Whereas America’s support of Great Britain, France, Belgium, and its other allies in World War I marked the first time in the Nation’s history that American soldiers went abroad in defense of liberty against foreign aggression, and it marked the true beginning of the “American century”;
Whereas more than 4,000,000 men and women from the United States served in uniform during World War I, among them 2 future presidents, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower;
Whereas 2,000,000 individuals from the United States served overseas during World War I, including 200,000 naval personnel who served on the seas;
Whereas the United States suffered 375,000 casualties during World War I, including 116,516 deaths;
Whereas the events of 1914 through 1918 shaped the world, the United States, and the lives of millions of people in countless ways; and
Whereas Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last veteran to represent the extraordinary legacy of the World War I veterans: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That—
(1) the Senate recognizes the historic contributions of all United States veterans who served in the First World War; and
(2) when the Senate adjourns today, it stand adjourned as a further mark of respect to the memory of Frank W. Buckles, the longest surviving United States veteran of the First World War.
It was an honorable gesture, perhaps even an indication of how far things had come since the days, just seven or eight years earlier, when no one at the Department of Veterans Affairs seemed to know or care how many doughboys yet survived, much less who or where any of them might be. And that, I suppose, is about as much as one can hope for in a congressional resolution of that nature; certainly, it’s not the United States Senate’s job to tell us why that war mattered, why the passing of its last veteran was significant. But having spent some time with him, and with a few others who passed before he did, I feel that I should at least try.
The significance of the passing of the last veteran of that war is obvious, if perhaps a bit difficult to articulate. It creates additional degrees of separation between us and the event; reshapes it in our consciousness, breaks it down and reassembles it in a somewhat less solid state, one that is harder to grasp, and to carry. You can read yellowed old books, watch grainy old silent films, peruse monuments verdant with decades of oxidation; you can stroll upon a forest floor still dimpled with shell holes, poke around crumbling concrete bunkers, zigzag through shallowed trenches, fill a grocery bag with jagged shrapnel picked from a freshly plowed field. None of it is anything like talking to someone who was there; or just looking at him as he lies in a hospital bed before you, mute; or even, simply, knowing that he is still alive out there, somewhere.
The significance of the war itself, though: that’s much harder, not because it’s difficult to discern, but because it’s so vast that you have to wonder how you can manage to step back far enough that you’ll be able to take it all in. You can’t, really; the best you can hope for is to stumble upon a crevice, a fingerhold somewhere on its surface that might offer you a place to commence.
Frank Buckles gave me that, too. It started with what seemed, in the moment, to be a fairly stupid question, which I posed toward the end of our first four-hour interview. (In my defense, though he could have talked for another four hours at that point, I was quite tired.) “Do you think,” I asked, “that the world in some ways is a much smaller place than it was?”
Ask a hundred people that question, and a hundred of them will tell you: Of course it is. Cell phones. Satellite television. Jet airplanes. The Internet.
But Frank Buckles was not one person in a hundred. He was Frank Buckles.
“Ah,” he said, and shook his head once. “No.”
I was startled. “You think it was smaller then,” I said, not asking a question so much as reciting the words, hoping to make sense of them.
“Yes,” he said. “Smaller then. At least, it seems that way to me.”
That was in August, 2003. It took me years, and many more conversations with World War I veterans—including quite a few more with him—to begin to understand what he meant by that, and more years still to understand that that’s the greatest legacy of the Great War. It made the world a much larger place for everyone involved: French and British and German, Russian and Austrian and Czech, Italian and Serb and Turk, Senegalese and Berber and South African, Australian and New Zealander and Indochinese, Newfoundlander and Canadian and Canadien. And American: native-born and immigrant, black and white, affluent and middle-class and indigent, southern farm boys and kids from Hell’s Kitchen, gardeners and lumberjacks, Connecticut Yankees and men of the West, drivers and mechanics and bakers and laborers and secretaries and students, people in search of adventure and people in search of a job, volunteers and draftees, the eager, the willing, the reluctant, the resigned. They left the world they knew—Livingston, Montana, or Kewaunee, Wisconsin, or Aberdeen, Mississippi, or Anna, Illinois, or Salina, New York, or Philadelphia, or New Orleans, or Harrison County, Missouri—for far-off places they’d never heard of, much less imagined, and there beheld things that even the people who’d always lived in them had never seen. They set off for a world war, and came back with a world. A much larger world.
