by Gill Paul
Edward Brittain’s medal for gallantry, earned at the Somme in 1916.
After the war, Vera finished her degree at Oxford, and lived a long life as a celebrated author of novels and memoirs, including the bestselling Testament of Youth. She also spoke at peace rallies and was a prominent member of the Peace Pledge Union. She married and had two children, but asked that when she died her ashes be scattered on her brother’s grave in the Italian hills, “because for nearly 50 years my heart has been in that Italian village cemetery.” Roland’s grave in the military cemetery of Louvencourt in France is covered in violets, in memory of the poem he wrote for Vera back in 1915.
“…for nearly 50 years my heart has been in that Italian village cemetery.”
Charlie & Valentine BOUCHER
Married: October 13, 1919
The British and French were delighted when America entered the war, but it took a long time before US troops reached the front line.
Amputations were performed on 2,610 American soldiers during the war, mainly as a result of shell explosions.
Charles Leo Boucher
FRENCH-CANADIAN
Born: February 13, 1894
Rank & regiment: Sergeant, 102nd Infantry, 26th US Division
Valentine Antoinette Breton
FRENCH
Born: November 1, 1897
Charlie Boucher photographed in 1917 before leaving for Europe. He had a taste for adventure from a young age.
Charlie always thought of himself as a lucky man, but the luckiest moment of his life would come near the war’s end when he saw a beautiful young French girl standing near a well. He fell for her on the spot.
Charlie came from a long line of French immigrants who had settled in Quebec in the early 17th century. His father, a carpenter in Providence, Rhode Island, was fatally injured in an accident at work when Charlie was only a month old. His mother took him, his two brothers, and his sister back to live on her father’s farm in Drummondville, Quebec, but Charlie didn’t learn to speak much French at home because his grandfather was a loyalist who ran an English-speaking household. When he was in his late teens, his mother moved the family to the Boston area where there was more work available, and in 1913 Charlie enlisted for the Second Corps of Cadets of Salem in search of adventure.
If not adventure, his army career did at least serve up a few scary moments when in June 1916 his company were rushed down to Arizona to help protect the border with Mexico after an attack on a US garrison by rebels led by Pancho Villa. For one thing, he was extremely lucky when, having captured a large lizard and put a string round his neck to keep it as a pet, a Mexican prisoner warned him that the lizard was in fact a Gila monster with a fierce bite and a poison more deadly than a rattlesnake’s. He also had a close shave when a Mexican sentry guard almost spotted him after he had sneaked across the border to do some sightseeing, but he managed to return unharmed. It was then he began to think of himself as “Lucky Charlie.”
… he began to think of himself as “Lucky Charlie.”
Soon after his return to Boston, in February 1917, Charlie was put on duty guarding railroad lines and bridges along the Connecticut River as there were fears after America entered the war that German agents might try to dynamite them. In another stroke of good fortune, he had a near miss one evening when a friend came in from guard duty with numb fingers from the freezing winter cold and accidentally discharged his rifle, the bullet grazing Charlie’s head. Charlie was fine, but the friend went into shock!
Rumors spread through the ranks that they would shortly be sent to Europe, but it wasn’t until September 20, 1917, that they set sail from the Canadian port city of Montreal. They were ordered to wear lifejackets at all times in case of a torpedo strike from a German U-boat, and indeed just two days away from the Irish coast they were startled by a number of explosions that rocked the ship. Charlie and his friends rushed up on deck about to leap overboard but were told the explosions had been gunner practice between the destroyers who accompanied them. They docked in Liverpool, then Southampton, and arrived in Le Havre on October 16, after which they traveled by train and on foot up to the Vosges Mountains for training in operating the new French machine guns and grenades. The British and French soldiers grumbled about the inexperienced Americans landing on French soil, but in fact they were delighted to have the “Yanks” join them in facing the Germans. The boost to morale was immense, as was the corresponding dent in the morale of German troops.
The Battle of Seicheprey
It wasn’t long before Charlie’s company saw action as they moved up through Nancy and Verdun to the Soissons area. Some of the men were wounded by shellfire or struck down by gas attacks, but there were no replacements available, and he complained in a memoir he wrote after the war that there was very little food to go around. One night Charlie managed to get lost among the hordes of Allied troops—British, French, and Italian—near the chalk mines of Soissons, and was pleased to be invited by a French sergeant to eat a hearty meal he had cooked to celebrate a friend’s promotion, before rejoining his men.
The Battle of Seicheprey began with a raid by German crack troops designed to intimidate the Americans, who were untried in battle. At least eighty of Charlie’s division were killed that day.
Men of Charlie’s division, the 102nd, line up to have their clothes disinfected. Lice laid eggs in the seams of garments and it was hard to get rid of them.
