The Last of the Doughboys Read online

  Like most people in Forenza, Rocco Pierro worked the land, but it was a hard living, and at some point, most likely after his son Antonio was born, he discovered that he could earn more for himself and his family by working someone else’s land, if he were willing to travel—to America. Which he did. As his sons and grandson explained it to me more than a century later, Rocco Pierro came to Massachusetts and found work as a landscaper for affluent Yankee families in Swampscott. I say “came to Massachusetts” rather than “immigrated” because he didn’t immigrate, not really—at least not until decades after he first arrived. Many immigrants back then came to America not to stay forever but to work good jobs, save their pay, and ultimately return home with a healthy bankroll. Rocco Pierro did, too—except, unlike most, he did it every year. As Rick Pierro explained it to me, once a year his grandfather would leave Swampscott, return to his wife and children in Forenza, tend to his affairs there, and, after a certain amount of time—typically a month or so—depart once again for Swampscott, leaving behind those same children and that same wife, who was invariably, at the end of one of those annual visits, pregnant. “Between children,” his son Anthony recalled, “having children, you know, he used to come here. Load up with all kinds of money that he had earned. And he’d come back. When that money was gone, he’d come back here again. Honestly, he was back and forth, back and forth. Every child. Between children.”

  No one’s sure exactly when Rocco Pierro started his annual transatlantic commute, but in 1914, Antonio, now eighteen, made the trip with his father and, not having started a family of his own yet, stayed. As it happened, his timing was good: While he was getting settled in to America, Europe was collapsing into the biggest war it had ever seen. Italy managed to stay out of it for eight months or so, until the Allies lured the Italians into it by promising them several Austro-Hungarian provinces once that old empire was defeated and dismantled. There was a good bit of fighting in Italy—at one point, the Austrians made it almost to Venice—but it never got close to Forenza. And it never got close to Antonio Pierro, safely across the ocean, mowing lawns and pruning shrubs in Swampscott.

  Until, that is, America entered the war and decided that, though he’d only been here a few years and wasn’t yet a citizen, they needed him anyway. They made it easy for him, too; he didn’t even have to make a trip down to the local recruiter’s office. “I didn’t have to do anything,” he told me. “They just drafted me in.” He was twenty-one years old, the minimum age for Selective Service in 1917.

  He was sent to boot camp at Camp Gordon, in Georgia, where he learned to play checkers and was assigned to an artillery unit. Someone discovered that he was good with horses; in Italy, he recalled, “I loved the horses. Whenever I had a chance I’d take a horse and go to the public forest and get a load of wood for the people.” So they made him an orderly to a lieutenant. Many artillery units had been recently converted from old cavalry units, and officers were still mounted. As an orderly, Private Pierro was responsible for taking care of the lieutenant’s horse. They gave him a horse, too, so he could keep up. He liked the work. “I used to mount the horse like a monkey,” he said with a chuckle. “I used to hop on a horse, no problem at all. Right from the ground up.”

  Horses run through just about all of Anthony Pierro’s memories of the war. If you ever need a quick way to remind yourself how long ago the First World War happened, and how much the world has changed since then, think of this: There were still horses everywhere, carrying scouts, towing heavy artillery from place to place, pulling supply wagons. By the next big war they were all but gone. (The Polish cavalry famously squared off against the mechanized Nazi Wehrmacht in the opening hours of that war; it did not fare well.) But in World War I, horses were essential. And they weren’t sheltered, either, kept far behind the lines and consigned to light work. They were in the thick of it, often getting killed—and even, occasionally, doing the killing. “Some of them were wild,” Anthony Pierro recalled. “And the city kids, they didn’t know anything about a horse or anything. No, they couldn’t even mount a horse. They had to crawl up there like a cat.” This is not a good way to approach a horse, especially one that has already been rendered skittish by a steady diet of bursting shells. “[If] he can’t see you, or who it is—he’ll kick you.” One city kid in Private Pierro’s unit learned this lesson too late. “He goes and puts his hands on the back part of the horse,” Mr. Pierro recalled. “The horse didn’t see him in the front, so, woo, he killed him. So, whenever you want to caress a horse, you go at the neck and then stay there. Yeah, animals are—I learned a lesson.”

