Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Fries had learned that he would probably have the same job in France as he had in Yellowstone: grading and constructing the roads. Roads and bridge work were bedrock civil engineering, essential for victory, built upon sand and gravel, surveying and drainage. Fries knew nothing of chemicals or gas warfare; to the colonel, chemicals were potions tucked into the medicine cabinet at home, tinctures and curatives for maladies like his own unsteady stomach. For his violent indigestion, Fries took an over-the-counter purgative called calomel, a wintergreen-flavored pink tablet. A mysterious ailment also afflicted his sickly son, Stuart. Writing in his stifling hotel room, Fries suggested that their boy take the pills as well. “I think it would be wise to ask Dr. Johnson about giving Stuart two or three tenths of calomel once or twice a week. It appeared to work well, but there might be some danger in it.” The compound’s other name was mercurous chloride, and it was utterly toxic.

  Fries was an engineer’s engineer, a stern soldier with a prairie practicality, steadfast as a well-driven fence post. His upbringing could not have been more different than that of the soft-skinned chemists from Harvard and Princeton who had flocked to Manning’s Research Division. Born on March 17, 1873, Fries had grown up in a remote corner of western Missouri that rubbed up against Nebraska, a lawless and violent frontier area where bands of former Civil War soldiers and bandits roamed up and down the Missouri River. When Fries’s father had moved the family there from Wisconsin, they received a chilly reception. Cattlemen already grazing the prairie bitterly resented newcomers as interlopers who augured a wave of unwelcome settlers to come. Not long after the family arrived, Amos’s father drew his pistol on two brothers who attacked him as he passed by with Amos and his sister in the family wagon. Word spread around Holt County about the new neighbor with the quick draw, and rumors flew that Fries packed six-shooters under his wagon seat. The family never had problems again.

  Fries’s childhood was one of hard work and discipline on the farm. With the nearest fence line a mile away, tending the herd meant roaming over endless prairie, hustling cattle out of the neighbor’s cornfields, and driving them back to the barn. Farm life turned the boy into a stolid believer in discipline and self-sufficiency, but he also had an adventurous streak. When a teacher he admired left for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, his student wondered about this place where young men went to become engineers and soldiers. The following spring, the Fries family left the Midwest for Oregon. Four years later, after Fries completed high school, West Point had lost neither its mystery nor its magnetism. Ignoring his mother’s objections, he wrote to his congressman for assistance in applying. Wait a year, he was told; perhaps then there would be a place for him. After the year went by, he passed the qualifying exams in San Francisco and was ordered to report to West Point on June 15, 1894.

  In Fries’s class portrait, he wore a military cape over his uniform with an expression of smoldering poise, exuding a confidence that would stay with him throughout his life as an engineer. He had a boiling fever to prove himself; when he went to visit the Washington Monument, he sprinted up the 897 steps to show he could beat the elevator to the top. The Spanish-American War, the “splendid little war” that made Theodore Roosevelt a household name, was under way as Fries graduated, and he was so eager to join the battle that he reported to the adjutant general’s office in Washington the day after his commencement. But his zeal for war was too late. Instead of being sent overseas immediately, he was ordered to Fort Totten at Willets Point, Long Island, for instruction in laying harbor mines. By year’s end, the war was over.

  The year after, he was ordered back to Oregon for a stint near his hometown, Central Point, under Colonel William Langfitt, the commander in charge of the Portland district. Fries was happy to have the assignment near his home, because he was sweet on a woman there, named Bessie Wait. In early August of 1899, Langfitt granted Fries’s request for leave, and he headed straight back to Central Point. For two straight weeks, Fries’s spent every evening in the parlor of the Waits house in nearby Medford, where Bessie lived with her parents. On August 16, they married and, the next day, left by steamer for their honeymoon in San Francisco. At the end of Fries’s leave, it was back east once again, to Willets Point. In 1901, Fries received new orders and was sent to the Philippines, America’s new territory gained from the Spanish-American War.