And left it to us.
18
We Are All Missing You Very Much
WHEN WE LEFT 107-year-old Anthony Pierro, many pages ago, he was standing on his front steps, waving and calling out “Adios, amigos!” as I drove off, my head occupied at that moment by the solitary thought that I would probably never see him again.
But I did.
It was May 17, 2006, nearly three years later. He was 110 now, a supercentenarian, and I drove up to Swampscott, Massachusetts, from Greenville, Rhode Island, having just interviewed Samuel Goldberg (he of the exquisite diction), to see Mr. Pierro again. I had learned a lot since I’d first interviewed him in July of 2003—about the war, and the battles he’d fought in, and artillery, and the America of 1917 and 1918, and the immigrant experience, and how to interview the very, very old. I had many questions for him, and the confidence—bordering, perhaps, on delusional—that he’d be able to answer them all. I had not forgotten how difficult, in some ways, that first interview had been; but now, almost three years on, having conducted dozens of subsequent interviews, I mistakenly attributed the difficulties of that interview to my own inexperience at the time, and not to the frailties of a 107-year-old man’s memory and expressiveness. Of course, quite a few of the interviews I had done since July 19, 2003, had been even more difficult than that first one, but you don’t remember those quite as well in looking back as you do the ones that went much better than you expected, the instances where you could converse with a 106-year-old man as you might with anyone, the discussions where you heard a few fantastic stories, learned a couple of startling things. It was those memories, those boldest and most felicitous ones, that informed my expectations for my second visit with Anthony Pierro. Maybe, I hoped, he’ll even remember that story about the fellow who called him a greedy Wop on the mess line.
He didn’t. He didn’t remember much of anything, anymore, beyond the most basic information—his parents’ names, the country of his birth, things like that. His baby brother, Nicholas, who was then ninety-seven, was there, too, and tried his best to fill in the gaps. Among the things Nicholas told me that day was that several of his brothers—not just Anthony—had served in the AEF. The firstborn, Michael, four years older than Anthony, was badly gassed in France, and never recovered; the 1930 census lists Michael’s occupation as “Retired—Disabled in War.” He died in 1951, not yet sixty years old. (His parents both survived him, living into their nineties.) I’m not sure why Anthony Pierro didn’t choose to share any of that with me the first time we’d talked. Perhaps I just didn’t ask him the right question.
The second time we talked, he could no longer remember anything about the war, except for Madeleine. I’m kind of glad it worked out that way; if I had lived his life and co
uld pick only one memory from that period of it to carry until I died, I might have chosen that one. Even so, I was disappointed: Not only did I not hear any new stories, I didn’t hear most of the old ones again, either. I know I shouldn’t have been surprised—at that age, three years is a long, long time—but I was. It bothered me that he might not have at 110 what he’d had at 107. I had come to think of him, and the rest of them, as supermen, and supermen don’t slow down, don’t deteriorate. They just live, right up until they die. In my defense, a lot of them did exactly that. Still, I shouldn’t have expected as much from him, or from any one of them. I shouldn’t have been disappointed. But I was.
In time, though, I would come to understand—I’d like to say it happened after just a few days, but in truth it was much later, probably sometime after he died, the following February, one week short of his 111th birthday—that he had, really, told me a lot of stories during our first visit: the time a tree saved his life by catching a German shell; how he climbed up into it to retrieve that shell and then brought it to his captain, who had jokingly ordered him to fetch it and was terrified when the order was actually carried out; the time a horse saved his life by stopping, with its body, shrapnel from another German shell before it could tear into his; burying that horse, and many others, to keep the wolves from getting at them; the fellow in his battery who once slapped a horse on the rear and paid for it with his life; “Upstairs, two dollars.” For years after that first visit, I spent a lot of time wondering about the stories I had come by too late to hear, not just from him but the rest of them, too; and about the veterans, centenarians and supercentenarians, that I never got to meet at all—because I didn’t start looking until 2003, or because I couldn’t arrange the trip in time once I did find them, or because they or their family felt uncomfortable for some reason, or because a cantankerous administrator at the Bay Pines VA hospital in Florida was in a bad mood and decided to abuse power he shouldn’t even have had. That last bit might have tipped you off to the fact that I still do think about it, sometimes.