  Much more typically, though, horses were the casualties. A boat full of them, part of the convoy that carried Private Pierro and thousands of other American soldiers across the Atlantic, was sunk by a bomb-dropping German airplane (or “aeroplane,” as flying machines were then called) as it approached the French coast. (It was, apparently, a very large convoy: “A whole division went [over] together,” he recalled. “It looked like a village.”) And one time, in France, when he was walking up a road behind a horse, an H.E. (high explosive) shell came screaming in and burst in front of them; the horse was killed, but its body shielded Private Pierro from the explosion and shrapnel, saving his life. “Oh, well,” he told me, “the horses, they got killed, yeah. But the only thing that we could do is dig a trench and bury them. Because leaving them outside, they would have had wolves eating it up.” Yes: wolves on the battlefield.

  Mr. Pierro didn’t just tend to horses in France. “I was a driver,” he told me. “I rode a horse attached to the carriage, to take the supply around.” What he didn’t tell me was that he would ride up to the front lines with a wagon loaded with supplies, drop them off with the troops, and ride back with another load: the bodies of slain infantrymen. I learned that part of the story much later, by which time I was no longer surprised that someone might leave it out in the retelling. Some memories, I had since learned, don’t grow easier to recount even with the passage of eighty-five years.

  In fact, though his nephew later confirmed that his uncle had, indeed, told him in the past that he had often carried bodies back from the front lines, when I spoke to Anthony Pierro in 2003, he remembered it differently. “We didn’t take no bodies,” he told me. “We buried them in the—at the front line. Wherever they died, that’s where we dug a hole and buried his body. Yeah. And the—the cross would be in the cemetery, but the body would be where he died.” However he remembered it, disposing of dead bodies was a regular event.

  And there were a lot of them. In World War I, artillery was responsible for more deaths than anything else, more than bullets and bayonets, more than tanks and aeroplanes, more than poison gas and barbed wire. Naturally, this made artillery units on both sides a favorite target of the enemy, and Private Pierro frequently found himself under fire. “The shells used to come pretty often,” he said. “That’s terrific. Shells are coming your way, and you don’t know where to duck.” Fortunately, soldiers would often be alerted that a barrage was about to begin by the sight of an enemy aeroplane overhead. “They’d send a plane to locate the enemy’s [position] . . . and that’s how they got the distance to shoot . . . oh, they’d kill quite a few soldiers.”

  The sound of an aeroplane overhead may have filled doughboys with dread, but at least it served as a warning to take cover, as did the noise the shells made when they were coming in. “They used to make a whistle when the shell was flying,” Mr. Pierro recalled, and whistled himself to mimic the sound. “They went weeeeeee, ba-BOOM! when it hit the ground and exploded.” It was such a regular event that some soldiers developed their own routines in response.

  “I had one tree—I used to duck underneath that tree,” Mr. Pierro told me. And one day, like that unfortunate horse, this tree saved his life. “I was lucky,” he said. “I was ducking underneath a tree. It got hit. But it didn’t—the shell didn’t explode.” He turned his gaze toward the ceiling and said, in the voice of a twenty
-two-year-old private: “Oh, boy. Thank you, God.”

  The incoming shell had gotten caught in the tree’s branches; if it had hit the trunk, or passed through and hit the ground below, it would have killed him. But it didn’t. “That’s what saved me,” he told me. “It was a tree. The shell landed in the tree. And it didn’t explode.”

  Private Pierro knew how lucky he was; he immediately ran to find his captain, hunkering down in a dugout, and told him the story. The captain just looked at Private Pierro and said: “Bring it over.”

  It: the unexploded shell. Anthony Pierro couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but an order is an order. “So I brung it over,” he recalled. He ran back to that tree, climbed up, retrieved the unexploded shell, and carried it—“oh, boy, nice and easy; if the thing went off, I wouldn’t be here, telling you”—to the captain’s dugout.

