The Last of the Doughboys Read online

  All along the German trench, at about three-foot intervals, stood a big Prussian guardsman with his rifle at the aim. . . . About three feet in front of the trench they had constructed a single fence of barbed wire and we knew our chances were one thousand to one of returning alive. We could not rush their trench on account of this second defence. Then in front of me the challenge, “Halt,” given in English rang out, and one of the finest things I have ever heard on the western front took place.

  From the middle of our line some Tommy answered the challenge with, “Aw, go to hell.” . . . He wanted to show Fritz that he could die game.

  The Germans, unimpressed, open fire with their machine guns while also throwing grenades. “The Boche in front of me was looking down his sight,” Empey says. “Then came a flash in front of me, the flare of his rifle—and my head seemed to burst. A bullet had hit me on the left side of my face about half an inch from my eye, smashing the cheek bones. I put my hand to my face and fell forward, biting the ground and kicking my feet. I thought I was dying. . . . The blood was streaming down my tunic, and the pain was awful.” He loses consciousness for a moment, then comes to and tells himself, “Emp, old boy, you belong in Jersey City and you’d better get back there as quickly as possible.” This was no mere exhibition of roughriding.

  He crawls away under the machine-gun fire, looking for the hole he’d cut in the barbed wire; but before he gets there,

  I came to a limp form which seemed like a bag of oats hanging over the wire. In the dim light I could see that its hands were blackened, and knew it was the body of one of my mates. I put my hand on his head, the top of which had been blown off by a bomb. My fingers sank into the hole. I pulled my hand back full of blood and brains, then I went crazy with fear and horror and rushed along the wire.

  He finds the gap, but as he rises to his feet, a voice in his head tells him to look around; as he does, a bullet hits him in the left shoulder. “It did not hurt much,” he says, but “then my left side went numb. My arm was dangling like a rag. I fell forward in a sitting position. But all fear had left me and I was consumed with rage and cursed the German trenches.” With his good hand he grabs a grenade, pulls the pin with his teeth, and “blindly” throws it toward the German trench. Seeing it explode, and once again “seized with a horrible fear, I dragged myself . . . through the barbed wire, stumbling over cut wires, tearing my uniform, and lacerating my hands and legs.” He is just about to make it through to No Man’s Land when that same voice in his head tells him to turn around; again he obeys, and another bullet hits him in the same shoulder. “Then it was taps for me,” he says. “The lights went out.”

  He wakes up in a shell hole in No Man’s Land; “How I reached this hole I will never know,” he tells us. Bullets are still flying just overhead. He is in great pain, soaked in his own blood, “and a big flap from the wound in my cheek was hanging over my mouth. The blood running from this flap choked me. Out of the corner of my mouth I would try and blow it back but it would not move.” He tries to wrap a makeshift bandage around the wound, but fails. “You would have laughed if you had seen my ludicrous attempts at bandaging with one hand,” he assures us, though I doubt it. He wasn’t laughing, either. “I had an awful horror of bleeding to death and was getting very faint. . . . The pains in my wounded shoulder were awful and I was getting sick at the stomach.” He passes out again, for an indeterminate spell.

  “When I came to,” he recalls, “hell was let loose.” The Battle of the Somme was under way.

  “An intense bombardment was on, and on the whole my position was decidedly unpleasant,” he explains. But then, from the friendly trenches somewhere beyond his shell hole, a cheer rises up, and the British come storming over the top. The first wave are “Jocks,” or Scots, in full regalia. They were known to kick soccer balls ahead of them as they charged up out of the trenches; Empey doesn’t report seeing this, but still, he says,

  They were a magnificent sight, kilts flapping in the wind, bare knees showing, and their bayonets glistening. In the first wave that passed my shell hole, one of the “Jocks,” an immense fellow, about six feet two inches in height, jumped right over me. . . . One young Scottie, when he came abreast of my shell hole, leaped into the air, his rifle shooting out of his hands, landing about six feet in front of him, bayonet first, and stuck in the ground, the butt trembling. This impressed me greatly.

