Being strong Presbyterians, every child was expected to learn both the Child’s Catechism and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. So after Sunday dinner dishes were washed, the children got down to memorizing. The denomination awarded New Testaments for memorizing the Child’s Catechism and Bibles for the Shorter Catechism. It didn’t matter that the latter was written by the Westminster Divines in England in 1640 and adopted by the Church of Scotland in 1648; every properly brought up Presbyterian child could repeat its questions and answers by heart.
The catechism tradition lived on after my grandparents’ deaths. I got my Bible in 1941, as my aunt Katherine, who was known as the champion catechism teacher in the Lexington Presbytery, was determined that her namesake be the youngest pupil she had ever coached to receive the coveted Bible. She had me follow her around the hen house while we gathered eggs. She knew all the questions by heart, of course, so she would call out: “What is God?” To which I had to immediately reply: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” Or “What is sin?” To which I would cry over the clucks of the hens: “Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.” Neither my father nor I remembered catechism sessions as unpleasant or taxing and we were both inordinately proud of our Bibles. I still have mine with Katherine Clements Womeldorf embossed in gold on the worn leather cover.
The Womeldorf family loved music, and one of Daddy’s happiest memories was of the day his father came home from town bearing a morning glory horn Edison phonograph with round cylinder records. “How on earth could that contraption sing and play lovely music?” he remembered marveling. The family considered it the wonder of the age and loved listening to it.
My father entered Washington and Lee University in the fall of 1913, walking the two miles from the farm every day. I once asked my father why he didn’t ride a horse to school during his four years there. “I’d have to fool with the horse once I got there,” he said. “It was easier just to walk.” Once he took us to W and L, where we paid respects to General Lee’s recumbent statue in the chapel and to the skeleton of his horse, Traveller, in the museum. My father told us that when he was in school, the skeleton of the famous horse was in the biology lab along with a skeleton of a colt. He related with great glee how student tour guides taking visitors through the buildings and grounds would point out Traveller’s bones, and, then, when they got to the smaller remains, would add, “And this is Traveller as a colt.” Many visitors seemed to accept this, much to the delight of the students.
While the actual Traveller bones were in the biology lab, on a day when the professor was late, the boys decided to autograph the skeleton. The ink was washed off soon afterward and the skeleton removed to the museum, but my father had signed the inside of a rib and that day we visited, he grinned mischievously and pointed out his unmistakable scrawled signature.
He entered the university the fall of 1913, and World War I began in Europe the summer after his freshman year. In 1917, at the end of his senior year, he joined the W and L ambulance corps. Training took place in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Raymond, who had never driven a car before, was placed behind the wheel of a Model T ambulance and told to drive it between two stakes. “I thought,” he said, “that the point was not to knock down the stakes, so I didn’t.” By so doing, he had unwittingly passed his driver’s test. He did plenty of marching after that day, but that single maneuver through the stakes proved to be the end of his driver education course. The next time he found himself behind the wheel was on the outskirts of Paris. “I wished many times during that drive across Paris that I’d had the sense to knock down those stakes.”
G. Raymond Womeldorf’s college picture.
Over There
Although my father died many years ago, a vivid reminder of his ambulance days recently arrived in a large box on my front porch. Inside was an old leather medical bag. It had come from the son of my college professor G. Parker Winship. David wrote that he had found the bag in a shop in Abingdon, Virginia, noted the unusual name, and sent it to me thinking I might know to whom it belonged. On the side in indelible ink was printed: R. G. Womeldorf, Lexington, Va, USA. The recruiter in 1917 had mistakenly listed my father as Raymond G. Womeldorf rather than G. Raymond—an error that caused a lot of headaches when my father applied for veteran’s benefits under his correct name. What David had sent me was obviously my father’s World War I medical bag. It is now in the collection at Washington and Lee.
My father never talked much about his time at the front, but I once got a glimpse of what it felt like to him. He was visiting us and we turned on Masterpiece Theater to watch Upstairs, Downstairs, a series to which we were somewhat addicted. The son of the household had gone to war and as the scenes of the trenches of World War I began to play on the small screen, my father stood up abruptly and left the room. I followed him out. “Is this hard for you to watch?” I asked. “Yep.” It was all he said.
