The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “Wouldn’t that have meant going AWOL from your unit in Winchester?” I asked him.

  “Well the way I was calculating,” he said, “we got in France, we’d stay there. But what happened was, I had somebody I had to take down to, I think Plymouth, England, or some distance, and I couldn’t get back in time. So here I left these poor fellows, three of them, without their leader.”

  “So they went to France and you didn’t.”

  “They went to France. And they came back.”

  “They sent them back?”

  “Under patrol.”

  “Because they had gone AWOL,” I said.

  “And they had a trial,” he recalled. He went and sat in on it, in the company of a major; fortunately, the three were only given work detail. And Frank Buckles kept scheming to get across.

  And then one day, after he’d been in Winchester for about six months, he said, “finally came an order, here’s a unit going through, and I believe it was an airplane unit. And it left this officer in Winchester, and they had to send him on to France. And I didn’t know why—it didn’t matter to me, I wanted to get over.” The Army needed a volunteer to escort the officer across. It got one very quickly.

  It soon became apparent to the volunteer why such an escort was needed. The officer—Mr. Buckles always referred to him as “Lieutenant Nick”—was a bit eccentric. After boarding ship with the lieutenant in Southampton, Private Buckles was told by a deck hand that they wouldn’t be departing for several hours, so he went back ashore to do some shopping; when he returned, he recalled, the lieutenant “wanted me to write a letter to President Wilson and General Pershing asking my pardon for going off the ship that day. So I knew there was something wrong with that guy.” Fortunately, he added, “I was in charge. I realized that because I had the orders.” When I asked him why he had been put in charge instead of the officer, he replied: “Because the guy was nuts.”

  The orders were to bring the lieutenant to Paris. Once there, they waited for further orders. Private Buckles didn’t mind; he was in France at last. He stayed at a hotel near headquarters, visited the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, ate well. Finally, after a week or so (“You know,” he explained, “the Army used to work awfully slow”), new orders came through: Bordeaux. “And the same thing worked over there,” he recalled. “Stayed at a small hotel . . .” He and Lieutenant Nick worked out a routine: “If I wanted money, all I would have to do is ask him for it. I’d ask him for twenty francs or whatever it was, and go down below and get a bottle of cognac. Bring up a little flask. Feed it to him until he’s about ready to pass out, and make sure he had his boots off—he sleeps in his clothes, but I felt the poor guy should have his boots [off].” He chuckled.

  It was in Bordeaux that Private Buckles first learned what, exactly, his charge’s role in the war was supposed to be: dentist. A week later, the two of them were ordered on to the port of Bassens, a few miles away. “He was sent there to set up a business and I was to be his assistant,” Mr. Buckles explained. “I don’t know how they figured I was a dental assistant.”

  In Bassens, another routine quickly took shape. “A patient would come in—he handled his business very well,” he told me. “But soon as the patient left, he’d sit up in a chair, in the dental chair, and I’d light a cigarette for him. And sometimes he’d go, he had a little washroom—I never was in it, just a tiny little place, and he’d go in there a few minutes and come out feeling fine.” He smiled knowingly. “Among other things, he had a trunk full of quarts of ethyl alcohol . . . and you mixed ethyl alcohol with water and you could really get a high. Oh, my. And you don’t have a headache afterwards.” Private Buckles didn’t partake; “I wasn’t very strong on ethyl alcohol,” he said. “But a lot of my friends enjoyed it.”

  That interesting work environment lasted for about a month. Then, one day, an American colonel came to the office, accompanied by a lieutenant, who promptly took Private Buckles aside and advised him: “Get the hell out of here quick. Don’t let the colonel see you, because he’ll raise hell with you.” The party, apparently, was over. “So I beat it out,” he said; later, “I found out what happened. That morning, or that night, the lieutenant had walked on his hands and knees, and walked into the major’s office, major’s room, barking like a dog.” It would seem ethyl alcohol does produce some sort of hangover, after all.

