My uncle, Alonzo Shewmaker, was born in Hicks, Ill., in 1879. He was one of 15 children, and, like most of his siblings, became a farmer. He enlisted in the U.S. Army on Oct. 22, 1917, and he served in an artillery unit in France from May 1918 until the end of the conflict in November of that year.
This account of the Great War is based on the three poetry ledgers that I inherited and an interview of my uncle, called Lonnie, that was published in the News-Advertiser of Inglewood, Calif., in August 1967. Lonnie proudly told the interviewer that he had graduated from the 8th grade, which made him “the best” educated person in the family. He began writing poetry in elementary school, and he said he did not stop until his hands became too arthritic to use a pencil. None of his poems ever have been published, he said, because he did not get enough education to be able to write poems like those of Longfellow and Whittier. But he did leave to posterity a collection of what he called “historical” poems about his time in France.
After training at Camp Lewis in the state of Washington, or “Swamp Lewis” as he called it, Lonnie arrived in France “in the merry month of May” along with his fellow soldiers of Battery E of the Combined Arms Command. In a poem titled Hurrah for the 58th Army, he soon found himself “wearing gas masks, slogging through mud and rain, and sleeping in “cow sheds.” His unit contained a wide variety of ethnic groups, “the Irish, English and Dutch,” and “the Polack and Hebrew.” Lonnie was proud when they deployed their “8 in. howitzer guns” to help “conquer The Huns.”
Unlike many of his comrades, Lonnie liked his French allies. In his own words, they fell “in ranks side by side” together through “shot and bursting shell and the poisonous gasses of hell” for the “freedom of nations of men.” Americans, he stated in a poem he composed on July 4, 1918, did not cross the submarine-infested ocean for conquest, “nor for fame,” but had come to defend freedom against autocracy. They had come to help a country which had helped us in the past, and he was very proud of what “we” were accomplishing together.
The cost was horrendous, especially in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in the fall of 1918. It lasted 47 days, and more than 26,000 Americans were killed and 95,000 wounded.
In a series of battlefield poems, he wrote that many friends “fell for freedom” in “No Man’s Land.” “No mortal tongue” could tell of the “sorrow, torture, and pain.” “The eye” could not “picture the scene of the world’s horrid war. Of the uncounted dead. And those of battle scar.” Through it all, Lonnie had no fear of death. Raised in a strong fundamentalist Christian family, he firmly believed that “it is an undisputed fact” that “if we die” we shall “live again.” There was no reason to fear death and decay, he concluded in The City of the Dead, for it would be followed by eternal life for the righteous in Heaven with God.
Lonnie Shewmaker, as he recounted in 1967, was “under fire in a dugout when the Armistice was declared” on Nov. 11, 1918. He called that “the happiest day” of his life. It is clear from Lonnie’s poetry that participation in the Great War was the most important event in his life. But he lived long enough to compose verse about three other conflicts. He viewed the Second World War as yet another “hellhole” of suffering and would have been happy to fight either the Germans or the Japanese or both. He found the “Death Hole” of Korea hard to fathom through either “prose or rhyme.” It was, he thought, a war that “should never have been.” As for the Vietnam War, he told a reporter that although he did not claim to be “the wisest man,” it did not “look good” to him. “I was never afraid to be killed when I was in the Army, but it is wrong the way our boys are being killed now.”
An undated poem titled War is Hell summarizes Lonnie’s reflections on the nature of war, especially for those who have actually experienced combat. It is, he wrote, “more than hell.”
My Uncle Lonnie died in a convalescent home in Inglewood, Cal., in 1971. I recall that he had difficulty climbing up the steps of our home to visit my parents, and I was told that he had inhaled a “whiff” of German mustard gas during the Great War. To my everlasting regret, I never asked Lonnie about his experiences during that more than hellish conflict. My mother, who was a registered nurse, left a hospital to work in the convalescent home in Inglewood to ensure that Lonnie would be well cared for. A fitting way to conclude is to end Alonzo Shewmaker’s status as an unpublished poet. This is from the poem of July 4, 1918 titled For the Freedom of the World, composed in France during the Great War.
For the freedom of the world
We crossed the raging sea
To fight for the right
The true cause of democracy.
We fought not for conquest
We fought not for fame
We fought for the best
And freedom was our aim.
Kenneth E. Shewmaker is a professor emeritus of history, and taught at Dartmouth College from 1968 to 2002.