The Last of the Doughboys Read online

  Rick returned with the discharge papers. I was surprised at how much information one double-sided sheet contained, recorded in beautiful penmanship—not simply name, rank, serial number, age at enlistment, height (5'4 ½"), eye color (brown), hair color (dark), and complexion (medium), but occupation (“Laborer”), unit (Battery “E” of the 320th Field Artillery), the date and location of his enlistment (October 4, 1917, Swampscott, Massachusetts), his level of marksmanship (“Not Qualified”) and horsemanship (“Not Mounted”—I imagined the anonymous clerk hadn’t actually asked Private Pierro about that), the dates of his typhoid vaccines, his marital status, his character (“Excellent”), and the dates of his departure, return, and discharge.

  In the middle of the back side of the paper was an entry, with three blank lines, for “battles, engagements, skirmishes, expeditions.” In this case, the clerk had to use all three lines:

  Oise-Aisne, from August 21, 1918 to September 11, 1918

  St. Mihiel, from September 12, 1918 to September 16, 1918

  Meuse-Argonne, from September 26, 1918 to November 11, 1918

  I couldn’t believe it. These were three of the largest battles in which Americans had fought in that war; in the last of them, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, more than twenty-six thousand Americans had been killed. Private Anthony Pierro had spent much of the final three months of the war under terrible fire. And yet, the war he’d spoken of had presented only random and anecdotal dangers—shells, and bullets, and kicking horses. “It’s a miserable life,” he said of the Army at one point, explaining: “You can’t do anything . . . on your own. They tell you what to do.” If you’d polled the men of Battery E of the 320th Field Artillery in the fall of 1918, I imagine that “being told what to do” would have fallen near the bottom of their list of complaints, well below getting bombarded and gassed, scurrying for cover in the dark, sleeping in the mud, dodging rats and lice, burying your dead comrades, literally keeping the wolves at bay, and, of course, army food. I wonder what Private Pierro would have said, though. It seems to me entirely possible that he would have given the same answer in 1918 as he did in 2003. I don’t know if he really was able to shut out the fear, the terror, the sense that a horrible death could literally fall upon you from the sky at any moment, or if he’d felt it at the time but was somehow able to leave it behind when he sailed for home, and never let it find him again. Whichever it was, I am sure it was part of something greater within him, an equanimity that helped him make it to the age of 107.

  He and Rick both showed me to the door. Walking to my car, I heard something, turned, and saw Anthony Pierro standing on the porch, alone. He was waving to me and calling out: “Adios, amigos! Adios, amigos!”

  As I drove off, I saw in my rearview mirror that he was still waving. And I thought: I will probably never see this man again.

  2

  Over the Top

  THE AUTHOR OF First Call, the book that offered the cheerful (or depressing, depending upon your perspective) assessment of the state of vice in France, was a man named Arthur Guy Empey. First Call was actually Empey’s second book, and that one passage tells you pretty much all you need to know about it. His first book, though—Over the Top—well, now, that one was really something.

  Almost from the moment it was published, in June, 1917, Over the Top was a tremendous success. In its March, 1918, issue, The Bookman, a trade journal for the publishing industry, reported that the book “has been selling at the rate of two hundred and fifty copies every business hour since its publication last June.” If you do the math, you come up with the figure of nearly four hundred thousand copies in print at that point—this at a time when the population of the United States was less than a third of what it is today, and literacy rates were significantly lower, too. By the time the war ended that autumn, more than a million copies of Over the Top were in print. If you want to know what one book almost all Americans were reading back in 1917 and 1918, what single volume most informed their vision of what that war was really like for the men in the trenches of France, this is it. It shares, in a voice that even today sounds surprisingly modern, a tale that most returning soldiers did not care to.

  Writers love to grouse about the undeserved success of best-selling authors, but Over the Top is, in fact, a wonderful book—interesting, compelling, well written, and even, in spots, very funny. Still, as is so often the case, its success was due, in large part, to good timing: It was published just two months after America entered the war, and weeks after Congress passed the Selective Service Act, effectively establishing the first draft since the Civil War. Americans were excited, apprehensive, and above all hungry to learn about this war they were now in. Empey, as it happened, was the man to feed that hunger. A fellow American, he’d lost patience when the sinking of the Lusitania did not propel his country into the war, so he made his way over to England, convinced the British Army to let him enlist, shipped out for France, saw a good bit of action in the trenches, and was badly wounded at the Somme, so badly that he was not expected to live. But he did live, and was eventually discharged and shipped back home, where he got to work on a book about his experiences. He didn’t plan the timing of its release, but if he had he certainly couldn’t have done any better. The convergence linked Arthur Guy Empey with the Great War in the minds of millions of Americans; and eventually, when that war was forgotten, he was, too.

  In 1917, when Over the Top began to sell, Empey gave some newspaper interviews, and the few that survive and can be found today are among the only sources of any information about his early life. To call them “interviews,” though, takes a good bit on faith, as they were all printed as soliloquies, and you get the sense, in reading them, that Empey (or perhaps a publicist) wrote them in full beforehand and just sent them out to be published as they were. They certainly serve to help create the legend he wished to proliferate. “When I first opened my eyes, I breathed the air of the Rockies,” he declares. “It is with pride that I state that I am a pure, unadulterated American.”

