by Neil Hanson
The rest of the men wanted only to be gone from France and on their way home, and in the absence of any definite news about when they would be embarking, the rumors flew thick and fast.35 Christmas provided a brief distraction, though it must also have provoked a renewed longing among the American troops to be home with family and friends. They tried to make the best of it, putting up a Christmas tree on the village green and taking up a collection to buy toys for the kids in town. Monk and his comrades had been given Christmas Day off, with no duty other than guard duty, but it was a very brief reprieve. The hated drill and practice maneuvers resumed on December 26, and on New Year’s Eve the regiment assembled at Saint-Michel for an inspection and review, finishing with a march of twelve miles through sticky mud and drenching rain.36
Cigarettes, cigars, and candy were freely distributed in an attempt to keep up the men’s spirits—in a single month, the American Expeditionary Force issued a billion cigarettes, twenty-two million cigars, and “three million rounds of candy”—and a schedule of leaves in the United Kingdom was also arranged.37 One officer and sixteen other ranks from each regiment went at first, and the numbers were slowly increased, though they were never to exceed 10 percent of a regiment’s strength. It is doubtful whether Monk ever took advantage of the opportunity. He preferred to spend his spare time working toward a qualification; his grade of Army Mechanic was finally confirmed on March 1, 1919.
To the continuing anguish of their families at home, even at this late stage, sixty members of the regiment, including seven from Company G, were still posted as missing in action, though there was little realistic hope now of them ever being found alive. Officers had the heartrending duty of replying to letters from relatives seeking news of their missing loved ones, or details of their death.
Decisions also had to be made over the fate of those definitely dead and buried. General O’Ryan had asked company commanders for their men’s views on whether the bodies of the dead should be repatriated or remain buried near where they fell in battle.38 The men of Company G were unanimous that the dead should lie undisturbed where they had fallen, and 86 percent of their fellows in the 106th Infantry agreed. Many of the grieving relatives at home shared that view, but others wanted their dead repatriated and were vigorously supported by a lobbying campaign of breathtaking cynicism mounted by the “Purple Cross,” a newly created group funded by American funeral directors eager to profit from the thousands of burials that would result. Some funeral-industry organizations and publications were brazen enough to openly discuss the profits to be made, and they even offered to send sufficient embalmers to France—at government expense—to ensure the return of every “American Hero … in a sanitary and recognizable condition.”
In the end, like Theodore Roosevelt, whose youngest son, Quentin, was killed in the war, thirty-one thousand American wives and parents believed that their dead husbands and sons would have wished to remain among their fallen comrades. As Roosevelt wrote to the army chief of staff, “Mrs. Roosevelt and I … have always believed that where the tree falls, let it lay.”39 Twenty-five thousand parents and wives still disagreed and opted to have the bodies of their loved ones returned to the United States for burial, though not all got their wish. Well over one thousand of the American dead, lost without a trace in the shell-cratered battlefields, had no known graves.
Rumors that the 27th Division was about to head home continued to circulate, but finally, on February 20, 1919, the 106th Infantry regiment started to move back to Brest.40 They had already been inspected for vermin on January 31, but, before being pronounced fit to be embarked for home, every American soldier had to be inspected again, deloused, and pronounced free from any communicable diseases. The 106th Infantry had been designated for earliest movement, and they were first to pass through “Bathing, Delousing and Re-Equipment with Clothing, Inspection, Verification of Records, etc.,” at the “Dirty Camp” at Belgian Camp, a process that took four or five days. They then boarded the 40 HOMMES—8 CHEVAUX boxcars for the last time for the journey to Brest, during which many of them were probably reinfested with lice.