On the night of April 19, 1918, Charlie was called to an emergency meeting in a dugout behind the lines where American officers were told that French intelligence had picked up reports of a planned German attack on their position. Charlie and his men were ordered to advance to an exposed spot which, as he later wrote in his memoir, “proved to be a suicide post.” As the Germans stormed their position, Charlie and his men mowed several down with machine-gun fire and killed yet more in hand-to-hand combat, but they were heavily outnumbered. In fact, the German troops turned out to be highly trained Prussian shock troops sent to terrorize the untested Americans in the outlying forward positions. Charlie was wounded early on the morning of April 20 by a piece of shrapnel that struck him in the leg but, having made a tourniquet from a shoelace and a piece of duckboard, he managed to continue fighting. One by one, his men were cut down around him. At nightfall, Charlie managed to crawl back through no-man’s-land toward his outfit, taking with him a wounded comrade, George Cooper. From his original platoon of sixty men, he found there were only eight left alive, all of them badly wounded. The Battle of Seicheprey, as this became known, was one of the earliest battles fought by the American Expeditionary Force and was generally considered a success for the Americans, although the death toll was high. The boys from Connecticut had held their “suicide post”; though, as Charlie said, “Oh! God! At what a price!”
TUNNELERS
A key tactic in trench warfare was digging tunnels under no-man’s-land then setting off huge caches of dynamite directly beneath enemy lines. The Germans tried it first in December 1914 when they wiped out an entire Indian brigade in Belgium, and the French and British were quick to follow suit, bringing in specialist teams of miners. The men worked in silence, listening for signs of enemy tunnelers, while conditions underground were dark, cold, and lacking in oxygen. It could take as long as a year to dig a tunnel and position a mine, but when it worked the tactic was spectacularly successful. In 1917, over 8,000 metres of tunnel and 600 tons of explosive were placed in position under German trenches at Messines. When these were exploded at 3:10 p.m. on June 7, 1917, 10,000 German soldiers were killed in an explosion so loud that it was heard all the way back in London. By the time Charlie arrived at the Front, tunneling was less used because the front lines were moving more frequently, but he wandered into the chalk mines at Soissons through a camouflaged entrance and saw “thousands of lights and routes leading in every direction.”
French tunnelers digging under a German trench, c. 1916. They had to work in utter silence to avoid detec
tion.
Field surgeons had to learn how to treat appalling wounds that were contaminated by bacteria from the unsanitary conditions at the front line.
A Long Recuperation
George Cooper died on a stretcher alongside Charlie’s while they waited for an ambulance to take them to the hospital at Toul. Charlie was sedated, but on arrival he dimly overheard surgeons talking about amputating his leg and he yelled and cried out in his sleep as if still fighting in the trenches. He was moved again and woke up in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Vichy, which was operating as a hospital. There were palm trees alongside his bed and he could just make out the shimmering outline of the city through his window. It was there he learned that he had sustained a fourteen-inch wound in his leg through which gangrene had set in. Moreover, he had suffered chlorine gas burns to his eyes and a burst left eardrum from the shellfire. The decision was made to move him to an American hospital near Bordeaux. Here they treated his wound with an antiseptic solution called Dakin’s fluid, which had just been developed for use on infected wounds. Charlie was desperate to avoid amputation, because the survival rate after the operation seemed to be very low, and fortunately the Dakin’s Fluid began to work. Then Spanish Flu hit the hospital, causing an average of 25 deaths every day at the height of the epidemic. Somehow Charlie managed to avoid it. His luck was holding.
“Gee … that girl is going to make some man a wonderful wife. She is as cute and neat as a pin.”
As soon as he could get about on crutches, he set out on little daily walks. The hospital was at the foot of a hill on which sat the town of Montignac and one day he hobbled up to the town, wearing only a pair of French army pajamas and a terrycloth bathrobe. A group of local people were chatting near a well, and his eye was caught by a French girl wearing a plaid skirt and white blouse. “Gee,” he thought to himself, “that girl is going to make some man a wonderful wife. She is as cute and neat as a pin.”
A few days later when he walked up to the town again, he noticed the girl and her mother sitting sewing outside their house, and this time Charlie tried out a few French words, with the aid of a French–English dictionary he had brought along. The women produced a chair for him and poured a glass of wine, and he learned that the girl’s name was Valentine. She worked as a dressmaker, having been trained by her uncle, a professional tailor. She and her mother were living with relatives after her father’s death at the front line earlier in the war. Up close she was even more beautiful than he’d thought, and Charlie began walking up to Montignac every day to sit with her and her mother. The relationship was entirely chaste and proper, but the two were strongly drawn to each other. Their secret smiles and long looks were as eloquent as any declaration of love. Shyly, Charlie suggested to Valentine that they might be married one day when his wounds had healed and she blushed and nodded her agreement. Valentine’s mother liked Charlie and was happy to give her permission for them to wed.
Not long after this a contingent of troops from Kentucky arrived in Montignac, and after a couple of fights in the town between the Southerners from Kentucky and the Yankees in the hospital, Montignac was declared out of bounds. Guards were even placed on the road, but Charlie borrowed some civilian clothes from a cousin of Valentine’s and, with his rudimentary French, managed to persuade the guards to let him pass so he could continue to see the girl he had fallen for. But then orders came that the hospital was to be evacuated and Charlie was told his war was over. He would not be returning to the fighting, but would be sent back to America on the next available hospital ship. Valentine’s mother cooked a special dinner for him on the last night, addresses were exchanged, and they said their sad farewells. Valentine prayed he wouldn’t forget her once he was back in America; she considered them to be engaged, but had no idea when—or if—they might be able to tie the knot.
