Monk Eastman

by Neil Hanson

  The lives of local residents in the Catskills were also heavily disrupted. A farmer—plainly not a regular letter-writer—wrote to the commanding officer of the 106th Infantry complaining that “the gates on the water works is all the times open by the solders and i cant get my cows whare be long thay rune all over and i want my rites and is gonto have it.9 i aint got no rite on the waterworks for thay halt me with the gun at me when i go for the cows tend to this rite away.” In reply, one of the regiment’s officers noted that leaving all the gates shut would require a trooper making a round-trip patrol to dismount and mount 344 times.

  The water company protested that soldiers were smashing locks to shelter in its buildings, opening manhole covers and throwing things into the water supply, and burning wooden fences as fuel, but the most serious incidents saw them firing on suspicious figures, glimpsed in the darkness. One farmer claimed he had been repeatedly fired at while driving to and from his farm in his automobile, and a guardsman was shot dead by a comrade when his rifle discharged accidentally while the two chased after two suspicious figures.10 11

  Meanwhile, Monk and the other raw recruits had been issued uniforms, blankets, and an empty cot mattress or ticking to fill with straw. They were temporarily housed in a tented camp in Van Cortlandt Park, where conditions left much to be desired. The regimental surgeon complained of shortages of basic medical supplies and typhoid and smallpox vaccines, and criticized the glaring defects of the facilities. In spite of the fact that the expenditure of just fifty dollars would have solved the problem, two companies were without bathing facilities, while drinking water could be cut off at almost any time.12 There were also disciplinary problems with the new recruits. The commanding general complained that, contrary to his orders, enlisted men were carrying pistols when out on the streets. They were probably doing so only in the hope of impressing girls, but their regimental commander was strongly reminded that soldiers were only to carry arms when on authorized military duty.

  Commanders and junior officers alike were also upbraided for the dilatory and tardy way they responded to orders from higher on the chain of command. “Our country is in an actual state of war, and defects and neglects that might have been condoned during annual encampments and maneuvers are now serious.13 The Division Commander trusts it will not be necessary to make examples of any offenders, regardless of rank, to impress upon all the seriousness of the present situation.”

  On September 29, 1917, escorted by veterans of the regiment, the men of the 106th Infantry marched through New York to the Twenty-third Street ferry. No one among the cheering crowds lining the streets to see them pass was aware that among the ranks of marching men, unrecognized by any of his former friends or his foes in the police department, marched Private Edward Eastman. After crossing the Hudson, the infantrymen boarded a train of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, bound for Camp Wadsworth, near Spartanburg in South Carolina, where they were to begin an intensive course of training in modern warfare.

  The train was formed from old wooden Pullman sleepers that had been banned for passenger use and pensioned off many years before, but which had now been rescued from storage yards all over the country and brought back into use. The sleeping berths were not used, so the men slept on the seats. An order from the adjutant general required all railroad shipments of equipment to be loaded to the equivalent of 110 percent of the designated capacity of the car, and the troops, jammed closely together, would have been forgiven for thinking that the same ruling had been applied to them.14 They were fed from a kitchen car on stew or canned beans, corned beef, bread and butter, coffee, and bread pudding made from stale bread. The troops assigned to kitchen duty dragged “forty quart cans of this miserable stuff” along the aisles and spooned it into mess kits.

  While they traveled slowly south, the new recruits had ample time to study a pamphlet issued to each of them, setting out their commanding general’s military philosophy and his views on discipline, efficiency, and sexual activity, including a doom-laden warning about the dangers of resorting to prostitutes, headed “ALL PROSTITUTES ARE DISEASED … There is a stinking, dirty disease which men acquire from prostitutes.15 It is called Chancroid. It causes the flesh to ulcerate, rot and fall away. Sometimes it causes a man’s penis to rot off. When a crab loses a claw another one grows in place of it. But when a man loses his penis he never gets another. He may lose a leg and get a wooden leg. But a wooden penis …” Nonetheless, despite such dire warnings, young men who might be killed within a few weeks did not want to die virgins, and many resorted to prostitutes while in South Carolina, and later, in France.

