The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  Irma wheeled her godmother out of the room, over Mrs. Briant’s loud protests. “I’m sorry it broke up like this,” Mr. Briant said, as soon as she was gone. “You lost the interview.”

  I assured him that everything was fine, and that there was certainly no need for an apology; but I couldn’t seem to convince him of that. “I’m sorry it happened this way,” he said. “But Mama—Mama’s a very upset woman . . . and I’m sorry for her, and I’m sorry for all of us. In her condition, she can’t help it . . . I hope you can forgive her.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive her for,” I said. But now he was preoccupied, unable to think about German prisoners and the Army of Occupation. Afterward, when I wheeled him back to their room, I saw that she was just fine. Actually, it was as if she had forgotten the entire episode; sweet as pecan pie, she asked me where I was from, how I liked it down here in Lew Z. Anne. At one point she tried to get me to promise her I would become a Catholic. “How do you know I’m not one already?” I asked her. It worked; she changed the subject, prattled on about this or that, asking me more questions but not really pausing to wait for an answer. At some point I looked at her husband; he just sat there, oblivious to the conversation. But he was smiling. All he needed was to be near her. Perhaps, at times, that was all he could take; but it was enough for him, after all he had endured in his long life. Four months later, she passed away. It was a Friday. He died the following Monday.

  Before all that, though, back in the common room, I was just about to turn off the video camera when he started answering another question, one I hadn’t asked. “Most people,” he said, “most people hate our enemies—either side. You know what I’m saying? I hate you because you hate me . . . You killed my father-in-law, and I killed yours, see? So we’re mad at each other and want to kill each other. But it’s the wrong thing to do, and we’ve got to look at it as warfare, and not as a grudge in life for the rest of our lives. We must try to be friends, and help each other. German or Frenchman, it makes no difference. We all suffered.” His voice started to break. “We suffered in war together. I suffered. You suffered. And I know very well you suffer because you hurt someone, your enemy. And I suffer because I hurt my enemy. And enemies . . . that’s bred into war. We teach each other to hate each other, when we’re living; and we try to outdo the other, unbeknownst to the other fellow. We try to overcome these things as we live along life’s pathway.”

  At the time, I thought he was talking to me; but watching him on that tape now, years later, I wonder if he wasn’t really speaking to his ancient enemies, the airmen who’d dropped bombs on him, the artillerymen who had killed his comrades on the last night of the war. I think it was a dialogue he’d been carrying on in his head for many years—and I wonder if that may have been what enabled him, at some point, to negotiate an armistice with his memories, the two of them moving through the decades together without wearing each other down. Private Briant did not hate. He understood.

  I don’t think Private Gunther, in those last minutes of the war, hated. But I don’t think he understood, either. That takes time; and, as he had just been informed, he was all but out of time, time to redeem himself—if not to others, like his former friend Sergeant Powell, hugging the ground next to him, then at least to his parents back home, and his fiancée, Olga, and maybe even to himself. How he must have despaired at that moment.

  And then—well, I’ll let the monument tell it:

  Suddenly, Gunther got up and ran at the enemy. Sergeant Powell ordered him to stop. The German gunners signaled to him to go back but Gunther kept advancing. One of them fired a five-round burst. Gunther was struck in the left temple and died instantly. It was 10:59 a.m. One minute later, the Armistice took effect and silence descended on the front. . . .

  General Pershing’s Order of the Day recorded Henry Nicholas Gunther as the last American soldier to die in the First World War. He was posthumously promoted to Sergeant and received the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1923, Gunther’s body was returned to Baltimore and buried in Section W of the Holy Redeemer Cemetery.

  Yes: It worked. Henry Gunther got his stripes back, and a DSC to boot. No one cares to remember that the last man killed in World War I—an American from the Liberty Division—was a suicide.

  17

  The Last of the Last

  AND SO: Frank Buckles.

