HISTORICAL NOTE
Lovely War is a work of fiction, but several characters are real, and the timeline of Great War events depicted is real. The British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) privates and sergeants named are fictional, but the senior officers named are real. For more on the fate of the Fifth Army, see The Fifth Army in March 1918 by Walter Shaw Sparrow.
James Reese Europe, composer and conductor of the Clef Club Orchestra, and first lieutenant in the 15th New York National Guard (later the 369th US Infantry), helped kindle France’s love of jazz, along with other black army band conductors. During his time in Aix-les-Bains, he joked about never sleeping but staying up each night to copy “three million notes” as he arranged new scores. (I thought it would be fun to add Aubrey as his uncredited helper.)
Europe’s star rose along with those of Vernon and Irene Castle, white dance-duo super-celebrities of the pre-war years. They danced to Jim Europe’s music, using versions of African American dances that he had taught them. They were global phenomena, trend-setters, and style icons, helping bring African American music and dance into the worldwide mainstream.
Europe’s boundless creative energy and talent would surely have made James Reese Europe a household name had his life not been cut tragically short on May 9, 1919, by an unprovoked attack from a disgruntled drummer likely suffering from shell shock. For more on his remarkable life, leadership, and music, I suggest A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe by Reid Badger.
Captain Hamilton Fish III, K Company captain, was a Harvard football star and the son of a wealthy family with deep roots in American history and politics. Following the Great War, Hamilton Fish III was elected to the US House of Representatives, where he served for decades, a staunch advocate for veterans and soldiers, and for peace.
I used several Army Band members’ real names, including Pinkhead Parker (saxophone), Alex Jackson (tuba), and Luckey Roberts (piano). Jesús Hernandez (clarinet) was one of several horn players from Puerto Rico recruited by Jim Europe to round out his orchestra. Noble Sissle (drum major, vocals) went on to lead a band. His talent and charm are captured in footage available online. Sissle was one of Europe’s close friends, along with legendary jazz and ragtime piano composer Eubie Blake. (Blake claims it was Europe who coined the term “gig” to describe an event that a musician is hired to perform at.)
Events involving the Clef Club orchestra and the Harlem Hellfighters are all drawn from historical sources, starting with the Carnegie Hall “Concert of Negro Music,” and through to the victory parade marching up Fifth Avenue. Their experiences of persecution at Camp Dix, Camp Wadsworth, Saint-Nazaire, and Aix-les-Bains are all taken from the historical record. (A light postscript on the Carnegie Hall concert: some of my sources said ten upright pianos were used in the orchestra. Others claimed fourteen. I went with the smaller number, though this may be the only book in print that asserts ten pianos on a stage to be “the smaller number.”)
BLACK SERVICEMEN IN THE GREAT WAR
The story of America’s contribution to the final year of World War I is one of sacrifice, valor, and honor. But it’s not a story of unalloyed white heroism. The shameful truth of how black servicemen who risked all for their country suffered widespread hatred, betrayal, and violence from their country is a crucial part of the story.
The US 369th infantry wasn’t the only black regiment to see combat in the Great War. Of nearly 400,000 black American soldiers who served, 200,000 were sent to Europe, and of them, approximately 42,000 fought. The rest worked as dockworkers, gravediggers, road and railroad builders, and other heavy laborers, in the military branch known as SOS (Service of Supply). Black SOS soldiers were cruelly misused, worked from morning till night seven days a week, often given minimal food, clothing, or housing. They faced brutality, humiliation, and violent reminders that they were to bow to white authority; and that restaurants, shops, train cars, and most of all, white society, particularly, white women, were off-limits. One SOS soldier described their treatment as being “in the spirit of slavery.”*
THE LONG DARK NIGHT
As the Great War broke, white supremacy in America was having its post–Civil War heyday. White America, long scarred by the bitterness and divisions of the Civil War, was tired of remaining adversarial, North versus South. The political, economic, and cultural opportunities possible in healing the breach between North and South were too tempting to pass up. Segregation, whether eagerly embraced or quietly overlooked, became the compromise that lubricated a nationwide reunification of northern and southern political and economic interests, at the expense of black Americans’ legal, civil, and human rights.
