Their Eleventh Hour

Pvt. Homer Fisher of the rear guard is at his post, remembering.

As he sits at a table in the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, sunlight from the adjacent Domaine Chandon vineyards sets aglow his blue eyes, his pink skin, his thin white hair. His recollections march in formation across the middle distance: Once again, the 56th Engineers parade before President Woodrow Wilson in Washington on Independence Day in 1917. Then they are rumbling north toward New York in the dead of night aboard a train blacked out in observance of military secrecy. Then they are rocking in a converted British cattle ship, headed for a hundredth time toward the abattoir of northern France. And, inevitably, German planes are once again above the ammunition dump that Fisher’s searchlight unit is guarding near the front lines, and the word among the defenders is “Jerry’s up there!” and because aviators love blowing up ammunition dumps even more than shooting down men scurrying on the ground, all hell is exploding.

Fisher, who is 99, exhales. His narrative is finished. He will not be drawn further into discussion of the attack, nor of his subsequent trip home on a hospital ship a few months after the war ended, even though eight decades have passed since then. “I still get headaches, and I’d rather not go into it,” he says in a soft voice. “Now we’re getting into something I haven’t lived down yet.”

In military tactics, the function of a rear guard is to remain behind and cover the withdrawal of the main force. Homer Fisher and his fellow American veterans of World War I persevere in that mission as the nation marks the 80th anniversary of the end of their war on Nov. 11, 1918--on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, as it became enshrined in cliche.

As the few among us who lived the 20th century’s most fecund tragedy, they embody our truest memory of the 4.7 million American veterans of the era who have withdrawn into the great abstraction, History.

The rear guard has been taking heavy casualties of late. Snapped bones, unfightable microbes and exhausted hearts have been depleting their ranks. They have been falling, the Department of Veterans Affairs says, at the rate of 167 a month. The department estimates that 4,300 are still standing; the Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A. believes that the figure is 3,000. Regardless, those left can’t hold out much longer. Their median age is nearly 100. When they are gone, it will be much harder for Americans to remember that conflict five wars ago and those who endured it. The field will be left to historians, hobbyists and “reenactors.” We will have the old soldiers’ preserved testimony but not their complicating presence to serve as counterweight to our generalizing, romanticizing and trivializing of their war.

It has grown harder for the veterans to convey their experience of the war. Many are shellshocked from the long barrage of the years. Others hear very little anymore. Many who try to give it voice lose their narratives in the snow of memory that has been coming down so hard for so long since those days. Some, like Fisher, remember everything but will not recount what shook them to their souls, or else wave it off with vague summaries. One hundred-year-old William Zelnicker of Sherman Oaks, who was gassed at the Battle of St. Mihiel and hospitalized for a year after that, smiles when asked about the experience and murmurs, “I don’t remember.” Conjuring details is tiring. Who, at their age, needs to waste precious energy on ugly reminiscence?

The members of the rear guard are, in a real sense, men of the 19th century, some of them grandsons of Civil War veterans. They were bred to manly silence and steadfastness. They would not visit cruel memories on their families when they returned from the war.

“I forgot about it. I was just grateful I didn’t get hurt,” says 101-year-old combat engineer Albert Willard of Sherman Oaks.

“No, hell, I wanted to get rid of it,” says 103-year-old combat infantryman Andrew Hess of Santa Barbara.

“I kind of let loose of the war, tried to put it out of my mind,” says Fisher. “But it’s something you can’t put out of your mind.”

Their war, to the extent that it is known at all, has taken on a curious lightness in the minds of later generations, a phenomenon most popularly exemplified by the World War I fantasies of “Peanuts” comic-strip character Snoopy. Americans have “tended to cheerful-ize our behavior in the First World War,” literary critic and war memoirist Paul Fussell has said.

The Chaplinesque newsreel photography of the time could not render faithful accounts of the fighting. Given the relative silence of the veterans, depiction of the war was left primarily to the pop-culture machine, which produced such serious-minded films as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Paths of Glory” but in the main tended toward a larky view of the war. “So much of the image people had of World War I had to come from movies and pulp fiction,” says Cal State Northridge war historian Ronald Schaffer. “So many people saw those things and so few saw the war. If all they saw were the films like ‘Wings,’ which won the first Academy Award, they saw it as a great adventure.”

Even the term commonly used for American soldiers of World War I, “doughboys,” has a whimsical ring by comparison to the sobriquets applied to those of later wars, such as World War II’s “dogfaces” and Vietnam’s “grunts.”