  People are fond of saying that truth is stranger than fiction; every once in a while, you’ll hear someone remark of a particular real-live human being that if he or she hadn’t existed, someone would have had to invent them. Neither of these clichés can touch Frank Buckles. No one could have invented him; “strange” does not approach the truth that was his 110 years and twenty-six days on this earth. I will just tell what I know.

  Of all the men and women in this book, perhaps the only one you may have heard of before opening its covers is Frank Buckles. For the last three years of his life, which concluded on February 27, 2011, he was the only surviving veteran of the American Expeditionary Forces of the First World War. Back around the turn of the new century, he was appointed national commander of the awkwardly named Veterans of World War I of the USA. For much of his term, he was the organization’s only member, too. I asked him about that once; he chuckled and said it didn’t bother him at all.

  If you perform that weird exercise I described a while back and subtract 110 years, Frank Buckles’s ultimate age, from 1901, the year in which he was born, you get 1791, the year the Bill of Rights was ratified. Pretty impressive, I suppose; but that’s not the real story here. It’s not even, really, that Frank Buckles was the last of the last of the doughboys, or the last surviving Army veteran of that war anywhere in the world, or, if you take into account every last human being with even the faintest claim to such status, the third-last World War I veteran to leave the planet. More than any person I’ve ever met or expect to, Frank Buckles’s consciousness embraced the entirety of American history; and more than any other person I’ve ever met or expect to, he personally experienced the entirety of the twentieth century.

  He was born exactly one month after the mathematical commencement of that century, on February 1, 1901, not all that far from what was then the geographical center of his country, in Harrison County, Missouri, near the town of Bethany. When I first visited him, on August 30, 2003—and every time thereafter—he was living on an old farm outside Charles Town, West Virginia. Charles Town is not what you think of when you think of West Virginia; there are no mountains or hollers there, and no coal. A lot of sheep, though. And round, verdant hills. And people who commute to work in Washington, D.C., just about ninety minutes away. About fifteen minutes away is Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Back in 1859, when both were still part of Virginia, John Brown was tried and hanged in Charles Town for what he had done at Harpers Ferry—or, more accurately, for what he had tried to start at Harpers Ferry.

  Ninety-five years later, Frank Buckles had come there for another, more obscure historical reason: Two centuries earlier, his earliest American Buckles ancestor—“Robert Buckles,” he told me, “who was born May the fifteenth, seventeen hundred and two”—moved to the area from an English Quaker settlement in Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River just north of Philadelphia. At that settlement, his great-great-great-great-grandson told me, “he married Ann Brown, whose grandfather was one of the original members of William Penn’s colony. And with his family and fifteen others, they came down to this area in 1732. Robert Buckles, according to the history of that time period, and his will, had 2,090 acres of land . . . near Shepherdstown.” Shepherdstown was about ten miles away from where we then sat; about a hundred miles away, in a different direction but also in 1732, George Washington was born.

  Frank Buckles was a genealogist; he cared about family, and lineage. After he died, I discovered, plucking around records online, that he had filed at least six different applications for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, each one for a different ancestor, all of them su
ccessful. “My grandmother,” he told me, early in our first meeting, “my father’s mother, whose name was Harriet Caroline Ripsom, R-I-P-S-O-M, said that her great grandfather, Mathias Riebsomeer—Holland Dutch—was killed at the Battle of Oriskany. And his name is up on the monument. On the Bicentennial, I went up to Oriskany to attend the ceremony. And Nelson Rockefeller”—then vice president of the United States—“gave the address. After it was over, I complimented Rockefeller on giving the address, and he said it was one of his favorite stories when he was a boy. So he knew it without looking at his cuff.” The story is this: On August 6, 1777, a band of Continental soldiers and Indians under the command of General Nicholas Herkimer, hurrying to the aid of the besieged Fort Stanwix (now Rome, New York), were attacked by a larger band of Loyalist troops and other Indians outside what is now the town of Oriskany, about seven miles from the fort. The Continentals took the worst of it, losing three times as many men as the Loyalists, among them General Herkimer.

