; by the time Russia left the war the following spring, nearly a billion dollars’ worth of American materiel was sitting in two Russian ports: Arkhangelsk, above the Arctic Circle in the north-central part of the country, and Vladivostok, in the extreme far east, near Japan. The British presented a simple case: Go in with us and help make sure the Bolsheviki—or, worse, the Germans—don’t get their hands on your stuff. Pretty straightforward. And persuasive.

  The second argument, though, was more emotional, and it might just have been the one that really swayed President Wilson. It involved a curious band of men—I’ve seen estimates of their numbers ranging from forty thousand to seventy thousand—who captured imaginations and won admiration throughout the West in 1918: the Czech Legion.

  In 1914, the areas that are now known as the Czech Republic and Slovakia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As ethnic minorities, though, many Czechs and Slovaks had no great love for the empire. Some fled east rather than be conscripted into the emperor’s army; others, who had already been conscripted, deserted. Still others were captured by the Russians in battle. At some point, someone hit upon the idea of forming a military unit, composed largely of these displaced Czechs, that would fight alongside the Russians in the east, against the Germans and Austrians. And it did—at least until Russia signed that treaty and left the war. The Bolshevik government couldn’t allow the Czech
Legion to continue the fight on their own, at least not in the east, but it did permit them to leave. The problem was that they couldn’t head west—the Germans were there. The only way out of the country was through the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok. Five thousand miles to the east.

  At first, things seemed to be going somewhat smoothly. For a while, the Czechs were able to ride east on the Trans-Siberian Railway—the only way to get to Vladivostok from Europe—more or less unmolested. But then some Bolsheviki decided they should try to disarm the Czechs. This did not go well. Soon the Czechs found themselves thoroughly embattled, mixing it up with Reds and German POWs and various bands of brigands. Nevertheless, they were astonishingly successful, plowing east in armored trains, defeating the Reds at almost every turn, and liberating towns and villages. They also established and ran a bank, built a theater and mounted productions, and secured a printing press that they used to publish books and a regular newspaper—none of which are easy to do even if you’re not on a moving train that is constantly coming under attack. They were celebrated internationally as heroes, but the battles took a great toll on them; they needed help. The British made the case for intervention to President Wilson who, though he may not have believed in racial equality, did believe passionately in the right of self-determination, at least for white men. He agreed to send troops to Russia, even adding a directive that, in addition to securing American war materiel and aiding the Czech Legion, American troops should offer support to “any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.” Which Russians, exactly, was never clear, and even if it had been, the doughboys couldn’t have done much about it; they had quite enough to do already in pursuit of the other two, less vague, directives.