THE WAR TO END WAR

It was an innocent man’s war, a simple matter for Americans, despite the millions of Europeans who lay dead already between Vihia and lhe Marne. We entered tlie tragedy at the beginning of the fifth act, like off-stage soldiers in a play; and we entered singing. Woodrow Wilson had given us our simple theme: Kaiser lull was a villain; and we marched to make the world sale for democracy.

Our weapons were simply modifications of earlier ones. Substitute the llimsy aircraft of the day with their remarkable pilots for the balloonist-professors of the Civil War. and General Pershing could have used Lee or Gram as a corps commander after routine briefing. We had the bolt-action rille, and a bayonet that is still unchanged. Then there were machine guns, a medley of them. There were some grenades and mortals and. for artillery, the French gave us the seventy-five, which our own crews, in true American fashion, subjected to a cadence of firing that both astonished and alarmed the French. They supplied us with tanks, too; and lor a large part of our two big pushes, crewed them for us. But For his set pattern of tactics, General Pershing took to open warfare.

We had begun with some exercises in trench warfare along quiet sectors; hut Pershing. in his first fulldress conference with Generalissimo Foch,announced his intention of reducing the formidable German salient at Saint-Mihiel, an engineering masterpiece that had repulsed both Hritish and French for four years. And he would take the salient with doughboys in tin hats and rolled leggings, all moving forward in frontiersman style, whether they were farm boys from Iowa or pushcart lads from Manhattan.

It was largely, at the outset, a singing war devoted to polite songs. There were croaks about K-K-K-Katy, Beautiful Katy. who would lind a man waiting beside the k-k-k-kitclien door. Then some sang that it was a long way to Berlin, “but we’ll get there, Uncle Sam will find a way.” There was some anticipation of the joys awaiting a man on leave: “How you Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm, after They’ve Seen Paree?” Then there was a great marching song, “Over There,” which the lads overseas changed to “Underwear,” with some unprintable allusions to the long drawers furnished by the quartermaster’s department. But the song of songs was “Mademoiselle from Armentieres,” and main a platoon wailed lor the wit of the team lo fashion new versions of that young lady’s extraordinary versatility and prowess. I recall that, as a young leutenant, my first platoon had a whole series of verses on the Mademoiselle describing the nine months of gestation in great physiological detail, terminating with the arrival in the world of a little marine. They sang these verses with great good will until one afternoon we marched to its cadences past a garden wall, unaware of the fact that our battalion commander was giving a tea party to some ladies of the haute noblesse behind it.

General Pershing made his declaration as to the Saint-Mihiel salient in September, 1917. He was exacily one year in preparing loi’ the day when his men, a new army green in manv divisions, would go forward with rille and bayonet and fulfill his mission. In the winter of 1918 we had some troops manning trenches in quiet sectors while General I’eishing steadfastly refused to piecemeal his troops, battalion by battalion, into British and French units. It is a tribute to his character that he could withstand the entreaties of men like Lloyd George and Clemenceau, formidable antagonists. A casual raid or two by the Germans, catching some of us napping, meanwhile set about a wagging of heads in London and Paris, with the happiest of smiles in Berlin. Then the First Division staged its divertissement at Cantigny, and the real American war was on.

The Germans sustained their first tine shock on the Maine around Château-Thierry, where Pershing threw in whole divisions for the first time, to bolster a shattered French line; but it was not his kind of a war. It was largely defensive, with occasional passages to the offensive, as witness the flamboyant charges of the Marine Brigade in Belleau Wood. Jt was the first iruc lesson for us, and the Germans administered it with great severity, f recall leading a digging party back from the vicinity of a town called Torcy, and watching a German sausage balloon ascending into the dawn sky. I took to the woods, hearing myself cursed by men swarming through brambles to follow. They were silent when we skirted a sunken road, for the soldiers there, grotesque in their attitudes of death, were still warm from a salvo directed by that balloon. We were new, we were ignorant, all of us; it was a matter of degree, but not of kind. And the Germans were teaching us.

No longer would the Kritish and French ask for battalions to be brigaded into their war-weary troops. They would ask for divisions. In the July and August that followed, the requests were continuous, and battle streamers fly from many of our flags with the names of actions only the men who fought them will remember. Who recalls Foch s great counterattack at Soissons? The bloody gallantry at Mount Blanc? The Ourcq River, a little stream where a poet named Joyce Kilmer died? Pershing would lend these divisions, and by September recover enough of them to command an army of half a million men, his own men, with many of his divisions now battle-worthy.