  The captain, seeing the private return to the dugout carrying a live shell, must have been just as stunned as the private had been when the captain had ordered him to fetch it from the tree; perhaps the order had merely been a joke that was just a shade too subtle. “Here’s the shell,” Pierro said to the wide-eyed captain. The captain’s response, he recalled, was to cry: “Get it out of here! Take it away from here!”

  “Where do you want to put it?” the private asked.

  “Just lay it down there!” the captain replied, pointing at a spot far away.

  And eighty-five years later, the private added: “Oh, boy.”

  And this coda: “You know, a foolish thing to do. Pick it up from the tree where it was stuck.”

  Although he had a couple of close brushes with death, the war stories Anthony Pierro returned to most frequently and with the most fondness that day were not tales of combat, and they didn’t take place anywhere near the front. There was the time, for instance, when, he said, on his way over to France, his unit passed through England and marched in parade for a special audience. “The king and the queen,” he recalled. “They were way up on the balcony while we were passing by.” Someone barked out an order: Eyes right! “So, you march and you look at the king and the queen,” he said.

  And then there was Madeleine. Private Pierro met her when he was stationed in Bordeaux after the armistice, and he confirmed, eighty-five years later, that she was very pretty and that they would go dancing “every night.” He became close with her parents, too. “I used to go to their house,” he said. “They had some goodies, and they put it out.” French fathers typically sought to keep their daughters clear of soldiers—especially Americans, who had been through less of the war and were very far from home, two factors that helped give them a reputation of being a bit wilder than French or British troops—but Anthony Pierro found a way to win over Madeleine’s father: “I used to bring him a bottle of wine . . . cigarettes, too. He would—he used to smoke, but it was hard to get the stuff at the store.” He smiled at the memory. “Oh, I got along fine,” he explained. But he got along best with Madeleine. “We used to dance, and this girl, Madeleine, every night, we’d go out dancing,” he recalled. “What else there was?”

  Actually, in most fair-sized towns in France, including Bordeaux, there was quite a lot else. While Private Pierro’s relationship with Madeleine was mostly innocent, the same could not be said of the dancehalls they frequented. On street level, everything looked normal, if a bit empty—a dance floor, maybe a small band or a man and a piano or perhaps just a gramophone, and a girl or two standing around, waiting for a dance with a soldier; but upstairs, almost always, was a bordello. “That’s the business,” Pierro explained. “One girl was down on the main floor. Upstairs were the other girls.” He smiled as he recalled the phrase that the downstairs girls had learned and repeated often: “Upstairs, two dollars.”

  “And did you go up?” Rick asked him, already knowing the answer; they had had this conversation many times before.

  “No,” his uncle replied. “I was afraid to get sick.” He thought again about the woman who worked downstairs, on the dance floor. “She had a skirt up to here. Yeah, she was sending the business from down the main floor upstairs. ‘Upstairs, two dollars.’”

  Two dollars was not an insignificant sum to an enlisted man in the American Expeditionary Forces, or AEF, in 1918, but these places did a brisk business, anyway—so brisk, in fact, that the matter became a cause for alarm, both in the Army and on the Home Front, where a new book titled First Call: Guideposts to Berlin was in wide circulation; its author, an American returned from serving in France, intended First Call as a primer on what newly minted soldiers, future soldiers, and their loved ones back home might expect from the war. In chapter 2, “For the Mothers,” the author, anticipating that the expression “Upstairs, two dollars” might soon work its way back to the Home Front, writes:

  I wish to impress upon you the fact that there is certain propaganda in the United States (if its source is traced it will be found that it is of pro-German origin), spreading the report that our boys, when they reach France, will have ample opportunity to mingle with women of questionable character. Nowhere in the world is a stronger line drawn between soldiers and this class of women than in France. In fact, when soldiers are quartered in cities, towns or villages, it is a court-martial offense for them to be found in certain segregated districts. This order or regulation is strictly enforced by provost guard and patrols, which constantly watch these districts and arrest all soldiers found within the prohibited zones, unless they have documentary evidence to prove that they are there on a specific military duty. So, Mothers, do not let this worry you in any way, no matter what stories to the contrary you may hear in the United States.

