CHAPTER 8
CHARLES WHITTLESEY
We heard that the Germans had a proverb: “He liveth best who is always ready to die.” I never asked any of our prisoners to confirm or deny this, but we would soon find out they fought that way.
The British soldiers with whom we were attached for training outside Calais warned us that the devils in field gray had emplaced across the Meuse-Argonne—which we planned to overtake—four Stellungen, or belts of fortification. As in some blood sport dreamed up by demons, we Allied troops would have to pass through parallel rows of pillboxes and bunkers that on maps looked like the spiked collars of malevolent dogs. In a Teutonic touch both silly and terrifying, the belts were all named after characters from the Nibelungenlied, an epic poem I knew mostly via Wagner works that Marguerite and I had been bludgeoned by at the Met; the third and worst Stellung, for instance, was called Kriemhilde, after the vengeful bride of the hero Siegfried.
When our assault on those fortifications came later that fall, it would be less grand opéra than Grand Guignol: prolonged, yes, and massive in scale, but possessing neither art nor glamour.
Any man among us who expected cries of “Vive les Américains!” when we landed in Calais was due for disappointment. Nobody cheered; they’d seen it before. The port city’s buildings, bombed so often by German airplanes, stood windowless beside the water like blinded faces, mute and empty. Aside from German prisoners working the docks alongside Chinese laborers, and soldiers from every Allied nation, Calais was a ghost town.
It was the first place we’d been that felt like it was at war, and for most of us our arrival was sobering. Not for all of us, however.
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” sang Lieutenant Maurice Revnes as he led his men through the streets. Revnes was a showboat, an actor in civilian life who’d produced a few one-act plays in New York before volunteering for the Plattsburgh camps. He’d been the theatrical director at Upton, and he’d resume that role on this side of the ocean, gathering musicians, singers, and vaudevillians to form the Argonne Players. Talented but mean was how I’d pegged him, and seeing him make his entrance in Calais did nothing to change my opinion: a toothy smile and scornful eyes, bluff and swaggering, his performance a poor fit for a city marred by tragedy. I exchanged glances with McMurtry, a little down the column, and he shook his head in disgust.
If Revnes noticed, he paid it no mind. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” he sang again, louder, his gaudy tenor echoing off the chalky walls.
“We’re going to get the kaiser, going to get the kaiser!” sang some of the men in reply as we awaited the order to march to our quarters.
Nearby a French captain with his right arm in a sling leaned against the base of an old stone watchtower, smoking with his good hand. He called to Revnes, “You remind me of me in 1914.”
“Merci, mon ami,” Revnes replied, doffing his cap to reveal the handsome sheen of his close-cropped blue-black hair.
“I saw this all the time at the front,” the soldier continued in English, accented but clear. “You want to attack. You are ready. But when the moment comes, perhaps you change your mind. Often when one has never done something, it seems quite easy to do.”
At our camp outside town, we began to hear similar sentiments from the British soldiers—the Tommies—who took charge of our education in throwing grenades and firing machine guns. Fights broke out occasionally, and then regularly, between our sergeants and those of the British army; our boys were deaf to the gradations of class that defined the Tommies’ service, while also being unaccustomed to the tartness of the admonishments they received in training, and I spent an alarming amount of my time smoothing over conflicts and supervising reluctant handshakes. But somewhat to my chagrin, I discovered that I had a better rapport with the British officers than with many of my fellow Americans.
“At first it was exciting,” admitted the captain whom I was shadowing, as we watched the men learn the thrusts of a bayonet drill. I’d often heard tell of the famous English reserve and encountered it often in Calais, but this officer was refreshingly open, even urgent, in his disclosures, and he had the kindly if unsettling mien of a haunted soothsayer.
“The training was dull, of course, as was all the waiting,” he said. “But I was slow to appreciate the extent to which our expectations had been shaped by the way we all spoke. Elevated by an almost feudal language. A friend was a ‘comrade,’ a friendship a ‘fellowship.’ Horses were ‘steeds’ and actions ‘deeds,’ and the enemy was ‘a foe,’ and danger was ‘peril.’ The dead on the field would be ‘the fallen.’ We would not be fast, we would be ‘swift.’ We would not sleep, we would ‘slumber,’ and we’d gaze not into the sky but into ‘the heavens.’ In the end that shaped us more than the training did.”
