The Last of the Doughboys Page 10

  Two days later, General Edwards was relieved of his command. The episode of “fraternization” cited as cause was most likely a pretext; a better-liked man would probably have received only a mild reprimand, if that, for something that was not at all uncommon at the time. I don’t know if Edwards was really that obnoxious, or if he was just another outspoken general who had made some poor choices in his alliances. Historians have made strong cases on both sides of the question; I’ve even heard it suggested that the Army’s top brass, many of whom were southerners, wouldn’t have cottoned to anyone leading a self-proclaimed Yankee Division. Deserved or not, though, Edwards’s unpopularity stigmatized his men.

  Laurence Moffitt never expressed any bitterness to me about the way his division was treated. But then, he wouldn’t have; I doubt he’d ever felt it. It wasn’t in him to do so. He did let on that he was a little disappointed about not going home immediately after the armistice. “With the war ending in November, we foolishly were sure we would be home by Christmas,” he recalled. “We forgot there were two million other troops over there. We didn’t leave for home until the last part of March in 1919.”

  But a strange thing happened to the beleaguered, maligned YD in their last few months in France: Somehow it was decided that they should, at last, be recognized and honored for their service. So now, instead of being criticized as sloppy and inconsistent, they were lauded as determined, effective, brave. They were even chosen, from among all the American divisions in France, to be reviewed by President Wilson on Christmas Day, 1918. “We were quite impressed to be able to see our president, and quite honored that he came to our regiment,” Corporal Moffitt recalled. But even here, there were, shall we say, issues. “The whole regiment was lined up along the side of the road. And we were stationed there at twelve o’clock, at noon, and he didn’t show until four o’clock in the afternoon. And we were four hours waiting for him to come and inspect us. But he came, and then we had lunch. But it was not until after he came that we had lunch.” By which time, I imagine, they were pretty hungry. And cold.

  “Did he talk to you?” I asked.

  “Not to me,” he said, “but one of the fellows in my company, he was right near him. And he [President Wilson] asked him how conditions were. And the fellow, as usual, said ‘lousy.’ And he got reprimanded for that.”

  I couldn’t tell, from Mr. Moffitt’s tone, whether or not he approved of the man’s response, but he certainly didn’t agree with him. “Actually, they were not lousy,” he asserted. “For the Army they were pretty good. . . . Some had better care in the Army than they ever got at home, and better food. Because it’s surprising how good the food was. Even beef stew. That was the standard meal, beef stew.” And, he added: “Always enough. Never without it. Right.” Perhaps this is another key to living to 106: no complaints, not even about army food.

  Life got a lot easier after the armistice. And better. “The girls were very hungry for male companions, because the youths were killed off pretty much in France,” Corporal Moffitt recalled, and left it at that. The rest of the time, “we just hung around. There were regular military exercises, and there would be hiking trips day after day, just for the troops to do something, you know . . . entertainment had to be planned. . . . And there were games of baseball and boxing, and probably other sports. . . . And I got a leave . . . I guess a ten-day . . . and I went down with other troops, down to a nice mountain resort area for a week, Aix-les-Bains. Do you know French? It’s a bath, as you know.”

  Nevertheless, he and the rest of the Yankee Division were eager to get home, which they did in April, 1919—one of the first divisions to be repatriated. “Had a big parade in Boston,” he told me. “And then more parades in Connecticut for our Connecticut regiment. And everything was veterans.” And then, to hear him tell it, life started right back up again. At least, his did; he was one of the fortunate ones in that regard. And he knew it. “As I said, I started working at an insurance company when I was right out of high school. And the company took us all back. They held our positions; they filled them with girls, mostly. But they took us all back. In my case, I had a job waiting for me when I came back. That was not true with everyone who was in World War I, unfortunately. So, I was hired by another company for certain reasons, and then . . . in 1921, I was hired by a New York [insurance] group, Crum and Forster. . . . I was hired by that company to represent them in Connecticut, out of Hartford, which I did for forty-two years. . . . It so happens I went to work for that company the year I was married.” His new wife had been one of the girls hired to replace him and his coworkers during the war.

  He had a good life, rising high in the company, traveling frequently to New York, where he belonged to two clubs, the kind of places that men like him—insurance men, New England Yankees, veterans—joined. In the late 1940s, he was elected president of the Connecticut Field Club, a state insurance organization. He was happily married, had four children and nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, all of whom adored him; his wife, Flo, had been a woman of “real class, not real sexy, but real class. Everybody admired her, loved her, loved to talk with her.” His job, he said, had been “very comfortable, no problem, no stress, never, never any pressure. It was just, develop a business to work with agents, helping agents, solving problems.” He retired at sixty-six, moved to Cape Cod, had another third of a century with his wife, and still belonged to several weekly clubs until his hearing grew so faint that he could no longer participate fully in their talks. He never disliked anything, it seems, except farm work.

  Maybe it’s true: Nothing ever was hard for him. Even the war. Especially the war. After our first visit, I actually came away with the impression that it was—or at least that he believed it was—the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  “Was your service in the Army a very important part of your life?” I asked him at one point.

