Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  For the men of the gas and flame regiment, going home was a disconsolate waiting game, and Christmas only heightened the homesickness. They had marched out of Camp American University on December 25 a year earlier, and now they were still stuck in France, even though the war was over. Tom Jabine, wiling away the days in the officers’ ward in Nantes, had given up predicting his departure. Separated from the regiment, he had hoped to be home by Christmas, too. He sometimes felt short-winded but otherwise felt fine. “I am just waiting around for a chance to go home,” he wrote. While mistletoe and holly adorned most of the wards, Jabine’s ward was almost bare—“Officers are too lazy to go out and get things,” he carped—other than a Christmas tree decorated with improvised ornaments. For a break from the monotony, he walked into town with other officers for a Christmas Eve meal. At 6:00 a.m. on Christmas morning, soft caroling awoke Jabine. A procession of nurses wound through the hospital, singing “Silent Night,” candles illuminating their faces in the darkened wards.

  At least Jabine was comfortable and warm in Nantes. The same could not be said of the rest of the regiment. The Hellfire Boys had decamped from Verdun to La Ville-aux-Bois, where Thanksgiving passed and two squads from Higgie’s platoon kicked up a row by stealing chickens. Every day, mail sacks bulging with packages arrived at headquarters where Higgie was detailed doing office work; he received a package containing chocolate and another with a handkerchief from Irene. In a desperate attempt at festivity, Company D decorated a Christmas tree with dangling tomato and salmon tins and draped its branches with toilet paper. It looked convincing from afar but ridiculous up close.

  On Christmas Eve, some of the men in Higgie’s billet got drunk and a fight broke out downstairs. One man broke his wrist, and another lost several teeth. On Christmas Day, Higgie slept until 10:00 a.m., then went into the office to fill out passes to allow the men to leave camp.

  Higgie was at work on December 30 when the order came through for the regiment to start for the coast the next day. He raced back to the billets to tell the men that they were leaving. He spent the day packing and barely made an evening show at the Y before bed. “We are all ready for tomorrow and it seems too good to be true. All the fellows are happy tonight,” he wrote in his journal.

  When they boarded the train for Brest, sixty-three men crammed into Higgie’s boxcar like livestock on their way to market. The trip took three days. Higgie thought they would march right onto a transport; instead, they hiked another six miles to a half-finished barracks. And then they waited.

  It was a hellhole. For three weeks, the men bided their time in freezing, damp misery. As at the front, mud was everywhere, even inside the mess hall, a building with no roof where the men stood in ankle-deep muck in the rain while they ate. That night, Higgie’s tent sank six inches into the mire. Lice infested their clothes and hair. Some days there was no firewood, and one night a powerful storm blew over many of the tents. On January 8, Higgie got to the mess hall too late, and all the food was gone. For dinner that night, he scavenged turnips from a farmer’s field and ate them raw. For weeks, not a single letter arrived for him from Irene or anyone else, and he wondered if all of his friends had forgotten him. His bunk was the only place to get warm. He dried his sodden socks under his mattress tick at night. It took days for each pair to dry out. One night, he lay in the dark talking to one of the men in the squad. “We are all wondering how long we are going to be kept in this hole,” he wrote in his diary.

  The Hellfire Boys weren’t the only regiment mired in misery; Sammies from all across the AEF were writing home to complain bitterly about the awful conditions they were in after the war. “We are still waiting after three weeks here,” Addison wrote mournfully in his diary.

  The day finally arrived on January 23. “Unspeakable joy at heart,” Addison wrote in his diary, tempered only by fear some last-minute reassignment might keep him in France. The chaplain spent his last day trying to make sure injured members of the regiment came across with them. Higgie packed at midnight, reveille was at 2:30 a.m., and breakfast at 5:00 a.m. Just before departure time, orders arrived requiring some men to stay for several more months, sending up a howl of fury from those ordered to remain behind. Higgie wasn’t one of them. The departure began at 7:00 a.m., the commanding officers demanding complete silence. Quiet as lambs, the regiment marched to the waterfront following the embarkation orders: overcoats buttoned, slickers over their packs, extra shoes cleaned and strapped to their packs. Absolutely no loud talking or singing, with the strictest march discipline.

