Nearly two hundred Americans died during the AEFs’s nineteen months in Siberia. I have no idea when, where, or how they perished, other than Sergeant Robins and Private Montgomery, killed at Posolskaya on January 10, 1920. Private Warren Hileman, eighteen years old, was in one of those boxcars that night when Semyonov’s Cossacks opened fire on them. But aside from confirming that he’d been there and hadn’t been hit, he didn’t care to say much about it. At one point, he told me: “I wouldn’t take anything for the experience, but I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for it . . . I’m lucky. The only thing I got to show for it, I got a bad scar on my left shoulder here, covered with a tattoo. But now we’re getting too close for comfort.”
“How did you get the scar?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No way,” was all he would say.
At one point, just after telling me about the night his dinner froze, he said, in response to nothing: “We had several that didn’t make it. They had a one-way trip.” But he wouldn’t elaborate on that statement. Instead, he talked about how the Army sent him to the Philippines and Hawaii after Siberia (he didn’t care for either—said they were too hot for him), how he went home afterward and took up farming, took a wife and finally had a daughter after twenty years of marriage. He told me that when it came time for them to leave Siberia—his papers mark the specific date as March 10, 1920—the ice in Vladivostok’s harbor was still so thick and solid that they had to blow it apart with hand grenades before the ship could move. As I was about to leave that day—seven months before I would come upon his obituary in the newspaper—I decided to try one more time.
“How did American soldiers in your unit die in Siberia?” I wrote on the yellow pad.
He took it from me, read the question, set the pad down. He was quiet for a moment. “Well, I’m going to cross that last one out. That’s zeroed-out information,” he said at last, smiling apologetically. And I must tell you: In all these interviews, hundreds of hours of conversation, that’s the only time anyone ever said anything like that to me. I don’t know what it was that he didn’t want to revisit after eighty-five years, but it must have been bad.
“Well,” he said, “that about covers it. That’s just hittin’ the high spots.” He folded his arms, and smiled.
And then added: “You ever try that Japanese beer, that sake?”
III.
She giggled at her own name. That was really something; if the sound of a 107-year-old woman giggling doesn’t stir your heart, then it’s time to reach for the defibrillator.
“Can you tell me your full name?” I’d asked her.
“My full name?” she replied. She paused for a second, then said: “Hildegarde Lillian Eugenia Anderson Schan.” And giggled.
“That’s quite a name!” I said, and she giggled again. I would have traveled a significant distance for that, but as it happened, I’d only had to go as far as an assisted-living facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was May 17, 2006; once again, I had traveled to hear a story that I imagined I wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere else. And once again, I was right: though Hildegarde Schan had not served in the armed forces in World War I, she was drafted into it nevertheless.
She’d been born, she told me, on January 13, 1899, in the Bronx—145th Street and Willis Avenue. Her parents, Carl and Charlotte, had both come from Sweden; according to census records, they immigrated to the United States in 1887, when they were in their midtwenties, and married in 1891. “My mother had two boyfriends,” Mrs. Schan explained. “And one of them did all of the talking, and the other was very quiet. So she didn’t know which one to marry. So she decided to marry the quiet one, because she liked to do the talking.” She giggled again, fluttering her wavy white hair and the string of pearls she wore over a dotted blouse.
“Why did they come to America?” I asked her.
“Because they were going to find gold on the streets,” she said, smiling. “Everyone said, you go to America, you’d find gold.” Instead they found each other, and started a family: three daughters and two sons. Her father, she told me, had been an inventor. “He invented the first shoe with a zipper in it,” she said. “Men’s shoes used to have buttons. And this was a zipper, and you pulled it up on the shoe. And then he painted on glass. He did a lot of painting on glass.”
“And he had the milk route,” her daughter, Joan, prompted.
“And then he had the milk business,” she agreed. “You know, with the old milk wagons and the horses. I remember I used to step on the back, and we all liked to ride on that.” The newspaper article that alerted me to her existence stated that Carl Anderson had had the very first milk route in the Bronx. Back then, the Bronx was relatively pastoral; when she was a child, Hildegarde Schan recalled, 145th Street “was a beautiful street, only three houses. But then they started to bring apartments and spoil the whole thing . . . We had a beautiful house. It was sixteen rooms.”
“Two sides,” Joan clarified.
“Eight rooms on each side,” her mother said. “So we lived in one end, and they rented out the other. Imagine—twenty-five dollars a month. For an eight-room house.” She laughed.
She attended PS 37, right up the street, but left school after the eighth grade and enrolled at Bird’s Business Institute, on 149th Street. “What did you study there?” I asked.
“Oh, everything,” she said. “Typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, everything for business.”
“Did you like it?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And then what did you do?”