  “Yes,” he said without hesitating. “Most important, all my life. That’s right.” And long after it had ended, it remained a major component of his social life. “Our original company . . . had annual meetings. Then our regiment, the 102nd Infantry, would have its regular meetings, monthly meetings. And . . . the 26th Division . . . would have its annual meetings, and some in between. And our Army veterans’ service unified us for many, many years . . .” There was the American Legion, too. And those YD license plates. “Any car you saw with a YD on it, you knew was owned and operated by a member of your division. And you would give him a toot, and he would give you a toot.” The division was reactivated in 1941, sent to Europe, fought at the Bulge, drove on into France and Germany, and helped capture Hitler’s hometown of Linz, Austria, before the war ended. And yet today, few people who aren’t military buffs or historians know anything at all about the Yankee Division. And when I met its last surviving World War I veteran, the division didn’t know about him, either.

  But what luck for me that I found him. And that I found him as early as I did. As I’ve said, without him this book wouldn’t exist—not just because I probably would have become too discouraged to seek out a third and fourth and fifth veteran, but because, without Laurence Moffitt, I might never have encountered the Yankee Division; and without them, well, I’m not sure I would have come to understand fully just what this war was to Americans.

  The YD’s crucible, Seicheprey, is very quiet now. Like almost every other village in the area, it was completely destroyed; unlike some, it was rebuilt afterward, just where it had stood before, and looks, I would guess, very much like it did in 1914. But I sense there is much less to it these days; like their American counterparts, French small towns have been shriveling up for a long time now. I suspect the process actually started that day in the spring of 1918; that some people, maybe quite a number, never bothered to return to their destroyed houses and shops and farms, never even tried to rebuild. I visited Seicheprey on a sunny, warm June afternoon, yet I never spotted a single resident walking about there; as far as I could see, t
here were no shops or commercial establishments for them to walk to. The houses are modest, and appear much older than they are. The church is pretty but small. The village’s Great War memorial is small, too, smaller than most I saw in France; but it is very well kept, with bright gold leaf still filling the engraved names of the local war dead, eleven of them in all. Underneath the list, someone had attached a slab of slate with a small, chipped photograph of a handsome man: A la memoire de Jean Paul Fourriere, victime de la barbarie Nazie, mort pour la France about six weeks before D-day, a reminder that the Germans successfully took the Toul Sector, and the rest of the country, the next time around. On a separate side of the memorial’s base, a generation earlier, another family had mounted a bright porcelain slab, bordered in more gold leaf, a grainy (but not chipped) photograph and likenesses of his medals: A la memoire de mon Papa regretté Lucien Petit, mort pour la France 11 Septemb. 1914. The long war had been barely a month old then.

  In the same little green space you’ll find a small fountain that has not been maintained nearly so well. Water hasn’t flowed from its spout for a long time; its bronze plaque has grown dark and discolored. You have to get very close in order to read it:

  TO THE COMMUNE OF SEICHEPREY

  TO COMMEMORATE THE SERVICE

  OF THE 102D INFANTRY, 26TH DIVISION,

  A REGIMENT OF THE AMERICAN ARMY

  RECRUITED FROM THE CITIZENS OF CONNECTICUT

  DEFENDERS OF SEICHEPREY APRIL 20, 1918.

  IN THE FIRM BELIEF THAT THE FRIENDSHIP

  OF FRENCHMEN AND AMERICANS SEALED

  IN THIS PLACE IN BATTLE SHALL SERVE

  THE CAUSE OF PEACE AMONG ALL NATIONS

  THIS MEMORIAL IS PRESENTED BY THE

  MEN AND WOMEN OF CONNECTICUT

  1923

  Of all the places they fought and died—Belleau, Château-Thierry, Oise-Aisne, Saint-Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne—this is the place the soldiers of the 102nd, and the widows and parents they’d left behind in Connecticut, chose to store on the highest shelf of their memory. Just as I wouldn’t have fully understood the war without them, it seems they wouldn’t have fully understood it without Seicheprey.

  About ninety minutes into my first visit with Laurence Moffitt, his daughter, Janet, who had been here and there in the house up until that point, sometimes listening in, more often not, told me she had to leave to go pick up her granddaughter. Suddenly, I was filled with an irrational but potent sense of dread: What if her father should die while she was gone? The man was 106 years old, after all; he looked fine, but who knows? So, although we were then nearing the end of the interview, I decided to stay until she returned. Mr. Moffitt seemed tired, but, in keeping with his stoicism, he didn’t let on; and when we finished talking about the war, we talked about everything else: his career, his marriage, his life. He told me he’d voted for the first time in 1920, for Warren G. Harding, and had voted in every election, national and local, since. He was a Republican; his father had been a Democrat. He said he participated in every parade they had in Orleans—Memorial Day, July Fourth, Veterans Day, whatever. “I’ve never missed an Armistice Day parade,” he said, “and I don’t expect to miss this one.”

  “Do you march?” I asked.

  “No, I ride,” he replied, without making me feel stupid for asking. “In fact,” he added, “the World War II veterans no longer march. They ride in a car.” He rode in Janet’s Japanese sedan; for the occasion, they slapped a magnetic sign reading WORLD WAR I VETERAN on the door. No one ever oohed or aahed.

