THE FLEDGLING
Lewis was the only man to board the train at Richmond, but four or five hundred Marine recruits from the North kept the cars lively all night and the next day, until they reached a remote siding in the South Carolina low country at Yemassee.
A tugboat and barge bore them to Parris Island, where they were herded into the quarantine station, a few rows of tents in the sand dunes. There they surrendered their civilian clothing and were issued utilities, pajamas, cots and blankets.
Six days later Puller marched with others from quarantine to the supply depot, where he drew his uniforms and equipment, shouldered his sea-bag and marched to their new camp by the maneuver grounds. That night they were issued rifles, Springfield 1903’s. They spent hours cleaning and oiling the weapons. By daylight the next morning they were through breakfast, had tried on their uniforms, policed their camp, and were on the parade ground. They formed companies.
The Drill Instructor of Puller’s company was a towering Paris-born Dane, Corporal John DeSparre, an athlete who spoke six languages and a student of history who had walked the battlefields of Schleswig-Holstein in his youth with his father. DeSparre soon noticed the soldierly Lewis Puller and marched around to face him.
“What’s your name?”
“Private Puller, sir.”
“Repeat.”
Lewis growled it again, with such spirit that DeSparre thought he must be one of the hardened veterans of the Philippine fighting. Within three days DeSparre decided that Puller was the natural leader of the company and gave him a platoon to handle.
Lewis took it off like a veteran and on the first afternoon had his men going passably through squad movements, a process usually requiring two or three days. Within a week Puller had the platoon on his own. DeSparre expressed his amazement to his sergeant: “I know he looks like he ought to be in three-cornered pants, but by God, he’s a Marine. He looks as if he must sleep at attention. You know I always have to tell ’em to look mean and nasty out there marching, but I never had to tell him. He’s a natural. And he never makes the same mistake twice. He’s already made the company Number One for parades, and he did it by himself.”
“A perfect D.I.,” the sergeant said. “We can use him. Drive him. They’re pushing us to get ’em ready for overseas in a couple weeks.”
Once a week there was a sunset parade and on Saturday morning the Commanding General’s inspection, under the eye of General Jack Myers, a Medal of Honor man from the Siege of Peking who seemed to Lewis the ideal of the officer. He could not fail to see, however, that the camp was actually run by two brothers by the name of Broadstrum, a major and a veteran gunnery sergeant who had become a warrant officer. They helped shape Puller’s opinion that former enlisted men as officers were superior to graduates of academies or colleges.
The training at recruit camp went on for two months, followed by two weeks on the rifle range, where an instructor stood over every recruit with a swagger stick. When they missed, the sticks rapped hard on their heads. Puller got no raps. “I don’t know where,” DeSparre told his sergeant, “but he learned it somewhere. He knows how.”
DeSparre examined Puller on military history and beat a retreat: “Hell, he gives me an inferiority complex. I’ve read some, but that kid knows von Clausewitz backwards—and guys I never heard of, by the dozen. He’s some kid. This stuff is like a religion with him. He takes in all this stuff about the Huns and their atrocities. He hates ’em like sin.”
The noncoms admired Puller’s work on the bayonet field, where big signs read: ADVANCE TO KILL! DeSparre set Lewis against bigger men, but Puller was too fast for them, and invariably bested his opponents.
Puller was among the five per cent of the class chosen for noncommissioned officers’ school and went into Drill Instructors’ training under Captain Jimmy Wayt, a spectacularly profane and ungrammatical old Marine who taught minor tactics and steeped the recruits in the duties of guard troops, squad leaders and sergeants.
Lewis met a fellow Virginian, Tom Pullen, the cheerleader who had yelled for him at the William and Mary football game long ago; they went into Drill Instructors’ school together, but both mourned the departure of their old companies to France, where they were to be used as replacements.
For two months the class went through intensive drills in the bayonet, rifle, boxing, judo and infantry drill. One October evening they were told that they were shipping for Europe and Puller and Pullen went with their group to the mainland and entrained for Quantico. The two Virginia boys used their first hours of liberty in months by walking about the little Marine town, staring at civilians and into store windows, then went into a restaurant where, after solemn deliberation, each ordered a dollar’s worth of ham and eggs.
Despite the obvious waning of the war in Europe there was uncertainty and the battalion remained on the base, training in trench warfare in the miles of ditches in a section dubbed Château-Thierry. One day the men were told that their orders had come, and they were packed to leave for Hoboken, New Jersey, to ship out for France. The move was postponed for several days, until Armistice Day canceled the orders.
The replacement battalion was then reinforced by other troops and sent to San Domingo to help put down the rebellion there, but Puller was once more sidetracked from combat. He was detached and sent to the third Officers’ Training School. He told Tom Pullen: “I’m going to stay in the Corps, one way or another. I’m qualified for it. I don’t know about civilian life.”
The winter was unusually bad and the students spent much of it in the wet, snow-filled pits of Château-Thierry, learning the details of trench fighting. Lewis already began to suspect that General Pershing’s real contribution in Europe was to get the Germans out of the trenches and return to open warfare after four years of senseless slaughter. Puller looked at the Virginia trenches with an eye to how they might be flanked and their occupants defeated. His instructors found that when called upon in class he had ideas of his own, expressed them belligerently, and could not be influenced by rank or position. There were several gifted instructors: Captain William Rupertus, who would become a Marine general; Eric Johnston, the future movie czar; Dr. Frank Graham, a future university president and United Nations official; and Francis Parkman, who became head of the National Council of Independent Schools.
Puller graduated in June, ranking 128th in his class, with a final average of 2.91. He became a Second Lieutenant on June 4. Two weeks later, when he had finished machine gun school, the end of the war brought a huge cut in the Marine Corps. On June 16 Puller was discharged with hundreds of others of his rank, and he was at loose ends. He had been a Marine officer for two weeks.
He went to West Point for a few days and then with a friend, ex-Lieutenant Lawrence R. Muth, he went north to enlist in a Polish-American army then being raised in Long Island, bound for Europe to help liberate the Poles. They stopped in Washington and quite by accident met Captain Rupertus at Marine Headquarters.
“What are you boys doing?”
When they explained the plight of Poland and their plan to enlist Rupertus countered: “If I were you, I’d go down to Haiti. You’ll get commissions in the constabulary down there. They need men, and there’s plenty of fighting. You’d see action and have some fun.”
Puller and Muth went into a hallway and discussed the matter briefly, and though Puller still yearned for the battlefields of Poland, they agreed to sign for the Gendarmerie d’Haiti.
Lewis had a few more days at home, then found himself in Charleston, South Carolina, with Muth, boarding a transport for Haiti. He was barely twenty-one years old.