But for all his enthusiasm, even valor, it took Woollcott a while to get the hang of combat. Winterich accompanied him on his first battlefield trip, to Château-Thierry. “Far off to the left, toward dawn, three guns, friendly or hostile (or one gun firing three times), went pop … pop … pop, with intervals of perhaps five seconds between the pops. A hand nudged me in the darkness and a courteous voice inquired, ‘Is that a barrage?’ ”
Woollcott showered his readers in glory—and in prose that was treacly even by the estimable standards of the day. But he was only giving the men what they wanted, and the proof was in the numbers. In a year the circulation of the paper, which started at thirty thousand, soared past five hundred thousand. Given this kind of growth and an army on the move, delivery of the paper was often a nightmare. Resourceful field agents did what they had to—including once, in the Argonne, enlisting Captain Eddie Rickenbacker to airdrop two thousand copies.
Later in his life Ross was often credited with “editing” The Stars and Stripes, and eventually he did become its top editor. For the most part, however, his leadership was manifested more by example than by title. Like everyone else in the place, he reported and wrote stories, made assignments, edited copy, and wrote headlines, but his greatest value was in generating ideas. More than anyone else on staff, Ross had an uncanny sense of what enlisted men would and wouldn’t read. It was the commoner’s touch, which sprang from his own background as well as his multifarious professional experience. He himself recognized this singular capability and asserted it from the beginning.
Just one month after he arrived, Ross conceived a campaign that turned out to be one of the boldest public-relations strokes of the war, not to mention one of its most poignant legacies. He proposed that A.E.F. troops donate money to “adopt” French war orphans. (More accurately, the Red Cross-administered fund cared for children who had had one or both parents killed or disabled in the war.) Ross hoped the modest campaign, announced in the paper on March 29, 1918, would spur friendly competition among the doughboys—the original goal was one thousand adoptions—as well as raise their consciousness of the French plight. He could not have imagined, even as he prodded readers with a weekly ration of heartrending stories, how enthusiastically the campaign would be embraced, not just in the ranks but even stateside. (Pershing himself adopted two orphans but ordered Ross not to make a fuss over it, so his contribution was simply recorded like every other on the list, between “Y.M.C.A. Secretaries, Base Camp No. 1” and “Aero Const. Squadron.”) By December, more than two million francs had been raised on behalf of nearly 3,500 French children. The French themselves were flabbergasted and genuinely touched. Ross’s commanding officer later would say that Ross had contributed “more than almost any individual in the A.E.F. to the cordial relations between the U.S. and the French republic.”
Gratifying as this was, Ross derived as much or more pleasure from his opportunity, at last, to be a war correspondent. He turned up at most of the hotspots, usually to help report and contribute secondary stories. In September, for instance, he recounted the success of an American cavalry regiment at St.-Mihiel, and in October, at the Argonne, he helped produce the paper’s expansive account of the fabled “Lost Battalion.” About this same time he got a call from the provost marshal’s office. They had an American soldier who had just escaped, via Switzerland, from a German prison camp; was The Stars and Stripes interested? Ross and Winterich rushed down immediately to take custody of one Private Frank Savicki. They debriefed him, then kept him under wraps for several days to thwart the civilian competition. Savicki’s escape was indeed dramatic, and Ross told the story in brisk, occasionally breathless detail. Clearly his narrative sense had come a long way since that boat ride on the Feather River. This passage picks up Savicki as he encounters his last, most treacherous obstacle:
Ross tours a World War I battlefield in France. (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)
In the cover of the bushes he remained all day. Across the valley he could see the peasants tilling the soil. They, he knew, were in Switzerland. Before him, in the foreground, too, he could see the river and the difficulties before him in crossing it. Paralleling the river was a railroad, the string of sentry boxes and a wide belt of barbed wire, obviously put there to prevent the escape of such as he. At noon he saw the sentries changed, and again in the evening.
