2

HIS PRIVATE WAR

Ernest had grown up in a so-called peacetime exploding with little wars all over the globe. These included the Seventh Cavalry’s genocidal attack on the Sioux at Pine Ridge, and the Philippines rebellion against overlord Spain, and then the self-liberated Filipino people fighting the U.S. in a bloody guerrilla war. Also in the Pacific, Japan’s army and navy humiliated imperial Russia in the 1905 war fought mainly at sea and in Manchuria. In China an anti-foreign movement, resentful of Christian evangelism and the importation of opium by the European powers, erupted in the Boxer Rebellion, involving U.S. marines, who themselves elsewhere invaded Mexico, Nicaragua, and Haiti. The Boer Wars in South Africa pitted British soldiers against Dutch settlers and made a popular hero of a daring young officer, Winston Churchill. The atmosphere was filled with glory and blood.

Lurid “yellow journalism” headlines, designed to generate sales and a popular fever for war, any war, anywhere, spread like fungi. One famous story, perhaps apocryphal, had the war-hawk newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst sending noted artist Frederick Remington to Cuba looking for war; when Remington cabled a lack of any real action, Hearst telegraphed: “YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES I’LL FURNISH THE WAR.” Important artists like George Bellows were recruited to portray German atrocities when the Great War broke out in Europe and the United States entered on the Allied side. Gutter journalists and publishers like Hearst and his rival Joseph Pulitzer outbid each other to fan the fires of warlust.

Ernest’s destiny called him to the colors in April 1918, when he was still a teenager.

Coinciding with a German offensive on the European western front that resulted in a blood-soaked Allied “victory” at the Second Battle of the Somme, Ernest quit the Kansas City Star and took off with a buddy for Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver. The year before, when the United States had declared “the war to end all wars” on Germany and Austria-Hungary, Ernest had tried enlisting in the army but was rejected for poor eyesight and his father’s refusal to sign the papers. But his idol Kipling’s Boer War tales of courage and adventure, and magazine articles about heroic American volunteer pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille, all climaxed in a perfect storm of anti-German “beastly Hun” propaganda that went to Ernest’s head.

Like so many innocent American youths Ernest believed World War I—the Great War—was a semi-religious crusade fought with conspicuous gallantry by knights in khaki. Hysterical war fever—“Kill The Hun!”—swept the country. Chicago streets changed most of their German names; German measles became “liberty measles” and sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.” Munitions makers, “merchants of death” like Remington Arms and DuPont chemical, made incredible fortunes out of a war that ultimately claimed thirty-seven million dead, wounded or missing (that is, blown into shreds).

Ernest was an emerging poet and reporter with one bad eye and a genetically inherited, undiagnosed condition known as the “Celtic Curse,” or hemochromatosis, an inability to absorb iron, which can cause serious fatigue and lead to death. But just recently out of high school, he was incredibly pumped up by the popular rush to a war that President Wilson insisted was morally pure. On his way to Europe to “do his part” by enlisting as an ambulance driver, he stopped briefly in New York where he mailed letters to his family boasting that he was now engaged to the famous silent film star Mae Marsh (she played the virginal white girl raped by a “renegade Negro” in D. W. Griffith’s sensationally racist Birth of a Nation). Years later, an elderly Ms. Marsh lamented what a shame she’d never met Ernest in real life.