  Right now I can see the butt of that gun trembling. The Scottie made a complete turn in the air, hit the ground, rolling over twice, each time clawing at the earth, and then remained still, about four feet from me, in a sort of sitting position. I called to him, “Are you hurt badly, Jock?” but no answer. He was dead. A dark, red smudge was coming through his tunic right under the heart. The blood ran down his bare knees, making a horrible sight. On his right side, he carried his water bottle. I was crazy for a drink and tried to reach this, but for the life of me could not negotiate that four feet. Then I became unconscious. When I woke up I was in an advanced first-aid post. I asked the doctor if we had taken the trench. “We took the trench and the wood beyond, all right,” he said, “and you fellows did your bit; but, my lad, that was thirty-six hours ago. You were lying in No Man’s Land in that bally hole for a day and a half. It’s a wonder you are alive.”

  How he got from that shell hole to the first-aid station—how anyone seeing him there even knew he was still alive—Empey does not say. Maybe he never knew. They do tell him that seventeen of the twenty men in his raiding party were killed that night; the officer who led it died while trying to crawl back to his trench. Only one of the twenty returned unharmed. The official communiqué on his trench raid began “All quiet on the Western front,” Empey tells us, and thus did American readers encounter for the first time a phrase that, a dozen years later, Erich Maria Remarque would enlist for the title of the most celebrated novel ever written about that war.

  For Empey, that communiqué marks the end of his war. He spends four months in an English hospital, witnesses daily unheralded acts of great courage, selflessness, and altruism, is discharged as “physically unfit for further war service,” and is sent home on the American ship New York, which, records show, left Liverpool on November 11, 1916, arriving at its eponymous port nine days later. As it pulls into the harbor and he spots the Statue of Liberty, he says, “Though it may seem strange, I was really sorry not to be back in the trenches with my mates. War is not a pink tea but in a worthwhile cause like ours, mud, rats, cooties, shells, wounds, or death itself, are far outweighed by the deep sense of satisfaction felt by a man who does his bit.”

  And then he wrote a book about it.

  That was just the beginning. There was to be a film version, for one thing, shot at Camp Wheeler, Georgia, the War Department graciously offering the production company use of its training trenchworks as locations, not to mention thousands of soldiers of the 82nd Division as extras. Empey himself wrote the screenplay; he also landed the starring role. Like the book, it was a hit, though Empey scarcely had time for red-carpet appearances, occupied as he was with speaking engagements, Liberty Bond rallies, and live demonstrations of trench warfare, staged at some of the country’s largest and most prestigious venues, including, on a half-dozen occasions, Carnegie Hall. They never failed to sell out. He even wrote and published several patriotic songs; my favorite is an anthem of love and trench warfare called “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land but Mine.”

  Somehow, “while trekking back and forth over this country,” as he wrote in its afterword, he managed to write First Call, a very different kind of book that enjoyed much more modest success than had Over the Top. In the years following the war he published several more books, all of them novels; none did well. In the 1920s, he moved out to California, hired a publicist, and wrote a bunch of screenplays, some of which were produced; none did well. He turned to pulp monthlies, churned out action and adventure and combat stories—“Bulldogging the Boche” and “Horsehair Ropes a Heinie” and “Stretcher
Bearers Up!” and “Lay That Wire!” and “When Gunmen Turned Soldiers” and “Cannon Fodder” and “Sealed Orders” and “Two Doughs in a Dungeon” and “Curse of the Iron Cross” and “To the Front in a Hearse” and “Buck Privates Commanding” and “All Quit on the Western Front” and more than a hundred others—until the next war killed both format and genre. In 1943, a reporter for the Associated Press discovered Empey working as a security guard at an aircraft plant. Twenty years later, when he died at a veterans’ hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas, the same wire service misspelled his name “Emtey” in his brief obituary. Five times.