The sentries, he discovered, did not walk post, merely maintaining a watch from their boxes. The wire, he decided, he could get through. The river, he calculated, was too broad to jump—but it could be vaulted. He stirred during the afternoon just enough to get a sturdy stick and trim it for a vaulting pole.
After dark he started. He crawled. So slowly and cautiously did he go that the trip to the edge of the barbed wire took five or six hours. There he rose and threaded his way through the strands, pausing after each step to unfasten the barbs which clung to his clothing.
He came to the railroad track and crawled over that. He could dimly discern the sentry boxes. He heard a guard cough in one of them. He crawled on, laying a course midway between two of them.
He gained the edge of the river. He stood on the bank. The other bank, ten feet away, was Switzerland and safety. He poised his vaulting pole and sprang for the further side. The pole sank four feet into the mud of the river bottom. Private Frank Savicki landed, belly deep, in the water with something of a splash.
There was a tense minute. Clinging to a clump of grass on the Swiss bank, Savicki waited for the bullets he was certain were coming. But none came. Evidently the Boche had not heard him. Finally, he pulled himself on to the land. He was a prisoner no more.
War might be hell, as Private Savicki could testify, but Private Ross was having the time of his life. He adored Paris (and became a lifelong Francophile), he was a war correspondent, and he was a key player in an enterprise that he believed in completely. In retrospect some have called The Stars and Stripes insufficiently critical and overly gung-ho, and certainly to anyone from the Vietnam generation the innocence one finds in the newspaper is as suspicious as it is beguiling. But it accurately reflected the emotion and sentiment not just of its staff but of the A.E.F. generally. Ross’s own letters home were full of passages that Hollywood might have been tempted to crib. In July 1918, smack in the middle of the Allied counteroffensive near Soissons, he wrote his parents: “The Americans were in it strong, of course, and fought wonderfully—so well that I don’t believe anybody will be able to fully describe it. I saw some of the soldiers as they came out of the line. They were jubilant, enthusiastic and confident. When the American army gets going full blast, it won’t take long to defeat the kaiser.” The flip side of his ardor was that Ross scarcely could look on such a scene without feeling guilty. At Belleau Wood, Woollcott found him sitting by the side of a dusty road, tired and disconsolate as he watched the American wounded being carried away. When Woollcott asked what was wrong, Ross fired a string of profanities at him, then said, “At home I was always a nonproducer and here, on a battlefield, I’m a noncombatant.”
——
The only time the German army came close to killing Private H. W. Ross was one pleasant Saturday morning in the middle of Paris. In March 1918, not long after he had arrived from Langres, the Germans began shelling the capital with the fearsome long-distance gun that the French nicknamed Big Bertha. This particular Saturday was her debut, and so Ross and all of Paris were caught unawares. He was sleeping late on his day off when he was awakened by an air-raid siren. He ran into the street and looked up for airplanes, but there were none. He continued to scan the skies. “I was standing with my mouth open, as I say, when whango! one of the shells dropped right behind me, so close I was spun around with the concussion.” He staggered to a subway station for shelter. Emerging two hours later, still shaken, he went off and, as he said, “consumed a whole bottle of ‘morale.’ ” (Ross’s friend Marc Connelly, the playwright, used to tell another Big Bertha story so exquisitely surreal that it more tha
n likely comes from the thick Ross Apocrypha. In this version, Ross decided one afternoon that he would see Paris from the city’s Ferris wheel, made famous in the exposition of 1900. Once he reaches the top, the wheel stops and, of course, Big Bertha roars into action. He was said to be stuck there for an hour, feeling like the fattest duck in the shooting gallery.)