  Mr. Buckles spent a good bit of time during our first visit telling me, in great detail, about his forebears. And I was reminded, as he talked, of the many autobiographies I have read of Americans of note—from Benjamin Franklin to Ulysses S. Grant and beyond—that begin with detailed accounts of their lineage, not to make any kind of point, I think, but rather to put themselves in some form of context. And that, I believe, is what Frank Buckles was doing for me that afternoon in August, 2003. There was history to his tale, and he wanted to make sure I had all of it.

  He began and ended his life on farms. The last of these, three hundred or so acres outside Charles Town, was called Gap View: rolling meadows, lovely vistas, solid stone house built before all those ancestors fought for independence. The first—well, I don’t even know if it had a name. He just described it as “my father’s farm, north of Bethany, in Harrison County, Missouri.”

  “What were your parents’ names?” I asked him.

  “James Clark Buckles and Theresa Keown Buckles. K-E-O-W-N. Scotch-Irish.” They were married September 14, 1881, in Illinois; “They soon after that came to Missouri,” he explained, “because my mother’s family had already moved there from Illinois . . . My father was born November the twentieth, 1857, in Jersey County, Illinois. My mother was born in the next county, Madison County . . . on April the twenty-fourth, Easter Sunday, 1859.” Eventually they had five children. “Three boys, and two girls.” Roy was the eldest, born in 1882; then Grace in 1884, Gladys in 1886, and, after a long break, Ashman in June, 1899. Twenty months later, Theresa Buckles, a few months short of forty-two years old, gave birth to another son. She and her forty-three-year-old husband named the baby Wood. No middle name, just: Wood Buckles.

  In January, 1904, four-year-old Ashman died of scarlet fever. Wood, who was not yet three, got the fever, too, but did not die of it. He lived most of his youth, he told me, effectively as an only child. “The elder brother,” he said, speaking of Roy, “left home from high school. Why, his son told me, was because he wanted to play in the band, and his father didn’t want him to. I can understand that, because my father was a farmer, and you don’t want the boy spending his evenings with the—as a musical student.”

  “Because he wouldn’t be able to get up for farm work the next day?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Probably.” He said he had no idea what instrument his brother had played, but music ran in the family. “My father, when he was at Illinois State, played the flute,” he told me. “And his five sisters all played some musical instrument . . . and his brothers both had musical instruments. And they, in their home, my grandfather would have assembled the eight members of the family and have his own concert.”

  He had pictures of various relations framed and displayed on a shelf in a curio cabinet that stood in a little sitting room filled with artifacts from his long life and books that dealt with the things he had lived through. That was where we sat and talked that day, and every time I came to visit him after that, he in a large red wingback armchair, facing his side yard, the sun illuminating his features as it set, though it never seemed to irritate him any. He was somewhat on the shorter side, in part because of a stoop, with white hair, a high forehead, and sharp features—sharp in the way FDR looked sharp, which is to say he always looked to be entirely alert, and interested, and thinking about something. He greeted me that first time in a cream-colored linen suit and bright blue-checked dress shirt, open at the neck; he hadn’t been interviewed all that much up to that point, and I suppose he wanted to make a good first impression. It was important to him, I would learn, to look good—not for anything as petty as vanity, but for his own dignity, and that of the occasion, whatever it might be.

  Almost as significant to him as dignity was luck; he had a lot of it, he would have told you, going back to his birth, an unexpected baby to parents already in their forties. The illness that took his brother Ashman had spared him. His father, having lost one son to music and another to the fever, gave up farming for a while, sparing young Wood those kinds of chores for a good part of his childhood. As the baby of the family, fifteen years younger than his next surviving sibling, he was indulged a bit, too, allowed to pursue his interests. And his interests then all seemed tied closely to the future, what would much later be dubbed the Next Big Thing. When I asked him what the earliest historical memory he had was, he said, “Well, of course, at that age, a young age, I wasn’t particularly interested in history. I do remember the first automobile . . . I would have been less than four years old.” It was in Bethany, the county seat; the car, the only one in town (and possibly the county), belonged to a Mr. Roleke, he recalled, a businessman who had a park in town named for him. “He needed some repair,” Mr. Buckles recalled, and had to bring it into a shop in town. So he hooked it up to “a team of horses, and drove throughout the town, so that people would be accustomed—horses would be accustomed. The big problem with automobiles when they first came out was for the horses to adjust. They were afraid of automobiles . . . that would be about 1904 or 1905.” I guess it’s the kind of sight you don’t forget, even after ninety-nine years.