  A ferry brought them out to the USS Celtic, the same ship that had returned Fries to the United States a month earlier. Wounded soldiers also came aboard, but there were far fewer soldiers than on the way over. As the ship moved out of the port, Higgie crowded onto the deck to wave goodbye to France. Then he went below, strung up his hammock, and slept.

  The Celtic set sail without Tom Jabine, who read about his regiment’s departure in the newspapers. He had long since given up trying to decipher how he had become ensnared in so much red tape. Weeks earlier, a doctor had marked on his chart that he was ready to go home. Unfortunately, he still needed to go before a discharge board, which might keep him in France still longer if he was marked fit for duty. “The situation is hopeless to understand and still harder to try and explain,” he said. He was beginning to feel like a prisoner. “I certainly have been fooled on this famous ‘going home’ proposition,” he wrote in another mournful letter home.

  Rather than fritter away his hours playing chess and taking walks, he set out for the Riviera with a friend for some sightseeing. They arrived on February 6 in the seaside resort town of Menton, where he strolled through villas and lush gardens filled with flowers and fruit trees, their limbs weighted down with lemons and oranges, with towering mountains rising above them and the Mediterranean to the east. They walked to the Italian border just north of the town and strolled across the bridge. “So I left France today for the first time in over a year! But alas not bound for the States just yet,” he wrote home.

  By the time Jabine awoke to the tropical smells of the Mediterranean coast, Higgie and the Hellfire Regiment had arrived in the United States. The Celtic steamed into New York Harbor before daybreak on February 2. Higgie watched the Statue of Liberty slide by in the morning light, then went below for breakfast. He returned to the deck later, when the welcome boat arrived to throw fruit and candy up to the men. Crowds waited on the pier when they disembarked, and Red Cross volunteers handed out hot coffee and rolls. The ship’s arrival presented another public relations opportunity for the Chemical Warfare Service. Articles about their arrival included boastful accounts of their bravery and high casualty rates. “Very little was known in the United States of our operations,” Major John Carlock told the New York Times, “because nothing was allowed to leak out. The nature of our work made it imperative that the greatest secrecy should be maintained and this was strictly carried out.”

  Higgie sent off telegrams and postcards; then the regiment took a ferry to Brooklyn and a train out to Camp Mills on Long Island. A few days later, they moved again, this time to Camp Kendrick, at Lakehurst Proving Ground in New Jersey, the artillery testing range for the Chemical Warfare Service. Sibert and Fries came out to review the troops. For three weeks, Higgie worked in the camp office, processing discharges for men in the regiment. He was in the office one day when an order arrived with his promotion to sergeant.

  The first group departed on February 12. Every day, more Hellfire Boys left the camp, and the ranks of the regiment dwindled. Higgie wondered when he would go. While he waited, he befriended the camp cooks, who served him breakfast whenever he felt like it. He took long walks in the middle of the day and played cards for hours at night. Sometimes he lay awake in the barracks, listening to his bunkmates mutter out loud in their sleep. Every night, there were fewer and fewer men in the bunks for Higgie to listen to.

  Finally, Higgie’s captain told him to submit
his own discharge papers. When the papers came through, they were for February 22. Higgie begged the captain to let him leave a day earlier. The captain gave in, and Higgie rushed to pack. He hectored the quartermaster for his pay, gulped down dinner, and then quickly changed clothes for the trip. Higgie put on a new suit he bought, but he couldn’t find his raincoat because one of the fellows had borrowed it.

  He left with his pal Staples. The last train left Lakehurst at 6:30 p.m., so they had to hustle. They set out on foot. A driving rain soaked his new suit. They wouldn’t have made it except a jitney appeared through the sheets of rain and gave them a ride to the station, where the friend who had nabbed the raincoat showed up just in time to return it and say goodbye. The train took them to Jersey City, where they took a ferry across the Hudson to Manhattan and on to Penn Station. It was 11:00 p.m. when they checked their bags and got their tickets for the 1:30 a.m. express train to Boston.