  And that was the end of Lieutenant Nick. “So,” Frank Buckles added, smiling, “I went back to my usual occupation—motor crew.” The Army sent him to Saint-André-de-Cubzac, about ten miles from Bassens. “What would you do in the motor pool there?” I asked him.

  “Nothing much,” he said. “Drive a car, a motorcycle. Drive a Ford ambulance. Not much.”

  “Not much” is hardly the first phrase that comes to mind when you think about what ambulance drivers do in wartime; but, like Bassens and Bordeaux, Saint-André-de-Cubzac wasn’t at the front. Or near it. The front, in fact, was hundreds of miles away. Still, Mr. Buckles said, there was no mistaking the fact that you were in a country that was at war, and had been for a long time. In France, he recalled, everybody seemed to be wearing black. But that was only the most obvious indicator; there were hundreds, thousands, of only slightly more subtle ones. For instance, he explained, “there were no lights at night. And it wasn’t because they were afraid of an air attack. It wasn’t that at all. It was because they were saving the lights.”

  Even so, four years of devastating warfare hadn’t managed to rob the French of everything. Sometimes, he recalled, “in the village there would be a group of French soldiers . . . They were leaving, and they sang the ‘Marseillaise.’ Well, I made some inquiries, to find out: What’s the purpose of this? They were called up, going back to the front.” He paused and nodded respectfully, still a bit awed, nearly a century later, by such a display. “And that was a surprise to me,” he continued after a moment. “Not that they were going to be called back, because they had to go, [but that they were] approaching it in the right manner.”

  The sight only made him more eager to get to the front, but time did not indulge him as others had. November 11, 1918, found him still in Saint-André-de-Cubzac. The celebration there, as he later remembered it, was subdued: “It didn’t seem to me quite as joyous as some of the people say,” he told me in 2006. Perhaps, though, that was just a projection; a few years earlier, when I’d asked him how he’d felt at the war’s end, he’d answered: “Well, very disappointed, of course. I felt like I hadn’t been anyplace. I didn’t get to the front . . . That’s what I felt I went over there for.”

  Just because he never got to fight the Germans, though, doesn’t mean he didn’t get to see them up close. Because he did, in fact—much closer, even, than many of the men who, right up until 11:00 a.m. that morning, had been trying to kill them. And though he didn’t realize as much at the time, the experience he did end up having actually suited him much better.

  For a few weeks after the armistice, nothing changed for Frank Buckles. He was still in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, still shuttling the sick and wounded around in a Ford ambulance. But then, for some reason, he was sent to the village of Saint-Sulpice-de-Cognac, seventy or so miles to the north, and given a new assignment. “I was attached to a POW company,” he recalled. “Prisoner-of-war company . . . Our principal job was taking the prisoners back to Germany.” And it was at the prison camp that Frank Buckles finally got his first look at the dreaded Hun. It was not what he expected.

  “They were behind barbed wire,” he recalled, “but they had an orchestra that they had formed. They made their own instruments and so forth. And on the outside of it we put up some lumber and made some seats, and the Americans would sit outside and listen to them . . .

  “I wish I had a camera,” he said. “Or I wish I could have sketched it . . . An American soldier would take a group, of maybe twenty, out on the different assignments. And this was an assignment up in the nearby woods, and they had their equipment with them. And here the [Amer
ican] soldier has a side[arm], a gun. But this day, it must have been a payday or something with the soldier, because—now, the French peasants, all they have to do to start a café is just [get] a table, a chair, and a bottle. So wherever they are, if there is a soldier there with any money in his pocket, he has access to a café. And here it came time to quit, and the picture that I saw was, coming along, here were soldiers, all in formation, a German soldier with . . . the American’s sidearm, and an older German smoking his pipe and pushing a wheelbarrow with [the American] soldier in it. That was something.”

