My grandfather died in 1978, at the age of eighty-eight; not quite Fred Hale territory, but respectable. I was eleven years old at the time, and hadn’t known him all that well, since he and my grandmother had been living in Miami Beach for most of my life. I had a vague sense that he had served in the Army at some point—there were old photographs here and there, including one fairly large portrait of him in uniform—but for some reason I failed to connect him with that monument by the library. It didn’t occur to me then to ask him about his service, and the war; by the time it did, he was long gone.
In 2000, my parents sold the house in which I had grown up, and were cleaning it out when they found, down in the basement, a cardboard box full of things my grandfather had saved, going back to his childhood in Russia. There were school notebooks and drawings, his passport, his train ticket from Berlin to Hamburg, a piece of stationery from the Amerika. Postcards addressed to him in Yiddish and Russian. His draft notice; furlough passes; railroad passes from Yaphank to Pennsylvania Station. A mezuzah and prayer book from the Jewish Welfare Board. A canvas rifle case. (Sadly, there was no rifle in it anymore.) Some uniform buttons. An Army-issued razor kit, and wristwatch. A pair of identification disks; a copy of the CPI’s Home Reading Course for Citizen-Soldiers, too. There were no letters that he’d written, but there were a few that he’d received. Most were official correspondence. One wasn’t.
Addressed to “Abraham Rubin, 306 Field Artillery, 16 St. and 4th Av., Battery C, Camp Upton, LI,” it was sent to him by his uncle, Morris Abramson. Like my grandfather, his mother’s brother, Morris, was an immigrant. He was somewhat older than my grandfather, I imagine, when he arrived in America, and English was not his native language. But he wrote in English. I have corrected his spelling and punctuation, but nothing else:
New York, Oct. 16/17
My Dear Abe!
Your postal and letter received!
And in reply will say that I have so much to tell you, so much to write to you, that I can’t start it at all.
All I know is that I set down with the intention to write you a cheerful letter. But if he, that is my letter, will not come up to the standard of cheerfulness, do not blame me for it. For there are times in life when emotion controls reason, when the heart controls the brain and hand. I really mean to write and send you nothing but cheers. But my uncontrolled heart jumps out and dictates to my hand to spell it “Tears.” . . .
So as I have said before, do not blame me for it! What I really want to tell you is that we are all missing you very much. And let me tell you, dear Abe, that I would rather serve in the Army, and struggle and suffer and even die on the field of battle, but to be liked and beloved by everybody as you are, than to live and enjoy all the pleasures of civil life and to be hated and despised by everybody—for instance, as your dear brother-in-law, A.R. So you see, dear Abe, even now you are a million times better-off than he is. And I want you to put that in your pipe and smoke, and watch the twists and turns of the smoke, and you will see that it will spell for you: “Cheer Up!”
Cheer up. For if you will look up the history of the world, you will find that from our great teacher, Moses, up to the present great men, all of them fought for the rights of others. And that’s what made them great. And I think it is a privilege, an honor, a glory, to fight for other peoples’ rights. Especially we Jews, who are charged by the enemies of mankind with being leeches and money-lenders, must show to those Rats of Darkness that we can sacrifice our fortunes, our blood, our lives for the rights of humanity. And we must show to the world that when it comes to fight, that the spirit of the Maccabees is in us as strong today as it was centuries ago!
In short, dear Abe, no one knows better than I the sacrifice you have made for our beloved country. But money could never buy the honor and glory when, in years to come, in the Roll of Honor will be found the name of Abraham Rubin, a Jew, a soldier, who was a credit to his country, a credit to his nation, a credit to his family, and a credit to himself. Don’t you think it’s worthwhile to fight for it?
I want to tell you, dear Abe, you have been a good boy. A good son. A good brother. A good nephew. A good friend. So keep it up, boy, and be a good soldier!
And don’t forget, that wherever you will be, in Yaphank or in the trenches of France, the hearts of your country, the hearts of your nation, the hearts of your family, will always be with you. And my tears which roll between these lines are dumb witness, that every word I say to you, every advice I give to you, comes from the bottom of my heart, and are meant for your good!
Now, dear Abe, let me know at once if we need a pass to see you. And also let me know before Saturday if you are coming to New York. If not, I will come out to see you next Sunday. And let me know what you need, so I could bring it to you.