Charlie wearing his medals in 1919. His mother received a telegram saying that he had been “severely wounded in action,” but before she visited him at Fox Hill Hospital, Staten Island, she had no idea what to expect.
Homeward Bound
Two days after the Armistice, Charlie sailed on the Orizaba bound for New York. His mother and two brothers came and joined him for a Thanksgiving dinner in a New York hospital. Over the next ten months he had to endure a number of operations as bone specialists reconstructed his damaged leg, removing splinters of bone, shrapnel, and scar tissue, then putting skin grafts over the wound site. The time passed slowly, but he focused on improving his French and writing letters to Valentine. She replied, keeping her language as simple as possible so he could understand her. Still there was a possibility his leg might be amputated, an outcome he dreaded, and he wrote to Valentine that if that should happen he would never think of getting married. He suggested that if any local young men coming back from the war should ask for her hand, she should not hesitate on his account. But, he promised, as soon as he was discharged from hospital he would come to visit her. Valentine replied, saying that she hoped he would not lose his leg but even if he did, they would get by just fine so long as he still cared for her. She sent him a photograph of herself which became one of his most prized possessions.
The Orizaba had been a cargo ship before the war, and as a hospital ship without any cargo below deck she became top-heavy and pitched and rolled badly while Charlie was on his way back to the US.
WARTIME MEDICAL ADVANCES
New measures were taken to combat infectious diseases during the war, including the development of a typhoid vaccine, and tetanus shots. A lot was discovered about wound management in field hospitals. Doctors learned not to close a wound where there was contamination but to keep it open and regularly trim infected tissue while using antiseptic solutions to clean it, as happened with Charlie Boucher. Orthopaedic surgeons pioneered new methods of amputation and bone reconstruction, while artificial limbs became more effective. Neurosurgeons learned about treating wounds that affected the central nervous system after fractures to vertebrae, and the art of facial reconstruction was pioneered to help pilots who had crawled away from the wrecks of their planes alive but badly burned. This led to the founding of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons in 1921. At first plastic surgeons refused to perform surgery for cosmetic reasons, but by the 1930s attitudes had changed and nose jobs were all the rage in America, followed in the late 1940s by facelifts.
The facial reconstruction of a soldier who was wounded in July 1916 during the Battle of the Somme.
In the summer of 1919 Charlie was discharged from the army. His right foot would always be semi-paralyzed, he had damaged corneas in both eyes, and was deaf in his left ear, but he could walk, albeit with a pronounced limp. He was entitled to a monthly disability payment from the army but before he settled down, his mother urged him to go back to Montignac for the lovely French girl he never stopped talking about. He sailed on September 13, 1919, sending Valentine a cablegram from the ship; she was waiting for him when he arrived in Montignac. They went to the mayor’s office to file the necessary papers, waited two weeks for the banns to be read in church and then, on Monday, October 13, 1919, the mayor pronounced them man and wife in a ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville (town hall). The following morning there was a church wedding after which the entire town of Montignac turned out for the wedding feast. Tables made of planks of wood lined the streets, and several courses were served: chicken, veal, beef, lamb, and side dishes, accompanied by wine and liqueurs.
When Charlie and Valentine sailed back to the States, Valentine’s mother came with them. They set up home in New Haven, Connecticut, where Charlie got a well-paid job as a postal supervisor. For the first few years of marriage, Valentine regularly had to change the dressings on his wounded leg, and she also comforted him when he had nightmares about the battles he had witnessed. In 1920 they had a daughter, Edith, and in 1922 a son, Wilfred. French was the main language spoken in the household, so the children grew up bilingual and absorbed their mother’s love of arts and culture. Valentine obse
rved many French traditions, such as preparing French meals with a salad following the entrée, and she always enjoyed browsing through French fashion magazines.
The couple’s marriage lasted sixty years and in time they were able to enjoy nine grandchildren. Valentine was everything Charlie had imagined she would be when he saw her standing by the well in Montignac—and more, as she turned out to be a wonderful homemaker and an inspiring mother to their children. Some question whether love at first sight can turn into true love that will last, but for Lucky Charlie that was definitely the case.
Valentine, Charlie, Wilfred, and Edith in 1924. The family twice went back to France to visit, once when the children were young and again when they were in their teens.
Ernest
HEMINGWAY
&
Agnes von
KUROWSKY
A Red Cross fundraising poster, c. 1918. The international organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1917 for its outstanding work during the war.
Ernest Miller Hemingway
AMERICAN
Born: July 21, 1899
War work: Red Cross ambulance driver
Agnes von Kurowsky
AMERICAN
Born: January 5, 1892
War work: Red Cross nurse