Black activists described the period between 1890 and the Great War as “the long dark night.” With the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized “separate but equal” facilities, segregation, now legally blessed, soon infiltrated American life. Schools, trains, buses, restaurants, theaters, workplaces, churches, and civic spaces were segregated on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
White supremacy wasn’t the view of just a narrow, hateful fringe; it was ubiquitous, enshrined in the White House with the 1912 election of Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern Democrat elected since James Polk in 1844. As president of Princeton, Wilson had blocked all black applications to the university. As President of the United States, Wilson staffed his administration with Southern Democrats who dismissed and demoted black workers, segregating the postal service and the Department of the Treasury. Such policies helped residential segregation laws pass in southern state legislatures.
White supremacy rested—and still rests—on greed, specifically, the desire to enrich oneself with free or cheap labor or stolen resources, or to reduce competition for jobs and privileges by suppressing other groups’ eligibility; on fears of black political power at the polls; on fears of the strength of armed black resistance; and especially, on fears of contaminating the “purity” of the white race through interbreeding. It rested, therefore, upon sex as much as on dollars, laws, votes, and guns. “Degenerate” blacks had to be kept far from white women, and from circumstances that would display their intellect, capacity, character, strength, resolve, bravery, and ambition.
Where better to demonstrate these admirable qualities than through military service? Black Americans, eager to prove that black America could produce exemplary citizens and soldiers, flocked to the Great War, seeing it as a major opportunity. By contrast, white supremacist America—the America in full control of the reins of political power—saw armed black men trained in effective combat as their worst nightmare.
EXPORTING JIM CROW
Military white supremacists watched with alarm as the relatively egalitarian French embraced black soldiers as brothers-in-arms, fearing it would “spoil” them and further destabilize the “race problem” in America. The US Army forbade black soldiers from interacting with white women overseas, yet local women welcomed their company.
Finally, in desperation, US Army officials induced French counterparts to distribute a memorandum to French military officials titled “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.” W. E. B. du Bois published it in the NAACP magazine, Crisis, in 1919. Below are a few illustrative excerpts.
. . . the French public has become accustomed to treating the Negro with familiarity and indulgence.
Americans . . . are afraid that contact with the French will inspire in black Americans aspirations which to them [the whites] appear intolerable. . . .
Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible. The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence . . .
The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly. For instance, the black American troops in France have, by themselves, given rise to as many complaints for attempted rape as all the rest of the army. . . .*
The slanderous accusations regarding rape were utterly false.
To their credit, when higher French military command learned of the memo, they ordered that it be gathered and burned. At the war’s end, the French Army lavishly honored the contributions of black American servicemen, and the 369th’s in particular.
THE HEROES’ WELCOME
When the war ended in 1918, and black servicemen returned home, their evident pride, self-respect, and confidence infuriated southern white supremacists. Lynchings spiked in 1919. Black Great War veterans were frequent targets, and many more were beaten, threatened, and abused. Some faced violence simply for publicly appearing in uniform.
Conditions did not materially improve for most black Americans who served; for many, the aggressive backlash made things unbearable. But for better and for worse, black servicemen returning from the war were idealistic no more. They came home confident, angry, and determined; ready to organize and demand legal and civic rights. When World War II came along twenty-five years later, a million black soldiers served. Within twenty-five years of the Second World War’s end, the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act, had passed. Fighting for freedom despite violence and oppression became part of the generational context from which civil rights heroes emerged.
For more on black servicemen during and after the war, I recommend the extraordinary work Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I, by Adriane Lentz-Smith. For a closer look at the Harlem Hellfighters, see A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighters’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home, by Peter N. Nelson; and Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I, by Stephen L. Harris.