“Then I got a job with Funk & Wagnalls. They’re the ones that run the Literary Digest.” While it’s largely forgotten today, the Literary Digest was a tremendously popular and influential weekly magazine in its day, a combination of Time and Reader’s Digest with a circulation that exceeded one million at its peak. Funk & Wagnalls, the magazine’s publisher, was also known for its reference books, particularly its encyclopedia; working there, even as a secretary—as Hildegarde Anderson did—would have been a source of some prestige. She enjoyed the job, too. “I liked the typing,” she said. “And we had a very nice superintendent. She was lovely.” She was there for about a year, she said, and was earning $125 a month. This was in 1917.
“When the war came,” Mrs. Schan explained, “every company had to pick so many employees and send them to Washington. So I was picked to go to Washington.”
This is how she remembered it: At some point in the fall of 1917, she and four other women were told to go take a civil service examination. “Where was that?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “In a government building.” In New York. Of the five of them, she told me, “only the two of us passed the civil service.”
“Why do you think they picked you to take the test?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They must have thought I could do it.” The test proved them right; and then, shortly thereafter, the government sent for her. “We got the telegram at one o’clock in the morning,” she recalled, “for me to report on December seventeenth. The next morning, I called them in Washington, and asked if they could wait until after Christmas, you know. And no, they said I had to come right away.”
A knock on the door from Western Union at one o’clock in the morning was not the kind of thing anyone ever hoped to hear. I have to wonder why the government chose to do it that way: Was it cheaper to send a telegram in the middle of the night? Or were they—that is, whoever sent the telegram—trying to convey a sense of urgency, even crisis? Whatever their reasons, that knock reverberated throughout the house—or at least the eight rooms on the Andersons’ side. “They woke everybody up?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And I got all excited—going away from home—and I was crying.”
“You were only eighteen, too,” Joan said to her mother.
“Did all of the companies have to send women down to Washington?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said.
; “Why?”
“They needed help.”
For years after that conversation, I asked all kinds of people, including quite a few historians, about this. I read everything I could find on the subject of women and the war, followed serpentine information trails, looked up footnotes, and worked every search engine I knew of to find a definitive answer to the question of what, exactly, had happened to Hildegarde Anderson in the fall of 1917.
I never found one. Over time, I came to understand that her belief—that, as she had put it, “every company had to pick so many employees and send them to Washington”—was mistaken. If such a program had ever existed on that scale, there would be some record of it. There is none. There were plenty of government agencies and bureaus and offices that were concerned, at least in part, with drawing women into the workforce for the war effort, whether at the War Department or munitions plants, but none of them were given the mission, or the authority, to actually conscript women for work. Still, Hildegarde Anderson had received that telegram at one o’clock in the morning. She reported to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan on the morning of December 17, 1917, and boarded a train for Washington, D.C. “Who decided that you should go to Washington?” I had asked her that day in Plymouth.
“My boss,” she said. “The woman at Funk & Wagnalls.”
To understand why, exactly, her employer might do such a thing to her, you need to know a few things. First, there was a severe labor shortage at that time in Washington; much of the government’s male clerical staff had either volunteered for, or were drafted into, the AEF. There weren’t nearly enough qualified women remaining in the city to fill all those jobs. There might well have been had President Wilson not, several years earlier, instituted a policy of racial segregation in federal offices; but he had. And now the government—particularly the War Department—was in trouble.
When America entered the war in April, 1917, some men, successful executives and the like who were too old or otherwise unfit for military service, chose instead to act upon their patriotism by taking leaves of absence from their jobs and offering their expertise to the war effort, in some form or other, for free. Actually, it wasn’t quite for free: The government typically paid their expenses—and, to sweeten the deal, a stipend of one dollar a year. They were known as Dollar-a-Year Men, and though they are largely forgotten today, they made an important contribution to the war effort. I cannot imagine that a company like Funk & Wagnalls, a high-profile member of what we would now call the mass media, would not have sent any Dollar-a-Year Men to Washington in 1917. Certainly, they would have understood that such a visible gesture could pay dividends in any number of ways after the war. Perhaps one of Funk & Wagnalls’ Dollar-a-Year Men worked at the Department of Labor (or at least knew someone who did) and, hearing that the War Department was having a difficult time finding good clerical help, thought to himself: Well, I know where there are lots of fine secretaries!
“I’ll never forget that train ride,” Mrs. Schan told me, eighty-nine years later. “We had a train, it was filled of soldiers. And they were singing, and they were so happy on the train, so nobody slept all night. We had to sit up all night on the train. Then we got to Washington, the Union Station, and they gave us a list of all the different places where we could go to see to live, and that morning we checked everything in Union Station and went out and took the trolley to look at the names of all these places they gave us, and it was snowing, and we were two people that had never been there. So we went from one place to another, and finally picked one place. I don’t remember the street now, but it was across the street from the German Embassy. Fourteen [th Street] Northwest.” The embassy, of course, was closed down at that point. “So it was a great big apartment house with an elevator, and there were three of us in one room. Another little French girl came from France. I don’t know why they brought her from France. And she was very homesick; she was crying all the time.”
“Was she very young?”
“She was about eighteen or nineteen. Marcelle Briere. She was a very nice girl, but she was so homesick.”