  Amos and Bessie’s home was Zamboanga, a city on the western peninsula of Mindanao Island, the largest island in the archipelago. A pet monkey gnawed on the golf balls that Fries had brought with him from the United States; in the afternoons, Fries played with one of the generals, who ordered prisoners to rake the ditches of the improvised, six-hole course for lost balls. Fries astonished soldiers under his command by working alongside them in the burning equatorial heat. His standing grew when he took over the difficult job of driving wooden piles after the soldier on the job fell ill with dysentery.

  Fries was not the only soldier on the island with a reputation. At the inland Lake Lanao, a Captain John J. Pershing commanded Camp Vickers, an outpost for exploring and mapping the island’s interior. Though the war was over, some of the Moro chiefs that had long defied Spanish rule also resisted the new American conquerors. Pershing’s predecessor had tried and failed to pacify the Moros through brute force, causing substantial American casualties. When Pershing catapulted into the command over hundreds of higher-ranking officers, he used diplomacy and patient negotiations to slowly win the chiefs over to his side. When Fries visited the camp, he was astonished by the scene that greeted him: several Moro chiefs gathered around Pershing, listening raptly to his phonograph.

  The scene made a deep impression on Fries. Long after he and Bessie departed in 1903, reassigned to Willets Point once again, he recalled his many memories of his adventures in the Philippines. Of all his recollections, his impressions of Pershing were among his sharpest. His admiration for Pershing bordered on reverence, and he marveled over the captain’s daring and his skills in strategy and diplomacy. “Just as there were thousands of sailors, there was only one Columbus who had the courage, the knowledge and the leadership to ‘sail on and sail on’ until he discovered then an unknown continent and then (though far in the future) our glorious government and beloved home,” Fries wrote of Pershing.

  Fries’s next assignment was back in Oregon, followed by several years as chief engineer in Los Angeles, then five years teaching at the Engineer School in Washington before he was ordered to take charge of the roads in Yellowstone Park. Founded in 1872, Yellowstone was the country’s first national park, but it had been underfunded and in decline for years, overrun with poachers and memento collectors who hacked at the mineral deposits and defaced the ancient hot springs. The Department of the Interior, desperate to save the jewel of the nation’s growing park system, asked for help from the army, which deployed its engineers as if it were an occupied territory. The early years were like a wilderness bivouac, with soldiers and engineers housed in tents on a high plateau near Mammoth Hot Springs. Eventually, the army built Fort Yellowstone, a permanent village of stone buildings. That made for a far-more-comfortable perch, but Yellowstone was still viewed less as a military duty than as a retirement position or an extended stay at a health spa for ailing engineers. “Fries, what’s the matter with you?” one engineer asked him after he received his assignment. “I thought they only sent sick men there.” Fries responded that this time the army wanted an actual living engineer in the position, rather than one with a foot in the grave.

  The new assignment delighted the couple. Their newborn baby, Stuart, was a sickly child, and they felt the environment of Yellowstone would improve his health. They lived a comfortable—if simple—frontier existence at Fort Yellowstone with their young son and two daughters, amid rolling carpets of lodgepole pines and majestic valleys, burping mud pots, and thermal hot springs trimmed with rainbow-hued mineral deposits.

  Fries took his responsibilities seriously. He reasserted government juris
diction over the park’s bridges and roads, whose upkeep had been ceded to private companies and hotel owners. There were almost no cars or trucks in the park when he began, and at first he navigated the park with a horse and buggy. During his watch, Fries gained a fleet of trucks, and the army assigned him an automobile—a Kissel Kar—to replace his horse and buggy. Soon tourists would arrive in cars themselves, changing the park forever, and Fries paved the way—an effort that earned him attention and accolades in Washington.

  America had been at war for two months when Fries finally got his long-deferred wish to go to war. In mid-June of 1917, orders arrived to report to the engineer’s examining board in New York for a promotion exam. He made the trip east, arriving with about a dozen other young officers. They took a quiz, doctors took their pulses, listened to their hearts, and tapped on their chests, and then they were ordered to report to the chairman of the exam board the following day.

