January 2011

It is one of the more curious distortions of the recent past that, 30 years ago, World War I seemed farther away from us than it does today. The uniforms—the soup-bowl helmets, the puttees, the choke-collared tunics—were as quaint as those lozenge-shaped tanks that tilted their way back and forth across the skinned gray landscape. And, in the darkening political climate of the 1960s, the conflict increasingly came to be what it had been to the generation or the 1930s: war as abject idiocy, four years of men moving toward their death, in the combat artist Kerr Eby’s phrase, “like maggots in a cheese.”

World War II, on the other hand, had been brisk, modern, a war of quick, decisive movement brought to a triumphant conclusion by men and women then still in their early forties. And most of all, it was a righteous war; its predecessor had been the bloody-minded fumbling of imperialists and kings.

It is early fall in France, anf the forest is silent and peaceful. A man, dressed in camouflage fatigues and carrying a metal detector and a sawed-off pickax, disappears into the misty underbrush. Here and there holes in the ground are half-filled with deads leaves; strands of rusty barbed wire hang from corkscrew-shaped metal posts. The forest, about forty miles from Paris, is officially called the Bois de la Brigade Marine. The French government has given this land to the United States; Americans know it as Belleau Wood. It was here that men of a U.S. Marine Corps brigade, attached to the 2d Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Forces, fought a desperate battle to keep the German army from reaching Paris in the summer of 1918. Most visitors to the site look at the cemetery and its ornate chapel, the hunting lodge, the captured German 77-mm guns whose wheels have long since rotted away, and the marble monument. Then they drive off to visit the imposing Aisne-Marne monument above Château-Thierry. Meanwhile, the man in camouflage is back, smiling. He has found what he was looking for: uniform buttons and a U.S.M.C. cap badge.

“The book is here now: a straight-forward prose account of four battles, with infinite detail of the men and emotions in these battles, reinforced with sketches and impressions drawn upon the field. It is, in the opinion of many of us who ought to know, the finest account of their sons in battle which the American people have received. …”

In many ways, 1918 is closer to us than we are inclined to think.

Look at Fifth Avenue in New York (or Regent Street in London, or the Champs-Elysées). Most of their present buildings were there seventy-five years ago. Automobiles, telephones, elevators, electric power, electric lights, specks of droning airplanes in the sky—there they were in 1918. Now, count back 75 years from 1918. That was 1843, when just about everything looked different. Everything was different: the cities, their buildings, the lives of the men and women outside and inside their houses, as well as the furniture of their minds. But many of the ideas current in 1918 are still current in 1993: Making the World Safe for Democracy; the Self-Determination of Peoples; the Emancipation of Women; International Organizations; a World Community of Nations; “Progress.” Seventy-five years is a long time; but then, the twentieth century was a short century, also exactly seventy-five years long, having burst forth in 1914, formed and marked by two world wars and the Cold War, ending in 1989.

When I interviewed for a vacant seat on the local historic-preservation board, no one mentioned a word to me about intrigue, romance, and murder. I was told that the board met once a month and that its primary job was to protect the city’s best historic buildings. I would serve with a group of fourteen other citizens that included lawyers, teachers, architects, and courtly Dexter Davidson, a former state senator. It all sounded very straightforward.

No one warned me I’d also be asked to avenge poor, dead Captain Flagg.

It began when someone named Alice Flagg, a gaunt woman in her late forties, asked to speak to the board. “It’s the house on Overhulse Street,” she said. “It makes me so angry I want to spit.”

My family lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown District during the late 1920s. I attended Francisco Junior High School, which drew its students from Chinatown and the predominantly Italian North Beach area. Like eighth graders then and now, we usually had time between classes to release the energy we had stored while listening to our teachers.

We had blackboards that were really black in those days, and when the teachers were away from the room, a favorite activity was throwing the erasers at them. One boy would draw a circle on the board and his friends would take turns seeing who could come the closest to hitting it.

One of my classmates excelled at this. He would throw his erasers from the back of the room. He threw the hardest, and was the most accurate. The signature mark of his throws was the cloud of chalk dust that arose when the eraser hit the board. I marveled at his accuracy and the strength of his arm. For whatever reason, his left-handedness also impressed me.

The fifteen-jewel Hampden Rail-Way watch on the facing page was made in 1877, one of the first timepieces marketed specifically to the railroad trade. Wound and set with a small key, the watch features a high-quality, adjusted nickeldamascened movement. While a delicate watch may seem to share little with the great wheels, rods, and pistons of a thundering steam locomotive, the watch and railway industries grew together and depended on each other.

Until about 1850 watchmaking was an inconsequential industry in America. In the eighteenth century a very few American makers imported unfinished European movements and finished them according to their customers’ needs. About 1810 craftsmen began creating whole watches based on European models, but innovations were few and numbers low. Then two developments helped turn watchmaking into a major business: the refinement of mass-production techniques and the expansion of railroads.

Southern Arizona has an enjoyable year-round climate but does get pretty hot in the summer. The best times to visit are fall and spring. For general information about the region call the Arizona Tourist Office (800-842-8257), or contact the TucSon Chamber of Commerce (602-792-1212).

“All this land used to be grass that came up as high as a horse’s belly,” Tom Hunt, a friend who is serving as my guide, tells me as we drive through Arizona’s Sonora Desert, “but now it’s all mesquite.” I look around at the desert dense with the wiry shrublike trees. Hunt, a tall, lean cowboy and ranch manager who was born and raised here in southeastern Arizona, goes on to say that when his father moved from Oklahoma at the turn of the century, one cow could be fed on a quarter-acre of land. “Now they need forty acres.” The reason is overgrazing. This was once some of the best cattle country in the United States, but working ranches in these parts have been declining for years, and with them the way of life of the Arizona cowboy. “There ain’t no future in ranching any more,” says Hunt.

“Dynamite! of all the good stuff, this is the stuff. Stuff several pounds … into an inch pipe … in the immediate neighborhood of a lot of rich loafers … and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result will follow. … It beats a bushel of ballots all hollow, and don’t you forget it.” This sunny exhortation was part of a letter to the editor that appeared in an anarchist newspaper in Chicago in 1885. A year later, when a bomb that killed one policeman and mortally wounded seven others was thrown at a mass meeting in an open square of the city known as the Haymarket, it was enough to get two of The Alarm’s editors (and two other men) hanged, even though no concrete evidence connected them in any way to the actual offense.