The temper of the singing men with the wooden guns was changing. Hospitals were filling with too many their buddies would not forget—and there were no “miracle” drugs in that war. There must have been little difference between the hospital where Oliver Wcndcll Holmes found his son after Antietam, and a tent J recall somewhere near the vicinity of La-Ferte-Sous-Jarre. It was mainly a gangrene tent, where some of us suffered from that tonnent. In those days the commander of our brigade’s machine-gun battalion sat bolt upright, quietly smoking away his agony. A lieutenant I had trained with would emerge from his delirium to apologize for the noise he knew he must have been making. There was no sulfa, no penicillin, to still the air. There was only morphine sulfate, and those who survived that tent had a sleep dill to climb before they could rid themselves of morphine’s toxic baggage.

The first glimpse of German prisoners, those fellows Wood row Wilson told us we were not making war against, was always a pleasant experience for green troops. Yanks stood by, hacking open tins of bully beef to see other men, trembling in Feldgrau, devour food scorned by the lads from Des Moines and Seattle. As the hospitals filled, as new divisions suffered from the accomplished deviltry of the veteran Germans, this altitude would change. Moreover, there was one provocation unknown in the Second World War. It was poison gas. It was everywhere. Gas had been introduced in secrecy by the Germans, but ihey failed to win a war by its surprise use. Time went on, and both sides possessed it. Many a platoon leader would strip down his men to find them lobster-pink at armpit and groin, eyes swollen half-shut, breath hard-caught.

Meanwhile Saint-Mihiel’s salient, a thorn in the Allied breast, was reduced by an American army with an element of surprise and a great élan in the attack. The first trial of true strength had been won; the great trial, the Argonne, lay ahead. Had it been left to Pershing, the name of Argonne would never have flown from a regimental staff. He had wished to push on from his victory at Saint-Mihiel, but the British protested to Foch. They had known a great day themselves on August 8 at Amiens, “the black day,” Ludendorff said, “of the German army in the history of the war.” The British under Haig wanted Pershing to reduce pressure on their right flank. They had begun asking for battalions, and progressed to requests for divisions, and now they wanted armies. Specifically, they wanted Pershing, who now commanded two American armies, to recapture the Argonne forest where for four years the Germans, who possess great skill in the use of fortifications, had been busy with their engineers devising tunnels and traps calculated to discourage the most aggressive opponent. Pershing, for once tractable, agreed to take the Argonne.

The saga of the Argonne is epitomized in the story of the Lost Battalion, those tough unfortunates from a New York division whose battalion commander had pushed forward into a trap. My own thoughts of it are colored by the memory of a wounded lieutenant from that outfit who was placed in a bed next to mine. He had lain for some days on the raw earth of the Argonne with multiple wounds and little care. His broken jaws were wired, front teeth extracted so he might sip nourishment through a tube. Both arms were broken and plastered across his chest as in prayer. Both legs had been fractured, and they too were in plaster. He could speak through clenched teeth, and he could wiggle the toes on his right foot. Thus accoutered, he entered the life of the hospital ward, which was teeming, after hours, with vigorous dice games and Martinique rum. He soon won a considerable sum in the dice games.

The lieutenant made his own casts of the dice, a brother officer placing the dice beneath the swollen toes for the lieutenant to wiggle, meanwhile holding a mirror so that he might “read ’em and weep.” He soon found that the raw rhum Negrito, sucked through his glass tube, was too fiery on his jaw wounds; and so a rubber drainage tube was acquired, being inserted in his nostril toward the esophagus, well past the fractured area. Then with a fellow lieutenant holding a small funnel, he was able to drink along with the rest. To me, he was a fitting ambassador from the Argonne, representative of the million who went forward into that vast maze of caves and traps, of machine guns and cannon. My friend with the rubber tube and the swollen toes showed emotion only once, when he wept one night because he was unable to get to his feet and fight a brother officer from whom, he erroneously believed, he had suffered an insult.

The troops in the Argonne were not all of veteran caliber. Some divisions were relieved, but mainly they moved forward, halted at times by their own ineptitude, or by the sheer severity of the defense. They were humorists still. A carrier pigeon could arrive back at the pigeon wagons bearing the message: “I’m tired carrying this damned bird.” The man who wrote that line was not far from the one in the Maine regiment that held the line at Gettysburg, a private who, when asked by his West Point colonel why he was chewing hardtack in the ranks, could reply: “For the juice, sir. I’m very fond of the juice.”