But much more often, now, I think about the stories—astonishing, frightening, heartbreaking, hilarious—that I did get to hear. And I think about the remarkable men and women I did get to meet, about how few of them there were, and how hard they were to find. It amazes me, still, that there were so many wonderful characters, and so many great stories—and so much history, otherwise lost—remaining yet in such a small pool. I imagine it always will.
Boy: Was I lucky.
In a park outside the public library in my hometown, in Westchester County, New York, stands a World War I monument. When I was a kid, I made great use of that library (it’s said the new wing was funded entirely by my overdue fines), and, in the process, got to know that monument well. It’s a life-sized statue of an American infantryman, standing between two tree stumps. His left hand, hanging down at his side, clutches his rifle. (There’s no bayonet on it; even in those pre-litigious days, I guess someone knew that would be a bad idea.) His right, raised over his head, cradles a pineapple grenade. A legend in the base reads: SPIRIT OF THE AMERICAN DOUGHBOY. The term “doughboy,” in case you’re still wondering after all this time, is most commonly used as a nickname for a soldier of the American Expeditionary Forces. Its origins are obscure and contested: Some say it refers to the phenomenon of infantry, covered in dust after a long march down dirt roads, looking as if they had been rolled in flour; others attribute it to the popularity of doughnuts—distributed by the Salvation Army and other organizations—among soldiers of the AEF. There are still other theories, too.
I was quite intrigued by that statue back then, spent a lot of time looking at it. There was nothing else like it in town—the closest thing was a plaque in the post office listing the names of local residents who’d fought in the Revolution, but that was small and plain and upstaged by a huge WPA mural of some guy trying to get control of a runaway team of horses—and though, in my elementary-school days, I didn’t know exactly what it was about, I knew it was something important. And I knew, too, that though it stood right out in the open in a corner of the park near a busy intersection, it was ignored. I never saw anyone else stop to look at it, or even slow down as they walked by. Once or twice a year a wreath would appear propped up against its pedestal, sit there for a while, and then disappear. That was it. I didn’t care: I loved that monument.
I’m not sure when, exactly, it happened, but at some point—probably after I left for some years and then returned as an adult—I discovered that it was ugly. Really ugly. My hometown is small; perhaps they couldn’t raise the money for a nicer monument, or perhaps the selection committee was just one person whose taste wasn’t very good. However it happened, we ended up with a dopey-looking doughboy. His uniform is entirely correct, but inartfully rendered so that it all looks wrong, somehow: His helmet is dangerously close to a derby; his puttees appear to be telescoping calves. His gas-mask bag resembles a man purse slung around his neck, and his ammunition belt reminds me of an ill-chosen 1960s accessory. His posture is odd—neither standing still nor running, he appears to be taking a casual stroll among the tree stumps, holding a grenade over his head for some reason. His eyes betray no emotion, no urgency, and, frankly, no intelligence. And his mouth is wide open. What could he possibly be saying? “Hey, Captain! What am I supposed to do with this, again?” No wonder nobody ever looked at it.
But you know that isn’t quite true, because I already told you that I did. A lot. Before I ever read a word about soccer balls and kilts and trenches and barbed wire, before my mother told me about the old men at the Bronx VA who’d never recovered from being gassed—before, even, I first encountered Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel—that monument was World War I to me. It told me: This is something you need to know about. Remember. And so it did its job.
