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Other than a few newspaper articles and a mention or two on NPR, expect little in the way of commemoration. For the U.S., the Great War didn’t last long enough, didn’t kill enough doughboys, to make much impression on a collective memory that’s a bit haphazard even in the most intense of historical circumstances. Then, too, the way things are today — with wars and rumors of wars — we’ve got more than enough problems to keep our focus squarely on the present.
A hundred years seems like a long time — but is it? The writer Havelock Ellis, writing in l916, spoke of “the ever widening circles of anguish and misery which every fatal bullet imposes on mankind,” and those circles, while faint, are not finished rippling quite yet.
There are nonagenarians alive who can vividly remember their fathers talking about the misery of the Flanders mud; there are men and women my age who never knew their grandfathers because a tiny piece of metal found him in some obscure French bois in l917. And with a Europe descending into pugnacious nationalism and an America retreating into selfish isolationism, the lessons of the First World War might be more relevant than we care to admit.
I’m thinking about this because of a book I found at a flea market in Fairlee. Its classy dignity, in a boxful of tawdry paperbacks, begged me to pick it up.
There couldn’t have been many places in 1917 as far removed from the horror of Passchendaele and the Somme as the state of Vermont, yet here too the war had its impact, with some 16,000 Vermonters serving in the armed forces, a not inconsiderable number given that this was the time of an already small state’s greatest depopulation. After the Armistice, an official history was deemed a fitting memorial to these men and women — the book that, bound in the pastoral green of her mountains, “Published by Act of the Legislature, l919 Session,” now rests beside me on the desk: Vermont in the World War.
The book, some 800 pages long, covers all aspects of the state’s involvement, with chapters entitled “The Yankees at St. Mihiel,” “How Food Helped Win the War,” “Patriotism of Those in the Department of Institutions” (“It might be an interesting fact to mention that in the year 1917, $47 was raised in the Windsor Prison for the Belgian Relief Fund”), and “The Churches in the World War.” It’s the kind of book that was meant to be respectfully purchased, respectfully displayed, respectfully skimmed through, respectfully forgotten.
But having surprised myself by reading every word (the first person to do so in how many years?), I’m struck not by the futility of such a monument, the jingoism and sloganeering that occasionally mar it, but at how much of the real pain and heartbreak of those years comes through.
“The Vermonters,” it explains in the introduction, “proved to be tractable soldiers, obedient and courteous to their officers, but without losing any portion of that self-respect and sense of individual quality that seemed to be an elemental part of their natures.”
There’s more in that vein, but then the first Vermonters arrive in the trenches and the tone dramatically changes.
“A faint, faraway rustle would announce the departure of a shell from the enemy’s battery pit, and all ears instantly attuned themselves to that malicious whisper which gossiped of death. Caught in the merciless steel broom, a healthy, sturdy specimen of intelligent young manhood becomes, in the wink of an eye, a mere bloody mist, a torn and tattered ball of fleshy rags, or a hopeless, shaking, lopped cripple for the rest of his days.”
A mere bloody mist? A lopped cripple? This is a long way from Newbury and Hartland and South Royalton. The fiercest anti-war writer wielding the harshest prose style could hardly have made it more graphic.
It was an era when the written word had more power and commanded more respect than it does today, but, faced with the war’s horror, even that wasn’t enough in the end.
“The Vermonter had to endure all this and more. He was denied even the meagre relief of confiding his impressions to others, for the science which had perfected the savagery of human destruction had neglected to provide a vocabulary fit for the description of its nightmares.”
What comes off Vermont in the World War’s pages with greatest force is the list of casualties that occupies 43 single-spaced pages in the center of the book. Linked together, unadorned, they are moving in the same way the names on the Vietnam Memorial wall are moving.
Pvt. John Connolly, of Windsor, is there, dying of wounds Oct. 9, l918. Sgt. Alfred Dupont, of White River Junction, is there, dying of disease the same month. Pvt. Conrad Hazen, of Norwich, died in a training accident. Pvt. Nathan Hill, of Thetford, died of disease, as did army nurse Josephine Barrett, of Bradford, Pvt. William Greenleaf, of Corinth, and Sgt. Charles Mason, of Woodstock. Cpl. Clarence Robinson, of Post Mills, is on the list, too, dying of wounds on, of all days, July 4, 1918.
(As in the Civil War, when farm boys fresh out of the hills, lacking any immunity, were mowed down by measles and whooping cough, the Vermonters in France suffered even more deaths from disease than from bullets, including the final ironic scourge of the Spanish flu.)
Some entries, with brutal honesty, spell out another cause of death. “Walter Goodrich, private, Plymouth Notch, suicide, October 29, l918.”
Along with these are the names of the wounded, broken down into three categories: “Severely,” “Slightly,” and ”?” These include George Lavell, of Hartford (A worker on the railroad? A laborer in the mills? His hand cut away, his living?), who falls into the “Severely” category; Raymond Bigelow, of Wells River, under ”?” (Flesh wound from shrapnel?), and Everett Devereux, of Springfield, “Slightly” (A Blighty wound that got him home in one piece?).
On the morning of Nov. 11, l918, with the war’s end only minutes away, the soldiers of the 101st Infantry, many of them from Vermont and New Hampshire, were ordered to attack “Hill 265” near the village of Maucourt in the Meuse-Argonne — the reason given being that “the enemy must not be allowed to discern any sign of weakness in the armies which menaced him.”
The result?
“Nearly 200 of the regiment are buried in the American cemetery at Lambezellec. The cemetery is well located on a hill, from which, looking to the west, one gets a beautiful view of the ocean separating the sleepers from their homeland.”
It doesn’t bear thinking about even today — boys from hills and farms I can see from my window being sent to die in a war the reasons for which they knew little about, and which, 100 years later, we’ve totally forgotten.
But maybe we should think about it, not only young men and women of military age, but their parents, teachers and grandparents. Viewed one way, Vermont in the World War is a musty old book that has absolutely nothing to teach us; seen another way, it has something extremely important to teach us — a lesson we’d better keep in mind before contemporary history forces us to learn it all over again, only this time not just through words.
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W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, story writer and essayist who lives in Lyme. He will be speaking on “The Forgotten Literature of World War One” at the Howe Library in Hanover on March 3 at 7 p.m.