  Three miles outside Spartanburg, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Camp Wadsworth was reached by Snake Road, an unpaved and often washed-out rough track. Four-wheel-drive trucks carried the recruits from the railroad siding to a cotton field in full bloom “where the soft red clay was up to our ears.16 We sloshed around in it, we slept in it, and when it was dry and the wind blew, we even ate it.” The camp was still a work in progress as they took up residence, with chain gangs of South Carolina convicts working on the roads.

  The soldiers themselves had to clear the trees to make camp, the first manual labor that some of the former clerks in the regiment had ever carried out. There were few permanent buildings on the site, and no wooden barracks or permanent latrines, because the division was expected to be posted overseas before many weeks elapsed. Instead, to their mingled disappointment and disbelief, the men of the 106th Infantry were housed in neat rows of square army tents that seemed to stretch away as far as the eye could see. Each squad of ten or eleven men occupied a tent set over a wood floor with wooden walls about four feet high. A wood-burning, cone-shaped stove stood in the center, with a chimney poking out of a hole in the apex of the tent like the poles at the top of a wigwam.17

  The camp was crowded; a shortage of trained and trainable officers meant that a U.S. division of twenty-eight thousand men was twice as big as a British, French, or German division, and even the officers they did have were virtually untrained for the kind of warfare they would be entering. For officers trained at West Point prior to the U.S. declaration of war in the spring of 1917, the war in Europe might not have been taking place at all, and no attempt was made to draw lessons from it; “while the French bled to death before Verdun, the cadets at West Point inspected Gettysburg.”18

  The overcrowding at Camp Wadsworth contributed to regular outbreaks of trouble. The 107th Infantry in particular was a volatile mix of blue bloods, Wall Street bankers, and upstate farmers. Despite orders emphasizing that at no time in their history had discipline been so important, it was far from good at first. A liquor still was found a few feet from where Major General O’Ryan’s headquarters was to be sited, and fifty military police were on permanent patrol on the streets of Spartanburg to deter and control drunken soldiers. During inspections, O’Ryan found men wearing sweaters and overalls rather than military uniform, and half a company drilling while the rest slept or played games.19 O’Ryan addressed the officers about discipline and strict obedience to orders as soon as he arrived, but he described reveille the next morning as “the worst I have ever observed … Officers appeared to be unable to get men out.” One sergeant of the 106th Infantry was still asleep in bed, and to O’Ryan’s fury, it was revealed that “it was not customary in this regiment for the men to turn out on rainy mornings.” Things were so bad at first that when other regiments of the 27th Division passed the 106th Infantry on the march, they taunted them about it.

  The men of the 106th were also christened “Champs of the French Leave Brigade,” with the worst record for the number of men absent from camp without leave.20 Those caught were shipped back to camp under guard, had the entire cost of their transport, food, and lodging for themselves and their guards deducted from their pay, and were then disciplined, usually by a spell in the newly erected barbed-wire prison stockade, so brightly lit that it was christened “Luna Park” by the sarcastic soldie
rs. As a result of the high incidence of French Leave among the 106th Infantry, the entire regiment was confined to camp and an example was made of Private William Kauffman, who was charged with desertion and sentenced to five years’ hard labor in the disciplinary barracks at Fort Jay, New York.21 He could perhaps count himself fortunate that his sentence was not more severe, for desertion in time of war was a capital offense.

  Camp Wadsworth also saw an occasional outbreak of the sort of criminal activity with which Monk had long been associated, including three privates convicted for passing counterfeit checks and sentenced to between five and seven years’ hard labor.22 However, Monk submitted surprisingly quickly to the discipline of the regular army, and throughout the regiment’s long stay in South Carolina, he was never involved in disciplinary proceedings, nor was he ever absent without leave.