In truth, the doughboys’ war was an enormous and unnecessary catastrophe that sprang from antiquated 19th century European military alliances. It gave birth to a litter of even greater catastrophes that defined the 20th century: Soviet Communism, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War.

During the war, the high commands muleheadedly clung to 19th century military tactics, such as infantry attacks in close formation across open spaces, which resulted in wholesale slaughter when the troops ran up against 20th century industrial technology, especially the machine gun.

On July 1, 1916, about 20,000 British soldiers were killed and another 40,000 wounded in a preposterous attempt to break the German lines at the Somme River. The 60,000 casualties are still the world record for a single military engagement on a single day. In all, about 10 million soldiers on both sides died in the war (compared to the American Civil War’s 560,000 deaths, two-thirds from disease).

The war shredded not only men but also such previously unquestioned ideals as honor and valor. Death rained indiscriminately on the courageous and the cowardly alike.

The absurdities sundered the modern age from the past, in just four years abolishing certainties that had reigned for centuries and instilling in Western culture a lasting skepticism. “Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so disproportionate to its ends,” wrote Fussell in “The Great War and Modern Memory.” World War I, however, “was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment.” Fussell contended that irony, the modern form of understanding that acknowledges the incongruity of expected and actual results, “originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”

The fighting had been going on for two years and eight months when America declared war on April 6, 1917, in response to German submarine attacks on American shipping. By then, the war had settled into a brutal stalemate of artillery duels and hopeless infantry forays, of spirit-sickened, lice-eaten front-line soldiers living among rats in watery trenches.

Into this morass marched the Yanks, cocky and well-fed, imbued with a notion of American exceptionalism. The typical American soldier was 22 years old. The America that dispatched him to clean up Europe’s mess was a primarily rural and small-town society that had been agitated to a patriotic anti-German frenzy by propagandists of the Wilson Administration. Homer Fisher’s German-immigrant parents encouraged him and three of his brothers to join the Army in part to disprove neighbors’ claims that the Arcata farming family was a group of “filthy Huns.”

It was an America in which volunteer citizens’ councils conducted “slacker raids” on suspected draft evaders, opened the mail of those under suspicion and enforced the buying of war bonds and other patriotic behavior. Half the states banned or restricted use of the German language. In Pittsburgh, playing Beethoven’s music was forbidden. In some states, it was a crime even to speak against the war, and people who did so were sentenced to prison.

Many African Americans were caught up in the war enthusiasm and hoped to earn their rightful status in society through combat service. About 400,000 black Americans were in uniform during the war. Yet some white troops refused to salute black officers, and black troops trained at segregated facilities. In Houston, 19 black soldiers were hanged after they killed 15 townspeople in response to a police beating of a black woman in August 1917.

Most black troops were assigned to menial labor. Those who saw combat were typically poorly trained and badly led by white senior officers. African American units that wound up under racially more tolerant French commanders, such as the 369th Infantry’s “Men of Bronze,” fought with distinction.

Although the American soldiers arriving in France were inexperienced (some had yet to fire a rifle), the robust sight of them picked up the morale of war-worn French civilians and Allied soldiers.

The Yanks did not suffer a casualty until Nov. 3, 1917, when a Cpl. Gresham and Pvts. Enright and Hay of the 1st Division died at Artois during a nighttime raid by Bavarian troops. The three, who were at the front temporarily to become accustomed to life in the trenches, were the first of 53,513 Americans who would die in battle (fewer than the 63,195 who succumbed in France and the United States to accidents and illness, especially the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918).

By comparison, Germany lost 1.8 million soldiers, Russia 1.7 million, France 1.4 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million and Great Britain 947,000.

Exactly how pivotal a combat role the Americans played in Germany’s defeat is a matter of interpretation. There is no doubt, however, that they forced the war into a decisive final phase. Germany had shifted large numbers of troops from Eastern Europe to France after the Bolsheviks came to power in war-exhausted Russia in October 1917 and sued for peace. With American troops pouring into France, the German high command decided to act while it still held numerical superiority and undertook a huge offensive in the spring of 1918.

The offensive, although initially successful, caved in under Allied counterattacks, during which American forces got their first real blooding. During the summer and fall of 1918, the Yanks made significant contributions at Chateau-Thierry, at St. Mihiel and in the climactic Meuse-Argonne campaign, which sent the Germans into full retreat toward their own border.

In part because of their lack of experience, the Americans acquired a reputation for recklessness and for a flip attitude about dying.

