Camp Meade was only months old, one of sixteen army cantonments thrown up in a patriotic frenzy of digging, sawing, and hammering in the weeks after Wilson’s appeal to Congress that spring. It still smelled of fresh wood when the first new draftees began reporting even before many outbuildings were finished, and by October 1917, some twenty-three thousand men filled the camp, where more than a hundred thousand soldiers would be trained by war’s end.
Hammett arrived at Camp Meade as a private. On July 12, following basic training, he was assigned to Motor Ambulance Corps Number Forty-Nine and began helping to shuttle sick and wounded soldiers, many returned from Europe, to the hospital. Out of this job would come two formative tragedies.
The big boxy Fords and GMs outfitted for the army’s new ambulance corps were an improvement over the horse-drawn wagons they were replacing, but they were also clumsy for driving, even in camp, far from the European front; their high wheels were good for crossing streams in a hurry but left the vehicles tippy when stacked full with patients. Volunteers operating the motor ambulances close to the European fighting employed some tricky maneuvering; to get around the challenges of the Ford’s gravity-fed gasoline system, which made it prone to stall on steep grades, some drove uphill in reverse. The brakes were also not designed for mountains, according to an army historian: “Drivers kept an eye peeled for strategically placed trees that could stop them if necessary. Sometimes patients had unforgettable rides.”1
Sometime that summer or early fall, Hammett would remember, he was driving an ambulance filled with wounded soldiers when it flipped over, with a terrible result: the men were thrown out onto the roadside. “He hit a rock or something and dumped the patients and he never touched a car after that,” remembered his daughter Mary, born well after the war. “He refused to drive, absolutely refused to drive.” As hazardous as these ambulance coaches were to maneuver, however, nine decades later no record can be found of Hammett’s traumatic accident at Meade. But the fact remains that, after the war, he almost never got behind the wheel if he could avoid it, citing this painful memory. Whatever the reason, something spooked him about driving, and in later years the wartime incident may also have served as a more manly sounding explanation when his illness left him too weak to safely operate a car.
Of the second episode at Meade there can be no doubt, since it was part of a much wider calamity that came on the heels of the world war: a deadly influenza in 1918–19 that killed many times more human beings than the Great War itself, claiming between twenty and forty million victims worldwide. It infected more than a quarter of all Americans, of whom some 675,000 died—a virus unprecedented for its deadly range, striking down people in their prime more than just the very young and old. A feverish young boy could go to sleep comforted by his mother, only to wake hours later to find she had been taken by the flu instead. It was a nightmarish, wracking death, from which victims often died after turning dark blue from choking on what a doctor called “a blood-tinged froth.”
The war and its network of army camps, featuring large clusters of men and their frequent deployments, sped the contagion along. “One in every sixty-seven soldiers in the army died of influenza and its complications,” the historian John M. Barry has pointed out, “nearly all of them in a ten-week period beginning in mid-September.”2 First appearing in the Midwest that spring, the virus infected men at Camp Funston in Kansas before traveling to the port city of Brest, France, loosed in a country where two million American servicemen were stationed. A more virulent strain returned to the States that fall. In early September, sick sailors aboard the Harold Walker left Boston for the Philadelphia Navy Yard, with others sailing on to deliver the virus to New Orleans and Mexico. By October 4, almost five thousand men were sick at Illinois’s Camp Grant, with four hundred and five hundred deaths daily; while at Camp Devens, outside Boston, fifteen hundred soldiers were reported ill on a single day. After seeing dozens of soldiers die, an army physician laid out the flu’s awful stages for a colleague:
Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face until it is difficult to distinguish the colored men from the white.3
In mid-September, the influenza had turned up at Camps Dix and Meade, the two cantonments nearest the wildly infected city of Philadelphia. Working in the ambulances, Hammett of course would have been regularly exposed to the virus as he delivered feverish soldiers to the infirmary. On October 6, three weeks after the virus reached camp, he fell ill himself, reporting a high temperature and chronic cough. (His medical report lists pneumonia, situated in his lower right lung.) He was shortly transferred from a field to a base hospital, where he spent eight days unable even to sit up in bed. After twenty days, he was returned to active service, weak and emaciated, his rib cage wracked and lungs frayed; but unlike the scores of soldiers carried from infirmaries to morgues, he was unmistakably alive. He had survived what was then his closest brush with death, yet had little idea the full extent to which it had broken down his body.4
“I have always had good health until I contracted influenza,” he would tell an army clinician. By February 1919, he was back in the camp hospital with “acute bronchitis,” complaining of a lasting cough and morning soreness in his throat. The symptoms were treated straightforwardly as lingering inflammation, an aftereffect, and Hammett returned to duty after four days in the hospital. By late April, he had made sergeant. In the group photo taken that month with the men of his ambulance corps he looks almost healthful, his face not especially gaunt beneath the rim of his doughboy hat. But he was back in the hospital on May 29, his breathing labored and leaving him dizzy. He had night sweats.5
This time doctors pronounced his condition untreatable: he had tuberculosis, they said, caught during his army service. He was judged 25 percent disabled, and a medical discharge was recommended that same day.