  The presence of so many soldiers sometimes provoked friction with the local inhabitants, and there was consistent hostility between the townspeople and the black 369th Infantry, who at first shared Camp Wadsworth, though they were rigidly segregated from the men of the 27th Division; the army even insisted that the division’s black cooks be replaced by white ones.23 The mayor of Spartanburg was no less prejudiced, complaining to the War Department that “with their northern ideas about race equality” the black troops would expect to be treated “like white men. I can say right here that … they will be treated exactly as we treat our resident negroes. This thing is like waving a red flag in the face of a bull.” The potential for severe disorder was demonstrated when African-American soldiers of the 24th Infantry rioted in Houston after rough treatment by the local population. Seventeen people were killed in the riots, and thirteen black soldiers were subsequently hanged for mutiny. In Spartanburg there were racial taunts and regular brawls until December 1917, when the War Department, alarmed by the events in Houston, hastily sent the 369th Infantry to France. There they trained with the French and, christened the “Harlem Hellfighters,” distinguished themselves in several battles.

  Fistfights between Spartanburg residents and white soldiers remained common, and there could have been no more reassuring figure to have at your side in a brawl than Monk. His scarred and battered face was probably sufficient warning to Spartanburg tough guys that this was one soldier it would be wise to avoid provoking. Any trouble there may have been for Monk and his buddies around the town was settled without the intervention of the police; neither Edward Eastman, William Delaney, nor any of Monk’s numerous other aliases was ever written on the blotter at Spartanburg police headquarters.

  The training program for Monk and his comrades had been expected to last only sixteen weeks. British instructors were brought in to supervise the training and, though some American officers found them intolerably overbearing, they did at least have experience of trench warfare and the conditions on the Western Front that their American allies would soon be facing.24 They laid great emphasis on physical fitness to “tighten the relation between the mind and muscle, so that the latter would become automatically and instantaneously responsive to the former, and the former instantaneously resourceful in applying methods to aid the latter when hard-pressed.”

  There were three hours of physical drill every morning and afternoon, and the men received additional instruction in unarmed combat from the redoubtable Frank Moran, a heavyweight boxer who had fought Jess Willard and Jack Johnson for the heavyweight championship of the world, and whose knockout punch, nicknamed “Mary Ann,” was “first cousin to the kick of an artillery mule and sister-in-law of a bolt of lightning.”25 One man from each company was detailed to take instruction from Moran, and they in turn trained the rest of their companies. It is doubtful if Monk needed much instruction in fistfighting, and boxing skills did not appear ideally suited to trench warfare, but Moran claimed that “it helps a man with his bayonet drill if he is a good boxer. It gives him quickness, confidence and strength. The English and Canadians who have gone over the top and have done some hot bayonet fighting tell me that it is just like a fistfight behind the shower baths when you run up against some Looie or Heinie in a trench: You watch ‘is bloomin’ heyes and you let im’ ’ave it.” The Pittsburgh-born Moran’s attempt at a Cockney accent while recounting this was, the regimental newspaper reported, “the kitten’s overalls.”

  Monk and his comrades also labored long and hard digging practice trenches on the hills behind the camp to simulate the battlefield conditions they would soon face. The practice trench system eventually covered a front of seven hundred yards, backed by eight miles of twisting, intersecting trenches, incorporating shelters, bombproof dugouts, reserve lines, and communication trenches. Colonel Vanderbilt, supervising construction of the trenches, had his engineers lay them out on a grid pattern like the streets of Manhattan, with which every member of the division was familiar.26 The main communication trenches were named Broadway and Fifth Avenue, and the cross-trenches were christened Thirty-fourth Street, Forty-second Street, and so on. The result was that every man could instantly orient himself and navigate his way through the system. Whether it would help them when they entered the less-helpfully named and laid-out trenches of the Western Front remained to be seen.

  Having completed the trenches, they then discovered to their dismay that, just as on the Western Front, they would have to dig them all over again because the divisional artillerymen would be getting their practice by shelling the trenches. The artillery was sited a mile away, and the men detailed to repair the ruins were stationed far enough away to protect them from the shells and shell shock, but close enough to witness the destruction of their handiwork. The bombardment continued for an hour, and as soon as it stopped, the infantry and the engineers had to reoccupy and rebuild the shattered trenches in the shortest possible time.