I asked her who was the other woman from Funk & Wagnalls. “Grace,” she said. “Grace Shea. And every time she would read in the paper that her husband’s battalion was here or there, then she’d start crying. It was a sad time and a happy time.” Grace, she said, had been about twenty-three years old then.
I asked her where she had worked in Washington. “On Pennsylvania Avenue,” she said, then specified: “I was in the Engineering Department.” In fact, she worked as a clerk in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance; she saved a copy of the memorandum, dated April 29, 1918, informing her that, “having completed three months satisfactory service,” she was given a raise, from $1,100 to $1,200 per annum. Even after the raise, it was significantly less than she’d been making at Funk & Wagnalls; and she’d been living at home then, too.
That memo was just one of many slips of paper she kept in a scrapbook of her time in Washington. It was nine decades old when I saw it, yet still in good condition; she must have taken very good care of it over the years. She kept everything: certification of her smallpox vaccination; postcards and valentines from beaux in camp and overseas; photos of herself and a friend (Grace Shea?) posing in front of a monument; clippings of articles (“May Beat Germany by Christmas Time”; they did) and cartoons; snapshots of Charlie Chaplin at a Liberty Bond parade. Perhaps he made an impression on the young clerk, because her scrapbook also contained a subscription to the Fourth Liberty Loan, which took a dollar from each of her $55.00 paychecks. The Belgian Children’s Fund took another fifty cents.
“Was the work interesting?” I asked her.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes. Very hard though. Big words, we never knew. We had a lovely boss. The boss we had came from the same town [as] my girlfriend. So he got me to work in his department after we got down there. They came from New Jersey.”
I asked her what her hours were. “One month we worked days, and the next month we worked nights,” she said.
“When they sent you down to Washington,” I asked, “did they tell you how long they were sending you down there for?”
“Oh, no,” she replied. “Until the end of the war.”
“And when they put you in that apartment, did they pay the rent, or did you have to pay the rent?”
“Oh, we had to pay the rent . . . we had to pay all of our own expenses.”
The War Department eventually solved its labor shortage and then some, it seems, because, as Mrs. Schan recalled, “they had built a lot of barracks on Pennsylvania Avenue, and that’s where we worked, in those barracks . . . big, open space,” room enough for a hundred women, maybe more. Some, like her friend Grace Shea, were married; and some were not. It wasn’t a bad time and place to be an unattached woman, because, despite the existence of a severe shortage of manpower to work clerical jobs in Washington, somehow there were always a lot of men in uniform around. She remembered with special fondness “the French soldiers, from France. They had the most beautiful outfits, and they were so polite. So we went out with them quite a bit . . . we’d go to nightclubs,” she said. “And they could all speak English.”
“What did their outfits look like?”
“Green pants and a white shirt.” Not what comes to mind when you think about French soldiers from that war, but maybe these were special troops; they were in Washington, after all.
They went out with American soldiers, too—“they were nice,” she said, leaving me with the distinct impression that she’d preferred the French—to nightclubs and restaurants and the like. And by “they,” I don’t just mean the single girls. “My girlfriend was married, you know,” she said, referring to Grace Shea. “She wouldn’t take off her wedding ring. So”—she giggled again—“when we’d go out on a date, she’d bandage her hand up to hide the wedding ring!”
Miss Anderson had had a boyfriend, she revealed (with yet another giggle), a Bronx boy named Theodore Ross who was als
o in the Army. “Did he go to France?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “He had the mustard gas and all of that.”
“Did he come back home after that?”
“Yes, he came back. And Grace’s husband came back.” Two happy endings. But, as you know, the name “Ross” did not figure anywhere into Mrs. Schan’s impressive monicker. “I liked this guy better,” she explained. This guy: the late Mr. Schan.
Miss Anderson had been told, at Funk & Wagnalls, that she was to go to Washington “until the end of the war.” And she was there on November 11, 1918, when word of the armistice reached the capital. “And we rushed out,” she said, “and everybody—an automobile would come, and everyone would get in, and then this big coal wagon—do you remember a coal wagon driven by horses?” I said I did, even though I didn’t; it seemed the polite thing to do. “And a big, high seat?” she continued. “Well, Grace and I got up on this big, high seat, you know, on the coal wagon, and this coal man, filthy dirty from the coal, and we got in the parade and drove up Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’d gone a little ways and this coal man saw a florist! So he got up and went into the florist, and he got each of us a great big chrysanthemum with the oak leaves. So, up we got on the wagon again, and here we’re sitting up on a big seat with a dirty coal man, and a big chrysanthemum on [do I even have to mention that she giggled yet again?], and driving up in the parade on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Sounds like it was an impromptu procession. And quite a celebration.
Miss Anderson understood that the war’s ending meant that she was free to return to her job at Funk & Wagnalls. But here’s the interesting thing: After she’d gotten settled in at the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, she found that, despite the cut in pay, she actually liked working for the government; preferred it, even. So she stayed with it, even though there was no longer any need for her in Washington. “They transferred me to New York,” she told me. “To the Veterans Bureau.”
The Last of the Doughboys Page 47