The longer Ross was in Paris, the more he grew in savvy and repute, but to all outward appearances he remained the Colorado Kid. The artist Charles Baskerville, who would be one of Ross’s important early contributors at The New Yorker and who was a decorated soldier in World War I, remembers running into Ross in Paris at the time. Ross was sociable enough, he said, but “a rough guy, uncouth. He was a very ordinary farmboy-type [who] just happened to turn up in this extraordinary situation.” Ross’s French, what he tried of it, was terrible. In Rossian dialect, a favorite bar, Monsieur Jacques, became simply “Monjacks.” His hair was an unruly thatch, and his ill-fitting uniform was known to prompt gasps: blouse usually unbuttoned, shoes unshined, leggings droopily telescoped around his ankles.
In time the Stars and Stripes regulars (and some irregulars, such as civilian correspondents Heywood Broun and Ring Lardner) fell into the pleasant habit of spending Saturday evenings at a Montmartre bistro, known as Nini’s after its accommodating owner. The soldiers provided Nini with extra ration tickets for sugar and bread, and she in turn provided them with sumptuous (for wartime) meals, good wine, and an intimate place to play cards and dice. Dinner and gaming typically stretched well into Sunday morning.
One night in November, just after the armistice was declared, Woollcott turned up at Nini’s with a young woman on his arm. She was Jane Grant, an old friend from New York. Attractive and outgoing, she soon had all the poker players vying for her attention in their best schoolboy fashion. Ross especially made an impression on her. “As I peered at him from across the table, slumping over his poker hand like a misshapen question mark, I decided he was really the homeliest man I’d ever met,” she later wrote. Nonetheless, before long Ross had finagled the seat next to her, and as he talked she found herself rather charmed. At dawn, he escorted her (with Winterich in tow) back down the hill to her hotel.
Jeanette Cole Grant had come to France two months earlier as a clerk with the Y.M.C.A.’s Motion Picture Bureau; with Woollcott’s help she was now transferring to the Y’s entertainment division. Born in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in Girard, Kansas, she was a gifted singer, and after high school her family had sent her to New York to study voice. She did some professional singing, but to make ends meet she took a job writing short notices for the society pages of The New York Times. Intelligent and independent, Jane eventually earned a general assignment job, in so doing becoming the first full-time female reporter in the Times city room. (She later teased Ross that she probably saw him the day he applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Times.) At the paper she became fast friends with Aleck and joined his widening coterie. She was thrilled with the transfer to the entertainment division because it meant she could perform for the troops and see Paris to boot. Woollcott was her only friend there, and she looked him up the moment she arrived. Early in their relationship, Aleck persuaded himself that his interest in Jane was more than platonic; he even spoke of marriage. Naturally enough, Jane was either confused or amused by this pose—Woollcott was a sexual neuter who tended to derive emotional gratification by arranging couplings and uncouplings among his friends—and shrugged it off. Though he remained close to her, Aleck never quite forgave her that. For now, however, he was satisfied to play matchmaker between two of his best friends.
Jane Grant, here in her Y.M.C.A. service uniform, considered Ross “the homeliest man I’d ever met.” (Jane Grant Collection, University of Oregon)
The courtship advanced in fits and starts. Jane was coy, and Ross, never articulate anyway, could be positively opaque when it came to matters of the heart. Neither quite knew where they stood with the other. Even as he felt himself tumbling into his first serious relationship, Ross was suspicious about it all. In February, when Jane was on the road performing, he wrote to her, “I haven’t laughed much since you left town. Funny coincidence, isn’t it?” Yet in the same letter, in the fourth of seven giddy postscripts, he says, “I can’t make up my mind about you.” He had made up his mind, of course, and presently he was doing everything he could think of to ensure that the feeling was mutual. Jane had become close to all the Stars and Stripes staffers, and she never lacked for beaus. This, as well as Ross’s expanding role at the paper, complicated his efforts to see her, but he was nothing if not persistent. He commandeered a Cadillac to give her a personal tour of the battlefields at Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry. Fortunately, the armistice was making it possible to enjoy France in a more conventionally romantic fashion, so in time they were sailing along the Seine, visiting Versailles, and dining in the Bois de Boulogne. To impress Jane, Ross even pretended to enjoy things he actually despised, like the opera. (As many an officer had discovered, he could be charmingly disingenuous when it suited him.) From this proximity Jane began to appreciate what an extraordinary paradox Ross was—as she said, “brave and fearful, kind and brusque, attentive and indifferent. He was as profane as a man can be—but he was never smutty. In the presence of women he was especially puritanical and I always found him excessively modest.” (Years later she told James Thurber that Ross had never tried to sleep with her until after they were married.) She knew things were getting serious when she found herself chipping away at Ross’s prejudices against New York, where she intended to resume her reporting career after the war. When he discussed his postwar plans in any detail at all, they usually involved a quixotic, Jack Londonesque South Seas sabbatical. Gradually his resistance to New York softened, however, and he began to talk to Jane in vague terms about things “they” might do once back home. Indeed, Jane probably didn’t even realize it at first, but Ross and Woollcott, in their café reveries, already had kicked around an idea for a magazine devoted to New York. They hadn’t taken the concept far, but they knew it would involve some new wrinkles, like criticism of the New York press. And it must have humor, they agreed, lots of humor.