  The men also had to practice moving up and entering the trenches in complete silence and pitch darkness. At 8:30 on the evening of November 19, 1917, Monk and his comrades in the 106th Infantry were ordered to prepare at once to enter the trenches for a twelve-hour tour of duty.27 Sergeants rushed down the company street rousting out the men, who had been excused from their duties that afternoon and had mostly turned in for a nap. Carrying blanket rolls, haversacks, canteens, picks, shovels, rifles, and heavy equipment but no ammunition, the soldiers formed up, waited silently while every ninth man fell out to pick up a dark lantern that gave only a glimmer of light, and then moved off.

  Just as would happen on the Western Front, a guide met the men at the entrance to the trenches. They followed the guide as best they could, “despite the fact you couldn’t see the hat of the man in front of you, the red clay wall to your left, nor the firing step to your right.”28 The trench was barely wider than the men, was slippery underfoot, and twisted and turned. The firing steps had also been revetted in places, and the stakes driven into the mud often caught on their overcoats or tore the laces of their leggings. “Occasionally a man stumbled or jammed his foot against a rock. Hoarsely but with vast emotion he cursed—cursed the war, the trenches, the Kaiser and like obnoxious things.”

  The platoons deployed into the support, cover, and firing trenches, lay on their stomachs on the parapet or stood on the firing step, about fifty feet apart, and settled down to watch and wait, peering into the ground mist. In front of them was “No Man’s Land”—two hundred yards wide and punctuated by “a jaded barbed-wire fence, a narrow creek and a scant strip of woods.”29 The men had been told that the penalty for falling asleep on sentry duty on the Western Front was death; they wouldn’t be shot for sleeping in the Wadsworth trenches, but by the time their punishment had ended, they would wish that they had been.

  As the hours crawled by, some men could not resist the temptation to raise their heads a little to peer out toward the enemy lines. Every time one did so, the field telephone would buzz and the “umpires” declared the man “dead.” Two patrols were sent out, creeping silently over the parapet, but both were spotted at once and also declared casualties. The rest
of their comrades remained on trench guard throughout the night, “through a fog that froze the marrow and a hard, dull bitterness of cold that contracted the innards.”30 Their eyes tired and sore from peering into the mist, sentries shouted challenges at enemy soldiers who turned out to be scraps of paper or clumps of cotton bolls moving in the breeze, and when the enemy finally did come creeping along the creek bed and through the trees toward them, the sentries failed to spot them. The men were relieved at six in the morning, given a cup of scalding coffee, and led back to their shelters bleary-eyed, filthy, and utterly weary.

  Although heavily censored, the reports filed by British observers were very critical of the American men’s performance.31 The observers had entered the trenches undetected and calmly watched the Americans peering into the darkness, trying to spot the men who were already standing, unseen, behind them. The failure of some of the soldiers to keep absolute silence and avoid showing lights was also criticized, though in an effort to lessen the sting of the comments, it was claimed that the observers had also commented upon the excellence shown by men who had never before been on trench guard.

  Each battalion in turn also went into the practice trenches for a forty-eight- or seventy-two-hour spell—Monk’s Second Battalion began their first one at 9:00 p.m. on November 23, 1917—and was then subjected to a simulated gas attack using lachrymator (tear gas) and smoke bombs. Practice continued until every man could put on and adjust his mask within six seconds.32

  British and French officers also continued training the American soldiers on every other aspect of the war they would soon be fighting, from trench routine and trench raids to the dangers of booby traps and German subterfuges on the battlefield. British instructors also taught the men grenade-throwing; like almost all their weaponry and equipment, the grenades used were British. The steel, egg-shaped casing of the “Mills bomb” was scored with vertical and horizontal lines, like the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe, and when the grenade exploded, it fragmented along those lines, hurling lethal shrapnel in all directions. The thrower often pulled the steel firing pin with his teeth, and the grenade detonated about seven seconds later—in theory, enough time to throw it, but not long enough for the target to retrieve it and throw it back. The straight-armed throwing action taught by British instructors was more like bowling in English cricket than a baseball throw, and Americans often struggled to adapt to it.33 While tests showed that it was better than the baseball catcher’s snap throw, the baseball outfielder’s throw gave the greatest range and accuracy and was the one used by American troops. Monk had a natural aptitude for it and repeatedly proved himself to be among the most powerful, fearless, and accurate of grenade throwers.