CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Some men chose to flee into the breaking waves to avoid testifying. “KOEHLER WITNESSES ESCAPE IN ROWBOAT,” read the headline in The New York Times.1 “RISK LIVES TO FLEE FROM KOEHLER TRIAL” dueled the Sun, reporting that on the afternoon of Monday, March 2, three enlisted men “took their lives in their hands and fled across icy, tide swept Plum Gut.”2 The soldiers “are said to have been actuated by fear of a grilling on the stand,” word having spread of the defense counsel’s “particularly severe examination.”3
The men had reason to fear worse, for Garrison’s threat to try anyone “spreading scandal and making false charges” was reported in Monday’s papers.
The three soldiers rowed to the nearest spot on Long Island, Orient Point, where they “abandoned their skiff and were last seen running in the direction of Greenport”—a distance of nine miles.
That wasn’t the kind of running away Charles Post had in mind when he wrote in Harper’s about high numbers of desertions, and the man now in charge of Fort Terry, Captain Patten (who was scheduled to testify for Ben), seemed rather blasé about the episode. Patten didn’t threaten the scared soldiers, telling the Times that a charge of desertion would depend on how long they stayed away.
The identities of the fleeing men are not known. They were not among the sixteen accusers; for by the end of the day on March 2, all sixteen would finish testifying.
“No time is being lost,” as the Times put it.
Outside the courtroom, a record-breaking blizzard was hurling sleet and snow, causing deaths, breaking telegraph lines, and stranding thousands in New York City, but for the jurors stuck on Plum Island, the raunchy stories continued without interruption.4
Harvey Kernan, who worked in the hospital tent during the drill season, began the day’s testimony with an account that Ben showed up one evening holding a flashlight and asked him, “Would you like to have one like that?” which Kernan took as a reference to penis size. According to Kernan, Ben then advised him to “marry a big Swede girl, she could hatch one,” and ran his hand over Kernan’s back.5
Under cross-examination by Hudson, Kernan made a series of revealing admissions including that Mills “insisted that I give an opinion of Major Koehler’s character” that Kernan “did not wish to give.”
“I knew absolutely nothing based on facts,” Kernan said.
Apparently, Kernan had told Hawthorne in his informal, pretrial interview that there was only “ordinary conversation” from Ben, but Kernan now claimed not to remember all he had said to Hawthorne, though he did recall that it was Worcester who told him to speak with Mills, even though Kernan had never told Worcester anything about an advance by Ben.
When Mayes resumed his questioning, Kernan returned to his original story about Ben’s having put his hand on Kernan’s back, though he subsequently went along with Hudson’s theory that he may have considered Ben’s actions improper because of gossip he had heard.
Kirby picked up on the theme of misinterpretation. He asked, “When Major Koehler showed you an electric flashlight saying ‘Would you like to have one like that?’ what did you understand him to mean?”
“I understood a penis that size.”
“Why did you understand a penis?”
“From the nature of one or two talks and from the nature of the gossip that I had heard.”
“Did he say anything at this particular moment to draw your attention to the fact that it was a penis that was meant?”
“No, sir.”
“When he asked you this question ‘How would you like to have one like that?’ or words to the same effect, what reply did you make?”
“I said if I did I would not have to work any more, or something of that nature.”6
On that peculiar note, Kernan stepped down from the witness stand.
“Give us the exact words,” Hudson asked the next witness, John Barrett.
“Why, he asked me this day if I woke up with a hard-on and I told him yes, sir. He said to me ‘You want to get a fat boy and leave the women alone.’”7
“Fat boy” proved a recurring phrase among the accusers. Had instructions circulated to use it as a reference to Ben’s stockiness? A “fat boy” was the opposite of the era’s masculine ideal, for social directions writ large held that muscular bodies were manly, “allow[ing] men to emphasize their difference from women at a time when women seemed to be insisting on the similarity of the sexes.”8 Team sports, magazines devoted to bodybuilding, and popular men’s novels with cowboy-type heroes fueled a “preoccupation with physicality,” writes Michael Kimmel. This gave bodies “a different sort of weight than earlier. The body did not contain the man, expressing the man within; now, that body was the man.”9
Edgar Koehler’s obituary had lauded his body, describing him as “manly” and “look[ing] every inch the soldier, being tall, good looking and well proportioned.”10 The repetition of “fat boy” by Ben’s accusers suggested that, in contrast, his body was perceived as defective. Worcester and Frick likely chafed at taking orders from and being disciplined by a man who did not appear to be as manly as they. Journalists also noted Koehler’s appearance, describing him as “short, heavily built, with a large nose and bronzed face.”11
Barrett was the soldier whom Ben had removed as provost sergeant and opposed as stable sergeant, the man allowed to stay in his cottage after the movie dispute in early 1912. Like other witnesses, Barrett’s recollection of the timing of Ben’s alleged bad acts was all over the place, starting as June to December 1913 when Barrett spoke to Mills, then becoming September or October with Mayes, and ultimately landing in the specifications as “on or about October 1.”