“This is scholarship of a different sort than I know from Williams or Harvard,” I said as my men drove and lunged.
“But the Oxford view I’d had of war could not long stand,” he said. “Those were not our ‘limbs’ strewn over the fields but our arms and legs. None of us who’ve survived this long can ever hear the word ‘machine’ without his poor brain following it with ‘gun.’ It’s really done us.” He smiled: sorrowful, not cruel.
The war drew closer. Its approach was less like the coming of a storm, more the onset of a sickness. We could feel it changing us.
Periodically we’d march the men eight kilometers to the nearest train depot to pick up supplies. The army was loath to admit how unprepared it was in regard to combat gear; much of the equipment we were issued was French and British, particularly the weapons. The light machine gun was a French model called the Chauchat; the men nicknamed it the “Sho-Sho” and within a few weeks began calling it the “Shit-Shit,” based on its habit of jamming after firing only a few rounds. The best means of clearing a jam in the Chauchat, per an oft-repeated quip, was to throw it away.
We were somewhat better provisioned with defensive gear. The train delivered an adequate supply of steel helmets, which replaced our wool caps; the mass of us donning them around the depot was like a sudden bloom of hard gray flowers.
“One of the most versatile pieces of equipment imaginable,” said McMurtry as we stood near the boxcars. “It sheds water like a roof, serves as a chair in the mud. It can be instantly turned into a candlestick in the dark. I’ll take it over a rifle any day.”
“If it can dissuade the occasional piece of shrapnel, then I’m sold,” I said, rapping its edge and making it ding.
The army also provided maps of the countryside for use on practice marches. I studied mine alongside Omer Richards, one of our battalion’s pigeon men, so he’d understand where his birds might need to go. Lanky and pale-cheeked, with a sweaty face and peculiar topaz eyes, his most notable feature was that he wasn’t Bill Cavanaugh. But I was charmed by the French-Canadian private’s delight at noticing a hamlet on the map north of us called Saint-Omer, his namesake.
To and from the depot we marched, through town after beautiful town brought to ruin: unchanged and of little significance for hundreds of years, then reduced to rubble by explosive shells and incendiary bombs. Houses disemboweled, guts pouring forth into sunless streets. Skeletons of churches, their entrances blocked by fallen chimes. Sometimes we’d pass a single shop left intact amid a row of destruction, a mannequin in its window raising a hand like Christ in blessing over a wrecked civilization.
Whenever we passed a tavern, Revnes would complain that the beer in France tasted more like rain, watery despite the exorbitant prices French farmers demanded. The men around him always laughed and agreed. Revnes, I’d begun to notice, had the ham actor’s habit of speaking to his platoon while really addressing other audiences: men in other units, or the French townsfolk, or, most often, me and the other commanding officers. The trick allowed him to skirt insubordination while maintaining the escape route of having been misunderstood. I began to mentally review punishments I might impose without recourse to a court-martial, just to be prepared.
It was hard to keep track of thousands of men, but I did my best to know at least something about each of those with whom I was in regular contact. A few were troublemakers like Revnes, but many more were guys so wholesome that one could imagine them drinking nothing harder than root beer and eating nothing more exotic than white bread slathered with butter. I did my best to be worthy of leading them.
One afternoon, in the last emaciated husk of a village we passed on our way back to camp, an old woman in a peasant scarf with a face as dry and lined as a walnut emerged from a shop that I’d taken as abandoned. “Cartes postales?” she called out—postcards—desperate to sell them. The men had been performing well and were due for a break, so we halted the column and let the company fall out.
The soldiers passed through the small shop a few at a time, and the woman fanned her cards out on a battered counter. Some showed sylvan scenes, others bucolic landscapes of what this place must have looked like before the war. Others slipped casually between the respectable ones bore pictures of nude women, or of men and women locked in carnal embraces. The woman asked the men if these cards were bon, and many replied oui. Some bought them and tucked them into their pockets with varying degrees of embarrassment.