With love and good wishes to you, and to all your friends in arms, I remain yours,
Morris Abramson
P.S. Lena tells me to tell you that she is sending you her best regards and her best wishes and xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Morris
When I read this letter sometimes I think of the tiny, bright blue flowers I once spotted peeking out of the charred plot of earth where a dignified old building had recently burned to the ground. That war was a terrible thing; people understood that then as well as they do now. Minsk sat near the edge of the Eastern Front for much of the war, and saw a fair amount of action; Morris’s sister, my grandfather’s mother, was still there then, as were my grandfather’s father, two of his sisters, several nieces and nephews, and countless aunts and uncles and cousins. I am sure that few of them, perhaps none at all, had been heard from for years by the time Morris Abramson wrote that letter. Some of them, I imagine, had already been claimed by hunger, or disease, or German guns. Others, perhaps many others, would not live to see the end of the war, or of the civil war that immediately followed.
That war should never have happened; you can argue, as did my old history professor Bruce Kuklick at Penn, that once it did start, the United States should never have entered it. But it did, and then it did, and since it did, you embark down a sure path to cynicism, and perhaps depression or even despair, if you don’t try to find at least some little green shoots among the millions and millions of dead, 117,000 or so Americans among them, not to mention the uncountable number of lives that might have been spared, technically, but were ruined nonetheless, and the many millions more (including those two sisters, all those nieces and nephews, and who knows how many of those aunts and uncles and cousins) who perished during the second war that the first war wrought. And so you contemplate all those doughboys who marched off in high spirits with high ideals, who brought America to the world, and to a seat at the dais of nations for the first time, and brought back perhaps even more than that; and you think about the people at home, searching amid uncertainty and anxiety and fear to find something higher, something eternal, that might possibly, in the best of all cases, come out of this awful calamity—and then pass it on to one of those doughboys. Maybe your nephew.
So, in addition to all those veterans and their stories, in addition to all the books and posters and sheet music and other artifacts of that war, I take this letter and pin it to that wheel, taking care to leave some space for all the letters and identification disks and booklets and everything else out there that remains yet in some old cardboard bin in a basement, or locked in a keepsake box that no one has tried to open for decades, or pressed between the yellowed pages of some aged book that is itself pressed between other aged books high up on a shelf. Though the last of the doughboys are now gone and will never return, I like to think that, like the battlefield detritus that pops up every time a field is plowed in certain parts of France, these things will continue to surface for at least a few centuries more.
I don’t particularly believe in an afterlife, and have never considered it a constructive exercise to spend time thinking about the world to come rather than the one we know for certain exists and have to live in f
or a while; but if you meet and get to know even a little bit some two or three dozen very old men and women who share their rich and complex stories with you and then die shortly thereafter, you come to understand why other people choose to believe in, and dwell on, such things. More than I can say, I like the thought, the image of all those men I met who lost their fathers before their tenth birthday, reuniting with them after a century’s separation; of Art Fiala cooking up a mess of pancakes and bacon with that French woman who nursed him back to health; of Reuben Law and his grandfather, James Madison Bowler, swapping tales of army life; of Eugene Lee once again throwing a baseball, or maybe a pair of dice, with Joe Wnuk; of Frank Buckles pulling up on a motorcycle with a sidecar and offering a ride to John J. Pershing or Eddie Rickenbacker; of Moses Hardy and the rest of the 805th Pioneer Infantry all sitting together, soldiers and officers, and taking in a show; of the men of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, one by one, filing past Corporal J. Laurence Moffitt as he checks off their name in his register; of Private William Lake, after a long hike, cresting a hill and coming upon Captain Elijah Worsham, and the two of them shaking hands vigorously and then saluting each other, because there’s no reason not to; and of me, seeing all of them, the whole lot, again once more, if only for a few minutes.
I wouldn’t even ask a single question.
Appendix
Typical U.S. Army Infantry Units in World War I
UNIT SIZE COMMANDING OFFICER
Platoon 40 men Lieutenant
Company 180 men Captain
Battalion 800 men Major or Lieutenant Colonel
Regiment 3,500 men Colonel
Brigade 8,000 men Brigadier General
Division 25,000 men Major General
A corps comprised several divisions; an army comprised several corps.
A Note on Methods
All of the World War I veterans featured in this book were interviewed in person; all of the interviews were conducted by me.
On a couple of occasions, the interview subject said something of note at a time when the camera was off or the tape was being changed; these were written down by me immediately. On one occasion, I called a veteran on the telephone several months after our visit to obtain a little more information on a specific matter.
The very old (and the rest of us, too) often speak haltingly, repeating words, clauses, and even entire sentences while grasping for what to say next. The transcript has for the most part been scrubbed of such interjections as “um” and “uh,” and of fragments and repetitions that were not part of the subject’s chosen way of relating their story (or of my chosen way of posing a question). I also, on a handful of occasions, took the liberty of correcting an uttered mistake within a quote, such as when a subject confused 1917 with 1918, or vice versa. I would be grateful, should the need ever arise in the future, if someone would do the same for me.