  Inventors were the great celebrities and heroes when Wood Buckles was a child; Thomas Edison was revered as a new kind of George Washington. It was a time when so many new inventions came along, one closely following the last, that there was scarcely time to grasp their magnitude, if it could even be grasped at all: the telephone; the electric light; the phonograph; the automobile; the airplane; broadcasting. I can barely envision a time before cell phones and the Internet, and I was a fully grown adult before I first encountered either; imagine how different the world of Wood Buckles’s childhood was from the one his parents had grown up in, back in the 1860s.

  That new world was just coming into focus when Wood saw that car being pulled around by horses, but it grabbed hold of him at that moment—or, I should say, he grabbed hold of it, and clutched it tightly ever after. He seems to have had a remarkable presence of mind from a very young age, coupled with a drive to seek out the kind of new that would prove important, and the ability to recognize it when he found it. “Do you remember the first time you saw an airplane?” I asked him at one point.

  He smiled. “I sure do!” he said, interlacing his fingers and sitting up straight; we had been talking for nearly four hours by then, and his posture was holding up better than mine. “It would be . . . when I was about seven or eight years old. And my mother, when we moved from the farm, every summer took a vacation, visited some of her relatives. We were in Decatur, Illinois . . . Lincoln Beachey with his biplane was coming into Decatur and going to exhibit at the racetrack. He was going to fly around the racetrack, and somebody—it wasn’t Barney Oldfield, but it was somebody of importance—was going to race around with the car, and he was going to beat the biplane. Well, we boys figured out the baseball park is next to it . . . So we went to the baseball park, climbed over the fence, and walked right over there to Lincoln Beachey. And it was close—well, you could touch his biplane .
. . That would be about 1908.” Beachey, a pioneer aviator, was killed while flying a stunt over the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915; he was a daring pilot who raced trains as well as automobiles, flew loops and even upside down. Among his many fans was said to be Orville Wright. Frank Buckles would have seen Beachey fly just a few years after the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.

  From the start, Wood Buckles was what we now call an early adopter. He was the first person in his family to cotton to the automobile. “I started driving when I was twelve years old,” he told me. “The reason for that, they had been bothering my father, coming to my father with automobiles, trying to get my father to buy an automobile. And finally, the agent said, ‘Well, Mr. Buckles, I’ll just trade you this new automobile for the steers that are over in that lot there.’ Well, he says ‘Oh.’” He smiled. “He knew that he couldn’t say that it was too expensive. So he bought the automobile. [The agent] brought it out. My father said, ‘This is the biggest harvesting season, busy season—I just don’t have time for it now. But—you can teach the boy.’ So, until my father had time to spare, I drove the automobile.” And he was happy to do so. The car, he recalled, was a Ford, and had an electric starter. “And that was unusual,” he told me. “A Grand Davis starter, almost as big as the motor. And the batteries were on the running board.” He learned how to make batteries himself; this before his house even had electricity.

  A year or so after he learned to drive, he developed a fascination with another nascent technology. “I read about Marconi,” he explained. “He was only forty years old at the time.” There were stories of David Sarnoff and the Titanic, and Lee De Forest, visions of a day not too far off when voices would fly through the air for hundreds of miles—maybe even across an ocean. Wood Buckles was captivated. “I took every magazine—well, there weren’t many of them—anything that had to do with wireless,” he recalled. “And somewhere I saw an advertisement for a company in New York that produced and sold these machines . . . Well, it had to be about 1914, I suppose.”