I made a point of letting these transactions proceed, literally looking the other way. The men, I imagine, took my averted eyes as indicative of my self-imposed restraint and steady moral code. In fact I simply wasn’t tempted, or especially interested: the cards weren’t at all artful, and their prurient appeal was lost on me.
Instead I watched Bill Cavanaugh. He didn’t buy any cards either—politely refusing the old woman’s inducements, slipping her some coins anyway—and this pleased me. For a moment, when he noticed me noticing his gesture, I met his gaze, blue as the cornflowers that lined the ditches. But he immediately looked down and away.
“All right, Sergeant,” said McMurtry, “let’s line ’em up.”
“One more kilometer, boys!” shouted an overeager corporal as the men filed out, only to have some wiseacre answer, “Kill-o-meter? More like kill-yourself.”
That day’s supply run hadn’t delivered the bedding the army had promised, so back at camp the men dozed off under used blankets, crusted with blood and reeking of delousing solution.
Early June it was time. We had orders to occupy the Baccarat defensive sector, east of Nancy in Lorraine, at the western foot of the Vosges Mountains. I had enjoyed the British sector and often found myself fondly recalling the Tommies’ attitudes and expressions, particularly the infrequently bestowed compliment “Good show!” I resolved to do my best to put on such a show every day I was in command.
One summery morning, warm and gilded, we marched back to the Calais station to ship south in boxcars labeled HOMMES 40, CHEVAUX 8. We filled them with hommes, there being a shortage of horses given how many had been killed in the almost four years of fighting.
The upstate men felt awkward crammed and standing in the cars, but those from the boroughs felt right at home. “A fella feels just like he’s riding the subway,” called Bill Cavanaugh from a corner. The air vibrated with excitement, the men exhilarated to be going somewhere again, finally. I felt less electric and more liquid, lonely and anxious, still suspecting my own fraudulence and wishing, always, for more time.
We stayed overnight near the station in Nancy, then continued the trek on camions, French motortrucks. The trucks had no shock absorbers, so the journey felt like being sloshed for hours in a cocktail shaker. As we drew close to the trenches, we got out and walked: fifty minutes of marching to ten minutes of rest, as usual.
“No-man’s-land” had a specific meaning in the war: the fatal flyway for bullets that separated opposing trenches. But the term seemed applicable to the villages we passed, too: no men of military age remained in any of them.
True to form, Revnes led the regiment in a vulgar marching song:
Lulu took the farmer’s horse and team
To drive to the country store,
But she eloped with the old studhorse
And won’t come back no more!
Bang, bang Lulu!
Bang her good and strong!
What’ll we do for banging
When Lulu’s dead and gone?
I longed to be the sort of carefree person who’d join the ribald chorus, but also congratulated myself on not being such a person.
The song passed the time, and it would have been pointless for me to look askance. But when some of the men began pilfering grapes from vineyards along the roadway, I couldn’t stay silent, sympathetic though I might have been to their hunger for the tough-skinned fruit, the largest quantity of fresh produce we’d seen in months. “Remind your platoons,” I said to the assembled lieutenants, “that we are here to rescue this country, not to sack it. We help these people; we do not threaten their livelihoods by stealing from them. Any soldier who forgets that shall be assigned extra duty for not less than thirty days. I trust that I have made myself clear.”
Baccarat was a “quiet” sector—given our near-total lack of combat experience, from officers down to privates, the Allied strategists had wisely opted not to plunge us into the thick of battle—but it still wasn’t safe to march too close to the front in daylight, so we bivouacked until nightfall and continued in the direction of the billets we’d been promised.
June 21 was a Friday night, the bright moon like a pearl. We, the Metropolitan Division, were many of us thinking of what we’d be doing in the city were we still at home. Midway through the woods, we passed the Fighting 69th, part of the Rainbow Division that we were relieving. Amid the splintered trees, with moonlight burnishing their faces, the city men sang “Sidewalks of New York” together and called out streets and home addresses. I held back—this was a working-class salute—but I wished I could share their panache and neighborhood pride. What would I call out? Midtown, by Grand Central? Or, worse yet, Wall Street? Not likely. When I heard Cavanaugh call out “Hell’s Kitchen!” I turned to catch his silvery face, as fine in profile as Mercury’s on a dime.