I did not correct subjects’ grammar or word choices. At the same time, I did not feel the need to render their dialect phonetically (with a few exceptions, as noted).
Finally, I should note that the various topics of conversation are not necessarily presented in the order in which they were discussed. The conversations were rarely linear. In constructing a narrative that would tell the veteran’s story in a way that would prove most meaningful for both the reader and the legacy of the interviewee, I have sometimes altered the order in which some topics are presented here relative to when they were discussed during the interview(s). Great care has been taken to preserve the context of all quotes, statements, and discussions, and to avoid misrepresentation.
—Richard Rubin
Selected Bibliography
Abbot, Willis J. Pictorial History of the World War. New York: Leslie-Judge, 1919.
——— . The United States in the Great War. New York: Leslie-Judge, 1919.
Altschul, Charles. German Militarism and Its German Critics. War Information Series, no. 13. Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1918.
American Battle Monuments Commission. American Armies and Battlefields in Europe. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1938.
Anonymous [John MacGavock Grider]. War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1926.
Arthur, Max. Forgotten Voices of the Great War. London: Ebury Press, 2002.
Axelrod, Alan. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World War I. New York: Alpha Books, 2000.
Azan, Paul. The Warfare of To-Day. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Barbeau, Arthur E., and Florette Henri. The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974.
Barrett, Michèle. Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War. New York: Verso, 2007.
Bates, Brainless [Brainard Leroy Bates]. Doughboy Ditties: Popular Parodies for the Battle Hims of the Republic. Boston: A. M. Davis, 1918.
Beatty, Jack. The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began. New York: Walker, 2012.
Bent, Christine, ed. The New York Times Book of World War I. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Bernstorff, Johann Heinrich Graf von. My Three Years in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.
Bet-El, Ilana R. Conscripts: Lost Legions of the Great War. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 1999.
Bisher, Jamie. White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Bliss, Paul Southworth. The Arch of Spring. St. Louis, MO: published by the author, 1932.
——— . Victory: History of the 805th Pioneer Infantry, American Expeditionary Forces. St. Paul, MN: published by the author, 1919.
Brittain, Harry E. To Verdun from the Somme. New York: John Lane, 1917.
Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. November 1918: The Last Act of the Great War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.
Buffington, Joseph. Friendly Words to the Foreign Born. Loyalty Leaflets, vol. 1. Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1917.
Burns, Robert E. I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! Abridged ed., with an introduction by Alex Lichtenstein. Savannah, GA: Beehive Press, 1994. Originally published 1932.
Callahan, Arthur D. Rhymes and Official Data of the American Army in the World War. Kansas City, MO: published by the author, 1919.
Call, Arthur D., ed. The War for Peace: The Present War as Viewed by Friends of Peace. War Information Series, no. 14. Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1918.
Captain X [pseud.]. Our First Half Million: The Story of Our National Army. New York: H. K. Fly, 1918.
Carey, Neil G., ed. Fighting the Bolsheviks: The Russian War Memoir of Private First Class Donald E. Carey, US Army, 1918–1919. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1997.
Chicago Daily News. The Chicago Daily News War Book for American Soldiers, Sailors and Marines. Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1918.
Committee of Welcome. Welcome Home YD: In Commemoration of the Foreign Service and Home-Coming of the 26th Division. Boston: Committee of Welcome Appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts and the Mayor of Boston, 1919.
Committee on Public Information. American Loyalty by Citizens of German Descent. War Information Series, no. 6. Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1917.
——— . The War Message and Facts Behind It: Annotated Text of President Wilson’s Message, April 2, 1917. War Information Series, no. 1. Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1917.
Cowan, Sam K. Sergeant York and His People. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1922.
Creel, George. How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920.
Current History: A Monthly Magazine of the New York Times. Vol. 11, part 1, no. 3 (December 1919).
Curtin, D. Thomas. The Land of Deepening Shadow: Germany-at-War. New York: George H. Doran, 1917.
Davies, Alfred H. Twentieth Engineers, F
rance, 1917–1918–1919. Portland, OR: Twentieth Engineers Publishing Association, 1920.
Davis, Richard Harding. With the Allies. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917.
De Varila, Osborne. The First Shot for Liberty. Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1918.
Dickson, Paul, and Thomas B. Allen. The Bonus Army: An American Epic. New York: Walker, 2004.
Drinker, Frederick E. Our War for Human Rights. Washington, DC: National Publishing Company, 1917.
Eisenhower, John S. D. Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Empey, Arthur Guy. First Call: Guide-Posts to Berlin. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918.
——— . A Helluva War. New York: D. Appleton, 1927.
——— . The Madonna of the Hills. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921.
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