  The author, a man of some intelligence, undoubtedly knew from his own time in France that this entreaty to the reader was bushwah of the purest form. Every soldier who’d been there would have.

  “The best part of it was being in Bordeaux,” Anthony Pierro said later, toward the end of our conversation. “The girls used to say, ‘Upstairs, two dollars.’”

  “But you didn’t go upstairs,” his nephew added.

  “I didn’t have the two dollars,” the old man replied with a shrug.

  On the morning of November 11, 1918, Anthony Pierro was guarding German prisoners in the Argonne Forest—“a whole bunch of them, we had them all fenced in”—when a messenger brought the news: The war was over. “Everybody was dancing,” Mr. Pierro recalled. “Hurray!” And then: “Who won? Who won?”

  Eventually Private Pierro sailed back home again, arriving in New York on May 9, 1919, 356 days after he’d sailed off for France. Six days after his return, he was discharged at Camp Dix, New Jersey. He returned to Swampscott and went back to work, landscaping for the same people he had left when he was drafted, a family named Waters. He got married and went to work at a shoe factory, trimming leather edges; then for a brother-in-law in the service department of a Pontiac dealership, where he did everything from straightening car frames to painting pinstripes; then at General Electric, where he worked on prototypes of engines for fighter planes. At some point, facing anti-Italian prejudice, he changed his last name to “Pierre” (anti-French prejudice, apparently, was less acute at the time), but later changed it back. He never had children. “My wife’s parents had ten children,” he told me ruefully, “and she couldn’t have any. Just—just couldn’t have any. That’s all.” He retired in 1961. She died in 1964. Thirty-nine years later, we met.

  “Why do you think you’ve lived so long?” I asked him. “Do you have a secret?”

  “No secret about it,” he replied. “Just healthy, and—you live. Something bothers you, you better get rid of it if you can.”

  “Other than hard of hearing, he takes no medication, prescribed medication,” his nephew said. “I give him Tylenol for his arthritis, and two multivitamin pills a day. That’s it. Every morning, he gets up and takes—he has an egg for breakfast, toast. He eats like a horse. Uses a lot of salt. He lived by himself until he was a hundred.”

  We
talked a bit more, and then I turned off the camera and tape recorder and packed them up. Rick Pierro went off to find a copy of his uncle’s discharge papers; his uncle appeared to be dozing upright on the couch. I looked over some of the old pictures Rick had dug out in anticipation of my visit. There was one of Anthony Pierro in his uniform in 1918; he was handsome—really handsome, what they used to call matinee-idol handsome. I looked at the man on the couch, then back at the picture. Several times.

  Behind me, propped up on a shelf, was a large framed color photograph of a rustic town spread out in shades of brown and white and green across a rocky hill. I walked over to it and examined it closely; the picture was taken at a distance, so the whole town was visible, although I couldn’t discern any people, animals, or even cars, which made me feel like I was looking at a scale model. I had an idea of what it was.

  “That’s Forenza,” said a voice right behind me. Anthony Pierro, now very much awake, raised his hand and touched a finger to the glass, pointing out the house where he had lived a century earlier, and the church he had attended as a child. That moment was, I sensed, the closest he had felt that morning to his distant past. There were a few points, during our conversation, when he punctuated a war story with phrases like “I hope it will never happen again” and “It wasn’t worth it,” but for the most part, whether he was talking about dancing with Madeleine or that shell hitting the tree or his wife’s infertility, his mood stayed the same, calm and detached, with faint hints of wonder or amusement here and there. But standing there next to me, softly pressing his finger to that glass, gazing through spectacles at the home he’d left forever at eighteen, he seemed to change just a little bit, to soften just enough for me to see a hint of that eighteen-year-old’s flame inside a 107-year-old body. He was very, very old, but he was still a man, the same man who had done all those things so long ago.