  When Fries arrived the next morning, he saluted the chairman and stood at attention. The colonel picked up a slip of paper from his desk, read a single sentence waiving any examination requirements, and turned his eyes back down to his desk. Fries stood there, unsure of what to do. A few seconds passed, and the colonel looked up at Fries, as if surprised to see him still there. “That is all, major,” he said curtly. Fries realized he had been promoted and then dismissed. With that brief exchange, for which he had traveled more than two thousand miles, Fries was a lieutenant colonel in the National Army.

  Fries had always hoped for this moment, and yet he was wracked with worry. He had three small children now, the youngest just ten months old, and Bessie was six months pregnant with their fourth. He was expected to leave for France immediately, but he convinced the army to allow him to return home first, since he had brought only a small suitcase with him for his trip east. Before he left Washington, he wired Bessie. Pack up the house, he told her. The family was leaving.

  He boarded a westbound train and returned home feeling sick with anxiety and excitement. Once he was back, the family frantically stowed their belongings into crates that would follow Bessie and the children to Los Angeles, where they would live with Bessie’s mother. On July 4, they finished packing, and the train left at 11:00 a.m. the next day from the park’s west entrance, almost forty miles away from Fort Yellowstone. They left in the early morning, the Kissel grinding down the mountains through clouds of steam billowing from the hot springs, steadily losing elevation as the car descended to the park’s west entrance. At the station, Fries helped bundle the children into their seats on the train. Both Fries and his wife were stoic and steadfast through the dry-eyed goodbye, but after the train left and Fries made the trip in reverse, a profound sense of loneliness settled over him, a deep uncertainty over his path ahead. The car trundled along the winding banks of the Madison River, gaining in altitude toward Firehole Falls. Instead of returning to Fort Yellowstone, he turned the car south, brooding as he drove toward the Paintpots and the leaping flumes of Old Faithful. He continued on, crossing the Continental Divide on his way to Yellowstone Lake. Fries saw none of it, stewing with his eyes locked on the road stretching out before him, driving with no destination in mind. “I had then that complete feeling of turning my back on all that was dear and near, perhaps forever,” he recalled.

  The house suddenly quiet and empty, he wrote to Bessie every day, describing the wildflowers in bloom, the level of Lake Yellowstone, the arrival of the seasonal tourists. A telegram arrived on July 13: his ship would embark from New York eight days later, on July 21. He packed a small trunk to send ahead to Washington, while his army bedroll and a larger trunk went directly to New York with the clothes he would need for France, including his enormous bearskin coat. He boarded a train east on July 15, and as he barreled across the plains, he pecked out letters on his new Corona typewriter, salting them with observations about the passing landscape, the weather and the crops, and wildlife that he spotted from the train window. He studied French and chatted with a fellow Mason he met on the train. Soldiers who filled the cars speculated about what lay ahead. “There are all sorts of ideas as to how long the war will last,” he wrote to Bessie in Los Angeles. He arrived in Washington on July 18, spent the night at the Army and Navy Club, and departed for New York the next evening on the overnight train. His departure date proved more tentative than he originally thought, and July 21 arrived with no definite word on when he would leave. He spent the day instead “in high society,” he wrote to Bessie, hobnobbing around Manhattan with his fellow officers in a car assigned to take him around the city.

  The next day, he set out for the Chelsea Piers to see the Orduña, the fifteen-thousand-ton steamship that would carry him and Langfitt’s regiment across the Atlantic. At 569 feet, she was not a small vessel, but alongside floating behemoths like the Leviathan and the Agamemnon, the single-funnel Orduña looked almost puny. As Fries walked the pier inspecting the ship, he spotted a familiar face on the quay: former president Theodore Roosevelt, whose youngest son, Quentin, would also be on the Orduña. Fries passed the former president several times before introducing himself and speaking with him briefly. Fries looked over the ship from stem to stern, and it looked sturdy enough. Still, his pragmatic nature led him to take precautions in case the Orduña encountered a submarine or some other mishap. Before he left, he went out and bought himself a full-body life preserver called an Ever-Warm Safety-Suit, which carried a hefty price tag of sixty dollars that Fries complained about bitterly to his wife. The night before he left, he spent fifty cents at target practice in a shooting gallery to make sure his marksmanship was still up to snuff. The shroud of dread and loneliness lifted, and for an army engineer accustomed to a no-frills existence, he found himself quite comfortable in New York.

