The Last of the Doughboys Page 9

  Later that morning they marched their new trophies to the nearby town of Thiaucourt, lined them up in rows, and took the photograph that today graces that kiosk in the French woods, above the caption: Les prisonniers américains du 20 avril photographiés dans Thiaucourt. The American prisoners of April 20, photographed in Thiaucourt. It was a public relations coup. This is how we dealt with the first of your soldiers, the Germans were saying. Bring on the rest.

  In fact, the men of the 102nd had acquitted themselves very well: Surprised and overwhelmed by veteran German troops with superior numbers, weapons, and experience, the troops from Connecticut nevertheless fought them off, killing quite a few (in one case, with a meat cleaver) in the process; most reports echo Sibley’s sentiments when he says, “In its essence, the result of Seicheprey was this: the enemy came over prepared to stay and didn’t succeed in doing so. His losses were heavier than ours. So . . . at least we had the best of it.”

  And yet: those prisoners. People just couldn’t get over that. Even the men of the 102nd who fought off the Stosstruppen and Infanteristen, beat them back with rifle butts and cobblestones and meat cleavers—even they came to view Seicheprey through that lens. Eighty-five years later, this is all the very last survivor of that battle—during which the German shock troops penetrated so far, so fast that there was even frantic fighting at the regiment’s headquarters—could bring himself to say about it:

  “Seicheprey. That was our first battle. In April of 1918. The Germans came over at us, captured quite a few, and took the city, where some of our troops were. And then, after, we turned and took the city back.”

  That’s it.

  “As I told my mother, she had reason to worry all the time about her son,” Corporal Moffitt explained to me in his living room on Cape Cod. “I worried only when I was in danger, and I wasn’t in danger most of the time. I was perfectly safe in the dugouts or in trenches. The people at home had reason to worry—they didn’t know when I was safe and when I wasn’t safe.”

  J. Laurence Moffitt: Nothing was a big deal to him. I asked him at one point what it was like to remember things that had happened almost a century earlier; he said his memories of 1918 were no different to him than my memories of 1993 were to me. “They’re mine, they’re yours,” he said. “I’m not impressed or affected by it.” A lot of people made a fuss over the fact that he was 106 years old, but he wasn’t one of them. “My wife and I never gave any thought to age at all,” he said; his wife, Flo, had died at ninety-seven, two weeks shy of their seventy-sixth wedding anniversary. “I don’t care anything about age. It doesn’t give me a thought. I just live, and age is never in my mind. I don’t know why people make so much of age.” His granddaughter, he told me, had recently complained to him that she was feeling old; she’d just turned forty-eight.

  It wouldn’t have occurred to her grandfather to complain on his forty-eighth birthday, or any birthday. “I take things as they are, and I don’t let problems bother me. I never have problems,” he told me when I asked him for the secret of his longevity. Several months later, when I visited him again and asked him if it had been difficult for him to adjust to civilian life after the war, he replied, “Nothing has ever been hard for me. I just live.”

  The war, though, couldn’t have been easy for him. Being in HQ Company did not spare him, or anyone, what the rest of the regiment was enduring. Everyone took their turns in the front-line trenches, and, as at Seicheprey, the fighting often came right up to HQ; after artillery and machine guns, it was the enemy’s top target. And in all their time in France—more than a year, between their arrival and the armistice—the YD spent only one month away from the front lines. They were moved around a lot, shuttling back and forth in boxcars between sectors. “There’d be maybe twenty-five or thirty, maybe more, in a single car,” Laurence Moffitt told me. “No chairs, no anything, except the floor.”

  “Was that an uncomfortable way to travel?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he replied, “everything was uncomfortable, obviously . . . you’re sitting on the ground or the floor. And you didn’t mind the discomfort. You took it as part of the job. Yep.”

  After the Toul Sector they were shipped to Château-Thierry, just ninety kilometers from Paris, where, among other feats, they liberated the town of Belleau. The battle of Belleau Wood is remembered as a triumph for the Marines, and it was, but the YD fought in the immediate area just weeks later, and it wasn’t a safe—or pleasant—place for anyone. “Apart from the hourly peril of the place, with its constant visitations from shell-fire, gas, and machine-gun bursts, the woods themselves were full of horror,” Taylor writes. “Shapeless fragments of what once were men hung in the jagged branches of the trees, blown there by shells. . . . A grisly odor of death hung heavy in the summer air . . . and men there came to move and talk as when they know that ghosts are watching them.”