On arrival, Monk and his fellows were assigned to Pontanezen Barracks, to be remembered without fondness for its mud and slippery “duck boards,” though “it was nothing compared to the trenches.”41 There were many complaints about conditions at the camp, but they were probably less attributable to the now familiar mud, cold, and discomfort than to the frustration of being camped within sight of the port and the ships that could take them home, but still without a firm date of departure. Disease was also rife. The great Spanish influenza epidemic that had claimed more lives worldwide than even the Great War itself was still carrying off men, and the childhood diseases of measles and mumps remained prevalent. Fostered in the unsanitary and often stagnant air of the dugouts in the reserve areas, such diseases had hospitalized many victims and continued to infect men at the Pontanezen Barracks.
It is probable that Monk was one of those who caught influenza. The gassing he had suffered in combat had made his lungs more vulnerable to infection, and on December 2, 1918, he reported sick. Within two weeks Monk’s condition had deteriorated so much that he was sent to the hospital. Unlike many of his comrades, however, Monk recovered, and by January 2, 1919, he was back on duty, though still excused from drill; he returned to full duty a week later.
On February 24, the men of the 106th Infantry at last received the orders they had long been awaiting and marched the five miles down the road to Pier 5 at Brest. They took their final step on French soil at ten past eleven that morning, before boarding the lighter Tudno for transfer to their troopship, the USS Leviathan, at anchor out in the harbor.42 They were the first of 10,343 officers and men of the 27th Division to board.
The Leviathan was one of six big transports—the others being Agamemnon, Mauretania, Harrisburg, Louisville, and Pannonia—assigned to carry American troops home.43 An impounded and converted German liner, the Leviathan was the fastest and, at fifty-four thousand tons, by far the largest of the fleet, more than twice the size of the next largest ship. Capable of carrying as many as twenty thousand troops in a single voyage, she always traveled alone because she could outrun any convoy or submarine. Loading continued all that day and the next, when the ship was also coaled and the baggage craned aboard. They sailed on the high tide at 12:30 p.m. the following day, February 26, 1918, a gray and rainy day. Included in the souvenirs that Monk was taking home were “ten homing pigeons and his trench hat, bearing bullet holes.”
Part III
21
THE FIGHTERS THAT THEY WERE
The Leviathan and one of her sister ships, the Mauretania, returned home together on March 6, 1919, bearing a total of about 13,700 New York troops. The pilot boat that met the Leviathan off Ambrose Channel Lightship delivered mail, newspapers, and an official letter of greeting from Mayor Hylan, but the first official welcome came from a flying boat sent by the Aeronautical Exposition and manned by C. J. Zimmerman, who flew out to sea early in the morning, met the Leviathan ten miles off Sandy Hook, and, circling low, dropped two canvas bags containing messages of welcome onto the deck of the ship.1 A fleet of boats carrying members of the city and state official reception committee and upstate representatives had also left the Battery at eight that morning to rendezvous with the ship as it came up the channel, and the Knights of Columbus sent out a boat laden with cigarettes and candy for the returning heroes—the first of many such gifts they would receive. A flotilla of other boats, chartered by friends and families of returning servicemen, also sailed to greet the ship. In all, more than fifteen thousand people were packed on the eighteen ships that sailed down the bay to greet them.
The Leviathan slowed as she reached Quarantine, allowing the welcoming flotilla to form an escort around her, and then steamed slowly on. “From the moment the huge Leviathan became visible to the welcoming fleet in the morning mists off Quarantine, until the last soldier stepped aboard the last train in the
embarkation station at Hoboken, thousands strained their eyes to catch glimpses of those who returned.”2 The men on board let out shouts as they glimpsed old familiar landmarks along the Brooklyn and Jersey shorelines, and there was a huge cheer when the white sands of Coney Island came into view.
Under a bright sun, the harbor was dotted with craft of all kinds, and the sea wall at the Battery was black with people cheering and waving flags and handkerchiefs. General O’Ryan stood on the flying bridge of the ship, acknowledging the greetings of the reception committee and the cheers of the spectators.3 Every porthole of the ship seemed to frame a smiling face, and the decks were jammed with soldiers. Ships sounded their foghorns and the Bands of the Port of Embarkation struck up as the great ship nosed in to dock at Pier 4 at Hoboken, but the noise was almost drowned by the cacophony of shouts and cheers from the waiting crowds, all desperate to identify their own returning heroes, and the answering yells from the men lining the decks.