A generation freshly memoried in the deeds of the Second World War cannot appreciate the simplicity of the first one. A brilliant defense at Château-Thierry, some fine bolstering counterattacks in the intervening two months before the reduction of Saint-Mihiel, and the great grinding sacrifices of the Argonne: that was the tale. It was told by correspondents still of the Richard Harding Davis tradition: it had no simple chroniclers such as Ernie Pyle. The result was that, when the men came home and began to write realistically of their experiences, the public was shocked at literary and dramatic works that seem, at this far-off date, rather pale by contrast with the works that followed the later war. These were true shockers; but Pyle and his school of writing had prepared a public for them. A man will read of that first one, even in the most realistic postwar works that followed it, and have difficulty in capturing the simplicity of its mood. The gulf between the two, the abyss of sentiment, is simply unfathomable.

When the Armistice came on November 11, 1918, the victors gave their exultant cries and set out scrounging for vin rouge; but not so General Pershing. He had sent a regiment across the fire-raked pontoons of the Meuse the day before, for he wanted, like the boys in the song, to go to Berlin. Some years later he could say to a friend of mine, who was his officer of the guard on another occasion: “They don’t know they were beaten in Berlin, and it will all have to be done all over again.” The temper of his troops was such that they would have pressed forward at his word, as witness that regiment, with Armistice talk filling the air, fighting across the Meuse at Sedan.

In both wars there was, beyond the death and the mutilation, the heroism and sacrifice, an American feeling of idealism. The literature following the wake of both wars would deny this; writers try to single out the variation from the norm. The coward seems more interesting, in pedestrian literature, than the heroic figures chosen, say, by the Greeks in their great age. Even the films following the first war that were concerned with the gallantries of the aviators will show, on examination, that it is the boy who is frightened who holds the interest of the writer. It was a long while before Hemingway, in his Farewell to Arms, could examine a man who forsook the war, turning his back upon carnage, simply because he wanted no more of it. The play, What Price Glory? was attacked by many high-ranking officers; one of its authors was even subjected to the possibility of a court martial by President Coolidge; yet it could be said of its characters what Froissart said of the Plantagenets: “Whatever may have been their faults, there was not a coward among them.”

One of the remarkable features of the Civil War was that, though peopled by great figures, it was followed by no great writing; only when Stephen Crane—a generation later, having never been near a battle himself—produced The Red Badge of Courage, were the men of its armies adequately pictured. In its way, the First World War left no great works either; some fine ones perhaps, but nothing like the work that Tolstoi, a generation after it, created from the wreck of Napoleon’s dream; nothing like Stendhal’s description of the field of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma. Yet the men who returned from the first one were unhampered, uncensored; above all they were victorious. They could not set down, however, their deepest feelings about it, any more than could the men who shook hands at Appomattox. The best works of literature following the First World War were from the pens of men like Sinclair Lewis, who makes little mention of it, and Eugene O’Neill, who seems unaware of it. Both of them won the Nobel prize.

It may be a characteristic of the English-speaking races; for certainly the finest English work written during the period of the Napoleonic wars, when England was frequently on the ropes, is Miss Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Written in an English garrison town, with one of its principals an officer in the army, it refers only on its last page to the war—or rather “the restoration of peace.” And so it was with our war. There were no chroniclers, no painters, no writers reaching greatness because of it.

In Stendhal’s account of Waterloo, in which he is actually adapting his own recollections as a French staff officer at Bautzen, where Ney failed to take an advantage and confusion followed, he restricts his field of vision to that enjoyed by a single green recruit. Actually, the men of Belleau Wood, of Saint-Mihiel, of the Argonne, saw little of their war, either. The nature of the terrain, the squirrel-hunting tactics, made it impossible to get anything like a big picture of the scene. What could a platoon leader see of it? If he was knocked down and his face bloodied by a grenade, as he scrambled forward to regain his line he might see his own platoon; a flank of the one on the right wavering temporarily because its lieutenant was knocked down and dying; and beyond the line a few of the enemy heads sighting down the barrels of light machine guns. There were isolated instances of the panorama such as must have been vouchsafed Andrew Jackson’s men at New Orleans, where behind mud ramparts the fog rose above meadowland full-dressed in British redcoats, echeloned and glinting as they moved forward toward the rifles of the Kentuckians and the Tennesseans.

Thomas Mann says somewhere that nothing is so remote, so difficult to recapture, as the immediate past. It must be that way with our First World War. The men who fought it are grandfathers, their own sons recalling a far more complex affair. And no anthologist can ever bring back the full body of it; though like all wars it carries thoughts too deep for tears.

Laurence Stallings, a marine veteran of two world wars, is the co-author of one of the most popular plays of the American stage, What Price Glory? and the editor of a picture history of the First World War.