  If the Germans made things particularly hard for the YD in the summer of 1918, it was because they knew what was at stake. At that point, there were still not very many American divisions in France, and the Germans had taken a big risk, overstretching themselves in a grand offensive that they hoped would end the war before the Americans could arrive in force. The risk didn’t pay off; ultimately, the Germans failed to destroy the fledgling AEF. Many historians credit that failure with mortally wounding the German war machine, starting a decline that would culminate four months later. But if the Germans didn’t manage to kill off the American Army at that point, they did nevertheless kill off quite a few American soldiers, and wounded many more so badly that they had to be sent back to America, perhaps never to recover. By his own account, Laurence Moffitt had a number of close calls. “I was very lucky,” he said, typically. “I was hit once by shrapnel, not severely.” He said it had occurred around Château-Thierry.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “Well, I was hit in the leg, in the hip. It wasn’t severely. It hit my leg, and it dropped, the shrapnel dropped to the ground and I reached down and picked it up and it was very hot. So I dropped it, and waited for it to cool, then picked it up. But I have it, still have it . . . a piece of shrapnel about that long.” He held a thumb and forefinger about two inches apart; it didn’t look like much, until you imagined a jagged, red-hot piece of iron that size tearing through your bowels or chest or head. So much of it fell on Lorraine that it still pops up today every time a field there is plowed. In just minutes one morning, strolling casually, I found enough of it in a field outside Seicheprey to fill a large grocery bag, including some pieces that were a foot or longer.

  “Did you come under artillery fire often?” I asked him.

  “All the time,” he replied. “We lived under it.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Well, after a while you disregarded it. You didn’t worry about it. You felt, If I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t. And you just paid no attention to it, the shells dropping about you. You couldn’t worry about it all the time.”

  Coming from another man, a younger man, I would have taken this statement as merely bravado. But I could tell that Laurence Moffitt was speaking what was, to him, merely the plain truth. As I said, nothing was a big deal to him; that, I suspect, is part of the reason he made it to 106.

  “Did you ever come under gas attack?” I asked him.

  “All the time,” he replied. “There was gas in all the shells, practically. And yes, I was severely gassed several times, but I never went to medical for it. I just lost my voice and eventually it would come back.”

  Although it was responsible for far fewer deaths than bullets, bombs, or bayonets (though probably more than meat cleavers), poison gas is remembered today as the weapon of World War I, primarily because of the horrible things even a little of it could do to you: blind you, cover your skin with blisters and sores, break down your lungs in a hurry, bleed you out internally, drown you in your own bodily fluids. “So you were very lucky?” I asked.

  “Yes, I w
as,” he replied. “Very.”

  Still, it wasn’t as if he’d been unprepared. “We were trained to put on the gas masks,” he explained. “As I remember, six seconds was the time it would take you to put on the gas mask. And when the shells started coming over, you would use those six seconds to get the gas mask on. And after a while, you didn’t bother to put the gas mask on. You smelled the gas”—it smelled, he said, like mustard—“and if it wasn’t severe, you didn’t bother to put your gas mask on. And we lived with that.”

  Only, a lot of men in Corporal Moffitt’s regiment didn’t live. Throughout the summer of 1918 and on into the fall, the Yankee Division, including the 102nd Regiment, went from fight to fight to fight. As at Seicheprey, they acquitted themselves very well; and, as at Seicheprey, some of them died in the process. Major George Rau of Hartford, who had commanded the defense of Seicheprey and been highly decorated for it afterward, was killed by a German shell three months later, near Château-Thierry; during that same week, July 18–25, Sibley claims the YD, in a counteroffensive against the Germans, “lost 4,108 men in killed, wounded, gassed and missing.” According to Strickland, “About 9,000 officers and men passed through the ranks of the [102nd] regiment during the war”; of those, official records indicate, 476 were killed in battle, 1,765 were wounded, and 1,909 were gassed—a total of 4,150, nearly half the regiment.

  Laurence Moffitt would have known those figures better than just about anyone in the 102nd; his job, he told me, was “personnel of the regiment . . . I was in charge of service records of the twelve companies in the regiment . . . about two hundred men each.” Regimental HQ “was just a short distance in back of the front lines,” he explained. “Maybe a hundred yards, more or less.” The Germans always had HQ in their sights; and, as I mentioned earlier, everyone who served there had to take their turn in the front-line trenches, too. The first time I interviewed Laurence Moffitt, he played down the danger he faced in France; but when I returned a few months later and asked him again, he conceded: “I was in danger always when going from one dugout to another, or one trench to another. The trenches were all open space, and they were always a dangerous place to be.” Then there were the “German airplanes flying up our regiment, dropping bombs. That’s right. Some of those bombs included gas, as well as artillery bombs. . . . That was a constant and regular occurrence.” But the greatest threat came from big German guns lobbing artillery shells—like the one that had hurled that piece of shrapnel against his leg, if not through it.

  “Were you caught in a lot of artillery barrages?” I asked.

  “I’d say not a lot,” he replied, of course. “But the artillery fired regularly at the different positions.”

  “How,” I asked him a bit later, “did you cope with it?”

  “You just lived with it,” he said. “It was a dangerous situation and you figured if you got killed, you wouldn’t know it. Other people would know it, but you wouldn’t. So you just lived like in any dangerous situation. You just ignore the danger.”

  During that first interview, I asked Mr. Moffitt if he’d seen anyone killed in action. He said no, he hadn’t, but said it in a way that made me wonder if he really hadn’t, or if he just didn’t want to think about it too hard, to summon up a memory he had long since put away. After interviewing a dozen or so other veterans, and then talking to him again about the danger he and the rest of the YD were in from day to day, I decided to ask him again. “Did you see anyone get wounded or killed in battle?”

