A Memory of the Great War

“In Flanders Field the poppies blow,” wrote Lt. Col. John McCrae, Royal Canadian Medical Corps, “between the crosses, row on row.” The year was 1915, and McCrae had watched the bodies pile up in the Battle of Ypres. It was merely the beginning of the carnage that would not end for three more years. It was called the Great War deservedly; no war had been so destructive before. Nine million soldiers died; nineteen million civilians died with them. It changed the fact of Europe forever; dynasties ended, communism took hold, and the seeds of another war were planted. Not until World War II, when twenty-five million troops died and another forty-seven million civilians perished would the numbers of World War I be exceeded in the whole of world history.

In Europe, grand monuments were erected in memory of the war; the cemeteries alone, vast and magnificent, were deemed insufficient. Yet in many ways, World War I for the United States is nearly forgotten. In Arlington, the Tomb of the Unknowns, which was established for World War I, also contains unknowns from World War II and Korea, (the Vietnam crypt is empty after its resident was identified from DNA) is guarded 24 hours a day, in all weather, but relatively few casualties from World War I are buried there, although many of its soldiers chose that ground for their final resting place. But for a variety of reasons, the national psyche is no longer affected by World War I as it is by the other wars of the Twentieth Century.

In Pikeville, Kentucky, a Doughboy statue sits on the courthouse square, like thousands of others across the United States, and at its base are four plaques. Originally, there was only one, with 43 names inscribed. Later on, county government authorized a second plaque for World War II; it listed 218 names. In Korea, 26 Pike Countians died and in Vietnam 28 young men fell; their names are there as well. The numbers do not reflect all Pike County’s losses, since many Pike Countians after World War I did not live here when they were called; the boom-and-bust cycles of the coal industry forced many permanently away from home and when they were called up they came from Michigan or Ohio or Indiana. The 43 listed soldiers of the Great War are probably the truest representation of Pike County’s losses in all its wars, and these were the greatest numbers since the Civil War. (click to view plaque)

Simple mathematics can explain much of why, as a nation, we remember little of World War I. It was the war of my grandfather’s generation, those men born between 1886 and 1896, and only a few centenarians are still alive. At last count, only seven Americans who fought in that war still live, mostly those who joined as mere boys. Veterans of the other wars are still with us. World War II was my father’s generation; that generation’s younger brothers fought in Korea. Although my father and the man he considered his brother are gone, their wars are still current in the national psyche, since many of those veterans remain. Vietnam was my generation’s war; for more reasons than the number of veterans, it will be a long time before those memories are erased.

Because the doughboys are gone, World War I is almost as arcane as the Civil War, but the Civil War was fought here and many monuments to it exist, more than for any other war. We have learned it well. But the patriotic fervor that erected the doughboy statues did not last long, and that may be understandable. World War I was a short war; barely a year and a half elapsed between the time the United States declared war and the fighting ceased and we had a tiny army at the beginning. The first US troops to arrive in France were largely symbolic, although the Germans respectfully named the Marines at Chateau Thierry “devil dogs,” an appellation we are still fond of in the Corps.

Near the end of the war, Americans died at the rate of a thousand a day in the Argonne Forest, but altogether only 53,402 died in battle; tiny numbers when compared to other countries. We lost another 63,114 to disease, mostly Spanish Influenza, but our population at the time was 92 million; France, with almost 40 million people, lost nearly 1.4 million boys. England, with a population of 45 million, lost nearly 900,000. Russia, with a population of 159 million, lost 1.8 million, and Germany, with losses of two million soldiers out of a population of 65 million, was by far the greatest loser. We lost about the same as Canada, which had a population of only a bit over seven million and the Canadians fought for four years.

But the numbers are not the only reason that the Great War is poorly remembered. After World War I ended, the Roaring Twenties came along and people began to turn to other things. The Jazz Age and its excesses tended to obscure the losses of the short war we fought in. America itself was largely untouched by the destruction, even more so in World War II, and after both wars, our intact factories boomed.

Another factor is that Americans fought another war during World War I, when the Spanish Influenza Pandemic killed six times as many Americans as we lost in the war itself. The grief from those losses overshadowed those who fell in the trenches.

On June 5, 1917, ten million American boys lined up in their hometowns to register for the draft. Great training centers were built, shipyards worked day and night to build the troopships to take the vast numbers of Americans in uniform to Europe, but Germany, blooded and broken, sued for peace just as the bulk of our arsenal was turned against it. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the war was over.
I am able to easily recite the numbers because I have researched the war for Hearts in Zion, the next book in my trilogy of the history of the coalfields as seen through my family. It covers the years from the industrialization of the region before World War I and ends with Pearl Harbor nearly forty years later, and one of the central characters is a doughboy, my grandfather Frank Hopkins, who died in 1973. There were questions I would have liked to ask him, but I doubt that I would have learned more than what I already know, since he would speak little of the war when I did ask.

I remember him bouncing me on his knee and singing a little ditty that was popular then:
“Oh, we’ll take a cherry pie,
And we’ll smash him in the eye,
And there won’t be a Kaiser anymore.”