  He was born on December 11, 1883, in Ogden, Utah, and his adventurous spirit, he claims, first manifested itself when he was four; the family was then living in Cheyenne, Wyoming. “I took it into my head to explore the sandhills,” he tells us, “and after a frantic twelve-hour search by my parents, was brought back to the fold.” His parents then put up a locked gate, which did manage to keep him in, as did the fact that, on several occasions, his father caught him trying to pick the lock, and, in the splendid parlance of the day, “applied the slipper” to his son. Thus was young Empey’s wanderlust stifled, or perhaps merely channeled through that of his family, which eventually moved to Virginia, then Canada, then New York. Empey enrolled in Brooklyn’s Manual Training High School, where he played left halfback on the football team (“the most worthy thing I did in high school”), and where his adventurousness resurfaced. “While in high school I took a notion to go to sea,” he declares. “I ran away and shipped as second cook on the tramp steamer Cuzco.” Nearly seven months later, he tells us, having “put in at twenty-six different ports and peeled eleven million barrels of ‘spuds,’” he returned to New York with “a monkey, a parrot and about $8 in silver.”

  Empey was only home for a couple of weeks before boredom drove him to join Brooklyn’s 47th National Guard Regiment, where, he says, he made sergeant before choosing to return to sea, this time with the United States Navy. He was assigned to “the USS Missouri, or Misery, as we called her.” It was an ill-fated post: The Missouri rammed and nearly sank another American battleship in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and later, on April 13, 1904, caught fire during target practice. Thirty-six sailors were killed; “I barely escaped with my life,” Empey declares.

  So he returned to the Army, this time to the 12th United States Cavalry; records show he enlisted on July 10, 1905, giving his height as five feet four and a half inches, and his occupation as “lifeguard.” He was, he tells us, eventually promoted to the rank of sergeant major, altho
ugh the highlight of his service in the 12th was giving “exhibitions of rough riding at the Jamestown exposition” of 1907. On July 15, 1908, he reenlisted, this time with the 11th United States Cavalry—the 1910 census lists him as a corporal stationed at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia—but on July 2, 1910, the record shows, he went absent without leave, or AWOL (the original designation—desertion—is crossed out on the form), surrendering to military authorities thirteen days later. He was ultimately discharged at San Antonio on July 25, 1911, presumably honorably; the record notes him as “reformed.” Empey understandably omits this episode from his account of his time with the 11th, stating only that he “did duty with them on the Mexican border during the trouble in 1911.” There was a lot of “trouble” along the border in those days; a few years later, General John J. Pershing would lead his own troops across it in search of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, only to return empty-handed.

  By his own account, Empey served a total of six years in the cavalry. Upon discharge, he returned to New York, where he joined a mounted National Guard unit, and then, when his term of service expired, joined another. He also, depending upon which account you read, “started in business for myself” (business unspecified) or went to work for “a well-known detective agency” (job title unspecified). But with the coming of the war, his wanderlust apparently returned. Records show that he applied for a passport on October 18, 1915, in New York, now listing his height as five feet five, his hair and eyes as brown, his nose as straight, his forehead as high, mouth large, chin square, complexion dark. He gives his occupation as “private investigator,” and claims he wishes to travel abroad—specifically, to France and England—for the purpose of “legal investigations.” He does not confirm or even mention any of this in his later accounts; rather, he tells us: “I thought I would take a peep at France, so I shipped on the horse ship La Gascogne as assistant veterinarian, and after ducking the submarines we landed thirteen hundred horses for the French artillery at Bordeaux, France.” He returned right home, he says, but shortly after his arrival, while walking down Broadway, “I heard a German pass the remark about the Americans being too proud to fight, so I went to London and joined the British army.”

  I won’t speculate on how much of this autobiography is factual, except to note that in Over the Top, Empey tells a different version of the story of how he came to enlist. He was working in Jersey City, he writes, when word came into his office of the sinking of the Lusitania. He and his office-mate, a lieutenant in the New Jersey National Guard, immediately break out the muster rolls, expecting a declaration of war to come at any moment. “We busied ourselves till late in the evening,” he recalls, “writing out emergency telegrams for the men to report when the call should come from Washington.” But the call never came. “Months passed,” he writes, “the telegrams lying handy, but covered with dust”; eventually, he and the lieutenant threw them away. “He was squirming in his chair and I felt depressed and uneasy,” Empey confesses. And then:

  The telephone rang and I answered it. It was a business call for me requesting my services for an out-of-town assignment. Business was not very good, so this was very welcome. After listening to the proposition, I seemed to be swayed by a peculiarly strong force within me, and answered, “I am sorry that I cannot accept your offer, but I am leaving for England next week,” and hung up the receiver. The Lieutenant swung around in his chair, and stared at me in astonishment. A sinking sensation came over me, but I defiantly answered his look with, “Well, it’s so. I am going.” And I went.