The ship docked at twelve minutes past eleven that morning, but it was more than half an hour before the first of three gangplanks was lowered and the first soldier—an officer of the 106th Infantry—rushed down to plant his feet on American soil. All day the streets near the army piers in Hoboken were so crowded with people hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the returning heroes that traffic came to a complete stop, but if families had hoped for a dockside reunion with their long-absent husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, they were to be disappointed. Only officials were admitted to the pier, and relatives had no opportunity to catch even a glimpse of the individual soldiers.
Alongside the thousands of men pouring down the gangplanks was a large number of dogs.4 Hardly any of all the scores of strays that individual soldiers had befriended and adopted had been given official permission to return home with the regiment on the USS Leviathan, but many had made the journey as stowaways, smuggled aboard, often rolled in blankets inside the men’s packs. The enlisted men were not alone in wanting to bring back their pets and mascots; their commander, General O’Ryan, brought a Belgian police dog, “Fique,” with him. After the dog attached himself to the division at Alençon in Belgium, his name was added to the official muster rolls and his blanket decorated with two service stripes and one wound stripe after he was slightly injured by shrapnel. The men of the headquarters company of the 106th were less successful with the thirteen-year-old Flemish orphan boy whom they had unofficially adopted. They tried to take him back to the United States with them after the war, but military police refused to allow him to board the troopship.
Eleven hundred men on board the Leviathan were still sick or wounded, including two hundred cases of the influenza that continued to claim lives.5 They were helped down the gangplanks long after the other men had disembarked, but thirty were so ill that they were kept aboard the ship for another night. Monk and his comrades did not disembark until four that afternoon, and they were then transferred by waiting ferries to Long Island City and by train to Mineola, Long Island. They arrived at 8:45 that night, and the first sight of Mineola triggered a barrage of shouts of the 106th’s battle cry. They then marched to Camp Mills, but homecoming celebrations were put on hold as the men were placed in strict quarantine until they had gone through the sanitation process. Despite the delousing at Belgian Camp, the majority of men and their kit were still infested with the lice they had first acquired in the trenches and French billets, and as soon as they arrived they were covered with liquid soap and kerosene and then given hot showers while their clothing and bedding were fumigated.6
It was after midnight by the time the last men from the Leviathan reached Camp Mills, by which time the earlier arrivals had already gone through the cleaning process and the baths were waiting for the last arrivals. Fifty-four medical officers presided over the examination of every man, and as soon as the cleaning process was complete, half the men at Camps Mills and Merritt were given forty-eight-hour leave passes, and upon their return the other half were sent on leave. All the men were either discharged or transferred to another camp within four days, making room for the next contingent of homecoming troops. Camps Upton, Devens, and Dix took most, with the overflow going to Camp Meade or Camp Merritt.
On March 24 the men of the 106th Infantry, with the rest of the five thousand men of the Brooklyn contingents of the 27th Division, arrived in the city on eight special trains. Their comrades in the 106th Machine Gun Battalion had not been billeted with the rest of their regiment and were transported from Camp Merritt to Jersey City on the Erie railroad and then ferried over to Manhattan. They took the subway from Wall Street and emerged at Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where a huge crowd was waiting to greet them.
Led by Colonel Franklin W. Ward and preceded by two hundred mounted policemen and the men of the Brooklyn State Guard, the 106th Infantry marched through the streets of Brooklyn with all the equipment they had carried when they went over the top at the Hindenburg Line, excluding their hand grenades and the machine-gun battalion’s weapons, which had been taken from them in France.7 They wore their tin hats and light field packs slung across their backs, carried gas masks, and had rifles with bayonets fixed. They marched in their platoons, sixteen abreast, from Bedford and Atlantic Avenues to Park Place and Flatbush Avenue, and then to Prospect Park West, where two reviewing stands had been erected, one built by carpenters of the Todd Shipyard, who did the work without pay. The stands could hold 20,000 people, only a fraction of the 125,000 applications for seats that had been received.