The Washington and Lee Ambulance Corps, also known as Section 534, landed in France on February 4, 1918. It was a month before they met the twenty adapted Model T Fords they were to drive. My father took #13 because no one else would. That next couple of weeks were spent learning how to take the engines of their “Tin Lizzies” apart and put them back together. Then the section drove from Paris to the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. The great fountains were all sandbagged; still, King Louis’ palace was quite impressive to a farm boy from Virginia.
They were to be attached to the 12th French Army that had been so decimated in earlier battles that they had been withdrawn to recruit and regroup before they were once again called into action. In the meantime the 534 was ordered on March 25, 1918, to head for the front to transport wounded French soldiers from the battle of Somme. They could hardly move their vehicles forward for the stream of men, women, and children jamming the roads, desperately trying to flee the slaughter.
The job of the 534 was to evacuate stretcher cases from the dressing stations near the front to hospitals that were often simply cathedrals or warehouses. They spent two weeks doing this, never having time even to take off their clothes, much less rest. When at last they were relieved for R & R, they stopped by the US headquarters in Chaumont, where the officer in charge threatened to throw them in the brig for wearing soiled uniforms, failing to shave, and having mud on their boots. My father mused that the newly arrived Americans had never seen men from the front before. But had they known their presence would receive that kind of welcome, they would never have stopped there.
We children were brought up in a teetotaler household, but it occurred to my brother that our father might not have always been abstemious. “Daddy,” he said, “when you were attached to the French army did you ever drink wine?” My father looked at him in amazement. “You don’t think I would have drunk water, do you? It would have killed me.”
William Roth, a teacher from Wisconsin who had been added to the W and L unit, wrote a memoir of the 534. In it he recalls an occasion when he and Labby Womeldorf went to a water fountain near the camp kitchen only to find a notice reading “eau non-potable.” They filled their canteens with the dry red issue wine and, because they were so thirsty, gulped it down. Since neither of them was used to alcohol they could only make it back to their billets by holding on to the buildings along the way.
Once the two of them visited an old invalid who had been a dancer and entertainer. They took a morning glory phonograph and cylindrical records they had salvaged in the Somme and played them for the old man, who sat up in bed and beat time to the music with his arms. Around this same time they helped an elderly couple they had met by hauling in their hay and were rewarded with a lunch of bread, cheese, and wine.
Months after that Roth tells of a walk he and Labby were taking when they came upon an enormous unexploded shell with German markings on it. “Let’s end it up and ta
ke our pictures beside it,” said my father. While two French soldiers nearby shook their fingers and yelled “Non! Non! Non!” the crazy Americans, after a couple of tries, were able to upend the heavy shell. It stood shoulder high and, Roth guesses, weighed over a thousand pounds. Roth and Labby each took a picture of the other holding up the shell. When it didn’t explode, the French soldiers came running over to have their pictures taken, but Labby shook his index finger and said “Non! Non! Non!” and tipped the shell back onto to the ground.
“It seemed,” says Roth, “that Labby liked to take risks. During the Marne-Aisne Offensive he gave me a demonstration on how to explode the detonating caps of German hand grenades (potato mashers). Also he liked to toss pennies on condition that restitution was made after the games. In the dud episode there would have been no restitution if we had lost.” I knew my father harbored more than a streak of mischievousness, but I was somewhat taken aback by his obvious daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother’s hair gray.
But very little of those long months in France was given over to fun and games.
Here are parts of a letter he wrote to his brother William on the 28th of July 1918 after the second battle of the Marne.
Dear Brother and all,
As we have been on the go for over a week there has not been much time for writing. But as I don’t expect to be called out tonight I am taking the time to write a short note. Perhaps you may be able to read it as I am in my bus along the road writing on a cushion on my lap by candlelight.
We are getting along fine and are again as busy as at first. But are on a front that is moving in the other direction above the old chateau that has made quite a bit of American history of late. We have been going day and night for four days now. But the work is much better at least it seems so when things are favorable. The Americans that were on this front did some excellent work and not only manned their artillery but when they captured a lot of German artillery, just turned the guns around and fired them, also as much ammunition was also captured. That was quite a stunt and has been practiced by others since.
We have seen many prisoners taken and have hauled quite a number of wounded Boche.
I have changed my mind about the quiet night, because they have commenced to go both ways as thick as hops. Perhaps more work tonight.