After the woods our good cheer was quelled by the faint first whiff of a real battlefield, a gagging combination of shit and gunpowder, gas and blood, decaying flesh and muddy rot. Though still distant, it was almost unbelievably awful, sending a spark of panic up my spine. I glanced down the column at McMurtry for reassurance, as I often did, only to see him as pale and stone-faced as I was. I immediately understood that all our training—the rehearsal of thoughts and actions, the merging of individual identities into a coordinated and interdependent force—was done in anticipation of this very moment, to stanch the fundamental impulse to flee from such terror. We smelled that death—perhaps the death of civilization—and we kept moving toward it, thereby becoming something more and less than human. Much of what happened to us later, I now believe, simply followed from that moment.
At last we arrived at our billets, old barns with dirt floors and starlight streaming through the roofs and walls, holes for windows, chickens everywhere, rats eating from manure piles shat by years-dead cattle. Late as it was, depressing as the accommodations seemed, some of the men still had energy for jokes, most of which took on a cruel and antic cast all too well suited to our circumstances. One private showed such a fear of rats that he was certain to become a figure of fun; every time he fell asleep, one of his buddies would run a bayonet up the seam of his pant leg, and he’d bolt awake and scream loud enough to wake men in adjacent barns. Laughter and merriment. Annoying, yes, but who was I to ruin their fun?
For the 77th was to be the first American division to enter the line.
For three weeks we had French mentors, and they told us stories. Proud and dignified, they were also respectful, and down-to-earth, and grateful for the relief. “It’s the least we can do, after that hand you lent us back in 1778,” McMurtry said.
It was interesting, and sobering, to see the change that came over McMurtry during our discussions with the French. He was still as buoyant and steady as ever, but his relaxed mien was gone, replaced by minute attention to our counterparts’ every word. We were now, I realized, approaching conditions of which my battle-hardened friend was as ignorant as were the rest of us.
Not every combat veteran among our commanders, of which there were several, seemed to share his concern, and the French intuited this. “Please understand,” a patch-eyed colonel told us, “that the devastation you will witness along the front has no military precedent. Even in the fall of Carthage, the Romans had at their disposal no poison worse than salt.”
I wanted to see no-man’s-land, to be prepared, so I signed up one night for a Cook’s tour of sorts, along with a handful of other officers. We crept through the trenches in small groups to reduce the likelihood of the division’s commanders all being wiped out by a single burst of shrapnel, then took turns peering over the edge toward German territory. The occasional star shell illuminated the barbed wire and the churned earth, the heaps of rags and meat that had once been human beings. That alien landscape, devoid of comforting common objects to put the vista into scale, did not seem real and taught me nothing. It settled into my bones like the chill that heralds a fever.
When we got behind the line again, the French colonel bade us adieu with one final tale. “There is no purpose in terrifying you further,” he said, wearily sipping his coffee, “but I have heard rumors of a battalion-size group of ghoulish deserters from both sides, British and Australian and French and German, who hide in abandoned trenches and come out only at night, looting supplies from the corpses. They have secret lairs everywhere, and long beards, and they wear rags and uniforms covered in patches. Barely human, more like carrion dogs. The generals don’t know what to do. They’ll need to be eradicated, but it will have to wait until after the war. Perhaps we will gas them. Naturellement,” he concluded with a hint of mischief, “the most superstitious among the troops speculate that these men cannot be killed, because they are already dead yet do not know it. But this is beyond the scope of our concerns.”
“Surely this war is horrible enough,” I said, smiling, “without enlisting the supernatural.”
The colonel shrugged, then spit contemplatively. “I hadn’t yet told that story to anyone from your army,” he said. “It is difficult to know how properly to report such a thing. But I think of it often, and I had to get it out. A good-bye present for you, my friends, along with the sector, which we leave to you tomorrow. Merci and bonsoir.”