  On the occasion of his 104th birthday, he’d received a letter from President George W. Bush, congratulating him. It did not mention his service. He kept it in a scrapbook, which he invited me to flip through; there was also in there a letter from a prominent gerontologist, thanking Mr. Moffitt for agreeing to leave his body to science.

  He showed me his Légion d’Honneur; it was a beautiful, colorful medal, and came with a large certificate signed by President Chirac. He’d had it mounted in a simple frame, from which a very large, jagged piece of glass—almost half the entire thing—had since broken out. It sat on the floor, leaning up against a piece of furniture.

  We talked about his family, his siblings, his parents and grandparents. After he reiterated that he made a point of keeping up with the news and world affairs, I asked him if he’d ever been on the Internet. “No, and I don’t know what the Internet is,” he stated. “And maybe you can tell me. How do I get on the Internet? Do I have to join?”

  “You have to have a computer,” I told him.

  “Well, I have a computer,” he replied.

  “You don’t have to join,” I explained. “It’s just that you have to—you have to subscribe. It’s like a service.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you pay a certain amount of money every month, ten dollars or twenty dollars, and you connect through the telephone line, go through your computer, and then you can connect with millions of different, what they call websites, all over the world. Information, and news, and music, and everything you can imagine. Pictures. It’s—I think you would like it very much.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I have plenty to do,” he said, finally. “Do I need it?”

  “No,” I told him. “You don’t.”

  He said he couldn’t remember what his grandfather had manufactured. I asked if he had fought in the Civil War. “No,” he said. “We had nobody in the Civil War. I don’t know why. Lots of my ancestors were in the Revolutionary War.”

  “How do you feel,” I asked him, “about being the last World War I veteran that many people will meet?”

  “Actually, you don’t feel any of those things,” he replied. “The last this, the first this. Actually, you don’t give it a thought any more than you live every day.”

  A few months later, I returned to Orleans to watch him ride in that parade and interview him a second time. When we were done talking, he and Janet told me they had a tradition of going out to lunch on Veterans Day, and invited me to join them. I considered for a moment, thought about the traffic I might hit on the way home, and demurred. They seemed disappointed; I said I would come back again sometime soon, maybe in the spring. Why not?

  Somehow, the fear that had gripped me a few months earlier, when Janet Moffitt had left to go pick up her granddaughter, had since left me entirely. It didn’t occur to me that her father might not still be around come spring.

  He wasn’t. He died on February 7, 2004, a month shy of his 107th birthday. Had some trouble with his heart, went into the hospital and never emerged. He was a corporal in HQ Company, the keeper of the roll for the 102nd Infantry Regiment of the 26th Division of the United States Army. The rest of the regiment—and the division—having moved on, he closed the register and did, too.

  4

  Cheer and Laughter and Joyous Shout

  There isn’t any girl in France, dear

  who in any way compares with you

  I crossed the sea to take my chance, dear

  with our own Red, White, and Blue

  If they’ll carry me back to old New England

  now that the war is through,

  They can keep all the Frenchies for the French laddies

  but I’m coming back to you.

  —from “Yankee Girl, I’m Coming Back to You”

  by Jack O’Brien and Billy Timmins

  Dedicated to General Clarence R. Edwards and the 26th Division

  NOT EVERYTHING OLD IS VALUABLE. Sure, some people are willing to pay a lot for certain things that have absolutely no practical or aesthetic merit, like those little glass insulator caps that fall off the tops of old power lines; no matter how long I may live, I’ll never understand the allure of those. But there is an awful lot of old stuff out there that people are just dying to unload, and if you should cross their path at the right moment, they will happily unload it upon you rather than haul it to the dump.

  Take 78 rpm records. They’re heavy, ungainly, fragile, and h
opelessly obsolete. They also take up an awful lot of space, and generally age pretty poorly. In my early twenties, though, none of that mattered to me. I bought them in bulk, a hundred or two at a time, for what typically worked out to about a nickel apiece. I knew their resale value was even less, but I didn’t care; I had started collecting Victrolas, and needed something to play on them.

  This was the early 1990s, before Antiques Roadshow and eBay conspired to obliterate the joy of finding things serendipitously. I was living in Memphis in those days, and frequenting a flea market that sprang up monthly at the city’s old fairgrounds. Scarcely a month would pass that didn’t see me lugging home a few large and very heavy boxes of 78s. I had a ritual: crank up the Victrola, get a packet of needles, and spend the day listening to my finds. I didn’t have space for all of them; a record had to be pretty special in some way for me to keep it.

  One day I put an old Victor black-label disk on the platter, dropped the needle on it, and heard this:

  Over in the trenches, up to their eyes in clay,

  Billy and Jack and Jimmie and Joe are singing all the day.

  When they see a German sticking up his snout

  They give him a chance to get out of France and then they shout:

  “Keep your head down, Fritzie boy,

  Keep your head down, Fritzie boy.

  Late last night in the pale moonlight

  I saw you! I saw you!