A 1977 documentary film, Men of Bronze: The Black American Heroes of World War I, directed by William Miles, then the official historian of the US 369th, features original footage of the Harlem Hellfighters, along with interviews with Captain Hamilton Fish III and other survivors from the regiment. The murders at Saint-Nazaire of men of the 15th New York National Guard (as they were then called) by marines, followed by retaliatory killing, are described in those interviews.
Many accounts chronicle the ugly reality of how all black Americans, Northern and Southern, were treated by white America during the early part of the twentieth century. I found Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, the autobiography of Richard Wright (also the author of Native Son), to be a riveting account of the chokehold racial hatred had during the war years and the decades that followed.
WOMEN AND WORLD WAR I
The Great War had a reverberating impact on women, particularly in the United Kingdom, where such a large percentage of men were pulled into the service of the war effort. Prior to the war, stringent laws and attitudes kept middle and upper-class British women within constrained, largely domestic spheres. Working-class women were chiefly employed as household servants, earning meager pay. Some women worked in factories, under appalling conditions, with wages they could scarcely live on.
When war broke out in Europe, millions of British men went overseas. Every industry now faced a dire labor crisis: farming, preaching, teaching, clerical work, entertainment, professional athletics, manufacturing, medicine, transportation, and more. Suddenly women were operating trains, driving trucks and ambulances, working in factories, assisting in hospitals, and even performing surgery. Women from every rung of the socioeconomic ladder stepped up to “do their bit.” Wealthy women organized charities and relief organizations for Belgian refugees, for war wounded, for widows and orphans. They opened hospitals and hired women doctors and nurses to staff them. Young women joined the Women’s Land Army and moved to the countryside to grow urgently needed food. The Red Cross employed thousands of nurses and nursing assistants. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) enlisted volunteers and secretaries at relief huts. Countless thousands of women left domestic servitude and took better-paying war production jobs in factories, turning out millions of artillery shells. For an engaging, thoughtful, and at times, hilarious account of how women stepped up to “do their bit” across all aspects of British life, I recommend Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One by Kate Adie.
Much of society was aghast to see women in the workplace, exposed to worldly vices. An anxious traditionalist element of society insisted that this “unnatural” state of affairs was temporary; as soon as the war ended, women would give up their jobs and return to domestic life, yielding jobs to the men. In large measure, this is what happened.
But women’s capacity had been proven, exposing the fallacy in the belief that women were too fragile, emotional, or unintelligent for political life. When the war ended, the British Parliament passed the “Representation of the People Act 1918,” granting suffrage (voting rights) to all men, regardless of property, and to all women over the age of thirty, with minimum property ownership requirements. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted American women the right to vote. In 1928, Parliament extended the Representation of the People Act, granting suffrage to all women over the age of twenty-one, on equal footing with men. (It took the Second World War drawing to a close for France to grant the vote to women in 1944.)
For a moving account of one young war nurse who became an activist for peace and women’s rights, I recommend Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. This beloved memoir stands as one of the greatest women’s accounts of the First World War. A 2014 BBC/Heyday Films feature film adaptation starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington beautifully depicts the book’s essence.
American women volunteered in large numbers as well, including African American women. Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, by Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn Magnolia Johnson, is a firsthand account that provides a frank look at the persecution faced, and the inspiring work done, by women who served as YMCA volunteers at the Camp Lusitania “Negro hut” at Saint-Nazaire.
IMPACT OF WORLD WAR I
World War I was the first war to use aircraft for surveillance and combat in any significant way, and the first war in which submarines were used to great effect. Tanks were invented during the Great War—a project directed by Winston Churchill—in hopes of bursting through the craters and barbed wire of no-man’s-land to penetrate enemy lines. By land, by sea, and by air, an entirely new form of war was waged, using heavy artillery field guns capable of bombing targets scores of miles away. Although nuclear weapons and smart missiles were yet to appear, World War I gave us modern warfare as we now know it.
Medical advances emerged from the treatment of the war’s millions of casualties. Modern weaponry created ghastly, debilitating injuries, but innovations in prosthetics and reconstructive surgery brought many an increased quality of life. Prosthetic facial masks, if eerie-looking, concealed gruesome facial injuries and lent their wearers dignity and privacy.