  “Yes, plenty,” he said, just like that. “Some young fellow along while I was going . . .” His voice trailed off for a moment. “It’s hard for me to remember where I was, where we went and why. . . . My company commander knew why. Us small units only did what they were told.”

  “But you were telling me about a fellow you saw get killed.”

  “Yes. His face was all blown off. I leaned down over him to tell him that his gas mask was off. Then I saw that his face was mutilated, and so I just left him for the fellows whose job it was to take care of the wounded.”

  I asked him if he’d seen anybody else get wounded or killed. “I saw fellows who were wounded frequently, yes . . . by shell fire, the three-inch, 75-millimeter shells the Germans kept sending over. You were always exposed to those, that artillery. And the Germans sent it over for a purpose.”

  I asked him if that fellow he had seen that day was the only fatality he personally witnessed. “Probably the only one that I leaned over in the war and looked at,” he said.

  “Did you see him fall?”

  “No,” he said. “He was back in the ditch on the ground. And I leaned over him to tell him his gas mask was off, and I saw his face was all mutilated.”

  If he hadn’t remembered it before, he certainly did now; and I felt bad for asking him again. This man before me, this small, very old man still dressed up from his Veterans Day parade in a salmon blazer and deep blue tie and wearing his helmet, his actual helmet with its scarcely faded little square painting of the Connecticut Charter Oak, the symbol of the 102nd, this man who said that nothing was ever hard for him, who didn’t mind the mud or the boxcars or army food—this man had once seen something truly horrific. And no doubt much more than once.

  Exactly eighty-five years earlier to the day, something remarkable—perhaps the most remarkable thing in J. Laurence Moffitt’s very long life—happened. This, again, is how he described it, simply: “All firing stopped. Complete silence. There wasn’t a sound at eleven o’clock. And we were able to go out of our dugouts and trenches without our helmets or gas masks, which was the first time we had been able to do that since we first went to the front.” He added that, most likely, he “yelled and rejoiced that the war was over.”

  I have a large old poster of that scene—a solitary doughboy standing next to a trench, helmet in hand, gas mask hanging from around his neck, eyes turned skyward; his expression is a mixture of awe and relief. The poster is an advertisement for the YD Fund, which offered support to soldiers making the difficult transition to life back home after all they’d seen and done Over There.

  Which was quite a bit: After a long summer at Belleau and Château-Thierry and Oise-Aisne, they were sent back east to the Toul Sector, where they played a critical role in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, a two-day affair that quickly turned into a rout of the Germans and set the stage for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the last great battle of the war. The YD was assigned to a sector on the right flank, near Verdun.

  And then, four weeks into that huge campaign, the high command decided they’d finally had enough of General Clarence Edwards. On October 22, 1918, they yanked him from the Yankee Division and sent him back to Boston. The pretext was that he had allowed his men to fraternize with the enemy.

  Shocked? Don’t be. There was plenty of precedent. Unlike their French allies, the British and American soldiers didn’t particularly hate the Germans; in some cases, quite the opposite. “We regarded them very highly,” Laurence Moffitt told me. “They were very well-trained, very strict, very rigid, very straight. And their movements were all very orderly. Even outside of our organization, organized activities, even alone, individually they maintained a high degree of dignity.”

  “Was there mutual respect between the Allied soldiers and the German soldiers?” I asked him.

  “To some extent, yes,” he replied. “Exactly that.”

  In many cases, it went beyond simply mutual respect; long before America entered the war, quite a few British and German units adopted unofficial policies of “live and let live” toward one another, wherein they wouldn’t try very hard to kill each other. Often, it meant nothing more than a tacit agreement that you wouldn’t shell each other during mess, target each other’s supply trains, and so on; but there are tales of one side warning the other when a barrage was about to begin, even going so far as letting them know where they might seek shelter. The most famous episode is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when British and German troops decided spon
taneously to celebrate the holiday together, sharing food, drink, and tobacco from home, and even hosting international soccer matches.

  Sibley reports that the incident that ultimately cost General Edwards his job occurred on October 20, 1918, when a unit of Saxons called out across a hundred yards of No Man’s Land and asked that a couple of Americans come over to their trench. They did, and were promptly surrounded by several dozen eager (and unarmed) Germans. Their spokesman said: “We want you to stop shooting at us . . . we are not barbarians, and we don’t want to kill unnecessarily. . . . We don’t want to kill Americans. We have had plenty of chances to shoot you in the last few days, and haven’t done it. When we have been ordered to fire by our officers, we have fired high, purposely.”

  According to Sibley, the Americans replied that the only ways the Saxons could avoid being fired upon were to surrender or retreat. The Saxons countered that they could do neither. The Americans went back to their trench and reported the conversation to their superiors; it went up the line until it was decided, as Sibley puts it, “to put down a heavy concentration of artillery fire on that spot next day—which was done. As the reporting officer put it, being of a literary turn, ‘the concentration was placed on certain German soldiers who had expressed a desire to meet some of our men as individuals for the purpose of discussing a possible cessation of hostilities.’” So much for live and let live.