Most things don’t age as well as the men and women I interviewed over the course of several years in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Monuments weather, and slowly—but, sadly, not uniformly—change color. (The last time I saw him, my guy looked like a bank dye pack had exploded on him.) Sheet music can fade, and sometimes crumble to confetti. Book bindings can crack, and spill out yellowed pages. Posters can crease, split, dissolve. Reputations and fame can diminish, or evaporate entirely. And memories can become corrupted well before they’ve even had time to start dissolving. In the last chapter of Company K, Private Sam Ziegler, the war some years behind him, is taking a summer road trip with his wife and children when he decides “to go see the old training camp again.” Perusing a roster, he discovers that his old sergeant, “Pig Iron” Riggin, is still stationed there, and asks to see him; “I’d like to talk to him about old times,” he tells the post commander, and soon he and Pig Iron are walking through the camp together. Inside his old bunkhouse, Sam notices that someone has put up metal plaques next to each bed, indicating who had slept there during the war; he quickly finds his own name, and then begins browsing through the others, reminiscing with the sergeant. Or trying to, anyway: The two of them can’t seem to remember any of the same men, or anecdotes, colorful though they were. In the book’s final paragraph, Ziegler tells us:
I stood there thinking, trying to bring up the faces of the men I used to soldier with, but I couldn’t do it. I realized, then, that I would not have remembered the face of Riggin, himself, if I hadn’t known who he was beforehand. I began to feel sad because it had all happened so long ago, and because I had forgotten so much. I was sorry that I had come to the camp at all. Pig Iron and I stood there looking at each other. We didn’t have anything to talk about, after all. Then we locked the old building and went outside.
Some might consider that sort of memory loss a blessing; the author of Ziegler’s words, William Campbell (writing as William March) surely would have. But he was not so graced. The war tormented him for decades after it ended. Perhaps he had hoped that writing Company K might enable him to let go of it at last. It didn’t. The book itself went out of print
after its initial run. Campbell battled depression and writer’s block for decades, and suffered a nervous breakdown at one point. Subsequent novels—all of them literary, none dealing with war—failed to gain much attention. In 1952, the Lion Press brought Company K back into print; my copy, a twenty-five-cent paperback edition, features a cover illustration of a trio of exhausted, battered infantrymen slogging through ruins, past a dark-haired, barefoot chippy trying unsuccessfully to beckon them. The men are all wearing World War II uniforms.
In April, 1954, March published The Bad Seed, a novel about a sociopathic, homicidal eight-year-old girl. It became a phenomenal success, a bestseller that would be adapted for the stage by the renowned playwright Maxwell Anderson, and later made into a movie—twice. Campbell, though, didn’t live to see any of that; he died of a heart attack on May 15, 1954, just a few weeks after the book’s release. He was sixty years old, and had been living in New Orleans, not far from George Briant.
My grandfather Abraham Rubin was born in 1890 in Minsk, in what was then known as Byelorussia, or White Russia, in the old Russian Empire. In January, 1906, at the age of fifteen, he left home, traveled to Berlin, caught a train to Hamburg, then made his way to Cuxhaven, where he boarded the Hamburg America Line’s SS Amerika, arriving in New York on February 16, 1906. When the war broke out in Europe, the Amerika was docked in Boston; it sat there, trapped, for two years and eight months, until the United States entered the war, seized it, rechristened it the USS America, and commissioned it as a troop transport.
A couple of months later, my grandfather, having just opened his own business in Manhattan after a decade of working very long hours and saving up, was drafted. He was sent to Camp Upton, in Yaphank, on Long Island (where Irving Berlin got to sleep late while writing Yip-Yip-Yaphank), and inducted into the 77th Division—specifically, into Battery C of the 306th Field Artillery. Despite the fact that a great many of the men in the Statue of Liberty Division were also immigrants, a lot of them from backgrounds very similar to his—and despite the efforts of the Foreign-speaking Soldier Subsection of the Military Morale Section of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department—it was, I believe, a difficult adjustment for him. He was twenty-seven years old, had lost his nascent business, and, though he had not yet married and started a family of his own, he was probably pretty homesick for the city, and his life there, and the people he’d had to leave. Those people knew it, too.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 58