For the next three weeks, Baccarat was ours alone: the first time an American division had held a section of the Western Front independently. The time passed without notable incident, apart from the sensation of that which had been abstract becoming real, then routine. The unseasonably wet weather we’d seen since our arrival continued, the raindrops like the ticking of a billion tiny clocks: mud, potatoes, mud, black coffee, and mud. Continually cold, continually wet, we feared influenza as much as we did the enemy. Every type of supply was short, and many of the men took to using coffee for shaving, given that it was hot and more plentiful than water. A popular pastime—particularly in Lieutenant Revnes’s platoon—became damning the generals for living in relative luxury far behind the lines.
One muggy night a few of us officers went on liberty to the nearest town, which like all towns close to the front had a bustling trade in goods and activities favored by soldiers, given that military paychecks were the only source of revenue. McMurtry was keen to enjoy a mediocre beer, as were most of the other officers.
My biggest delight was being back in civilization, walking amid the storefronts, however pitiful, and seeing the people and the signs. On a chipping plaster wall on the way to the tavern, I saw a poster that the Signal Corps had put up, clearly for the benefit of our own men:
BROKEN LINK IN VITAL COMMUNICATIONS: DON’T SHOOT! THE CARRIER PIGEON!
The letters were emblazoned above a cartoon image of a dead bird, X’s over its little eyes.
“Now, who would do a damn fool thing like that?” I asked Lieutenant Peabody. His boots and mine were marching in step across the cobblestones, not out of intention but habit.
“Some bored man itching to shoot his rifle, I guess. Not one of my machine-gunners, that’s for certain. Wouldn’t be any fun.” He laughed, then shrugged. “Or someone very hungry.”
The importance of battlefield communications, and therefore of pigeons, had been so thoroughly drilled into us during our training as officers that I tended to forget that the enlisted men might not have an equal understanding of the topic. The Signal Corps did its best to run telephone wires to frontline units, but the infantry usually outpaced them—and if the wires weren’t secured along their full lengths, the enemy could listen in. A soldier sent to deliver a written message could be killed or captured. Radios were mostly useless in the field, fragile and unwieldy, and even when they worked, their transmissions could be picked up from the air.
But pigeons remained as fast and as reliable as they’d been since the time of Alexander the Great. I thought of Bill Cavanaugh and how it would grieve him to see one of our birds killed, much less eaten by his fellow soldiers.
The tavern was hazed with tobacco smoke and dotted with oak tables, each topped with bottles and ringed by other American soldiers. A pregnant French girl—her baby’s father probably gone with the French force we’d relieved—took our order, deux bières for Peabody and McMurtry and vin blanc for me.
“Lieutenant Revnes is also on liberty tonight, isn’t he?” I said. “I don’t see him here.”
“We can rule out the other taverns,” Peabody said, “because there aren’t any.”
“He’s probably cooped up memorizing a monologue by Shakespeare, or Shaw, or Ibsen, or whomever,” said McMurtry. “There’s no reason to worry about him.”
“I can think of any number of reasons to worry about him,” I said.
“Well, he’s on liberty, Whit,” McMurtry said. “We can’t very well expect our men to defend freedom if they’re not allowed to enjoy it now and again. Sure, he’s probably up to no good. But if he’s not hurting anyone and he’s still able to discharge his duties when he returns, then let’s leave him be.”
I could see several holes in that argument, but I chose not to attack them and smiled instead. “McMurtry, you’re an example to all of us,” I said. “You always see the best in everything, be it person or incident.”
“Oh, like hell,” he said, concealing his embarrassment with a sip of his beer. “Charging me with Pollyannaism will be a tough case to prove.”
“Now, hear me out, fellows. I’m being uncharacteristically sincere. Were McMurtry to be told, hypothetically, that one of our men had stolen a thousand francs, he would most likely say, ‘Oh, I don’t believe that! He’s quite incapable of such a thing.’ If proof of the man’s guilt were provided . . . well, then he’d say, ‘If you’re sure, then he probably did. But there must have been some reason for it that we don’t know anything about. You notice that he didn’t steal two thousand, which he might easily have done.’ Am I mistaken, gentlemen?”
The other officers laughed. “Let’s have a toast to McMurtry,” Peabody said. “If the czar and the kaiser shared his generosity of spirit, we might be raising our glasses at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street tonight.”