  When they got to the platform just after midnight, a jostling crowd already awaited the train. When it pulled in, Higgie and Staples leaped aboard and claimed seats in one of the coaches. They pulled their raincoats and mackinaws up to their chins and fell asleep. Higgie opened his eyes at daybreak and looked out the window. An overnight storm had swept over New England, and snow blanketed the landscape, as if he had been transported to another, wintery land while he slept. To Higgie, it seemed the train moved excruciatingly slowly as home grew closer, mile by mile.

  At 8:00 a.m., the train finally pulled into Back Bay Station in Boston. It was February 22. Amid the crowds, Higgie spotted his aunt and a family friend waiting on the platform. He couldn’t push his way out of the train fast enough to greet them. He had a suitcase with him, but he had checked his army bag through to South Station. Higgie reboarded the train for downtown Boston, so he could claim his bag. He didn’t expect a soul to be there for him, so he was stunned to look out on the busy platform and see his sweetheart, Irene, searching anxiously for his face among the passengers stepping down from the car. “I had the best surprise of my life when I spotted the best little girl in the world looking for me,” he wrote in his diary.

  Then Higgie went north, away from the crowds, away from the patriotic bunting and the ticker tape and the brass bands in Boston, back to his little house in Lawrence. The morning Lawrence Telegram carried a picture of Higgie in his uniform, looking as serious as could be. The Evening Tribune’s headline said everything there was to say: “Higginbottom Is Home from France.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Fight the Devil”

  Patches of snow dappled the hillside behind American University as Charles William Maurer tramped down the slope with his gas mask. In winter of 1918, Mustard Hill had begun to empty out. Every five days, the service discharged another one hundred soldiers. As work slowed, Maurer and a friend wandered the campus, snapping pictures of the creaky sheds and huts where they had worked. Maurer clowned for the camera, holding his nose outside the man-test laboratory and crouching inside shack number 5, a skull and crossbones scrawled over the door.

  A dirt road led to two shacks on the top of the hillside, just inside the barbed-wire fence encircling the station. Partway down the hill, Maurer posed at the lip of the pit called Hades. At his feet, a jumble of bottles, jars, and jugs lay on the hillside. Bending over in his gas mask, Maurer reached toward the bottles, the mask canister dangling down at his waist, as his friend snapped the shutter.

  Private Maurer became Sergeant Maurer on January 1, 1919, in a flood of bottled-up promotions. His discharge came on January 20. On his way home, he stopped in Cincinnati and Saint Louis to sightsee, visited friends in San Antonio, and dropped in on his brother in the border town of Mission, Texas. Soon he was back in Marfa. As President Wilson barnstormed across Europe before the Paris peace talks, former president Teddy Roosevelt died in his sleep of a lung embolism. California banned liquor, nudging the country closer to Prohibition. Labor strikes broke out nationwide, and police rounded up Communists and anarchists. Anxiety rose over labor radicals and Bolshevik agitation. The country was moving on.

  Maurer, too, had put the war behind him. Yet on the vast expanse of the West Texas plains, reminders of the Chemical Warfare Service reached him. When the Baylor newspaper, The Lariat, arrived in the mailbox, it included an article entitled “Dr. Gooch Tells Class of New Gas.” In the article, the professor described a “wonderful gas” that American chemists developed. It was so secret that probably only three men knew its formula, and so lethal that “a minute drop of the liquid from which this gas is formed will bring almost instant death.”

  Soon after, a letter from Maurer’s alma mater arrived, asking for an update for an alumni directory. Will mailed in a ten-page letter describing his time in Washington. He sent a folded lyric sheet from the camp stunt night, a humorous but dark ditty about the perils of the station. “Nevertheless, ‘sweet were the days at the shell plant’ for after all we had to suffer few of the hardships of the boys in the line,” he wrote. He tucked a dollar into the envelope for the alumni directory.