Injuries less likely to be seen, but no less debilitating for many, were mental and emotional. It wasn’t until later in the war that the concussive impact upon the brain of nearby explosions was better understood. It took longer still for the psychological devastation of trench warfare to be seen as a war injury and not mere cowardice or weakness. Manifestations of “shell shock” varied from uncontrollable shaking, to refusal to return to combat, to erratic behavior, suicide, nightmares, screaming, depression, anxiety, and violent behavior. Hospitals like the one in Maudsley grew in number and expanded their mental health facilities, designing them with comfort, therapy, rehabilitation, and medication management in mind. Pink walls and friendly, cheerful treatment were innovations. Though the world had, and still has, a long way to go in understanding, treating, and destigmatizing mental illness, it’s inspiring to see what gains were made in the name of compassion and sympathy for those who suffered in ways that, not long prior, would have been scorned as cowardly or “unmanly.”
A WAR OF THE OLD UPON THE YOUNG
Older men made the decisions that thrust the world into war in the summer of 1914, but it was chiefly the young who bore the war’s burden. Countless youth lied about their age and enlisted as young teens.
Throughout the war, soldiers who saw lives wasted in endless, futile carnage for no perceptible gain grew increasingly disillusioned with the middle-aged leaders who poured out young blood like water from the safety of their leather-backed chairs. The disparity between the gore and filth of the trenches and the image of heroic honor conjured by war propaganda caused a crisis of faith—both religious and patriotic—for millions.
Poets and artists in the trenches used art to lambaste this war apparently waged by the old upon the young. The works of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Alan Seeger, and Edward Thomas, and even the idealistic early war poetry of Rupert Brooke, stand as memorials to youth and innocence lost forever, alongside works by well-known writers and poets such as Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Women working at the Front, among them Vera Brittain, the author of Testament of Youth, contributed stunning poetry to the war canon. The Poetry Foundation has compiled an outstanding collection of World War I poetry on its website. It’s brilliant, bitter, and heartbreaking.
For memoirs and fictional accounts of life at the Front from soldiers who fought there, I recommend the perennial classics All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and Good-bye to All That, by Robert Graves.
The causes and provocations that led the world into such a devastating war aren’t easily distilled; perhaps for that reason, the First World War remains less understood than the Second. For eminently readable accounts of how we got into such a global mess, I recommend the highly acclaimed works The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, and The War That Ended Peace, by Margaret MacMillan.
IN MEMORIAM
Researching and writing Lovely War made me love these soldiers, these Tommys and Poilus and Doughboys and Anzacs and Jerrys who fought and died along the Western Front because they had no choice. But it wasn’t until I traveled to France and Belgium, visiting preserved trenches and underground tunnels, still-hollowed shell craters, breathtaking monuments, war museums, and row after row of pristine gravestones—witnessing Europe’s fidelity to their memory—that I began to glimpse the true cost of this war. I have never seen anything like it. Lovingly tended graves marked “Welsh Soldier, Known Only to God,” broke my heart.
A frequent theme in the writings of men at the Front was their marveling at how, over the shell-blasted wasteland of the killing fields, a glorious sunset could still paint the sky, or the freshness of dew and birdsong could still make morning sweet. Even in the trenches. For all its horror and despair, for many, the Great War sharpened life, showing it for the brief and fleeting gift it was, and revealing home, freedom, safety, family, beauty, and love to be precious beyond price.
Many never returned from the war. Others returned but were never the same. Still others returned to bigotry and hatred that history has yet to leave firmly in the past. They paid a price.
Their children paid a similar price in the global war that followed.
We owe a debt.
How might the twentieth century have gone if nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip had failed to assassinate Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand at a June parade in Sarajevo in 1914? Possibly some other spark would have lit the same fuse. Possibly not. We can’t know.
But we can choose to use whatever means lie in our own power to be agents of healing, hope, justice, plenty, and peace.