In fact, though he likely contracted it in the army, Hammett had possibly been exposed to the disease first as a child. His mother’s cough was a familiar sound around the house, leading some to speculate that his wartime bout of influenza had possibly weakened him enough to waken a long dormant strain of TB. “Primary” TB, however, as opposed to “reactivation” TB, starts in the lower lobes of the lungs, as Hammett’s seemed to, attacking his already weakened respiratory system.6 Certainly the army believed he had contracted it in camp. On May 30, 1919, he left the army as a sergeant with an honorable discharge and a small pension, a twenty-five-year-old former shadow man now too short-winded to climb a set of stairs. Hammett came home a disabled veteran of a war he had never seen, whose fighting he had heard about from wounded men in his ambulance. He was back with his parents after less than a year, his health wrecked, but hoping somehow to return to work as a detective.
At the time of his diagnosis, tuberculosis was no longer the romantic-sounding “consumption” that had taken John Keats, the affliction that sent patients for enforced rest in the country, where they often died out of sight. Ever since 1882, when Robert Koch spotted “beautifully blue” tubercle bacilli among the brown animal tissue under his microscope, it had been known as an often deadly communicable disease of the poor, transmitted among passengers in steerage, tenants packed in overcrowded slums, or, in Hammett’s case, from cot to cot in a teeming army hospital. It was no less deadly a disease than before Koch’s discovery, but now carried a more shameful stigma because of its communicability. It was the mark of the patient’s marginality, and even if a person’s health seemed to return, there was always the specter of a hacking end in which the body withered and the lungs filled with blood.
It was no wonder that Hammett chose to make the most of his time between relapses. “His illness caused him to conclude that it was useless to take good care of yourself,” wrote his daughter Jo. “He told me that the guys in the army hospital who followed the doctor’s orders, got lots of rest and good nights’ sleep, did worse than those like himself who sneaked out to town and smoked, drank, and helled around when they could. He believed that the disease respected toughness, a quality that my father admired greatly.”7 Hammett made very few decisions in favor of his health, smoking and drinking when he was strong enough, feeling, as many “lungers” understandably did, that his present life was borrowed and his future short and deadly.
During his time away, Hammett’s parents had moved nearby to a house on West Lexington Street. Although he appears in the city directory at this address only as “salesman,” he probably did part-time work for Pinkerton’s, as his strength permitted, to supplement his pension. In December 1919 his health again worsened, army doctors pronounced him 50 percent disabled, and his pension was raised to forty dollars per month. Over the first few months of the New Year came another ebbing of his symptoms, and by May his tuberculosis had receded enough that he seized the chance to set out on his own.
He headed all the way to Spokane, Washington, a fast-growing northern rail center whose population had just passed one hundred thousand, earning it a new outpost of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency—a promise of work if Hammett’s body held out. The wet cold of the Pacific Northwest wasn’t necessarily better for Hammett’s lungs, but over the few months before his health crashed again he collected a number of detecting adventures he would later exploit—in the mining country, on the ranches, in small towns in Washington, in Oregon, or in Montana, where he transported a prisoner outside a dying gold mining town:
Taking a prisoner from a ranch near Gilt Edge, Mont., to Lewiston one night, my machine broke down and we had to sit there until daylight. The prisoner, who stoutly affirmed his innocence, was clothed only in overalls and shirt. After shivering all night on the front seat his morale was low, and I had no difficulty in getting a complete confession from him while walking to the nearest ranch early the following morning.8
From early on, Hammett knew how to make his sketches more believable with a mix of street knowledge and self-deprecation, an approach that gained him the benefit of the reader’s doubt, whether the story was about his achieving a confession from a chilled prisoner in a broken-down car or going undercover as a member of the Civic Purity League.
After his months in Spokane and Seattle, the operative’s life again proved too much, and by October 1920, when his weight had dropped from around 150 pounds to 132, he was complaining once more of weakness and a shortness of breath. He was again hospitalized for “pulminary tuberculosis.”9 Until then, each breakdown in his health had taken something away—his livelihood as a full-time Pinkerton, his army career—but with his transfer to a new sanitarium outside Tacoma, his awful disease would finally add something wonderful to his existence.