  The depth of his fall, though, does not diminish the accomplishment that initially carried him to the heights from which he later plummeted. I don’t mean selling a million copies of his first book; lots of people make and lose fortunes in short order. But more than any other volume ever published, that first book, Over the Top, brought the war to America, and shaped Americans’ understanding of the conflict; and somehow, while doing all that, Empey managed to assure new doughboys’ families back home that it was OK to laugh. Most important, he simultaneously managed to assure those new doughboys that it was OK to be afraid. As he writes in the book’s final passage:

  There is one thing which my experience taught me that might help the boy who may have to go. It is this—anticipation is far worse than realization. In civil life a man stands in awe of the man above him, wonders how he could ever fill his job. When the time comes he rises to the occasion, is up and at it, and is surprised to find how much more easily than anticipated he fills his responsibilities. It is really so “out there.”

  He has nerve for the hardships; the interest of the work grips him; he finds relief in the fun and comradeship of the trenches and wins that best sort of happiness that comes with duty done.

  The same month those words first appeared in print, hundreds of thousands of draft notices, the first of the war, were sent out; and soon, very soon, a great many young men—draftees, like Antonio Pierro, a poor, struggling immigrant who had just managed to establish a toehold in America and was now being sent back to the continent whence he had escaped; and volunteers, like a twenty-year-old Connecticut Yankee named J. Laurence Moffitt who had seen the storm coming and had already enlisted to do his part—would have the chance to measure Empey’s final sentiment against their own experiences Over There.

  3

  The American Sector

  J. LAURENCE MOFFITT IS directly responsible for the fact that you are holding this book in your hands. Not that he had anything to do with your choosing this title over, say, something by Jane Austen or Louis L’Amour; but were it not for J. Laurence Moffitt, I’m pretty sure this book wouldn’t exist.

  Let me explain. I first met Mr. Moffitt at his home in Orleans, Massachusetts, right at the elbow of Cape Cod, on July 20, 2003. It was the day after my conversation with Anthony Pierro. But that word, “conversation,” is, to be frank, a term that masks the problem that left me terribly discouraged afterward. Yes, I asked Mr. Pierro questions, and he answered them. But it was not a conversation of the type you and I might have if we found ourselves in the same place and were inclined to talk to each other. It was, rather, a bit like a complex game of pinball: There were times when a question would hit a bumper and get a response, or land in a hole and get a big response; but more often it would just fall, freely, striking and setting off nothing but a look of mild bemusement. When this happened I always tried to bat it up again and get different results, but again, more often than not, it would just fall, and eventually I wouldn’t be able to bat it up anymore and I’d just have to move on to the next ball. If I asked the right question, something that would spark in Anthony Pierro the memory of a favorite anecdote—and I received a lot of guidance from Rick Pierro in this regard—then I would get to hear it. But there wasn’t a lot of telling done beyond those favorite old anecdotes. Perhaps the most frustrating part of it was the fact that there were, apparently, some very interesting old stories that Anthony Pierro had forgotten completely, like the one Rick tried to get him to tell me about the time he went back on the chow line for seconds and another soldier, angered by this for some reason, called him a greedy Wop, and a brawl ensued. I would have liked to have heard that one.

  In any event, as much as I had enjoyed meeting and talking with Anthony Pierro—and as grateful as I was that a 107-year-old man who knew nothing about me would take a couple of hours out of his life to talk with me in the first place—I left his house that day with grave doubts about this endeavor I had undertaken. Was I just kidding myself in thinking that I could really converse with World War I veterans, and they with me, and come away with something real and true?

  Those doubts lasted exactly one day. They evaporated a few minutes into my first conversation with J. Laurence Moffitt. He had just told me that he had been born in the small northeastern Connecticut town of Lebanon, when I asked him if he had gone to high school there, too. Here is his response:

  I went to high school from Lebanon. That high school was in Willimantic, which was about two miles from home. And then, I was directed to an insurance company in Hartford for a position and accepted. And I spent my life in insurance. I was hired by two companies, one then another. And I went to World War I. I graduated from high school in 1914. I went in the Army in 1917, in April of 1917, just before war was declared. And I was in the Army for two years; eighteen months in France, in the first division to go to France. The division was the 26th Division, made up of the National Guard of the six New England states. There are four infantry regiments in a division, and artillery batteries, with which I am not acquainted. And the 101st Infantry Regiment was made up of the Massachusetts National Guard. The 102nd was made up of the Connecticut National Guard; that’s where I was, in the 102nd Infantry. The 103rd Infantry Regiment was from Maine, and the 104th from New Hampshire and Vermont, and artillery mostly from Rhode Island.