Mayes had since learned that Ben and most of the troops, including Barrett, were on their way to Rhode Island on October 1, so, while Barrett was on the stand, Mayes tried to shift the location of the alleged improprieties to Rhode Island. The previous witness had changed one incident to two, and this witness wanted to shift locations.
Kirby sustained Hudson’s objection to the “surprise . . . suggestion that this accusation occurred in another place,” so Mayes had Barrett testify to other actions that supposedly took place at Fort Terry in September, even though Barrett had told Hawthorne there was only one day when improprieties occurred. Now he spoke of multiple offenses at the stable, including Ben’s grasping Barrett “underneath the arm,” “by the buttocks,” and “by the testicles,” and comparing their penis sizes to that of a mule.
Like Moody and Kernan, Barrett said he was summoned to speak to Mills by Worcester.
“I would like to know how Captain Worcester learned that you had had any unusual experiences with the accused,” a juror asked.
“I don’t know, sir.”
Barrett did know, and acknowledged, that Patten had recently demoted him to private for gambling with a private he supervised, Walter Ensley, who was next up for the prosecution.
Before his transfer to stable duty, Ensley had reported to Worcester’s friend, Captain Ellis. The specifications alleged that Ben groped Ensley when Ensley was driving the buckboard. In the first part of his testimony, Ensley said the incident happened in August 1913. However, under cross-examination, he got tripped up by his prior statements about background events. He solved that dilemma in the same way as Moody, by announcing that there were actually two gropings, one during target practice and one during the Army-Navy maneuvers.
Hudson could not contain his disbelief.
“Did you mean by that that exactly what you related took place twice?”
“Yes, sir.”12
Ensley had said that while he was sitting in the front seat holding the reins, Ben reached up from the rear seat—one to two feet behind the front seat—and unbuttoned Ensley’s pants and held his penis while removing one of Ensley’s hands from the reins and placing it on his own genitals. Later, Ben exposed his penis. All the while, the mules kept walking.
Apparently realizing that it seemed incredible for this same set of actions to have occurred twice, Ensley proceeded to deconstruct his own testimony and break the incident into two parts. The first part, he said, happened in broad daylight. The second part, when Ben exposed his penis, happened on a second trip, which Ensley placed at a little after midnight.
“How do you know that he exhibited, showed his penis?” Hudson asked.
“I seen it through the light, sir.”
“What light?”
“Street light, road light.”
“You looked around to see it, did you?”
“I seen it, yes, sir, I looked around.”
“What caused you to look around at that particular time?”
“I just happened to look around.”
After lunch, Ensley embellished the answer when a curious juror asked again, “How did you happen to see it? That is the thing—did he tell you to look around at him?”
“He says ‘Look at this,’” Ensley went along. The lights had been out “and they lit up again in a few minutes” just when Ben took out his penis and Ensley looked back.
Another juror questioned the penis-holding part of Ensley’s story, asking, “How could he do that when you were on the front seat and driving and he was way back on the rear seat?”
“He was leaning over, sir,” answered Ensley after a long pause.
“He was leaning over?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could he sit down and lean over and pull your hand back clear to his person? Are you sure of that, that is what I want to know? Now tell it in your own way. Are you sure of it or not?”
“He was sitting down, yes, sir; he was not standing up.”
Throughout his testimony, Ensley took such long pauses before answering questions that Kirby grew frustrated, chiding him, “Don’t sit there and think so long; you certainly ought to know what you know.” It turned out that Ensley was already familiar with senior officers’ ire. He conceded that Ben accused him of taking whiskey from his house.
“Did he seem to be quite angry with you?” Hudson asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“And it was on that occasion [that] he told you not to go near his house again?”
“Yes, sir, he said not to enter his quarters no more.”