  Arthur Guy Empey was by no means the first American to join the fight. Since the war had begun in Europe in 1914, American citizens had been sailing off to England, or making their way up to Canada, to get around their own country’s neutrality and get in their own shot at the Kaiser. (Or possibly to fight for the Kaiser, though I’ve never read about any such men.) Empey, though, writes as if he were the only one, and the early sections of Over the Top are filled with comic scenes of Englishmen encountering a Yank for the very first time and not knowing quite what to make of him. He has difficulty getting someone to let him enlist, more difficulty getting someone to give him something to do, more difficulty still getting anyone to agree that he should be allowed to fight. And when at last he does manage to get himself sent to training camp, misunderstandings compound misunderstandings. (He never quite tells us which unit he joined, just that they were part of the Royal Fusiliers; if you hold a magnifying glass up to the photo he includes of his arm and identification disk, though, you can make out that he was a private in the Machine Gun Company of the 167th Brigade, 56th Division.) They find his brand of English incomprehensible, and we quickly come to understand, by way of his phonetically rendered cockney accents—you could call it a bad movie brogue, but movies were still silent then—that the feeling is mutual. Empey, the proud autodidact, eagerly shares what he learns regarding regulations, equipment, terminology, slang. But then he gets sent to France, and at this point the experience changes for the reader as quickly and dramatically as it did for him:

  The odor from a dug-up, decomposed human body has an effect which is hard to describe. It first produces a nauseating feeling, which, especially after eating, causes vomiting. This relieves you temporarily, but soon a weakening sensation follows, which leaves you limp as a dish-rag. Your spirits are at their lowest ebb and you feel a sort of hopeless helplessness and a mad desire to escape it all . . . a vague horror of the awfulness of the thing and an ever-recurring reflection that, perhaps I, sooner or later, would be in such a state.

  The dead body in this instance—and there are a lot of them in Over the Top—is that of a German soldier, stumbled upon by a member of Empey’s digging party when, in the darkness, he inadvertently thrusts his pick into its lifeless chest. “One of the men fainted,” Empey reports, adding, gamely: “I was that one.”

  When you read something like that, the question of why Empey’s book became such a sensational bestseller just disintegrates in your mind. But it is soon replaced by another: How did something like this even manage to be published at all in 1917, given that the country had just entered that same war? Because Empey wasn’t just relating the horrors of war; he was testifying to the rank stupidity of the men in charge of waging it.

  Take this description of a nighttime mission assigned to Empey and a few others shortly after they arrived in the trenches—that is, long, muddy ditches filled with rats and vermin and separated from the enemy’s long, muddy ditches by no more than a few hundred yards of shell-ravaged earth known, for good reason, as No Man’s Land:

  All we had to do was crawl out into No Man’s Land, lie on our bellies with our ears to the ground and listen for the tap tap of the German engineers or sappers who might be tunneling under No Man’s Land to establish a mine-head beneath our trench.

  Of course, in our orders we were told not to be captured by German patrols or reconnoitering parties. Lots of breath is wasted on the Western Front giving silly cautions.

  Ill-conceived as this assignment is, Empey and the other men do it anyway, and without question, or at least uttered question. At one point, lying there completely exposed, they are very nearly discovered by a German patrol.

  A dark form suddenly loomed up in front of me, it looked as big as the Woolworth Building. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins and it sounded as loud as Niagara Falls.

  Forms seemed to emerge from the darkness. There were seven of them in all. I tried to wish them away. I never wished harder in my life. They muttered a few words in German and melted into the blackness. I didn’t stop wishing, either.

  That time, everyone made it back. “The next morning I was stiff as a poker and every joint ached like a bad tooth,” Empey tells us, “but I was still alive, so it did not matter.”

  Another night—the hard work, it seems, was always done under cover of darkness—Empey is sent out to inspect the enemy’s barbed wire fence. He manages to complete this portion of the mission,
but becomes disoriented while returning to his trench and nearly crawls into a German trench, instead; he is discovered, leaps to his feet, and sprints back toward his own lines. “The bullets were biting all around me,” he tells us, “when bang! I ran smash into our wire.” He is nearly shot by a British sentry.

  Despite that, he remains quite fond of “Tommy,” or the typical British soldier; he also develops a grudging but firm respect for the enemy—and even, in some cases, affection. Prussian and Bavarian units usually gave Tommy “a hot time of it,” but the Saxons were, in Empey’s view, much more civilized. When Saxon and English units faced each other, he writes, “both sides would sit on the parapet and carry on a conversation.” They would chat genially; then, “when the Saxons were to be relieved by Prussians or Bavarians, they would yell this information across No Man’s Land and Tommy would immediately tumble into his trench and keep his head down.” The Saxons did the same when the English called out that they were about to be replaced by feared Irish troops. “The Boches,” Empey explains, invoking a popular ethnic epithet of the day, “hate the man from Erin’s Isle.”