  I am getting quite expert at taking it easy when I don’t have to hurry, and taking it calm when I do. Guess I have grown into the feeling that this war is so vast that the only thing for me to do is to do what I can and not worry for the work one can do is so small in the total that an ounce or two of extra effort won’t even be a drop in the bucket.

  When he boarded the Orduña to set sail on July 23, Fries had a stateroom to himself—a benefit of being one of the highest-ranking officers on board—and a bathroom that he shared with another officer. His upper-level room had a wide-open view of the ocean overlooking the second deck, and as the ship carved through the waters toward Nova Scotia, Fries could see porpoises shooting through the waves alongside the ship and bobbing Portuguese man-of-wars. The ship had a ballroom and a social hall, a gymnasium with weight benches and a punching bag, and a wood-paneled smoking parlor with plush sofas lining the walls where the passengers could gather in the evening. The bracing ocean air grew colder as the ship sailed north. Thrice-daily French classes took up Fries’s days, taught by a Catholic chaplain, and soon French words and phrases began to creep into his daily letters home. He joined shuffleboard games on the deck and sometimes played low-stakes poker in the evening. Fog often shrouded the ship, but occasionally the skies cleared, revealing glassine ocean and flocks of birds that darted and dove around the decks and funnel of the ship. As the ship sailed into Canadian water, the temperature dropped precipitously. Unable to tell his wife the location of the boat, he described it drily as “somewhere near the north pole, judging from how cold it is.”

  The ship anchored in Nova Scotia for more than a week. Fries awoke each morning at 6:00 a.m. to exercise, bathed in cool saltwater baths, walked another thirty minutes around the deck, and then went for breakfast in the dining room. The air was clear and cold, the ocean still in all directions, as the days drifted slowly past, Fries keeping time by his daily exercise and rigorous language study, boasting that he could now count, name days of the week and the months of the year in French, and order off a menu. When he wasn’t studying or dining at the lavish tables in the ship’s dining hall, Fries improved his skills at bridge.

  Not all was relaxation and leisure on the ship. Rumors flew through
the ship that a new offensive had begun against the Germans. There were other more immediate worries: the threat of German submarines. Bantering with the captain, Fries learned that the Orduña had made thirty-one trips across the Atlantic and had encountered a U-boat only once. In the encounter, the small ship was fired upon but escaped without damage. “Besides the ship is itself now armed,” Fries wrote to his wife.

  As dusk fell on August 1, fog shrouded the Orduña as it prepared to raise anchor. Four other ships hulked nearby in the cloud banks enfolding Halifax. The four transports and a converted cruiser would cleave through the freezing ocean air with their lights doused, the navigators charting the convoy’s position in impenetrable darkness, a project that made even the steely Fries nervous. After sundown, the firemen stoked the boilers, the Orduña’s engines powered up, and its funnel began to belch smoke. Cloaked in darkness, the convoy slipped through the waves to France.

  Chapter Six

  “Fiendish Work”

  The British offensive that Fries heard rumors of on the ship had begun near Ypres, not far from where the Germans had released clouds of chlorine in 1915. The decision to launch the attack had been bitterly controversial. Prime Minister David Lloyd George felt that the Flanders offensive would be “a folly and a crime,” and military advisers argued that the British should wait for the Americans. But General Douglas Haig had been determined to break the German line after his failure at Arras, and intelligence from the front hinted that the Germans were on the brink of collapse. Moreover, the British wanted to seize the Belgian coast and destroy two German submarine bases. There were strategic locations within British reach that would give tactical advantage to the Allies—the high ridge of Passchendaele, the rail hub at Roulers.