  And we were, in Connecticut we were assembled at New Haven. All the different National Guard companies of Connecticut were assembled in New Haven, in 1917, July. And from there we went—it was so early in the war there were no transports. We went to—my company, and I don’t know how many others—went by train, the CV, Central Vermont, to Montreal, and then embarked there and sailed down the St. Lawrence to Halifax, where we joined several other National Guard companies that were ready to go across, and went across to Liverpool. A nine-day trip, it was. And then across the Channel to France, and then across France to a certain area, Landeville, and the regiment trained for four months there. And in February we were sent to the front. At that time the Allies, Britain and France and Belgium and others, they were, had been in the war since 1914. And we joined them in 1917, and went to the front in February of 1918.

  So, the first sector was, the Allies at that time were defending themselves against the attacks of Germany. And we were just in defensive action. I was in the Headquarters [Company] of the infantry regiment, and on the staff of the colonel, along with others. I had the rank of a corporal. And I escaped the front line, trench warfare, but I was subject to constant artillery fire. I spent my twenty-first birthday in the front line, March sixth of 1918. And I went out on patrol with a patrol group that night. And we spent two months in that sector, which was the Chemin des Dames. . . .

  Well, that was our first sector. Two months later we were moved to another sector, the Toul Sector. And then came Château-Thierry in the summer of 1918, and then the closing war at Saint-Mihiel and Verdun, and the war was over, as you know, on November eleventh of 1918. . . . And President Wilson paid our company a visit while we were there. And talked to us, and that might have . . . I, I don’t remember . . . don’t recall now just when that was, or what the occasion was. But it was maybe a holiday.

  Mr. Moffitt was 106 years old at the time; he was talking about things that had happened eighty-five years earlier. And not only did he remember these things precisely—he offered up, unsolicited, details like the composition
of various regiments of the 26th Division, and the name of the railroad that carried him to Montreal.

  And he was just getting started.

  J. Laurence Moffitt: He was the first veteran I found off the French List. He was actually listed in the phone book. This proved encouraging, though not quite exciting; lots of people remain in the phone book long after they have died. But when I dialed the number and a woman—I would soon learn she was his daughter, Janet—answered the phone and I asked her my now-refined “Is he still living?” she actually answered, “Yes. Would you like to speak with him?”

  I said I would, and there was silence for what seemed like a very long time, though in fact it was probably just a minute or two. And then another voice came on the line and said: “Hello.” It wasn’t frail; it didn’t quaver. But it came wrapped in an accent I had never heard before, one that had all but vanished before I’d been born. Though he now lived in Orleans, Massachusetts, this man was a true Connecticut Yankee, a relic of a time when Connecticut was a state of farms, not tony suburbs and enormous Indian casinos.

  We met just a couple of weeks after that. Like most of Cape Cod, Orleans had long since metamorphosed from an old fishing village to an expensive summer destination, a place of large second homes. J. Laurence Moffitt had retired there after decades working in insurance, traveling throughout Connecticut and taking the train into Manhattan. His was a small house, set back in some woods; it didn’t get much light. There was only one armchair in the living room on the day I visited, and it was offered to me. I, in turn, offered it back to him, and took for myself the only other seat in the house: his wheelchair. We sat like that for two hours—and, when I returned to see him a few months later, did it again. He was a small man, and thin; on that first day he wore a baggy yellow short-sleeved golf shirt with a button-down pocket, and very large eyeglasses. Exuberant tufts of white hair sprang out from all over his head, a bit more thinly in the middle of it, but still there nonetheless. He spoke very slowly—not that the words came out of his mouth haltingly, but he was prone to taking frequent pauses, sometimes several per sentence, during which, more often than not, he hummed softly. I liked him immediately.