  I’ll say. “So the Americans and the Germans after the war—there wasn’t a lot of animosity between them?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “None whatsoever. One evening—my reason for going into the German barracks I don’t know, it was some communication, I guess. Like I told you, we didn’t have telephones, so we moved the information around by letter. And in there—I don’t have the vaguest idea [anymore] what the argument was about, but there was a young German, maybe about my age, and he and I got into an argument. And it looked like it was going to be pretty serious. Well, just then, two big older Germans stepped up. One of them pinned the other fellow’s arms behind his back; the other one pinned mine. And they started talking to us, and telling us what would happen, that we’d all get in trouble if we had any fisticuffs in there. They made us shake hands.” Just a few weeks earlier, they would have been obligated to try to kill each other.

  Eventually, orders came down for Private—now Private First Class —Buckles to escort 650 German prisoners back to Germany, by train. “The first town we came into in Germany,” he recalled, “they had the train stop there, and what they had—the equivalent of Red Cross, or whatever it was, to receive them. So the prisoners all lined up with their cups to get some coffee”—a mischievous grin spread across his lips—“and I did too. I was the only escort who would; I was always ahead, I never missed a thing.” He smiled. “So I lined up with them. So when it came to me, they gave me the coffee. I just stood there [before] an old gentleman with a beard, and I said, Danke schön, das Kaffee ist sehr gut. With that, he reached behind the counter, gave me a slice of potato bread. And I said, Danke schön, das Brot ist sehr gut. Well, I got a piece of baloney in addition to that. See, that’s where early I learned the advantage of foreign language.” He laughed.

  The prisoners were confined to boxcars at the rear of the train, while the guards rode in a coach close to the locomotive; but after one stop, PFC Buckles, having dallied a bit too long, arrived back at the station just in time to see his coach roll by. “I couldn’t catch up,” he explained. “So Germans sitting in the boxcars [rolled up], the doors open, and the Germans signaled to me—I was running, trying to catch up, and he reached down and grabbed me and brought me aboard. So I stayed in their car the rest of the way.” Again: the old enemy was clearly no longer a danger; but, he soon learned, the old allies just might be. “While I was in this [boxcar],” he told me, “I don’t know how long—it was some time before we stopped the cars again—but in the distance was a French guard with French prisoners. And he took a potshot at the car.” Five or six years later, Frank Buckles was down in Brazil when he made the acquaintance of a photographer. “And the man was a German, and he had an American accent,” he told me. “He spoke English with an American accent. And I asked him where he picked that up. He said he was a prisoner during the war, and he’d perfected his English. So I asked him about, if anything unusual happened.” Why yes, the man said: After the armistice, he was being transported back to Germany in a boxcar, with an American guard onboard, when a French soldier in the distance had taken a potshot at the car.

  The German prisoners were very fond of their captor, apparently, and he of them. I’m not sure what he had to barter—perhaps nothing more than chocolate and cigarettes; he couldn’t remember—but he came home with plenty of souvenirs, including a gray uniform cap, “a knife which had Von Hindenburg’s silhouette on the side of it,” and even a Gott Mit Uns belt buckle, the most prized German souvenir of all. After the war, at the YMCA in Oklahoma City, another veteran offered him twenty-five dollars for it. He really could have used the cash right then; but when I visited him at Gap View Farm nearly nine decades later, it was still there, on a shelf in that curio cabinet, along with the cap and knife.

  The Army sent him home the following fall, formally discharged him with the rank of corporal on November 13, 1919, at Camp Pike, Arkansas.

  He was eighteen years old.

  While Frank Buckles was guarding German prisoners, the leaders of the victorious Allied nations were gathering in Paris to formalize the peace. Or so they said. What they really did was redraw the maps of much of the world, divvy up fallen empires, appropriate certain choice properties, spin others off into brand-new countries, and, most of all, punish and humiliate Germany. Severely. It lost all of its overseas possessions. Big chunks of its home territory were lopped off and given to France and Belgium and several new nations, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Lithuania. Germany was forced to shrink its military to the point where it would be, effectively, a ceremonial entity. It was ordered to pay pretty much the entire cost of the war, an amount equivalent to nearly half a trillion of today’s dollars. (They made the final payment in October, 2010.) And it and its allies—the bloc known during the war as the Central Powers—were awarded complete responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” A nice little flourish, that. The victorious Allies alone worked out the details of the treaty; Germany was given three weeks to read and sign it.