——
With the armistice, Paris exploded in celebration. “In a restaurant today an old Frenchman got up and shook hands with me and (I think) would have kissed me if we hadn’t had the table between us,” Ross told his parents. “I’m onto the kissing dodge, however, and am always elusive.” He was glad for an end to the fighting, he added, not so much for himself as for “the fellows who have been up on the front for months under fire and in the mud and cold which induces as high a degree of physical misery as can be imagined.”
At The Stars and Stripes, meanwhile, the cease-fire was kindling the spirit of insubordination. If they didn’t have to shoot Germans anymore, the staff figured, they could finally concentrate on their real enemy, Visk. Nine months of working with Captain (for he had been promoted) Viskniskki had only intensified their disdain. They called him rude and arrogant, a schemer and a meddler. Looking back on the insurrection, Woollcott would finger Ross as the protagonist, and Ross Woollcott. It’s impossible to know who was right, though the episode certainly anticipates some of Ross’s deep-cover sorties against Raoul Fleischmann at The New Yorker. In any event, both men heartily endorsed a bill of particulars that the editorial council drew up against Visk and sent to the army command. Ordinarily such insolence might invite some time in the stockade, but the general staff knew full well that it was Ross and company, not Visk, who were more critical to the production of The Stars and Stripes. Visk was promoted up and out.
This left the small problem of who was to run the paper. Ross, Woollcott, Winterich, Hawley, Baldridge and Wallgren met to decide. Ross, who was said to resemble a Bolshevik anyway, suggested a soviet-style solution: create a managing directorate, he said, from which one member would serve as managing editor, but only for as long as he pleased the group. The idea was accepted. Ross
nominated Winterich for the top job, for he was generally regarded as the steadiest and most technically capable editor, but the shy Winterich demurred. Instead, Ross was chosen by acclamation, and his leadership was never again put to a vote.
At thirty-eight dollars a month, Private Ross was suddenly the lowest-paid managing editor of a major American newspaper. (He stubbornly resisted efforts to promote him to a more respectable rank, though he did have his own business card.) There was something exhilarating about a private—“the lowest form of human life in the A.E.F.,” Woollcott said—consigning a captain’s lovingly wrought poetry to the circular file. Still, Ross’s friends had done him no favor. With the war on, the paper’s direction had been obvious, but with peace breaking out, what was the staff supposed to write about? The only thing the two million Americans in Europe wanted to know was when they were going home. Ross saw that the paper’s focus must change, and it did. The Stars and Stripes covered the peace talks—Ross and crew carried off pieces of the German flag of truce as souvenirs—drummed up interesting feature stories from the field, and resumed the sports pages. It examined, and tried to combat, growing anti-French sentiment in the American ranks, especially among those units posted in or near Germany. The paper also published as much information as it could to smooth the enlisted man’s reentry to civilian life.
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