  Maurer also wrote about the gas that Dr. Gooch spoke of in the Lariat article. “He probably referred to Lewisite, named after Capt Lewis of the American U. in Washington,” he wrote. “It has been called the most terrible weapon ever devised by man. American chemists proved themselves far superior to the squareheads at their own game and accomplished more and better results in two years than the Germans had in forty.”

  Sergeant Maurer’s reminiscence of his time at American University reflected the start of a wider shift in the nation, an inflection point in how the country viewed chemical weapons. A new openness about chemical warfare had begun in fall of 1918 when the guns fell silent, and men like William Sibert unveiled the secrets of the chemists’ war. But it wasn’t until 1919, when soldiers like Maurer headed home, the men of the gas and flame regiment stepped off the boats in Hoboken, and the dollar-a-year men resumed their university work, that a new mythology about chemical warfare began to take root. It would be neither a single story nor a simple one. Nor would it be the entirely celebratory one that Sibert, Amos Fries, and many scientists hoped for. Like a chemical cloud bursting from compression, the story of chemical weapons proved unpredictable and difficult to control.

  American University itself was emblematic of that mixed legacy. On December 30, 1918, Sibert wrote a thank-you note to Bishop Hamilton at American University for the use of the campus. The letter was intended to be a grateful handshake, a gesture of mutual admiration. Hamilton’s offer of the campus in April of 1917 had been an optimistic gambit to help the army and ensure the university’s continuity. But the postwar landscape yielded a more complicated reality. Debris and wooden huts reeking of poison fumes littered the once bucolic campus. Arsenic saturated the soil, and practically every blade of grass was gone. The enormous new chemistry building sat unfinished and empty. Bomb chambers, explosives pits, and test trenches riddled the campus and properties around it. Cinders and ash blanketed the campus, the trees hacked down or killed by gas. The farmer named Weaver, whose land was used for testing mustard and other chemicals, complained that his property was badly contaminated and suspected that buried mustard had killed one of his cows. Years after the war ended, area residents reported finding shell holes and dugouts used for storing explosives. And beyond the far reaches of the campus, down the hillside that the soldiers called Death Valley, chemicals and ordnance rested for generations in the pit called Hades.

  Germany had been defeated, but from the moment that Amos Fries returned to Washington, he had his sights on a new adversary: the War Department. After his Christmas reunion with his family in Los Angeles, he repacked his bags and returned to the capital for what he knew would be a battle over the future of the gas service. He was Sibert’s right-hand man now, the only arrangement that he would tolerate short of being the chief himself. Fries was bumped back down from brigadier general to lieutenant colonel, as he feared would happen, a postwar reduction in rank that he r
esented and protested fiercely.

  When Fries came back to Washington on January 20, he went first to see Sibert at his office on Seventh Street. Goliath delivered what must have been disheartening, if expected, news: the War Department intended to dismantle the gas service.

  Fries asked Chief of Staff Peyton C. March for a meeting. When Fries arrived at March’s office a few days later, an aide went to the general to announce Fries’s arrival. A moment later, the aide returned and said that the general wouldn’t meet with him. When Fries asked the aide to go back and ask for just fifteen minutes, that was refused, too. The aide relayed the message that if Fries had come to plead for the Chemical Warfare Service, it was no use—March’s mind was made up. The matter was closed. Still, Fries insisted that he see the chief of staff, sending the aide back a third time. This time March let him into his office. Fries launched into a diatribe about chemical warfare, but March abruptly cut him off, threw up his arms, and said, “There’s not going to be any more Chemical Warfare Service.”

  When Fries returned to Sibert’s office, he told the director what had happened. “My hands are tied, so I can do nothing,” Sibert said. But he gave Fries his blessing to do whatever he could to prevent the War Department from dismantling the Chemical Warfare Service. Fries was already formulating a plan—he would appeal to Congress. He had strong relationships with two key lawmakers in particular: Congressman Julius Kahn of California and Senator George Chamberlain of Oregon, the respective heads of the House and Senate Committees on Military Affairs. Within days, both had agreed to back Fries and his position that the Chemical Warfare Service should continue in peacetime.