We drank another round, then settled up with the girl. The bell in the church spire chimed ten o’clock as the tavern door swung shut behind us, closing the songs and cigar smoke and lamplight off from the sleepy street.
It did not remain sleepy, alas. “Good night, ladies!” came a lubricious tenor voice from the terrace of the battered house next door. “Good night, ladies! Good night, ladies! We’re going to leave you now!”
Revnes staggered down its steps and into our path, a bottle of cognac dangling from his right hand, a woman barely wearing a slip enfolded in his left. In the silence following his command performance, the splashing of the fountain in the square sounded like mocking laughter. Haughty as an insolent housecat, he all but ignored our presence on the otherwise empty street.
“Lieutenant,” I said, barely above a whisper, hating the impression of Americans he was giving the town’s beleaguered residents. “Collect yourself.”
I snatched the cognac from his wilted grasp and handed it to the whore. “Merci, Capitaine,” she said, clutching the bottle and drawing herself up into a posture of elegance despite her smeared lipstick. “Perhaps you and your friends would like to come in?”
“Non, merci,” I said, shifting Revnes’s weight to my own shoulder and leading him from the doorway. “Lieutenant, your liberty has come to an end, I’m afraid.”
“But O Captain, my Captain!” Revnes declaimed into my ear at unnecessary volume. “I have only been on liberty from the Army of Mars. I am on the march in the Army of Venus!” He sank into me, boneless as a scarecrow.
“You’re only in one army, Revnes. And it demands better of you, even on liberty. Do you really expect your platoon to show discipline if this is the example you set?”
“But a soldier must be a complete man. Don’t you agree, Captain? Not an automaton. I have been exercising my virility to better serve our nation! My every undertaking proves my loyalty.”
“Your conduct is unbecoming of an officer, Revnes, and I’ll take action to that effect if you don’t come back quietly. We can dock your pay and confine you to quarters. Do you understand?”
“Oh, you’re a smart one, Captain, just like they all say,” drawled Revnes, yawning a stagy and feline yawn, revealing the carmine interior of his mouth. “A real clever kid. But what this army needs are idiots! Idiots like me. Tell me, Captain, is there any law in the United States that says you can’t be an idiot?”
“We’re not in the States,” McMurtry cut in. “As perhaps you’ve noticed. And being an idiot here has consequences—for you, which we don’t care a damn about, but more to the point for your men.”
McMurtry had hesitated to intervene, but I appreciated the help. Revnes respected McMurtry more than he did me, and after that we got him back with little fuss.
I reported the incident, and Revnes received a formal reprimand, but the experience galled. I had the unshakable suspicion that among the many thousands of New York men who constituted the 77th Infantry Division there must be at least one or two with firsthand knowledge of what the army would broadly term my “sexual depravity,” and although my personal conduct since arriving in France had been unimpeachable, disciplining the sexual misadventures of others felt like hypocrisy, even if it wasn’t. Revnes was right: I had been a clever kid, at least so far, and I intended to continue.
In Calais we found that the French took a permissive attitude toward sexual matters; their local officials refused to cooperate with efforts to suppress prostitution near our bases. Meanwhile the army had launched shock-tactics campaigns to curb venereal disease—mostly to protect our health and combat-readiness but also from a touching if presumptuous concern with preserving the sexual morality of young men from rural homes. (City boys were assumed to be a lost cause.) We were all regularly instructed to shun contact with prostitutes and other loose women.
The campaigns—promulgated with the assistance of the YMCA—were so histrionic in their portrayal of females as sources of infection that many soldiers came to regard them as much more dangerous than sodomites and other such “degenerates” criminalized under the Articles of War. I had to laugh inwardly at this rhetorical emphasis, for the YMCA facilities in New York and elsewhere had a well-established reputation as pickup hubs for queer men.
Though I never engaged in degenerate behavior in France, I knew from the men’s talk that there were “cocksuckers” around, both in our ranks and in the towns. So there would have been opportunities. But I could see the danger that men like Revnes posed to the division—due not to their erotic predilections but to their lack of restraint—and to earn the authority to safeguard order, I held myself to a higher standard of duty than I held those under me. I didn’t relish enforcing puritanical dictates, but Revnes had left me with little choice.