Mayes told Garrison that only four accusers had issues with Ben, but clearly the count was higher: Worcester, Frick, Ward, Kirkman, Barrett, and Ensley so far. Moody also could be added to the list if it was true, as Ben would testify, that he declined Moody’s request to transfer to San Francisco.13
Sergeant Jacob Campbell held no obvious grudge against Ben. He did, however, work in Worcester’s company. Even though he had never told anyone about improper actions by Ben, Campbell said he received a call to speak to Mills—from whom, he could not recall.14
Hudson asked him, “Did you not state to Colonel Hawthorne that you were very much surprised that you had been called before Colonel Mills, as you considered that nothing that had taken place between you and Major Koehler was exceptional?”
“I believe I did, sir.”
Campbell also admitted telling Hawthorne that Ben “never done anything to me that I ever remember that I considered wrong.”
Nonetheless, Campbell testified in response to Mayes’s questions that Ben “kind of squeeze[d] my arm” on or about November 15, 1913, in the Post Exchange, where Campbell worked. “One or two different times I believe he taken hold of my leg with his hand,” Campbell added, and a little while later this became “Two or three times that he slapped my leg and felt of my arms and generally on my legs here at my thigh.”
Campbell was also the soldier who testified that Ben spoke to him about “Pacific sporting houses.” At first, he said he could “not remember it just word for word,” but the “gist of the conversation” concerned “the different kind of women that a man could meet, and the different ways and manners that a man could get satisfaction in a sporting house.”
“I would like to know,” asked a juror, “did the accused mention different ways of accomplishing sexual intercourse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just describe some of the methods he mentioned.”
“Do you mean the different ways?”
“That he said it could be done.”
“No, sir, I don’t believe he just exactly described to me how this intercourse could be accomplished, but he just described to me the different ways that a man could get the satisfaction. That is, I don’t know just exactly how to explain it, sir.”
“What did he say—just use his words as near as you can remember.”
“Well, he told me that you could get screwed or you could get sucked or you could get a fat boy, or anything you wanted. That is the words the Major used to me.”
Faced with Campbell’s sudden recollection, Hudson asked, “Did he say that this was the custom on the Pacific coast?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then it was describing a general custom, not anything that he—?”
“No, sir, not any of the experiences that he went through, that is he didn’t say they was.”
Hudson stopped there. The jury heard nothing more about Ben’s time in San Francisco—not a word about his “great shot” that shattered a moving target three miles off the coast that had so impressed people back in 1903.
As the prosecution’s case neared its end, the accusers had less and less to say and the jurors asked fewer questions. Were they tired, zoning out, or becoming inured to the accusations, like spectators at a bullfight getting used to seeing blood by the sixth gored bull?
Private Henry Fairey, the next witness, never spoke to Mills. Fairey’s boss, Barrett, told him to see Mayes and “tell him what you know.” This was what Fairey said he knew: “I couldn’t say the date, but about the latter part of August [1913], I was in the corral and the Major came in to get his horse . . . I went in to help him put the saddle on and he pinched me in the leg.”
Mayes asked if there was lewd talk, and Fairey disappointed him: “He just said something about women, pretty nice to be with a nice girl, or something that way.”
If Fairey had put it differently in an earlier discussion, he was perhaps having second thoughts, like the men in the rowboat who had fled—though it seems Fairey was another accuser with grounds for a grudge. According to Ben, Fairey had requested a recommendation for a promotion that Ben declined to provide, telling Fairey that he was too young and inexperienced for the job.15
Of all the claims, perhaps none was more outlandish than that of Sergeant Charles Byers, who claimed that while Ben’s good friend Major Andy Moses sat a few feet away, Ben felt Byers’s “privates” while they crouched on the floor in a small room inspecting old ammunition.
Byers (no relation to accuser Elvin Byers) worked as quartermaster sergeant at Fort Wright. Byers reported to Robinson and served in the same company as Moody. He admitted that he and Moody discussed what they would tell Mills in advance of their interviews.
Byers said he had seen Ben only once before, at maneuvers. When the incident was alleged to have occurred, in October 1913, Ben had traveled to Fort Wright to inspect condemned ordnance in his position as acting commander of the district.
First, Byers claimed, when he passed items, Ben “would take hold of my hand in place of taking hold of the article and feel over my hand.” Then, Ben “felt down on my legs into my privates like that, and he done that two or three times and I got up from behind the desk and he put his hand up from behind up on the backside of my leg.” Throughout the inspection, which lasted five to ten minutes, Moses was sitting at a nearby desk calling out the names of the articles.