People had been claiming vantage points on the route since well before dawn. Many of the earlier arrivals had brought their breakfast with them, but others relied on the sandwich and hot dog men, who were already doing a roaring trade. The masses that jammed the streets along the line of march and overflowed well up the cross streets formed by far the largest crowd ever gathered in Brooklyn. The “wild men,” as the Brooklyn soldiers who first swarmed over the outposts of the Hindenburg Line were described in diaries found on captured and dead Germans, marched beneath a canopy of American flags, banners, and welcoming ribbons, fluttering in the breeze in bright sunshine.8
Many of these same men had paraded through the streets before going off to war, but they were different now. Their uniforms were battle-worn, and the naïveté and youthful enthusiasm that had shone from so many faces then had gone. “With set faces that betrayed no interest in mere display, with a step that carried them tirelessly over the distance but had no parade ground snap … they were impressive because they looked—with guns carried easily instead of smartly, bundled in their big coats, encumbered with packs and gas masks—rough and tough, the fighters that they were.”9 They seemed to have aged far more than the year that they had been away, with a look in their eyes that spoke of things seen that made the gang wars of the Lower East Side seem like the playground bickering of infants. “The straight lines cut into their faces by facing death and dealing with it … were not relaxed by the pleasure which they must have felt at the reception … These stern countenances struck a kind of awe into the crowd. One glance was enough to show that these were men just returned from the bloody battlefield with their experiences stamped on their features.”
The crowd’s reaction had been subdued by these silent, grim-faced, marching men, but there were cheers and laughs as three regimental mascots appeared—two dogs and a young goat.10 One of the dogs, a collie, wore a blanket with the division insignia and two wound stripes. The dog had been adopted by the regiment while they were in training at Spartanburg and had been on the front lines with them, suffering wounds at Vierstraat Ridge (machine-gun bullet, left foreleg) and the Hindenburg Line (shrapnel, neck). He had also been marked AWOL from June 20 to 22, 1918, but that was the sole blemish on his service record, and he was the only dog officially cited by his commander, Colonel Franklin W. Ward, for distinguished service with the A.E.F. The dog was guest of honor at a dinner of the Brooklyn Democratic Club at the Commodore Hotel after the parade, his invitation bearing the
promise of a silver collar and three extra bones.
Although the sight of the animals drew smiles and applause from spectators, “the spell of the grim fighters was not entirely broken until the veterans who were no longer under military discipline came along.”11 They included Brooklyn men from other units like the Rainbow Division, the Camp Upton Division, and the marines. Some had already been mustered out of the service, others were wounded convalescents, and they marched along in the rear, smoking, chatting, shouting, and waving at friends. Brooklyn hospitality had been lavished upon them before they started and at intervals during the march, to such an extent that most of them were laden with doughnuts, buns, candy, and sausages. They had eaten all they wanted by the time they reached the official reviewing stand at Prospect Park and Ninth Street and began using the surplus as missiles in a lighthearted food fight. Sharp orders from their officers restored some order, but sausages and buns continued to fly from their ranks at intervals as they marched on.
The parade ended at Fifteenth Street, and after leaving their weapons and equipment in the armories, Monk and his fellows attended dinners for enlisted men and noncommissioned officers at 150 different hotels and several armories, followed by “general jollification and entertainment.”12 More cigarettes, candy, and chewing gum were distributed to each man, courtesy of the Knights of Columbus, and eight thousand Ward Baking Company cakes were handed out. Across the East River, a monster boxing carnival was being held in Madison Square Garden to entertain the troops, and scores of theaters added special showings at which only uniformed men were admitted.