Between this unsavory business and the interminable rain, a sourness settled over me and persisted for weeks. In a pattern that would recur often, that bad thing was eventually scattered by something worse—in this case the news that we’d be moving to an active sector.
The sounds of war are complex as any orchestra; one could make a study of their subtleties. Shrapnel or high explosives scream and then explode with a roar. Gas shells warble, then bang, cracking open to exhale sickness and death.
I learned this on the banks of the Vesle River—by American standards more of a sluggish stream, not thirty feet wide and maybe six to eight feet deep.
On August 12 we were sent to relieve the 4th or “Ivy Division” and occupy the Vesle sector, which was anything but quiet. The river snaked through a broad marshland, brush and barbed wire snarling its banks. Above it rose bare chalk ridges, six hundred feet high and riddled with caves. The Germans had dug in on the northern heights.
Each day we lost men to artillery fire, some of whom we never found enough of to identify. Most of the officers slept in dugouts, but I remained aboveground like the enlisted men, figuring myself not indispensable and wanting to prove something to my troops, and myself.
Vesle was even more rugged and filthy than Baccarat had been, and baths became distant memories, almost embarrassing, like fairy castles and treasure chests we read about as children.
But we had some mild nights, some misty stars. And though I wasn’t a glory hunter, I found to my surprise that I was, for lack of a better way of putting it, good at war.
Leading my men against the Germans, I displayed “tactical finesse and taciturn courage,” as Colonel Averill said when they bumped me up from HQ captain to regimental operations officer, responsible for conceiving and implementing battle plans. Though Averill and I had had a tense exchange over war-bond allotments back at Upton, like most of the men I admired the old cavalry officer, and his admiration meant much in return.
Beyond commendation and advancement, there was a rigid passion, a stiff exhilaration, to be had from achieving success under such straitened circumstances. And I’d be lying if I said that this fulfillment—egotistical at its core—didn’t lead, on occasion, to error.
Phosgene and mustard were the two types of gas we were trained to beware of. Phosgene was an urticant, raising hives on the skin and overstimulating the lungs until a man drowned from the inside; it smelled of new-mown hay, or rotting bananas. Mustard gas, the Germans’ favorite, was a vesicant with the strong smell of mustard seed; it killed by blistering and burning. Inhaled or swallowed, it seared everything on the way down. If one so much as brushed against trees or dirt that mustard gas had settled on, the residue clung. At Vesle I saw a private—John J. Munson, one of my battalion’s bravest men—take off his service coat after a gas attack only to have a layer of skin come off with it.
Among the most insidious qualities of mustard gas was the fact that the onset of its effects was slow, sometimes taking a full day to manifest. But the tiniest breath of it could cause diarrhea, potentially fatal when water was scarce. Wisps in the air or on the ground dried out one’s fingertips until they split and bled. Enough in the eyes could cause permanent blindness. Most relevant to my own mistake, inhaled gas also caused a heavy, dry, chest-deep cough that might never subside. This had happened to my younger brother, Elisha, during his service as an ambulance driver. But when one has excelled in war, one tends to convince oneself that one is invincible, and I refused to consider that it could happen to me.
Naturally it did. On August 21 a hail of shells made Swiss cheese of the roof of the farmhouse that was the 308th Regimental HQ. Most of the men inside were struck by shrapnel, or gassed, or both. A signal officer, Lieutenant Meredith Wood, rescued several men, dragging them from the splintered timber and crumbled plaster. Gassed in the process, he was in the hospital until mid-October.
I got gassed, too, and as severely. Wood, helping me out of the building, insisted that I report it. I never did. They would have taken me off the line, like they did him. My sense of duty could not accept it.
Had I sought treatment in that instant for the poison in my lungs, so much might have turned out otherwise. If I, like Wood, had convalesced until mid-October, neither the Small Pocket nor the Pocket might have occurred. Bill Cavanaugh and hundreds of other men might not have died, at least not under my command.
And I might not be in the boat—literally—that I find myself in now.
At the time I felt proud for sticking it out.
I stand wheezing at the rail of the Toloa, my nose running incessantly and my lungs feeling like fire. Hateful as it is, the cough is hardly the worst thing that haunts me.