But when I was studying World War I in school and asked him about it, he would only shake his head and speak of the French farmers who nonchalantly went to their fields every day, passing the gun emplacement he manned, as if nothing was happening. My grandfather must have confided in my grandmother, who did tell me about my grandfather’s war experiences and all my family stories, but I doubt that he told anyone else. He found it remarkable that anyone could have carried on a normal life amid the indescribable horror of the battlefield and that was all that he would reveal to me.

For those who have read my books or my columns, they will know that my muse for all my books was my grandmother, who was really my great aunt, and who had been given my father when he was an infant. Frank had seen his wife, my real grandmother, and his first child die within a year of each other and nearly went mad. With his other child sickly and near death himself, he gave him to his younger sister Rissie to save, and she did. When my grandfather managed to piece his life back together, his sister would not give up the child and Frank accepted the arrangement. In the dangerous life of the coalfields, when disease was rampant, he had lost two more children with his second wife, and he may have decided he was just too unlucky to raise a child. By that time, he had packed all the memories of his first wife and child into a steamer trunk that he kept locked up for fifty years. During all that time, he would not speak of the past; only Rissie brought it to life for me. After Frank’s death, his second wife, who was another grandmother to me, gave me the trunk. Among the debris of the life he had lost, I found his dog tags from World War I.

I did not know my grandfather’s division or regiment, but I requested the information from the National Personnel Records Center and found that he had served in the 326th Field Artillery of the 84th Division and served from March 8, 1918 to March 8, 1919. He served only one year, and further research on the 84th Division indicated it never fired a shot in combat. It arrived in France barely a month before the Armistice that ended the war. This surprised me, since my grandfather spoke little of the war, but my grandmother told me that he had seen horrible things: mangled bodies, headless corpses, men burned horribly from mustard gas, his own lungs scarred from an attack. It would seem that my grandmother was wrong and my grandfather spoke little of the war because he had seen little of it, but I had finally learned not to doubt my grandmother’s stories.

Further research revealed that the 84th Division was “skeletonized” when it arrived in France, meaning that units of the division were parceled out to other divisions that had losses. In fact, the disparate units of the 84th were thrown into a maelstrom of steel and blood, for which they were almost unprepared.

At the beginning of 1918, Germany was worn down from fighting a two-front war, but the overthrow of the Romanov Dynasty in Russia relieved the German High Command of fully half of its worry and Erich Ludendorff, the Supreme German Commander, hurled thirty-five divisions against the Allied lines. Without the flow of American troops, now reaching high tide, the Allies would have lost the war, and by fall the armies were locked in a final, titanic struggle. On September 26, 1918, American Commander John “Black Jack” Pershing slammed into the German lines in the Argonne Forest and with the newly-invigorated British and French armies, German was backed into a corner. Holes in the German lines were appearing everywhere, and Ludendorff had nothing to plug them with. Both sides pulled out all the stops; artillery blasted night and day, guns melted. German guns zeroed in on American guns and vice versa. Artillery, horses, caissons, and men were blasted into pieces, parts spraying down in neighboring emplacements. In the 82nd Division, Tennessean Alvin York won the Medal of Honor. My grandfather’s 75mm French gun supplied covering fire. His new unit stopped only to clear body parts as they fell into his position.

Behind the lines, men were turning blue and dying in hours from the time they contracted the flu. Armies on both sides were running out of men. Doctors, when they had time to calculate, estimated that if the flu progressed, entire armies would be dead from disease instead of enemy bullets.

And then it was over.

When my grandfather’s division reformed, it was only to return home; the rest of the time was spent attempting to find the dead and begin the cleanup of unexploded ordnance that both sides had flung toward each other. But his job was never done; even into the 21st Century, French farmers occasionally die from discovering an unexploded shell in their fields. It is estimated that it will take several hundred years to clear France of what is buried within its soil.

With what Frank Hopkins saw in France, with what he lived through in spite of his short tenure, and with what finally crushed him at home, it is no surprise that he would not talk of those times. When he died at 76, we buried him beside the dust of the 21 year old girl he came home to and married, yet I cannot remember one word he said about her. Everything I know about her came from my grandmother Rissie’s stories: her black hair, her porcelain skin, her smiles and laughter, how much she loved my grandfather. Frank may have felt he simply could not do justice to her if he tried to describe my real grandmother, although it is more likely that he simply could not speak of a wound that had not healed after fifty years.

This fall, we hope to publish Hearts in Zion; perhaps I will be able to do justice to this part of my family tree and now, with the 90th anniversary of World War I upon us, maybe this nearly forgotten war itself will receive a long-overdue reevaluation. Currently, a movie with the same title is being produced from the 1991 book A Soldier of the Great War. The book is about an Italian soldier, but it may rekindle an interest in all the soldiers of that time. My story is about my grandfather, his brothers, the homes they left and the homes they created after they came home, and my grandmother, the woman who saved those stories for me. This will be her story too, and it is merely another installment on an old debt I have yet to fully repay.