Kirby wanted to know whether Moses could see what was taking place.
“He was in such a way that he could not see the accused,” Byers answered.16
Moses’s ability to observe what Ben was doing with his hands would become a matter of considerable dispute, but not before the last complainant took the stand.
That honor fell to Harry King, one of the men Ben had criticized for not sleeping in camp. For two years, King had served in the junior position of master gunner. At the end of 1913, he obtained a commission as second lieutenant at another post.17 Now, on Monday afternoon, as the blizzard stranded one hundred thousand rail commuters in New York City, King returned to his old post with a train story of his own: that Ben spoke to him about sex when King returned to Plum Island in spring 1912 after a furlough.18
Ben was also heading back to Fort Terry after his visit with William Kenly, and King apparently saw the two men together at Grand Central Terminal, though that wasn’t what King spoke about on the stand. Instead, he testified that he was retrieving his checked luggage when Ben “came up behind me . . . and I believe he swung a suit-case into me from behind and asked ‘Where are you going.’” King said the two sat together on the train—at Ben’s invitation—and that Ben asked King if he had “got enough to last me for a while,” which he understood to refer to sexual intercourse. Then they talked about “women in general, and a man’s connection with women and so forth . . . sexual intercourse I should judge, although I don’t know that anything was said directly about that, but that was the understanding I had all along.”19
Later, when Ben testified, he would deny sitting with King, describing an entirely different train car, which might explain why King could not remember anything else Ben said to him—beyond reference to “women of easy virtue”—on the three-hour trip.20
King’s charge, brought solely under the “conduct unbecoming” article of war, highlighted the elasticity of that provision, especially considering that, according to King, Ben’s remarks concerned heterosexual sex. Was the Army saying it was a violation of the articles whenever an officer spoke of women and sex? Surely, any such policy could only be selectively enforced, as conversations went on all the time without being overheard. More aptly, it seemed that speech a “normal” man might get away with—like Frick and his sexual gossip—was being cast as improper when allegedly uttered by the wrong sort of man. The innuendo was that an officer who spoke to enlisted men about sex was likely to grope them, too.
The account King gave put him first in the chronology of victims, though he was the last to come forward. King never spoke to Mills. He said a telegram sent to his new post in Queens told him to go to Governors Island to meet with Mayes, right before Mayes finalized the charges.
Later testimony would suggest that Byron Brown, King’s best friend at Fort Terry, persuaded him to join the campaign against Ben and gave King’s name to Mayes. King provided ample motive for his willingness to do so. Contrary to his inability to describe the train conversation, he exhibited a clear memory of the times Ben disciplined him. Once, King was carrying a load of blankets. It was hot, and he had his uniform open at the collar. Ben, riding by on his horse, stopped to tell King to button up. Later, after King had left to take the officer examination, Ben criticized him for failing to report to headquarters when he returned to Fort Terry for a visit.21
The jurors had no questions for King. He left the stand, unceremoniously ending the prosecution’s main case. When the trial resumed the next afternoon, witnesses for Ben would finally begin to testify.
Hudson and Hawthorne had their work cut out for them. While the accusers had fudged details, proposed some unbelievable scenarios, and revealed animosity toward Ben, there was no denying the strong, cumulative impact of so many stories of penis grabs, erotic fixation, and ribald talk.22 Could the jury be persuaded that all sixteen men were lying?
Hudson needed to shatter many targets as well as prove a conspiracy. It wouldn’t be easy. Nor would it be as private as before. Major Sarratt had arrived reportedly to investigate the prior day’s rowboat escape. Leaks to the press were also being investigated, and photographs of Ben were being offered for sale—all causing “panic,” according to the Sun.23 The Sun was beginning to print details of Ben’s supposed advances, exaggerating the testimony against him to such an extent that plainly a source on the prosecution’s side was intentionally misleading the reporter.24
As if that wasn’t enough, reporters and photographers would be allowed on Plum Island on Wednesday. The order came from Wood, who had installed a temporary replacement for Barry over the weekend: a Mississippi-born brigadier general named Robert K. Evans, who had gone to West Point with Mills. Wood let it be known that he would replace Evans in about two months.25 Apparently, Wood still had a few things he wanted to accomplish in Washington, such as sending the press to Plum Island.26
Although the courtroom would be off limits, that would not stop the journalists from trying to find out what scandalous acts Ben Koehler was said to have done that warranted so much secrecy and concern.