Andrew Hess, then a corporal in the 89th Division, which spent 28 days in combat, recalls his unit discovering kegs of carrot beer as they occupied dugouts abandoned by the Germans. “We rolled the kegs up the hill and took our hatchets and knocked the bung out, took our mess kits and caught the damned stuff as it came out,” Hess says. “It was pretty good beer, but we were only 28 miles from the Germans that we’d run out of there, and they knew every foot of that ground, so our dugouts didn’t do us much good. And Bradshaw, my buddy, and I had nailed on to a feather bed that we put in our dugout, and then we went back to drink beer, and there was a direct hit, goddamn, and the feathers just flew. And the boys said, ‘There goes Hess and Bradshaw.’ And we said, ‘No, they’re here drinking beer with you.’

“We made as much fun out of it as we could. Which wasn’t fun, by a hell of a ways.”

As the hour of the armistice struck at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, Albert Willard and other members of E Company, 7th Engineers, climbed from their trenches and joined German soldiers celebrating the end of the killing. Then distant German artillery cut loose on the scene, killing a dozen members of E Company, including its commander, who was a captain, and two lieutenants.

“They wanted to get rid of all their artillery shells,” Willard says, “and even though it was a few minutes after the Armistice, that’s when the dirty work was done.”

Less than half of the 4.7 million in the American military during the war served outside the United States.

For Pvt. Harry Gamble of Studio City, who’s now 99, the war meant tending horses as a member of the 13th U.S. Cavalry in Spofford, Tex. For Sgt. Sam Wilson of Tracy, now 99, it meant supervising construction troops in Kansas, Michigan and Virginia as a member of the all-black 10th U.S. Cavalry. For Pvt. Benjamin Levinson of West Los Angeles, now 103, it meant taking dictation and typing for senior officers at a camp near Waco, Tex. For Cpl. Perry Fusselman of San Diego, the war was but a few months of artillery practice at Fort MacArthur, which overlooked the harbor at San Pedro.

Whether a soldier had dodged German machine-gun fire at Belleau Wood or had done his bit amid the dust and tedium of a hastily constructed camp in the American Midwest, his farewell from Uncle Sam was unceremonious. He received $60 in mustering-out pay, an overcoat and a railroad ticket home, where, 11 years later, the Great Depression descended like a shroud. When it lifted, a much bigger and far more destructive war was roaring on three continents.

World War II was exhaustively filmed, photographed and chronicled. More than five times as many American soldiers died in combat as in World War I, and those who survived received lavish veterans benefits that the men of World War I scarcely could have imagined. World War II cost the United States $2.1 trillion, 10 times as much as the earlier war.

It propelled America to world dominance and became Hollywood’s favorite war, all but blotting out the memory of its predecessor. The Great War became not only less than great but seemed hardly to have taken place at all.

World War I veterans “were people whose service has been overshadowed by things that happened afterward,” says historian Schaffer.

“Relatively few young people have much recollection that these people did anything really important. World War II has dominated war history in the media in the 20th century. My students think World War I is World War II. The experience of World War I was just as powerful, but the memory is much weaker.”

For the surviving American veterans, the war occupied just a year or two in lives destined to amass eight more decades of personal significance. They think of themselves primarily as former steelworkers and postal clerks and businessmen, as husbands, fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, not as former soldiers.

Still, the eyes of the entire country, as well as the Western world, were fixed on them as young men ready to live at close quarters with death.

Anniversaries stir our desire to remember, and the 80th anniversary of anything that can be marked by living participants is remarkable in itself. The French government is seeking to identify American World War I veterans who served in France so that it may confer on each of them the French Legion of Honor this year, before they, like the great mass of their fellows, exist only in memory.

In the 23 years that Muriel Sue Parkhurst has worked for Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A., the rear guard has dwindled from 750,000 to half of 1% of that figure. Nearly all the survivors live in homes or hospitals for the elderly.

“To me, every one of them is so special. I sometimes get off the phone and sob myself to sleep because I’ve just learned I’ve lost another one,” says Parkhurst, who is executive director of the Virginia-based organization.

“In the spring and the summer, I lose them at a lesser rate, because that’s when they’re in better health. But [during] the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, it increases, because they get miserably lonesome. I mean, they’ve outlived their wives, outlived their children, outlived their dogs.

“At one of the national conventions, I told them I forbid any more of them to die.”

The members of the rear guard have come full circle, living again at close quarters with death, and deserve to be placed clearly before our eyes once more. Time has shrunk them. It has creased their skin, hobbled their steps and drained the reserves of their vital organs, so that their every day is lived on a razor’s edge of will.

But, adamant in their manliness, beautiful in their frailty, they evoke a powerful sense of something definitive in our past that can never be remembered in the same way once they’ve departed.