  In Paris, the other Allies rejected the first thirteen of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, an idealistic plan for establishing and maintaining global peace, allowing only the creation of a “League of Nations” that would safeguard borders and settle international disputes. Back home, an increasingly isolationist United States Congress rejected both the peace treaty and the League of Nations. (The United States would sign its own individual peace treaty with the Central Powers in 1921.) Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up and deported hundreds of foreign-born men and women, many of whom had done nothing more than speak out in favor of anarchism, communism, or some other leftist ideal—or, in some cases, merely keep company with those who did—and the country soon found itself caught up in its first Red Scare. In 1921, Congress passed a temporary immigration-restriction act; three years later, it passed a new one that tightened the restrictions even further—limiting immigration from eastern and southern Europe to a tiny fraction of what it had been, while greatly favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe—and made them permanent. President Calvin Coolidge, who would later display an execrable callousness toward impecunious veterans, eagerly signed it into law. The golden age of immigration was dead.

  Frank Buckles would have read about all of this in the newspaper, but for a while, at least, most of it must have seemed as much of an abstraction to him as had the European war before April 6, 1917. From Camp Pike he went back to Oklahoma, $139.50 of discharge pay in his pocket; he visited with his parents for a bit, and enrolled at Hill’s Business College in Oklahoma City to study shorthand and typing, skills he figured would be valuable for whatever course he might embark upon next. One day, he heard that General Pershing was to be speaking at the city’s Hotel Skirvin. Oddly, he told me, he was unable to convince any of the veterans he knew at the college to go along, so he went alone. And in uniform. “I don’t remember seeing any military men,” he said. “There may have been earlier in the evening. But when I came along, the sergeant followed me and said the general requests me to come back. He said, ‘He would like to talk to you.’ So General Pershing asked a number of questions . . . He asked where I served . . . and also he asked where I was born. Of course, I told him, ‘North of Bethany, in Harrison County, Missouri.’ He
said, ‘Just forty-two miles as the crow flies from Linn County, where I was born.’” It was a story Frank Buckles would repeat many times in the years to come; he always told it exactly the same way. He was, he declared, “very impressed” with the general.

  After a few months at the college—during which time he was also working 4:00 p.m. to midnight at the post office, for sixty cents an hour—he felt stuck. “I was not progressing too well,” he explained. He was also coming to understand, he said, that “I had to get out of that atmosphere of association, associating only with Army men . . . nobody wanted to talk to me. Nobody knew my story.” Veterans, he realized, were “the only people I knew.” He was also sick of the heat. He thought about heading up to Montreal and getting work at the seaport, but a fellow he knew recommended Toronto, instead, so that’s where he went. “Well,” he recalled, “I hadn’t the vaguest idea as to how to get a job. I didn’t know you could look in the newspaper for want ad jobs. They didn’t tell me that in the school. [!] But the nice Irish couple at the place I roomed would cut out the items from the newspaper and paste them on a board for me to answer. I rented a typewriter, for three dollars a month, for a month. Started answering the advertisements. One of them was from the White Star Line. When I saw the flags on there . . . I said, ‘That’s the job I want.’ And I was going to get that job.” And he did. It was in the line’s freight soliciting department; he made sixty-five dollars a month. He got a second job working nights across the street, at the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company, looking up old accounts for thirty-five cents an hour. Later he left to work for an automobile dealership in town, at the salary of twenty-five dollars a week. “It wasn’t very long until I had money enough,” he said, “I went to the best tailor in Toronto, on Yonge Street, and had a suit of clothes made.” That was the second lesson he learned, after the utility of knowing foreign languages: It pays to look sharp. Or, as he put it: “I recognized that the important thing was the appearance.”