The souvenir gatherers should be here. They could find anything from a Boche tank to cartridges and the like. I have seen so many helmets, etc., that I would like to get to a place where there are no souvenirs. You have seen the pictures of the forests, how they are torn and ruined; well those are no exaggerations. I saw this afternoon one tree between three and four feet in diameter cut off. And the smaller trees are lying in a tangled heap everywhere. Now and then there will be a shell that did not explode in a tree, while some of the trees are so full of shrapnel and bullets that they are well loaded.
We are well. Our headquarters are in a small town where it was impossible to find enough of good roof left to keep the cooking stove dry. So you see we must sleep in our cars or in dugouts, which are very damp, especially after several rainy days that we have had. Such is life in a place that wherever you and your “Lizzy” keep together you are at home. You never worry about getting back, you are always there. . . .
The wheat, what is left, is very fine indeed, if it could be harvested.
Censored by 1st Lt. A.A.S. Your brother,
Raymond
P.S. How does that Overland run now? Ride over and I will race you in my Ford. I know you all enjoy it very much. R.W.
Roth’s memoir includes many details of the 534. Of the dangers they regularly underwent, of the seemingly useless taking, losing, and retaking of decimated villages, of the night drives on rutted roads with no lights burning, and the wasted countryside. In my father’s own brief memoir, which he wrote for us children, he says: “It is useless to speak of the horrible slaughter of these fronts.”
One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn’t finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason. When I hear men bragging about their war experiences I wonder just how much they actually witnessed. The people I have known who, like my father, were in the thick of the horror rarely spoke of it. I finished writing Rebels in 1982 and took the manuscript to my father for him to read, but he shook his head and said he’d rather wait for the book. He died a few months before it was published. So I wasn’t to know how he would react to the terrible scenes of war that I had imagined but he had lived through.
With fall the section moved up into Belgium, and it was here, on October 31, that my father, who was waiting to take the wounded from a dressing station in Wantgren, was hit in the leg by a shell fragment. Soon afterward the area was gassed, and he pulled off his gas mask in a frantic effort to cover his wound. He knew that if gas got into it, it would soon become gangrenous. In telling of the incident, Roth says: “He was an excellent and fearless driver.” When I learned as an adult that my father had been wounded on the day that was to become my birthday, I wondered how he might think of that anniversary. He never mentioned the coincidence. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember that day in 1918, or maybe he remembered and didn’t want to spoil my birthday by speaking of it.
Womeldorf family. My father is the tall one in the back row.
Dad before being wounded.
Raymond was taken to a French hospital, which was an old cathedral, where he lay for two weeks. He remembers lying there, unable to speak or move and hearing the doctor who was leaning over him say: “You can forget this one. He’s gone already.” So he strained every muscle in his body to move something to show the doctor that he was still alive and managed to wiggle a toe.
He and others were shipped to an American hospital, only to find that it was not there. So they simply lay on their stretchers in tents for days until they were finally sent on by freight car to a casino in Boulogne, France, where it was necessary to amputate his right leg just below the knee. His earlier attempt to save his leg had failed and only resulted in damage to his lungs.
On a post card provided by the French army, he wrote:
My dear father and mother and all. I am getting along as well as could be expected. Now don’t be all worried and stirred up.
Your devoted son,
Raymond
Dad at the hospital.
In Hospitals
Finally, after weeks of recovery in the casino, my father found he could sit up and see across the channel to the White Cliffs of Dover. At Christmastime the nurse brought him a gift of fruit that she said a kind person in Virginia had sent the money for, hoping it could be given to some wounded soldier from Virginia. The donor turned out to be one of his high school teachers. He always cherished this happy coincidence.
“Well,” he wrote home, “I’m getting along all right; of course it is a slow process. You should see my rosy cheeks. Every day the sun shines four fellows pick up my bed and carry me out on the veranda. Yesterday I was out in time for a band concert. Everyone is as nice to me as possible. My nurses brought one day steak and mushrooms, another chicken and often fruit from their own mess.”
At length he was sent to England, where he was in hospitals in Dartforth and Liverpool before finally being shipped back to the United States and to a hospital in New Jersey.
I think it was while he was at that hospital that he decided to try to visit New York City. He hadn’t yet been fitted with an artificial leg, so he was painfully trying to make his way on crutches when a limousine pulled up to the curb beside him and a plump, middle-aged woman with a heavy German accent leaned out and asked him where he was going and if he would like to have a ride. He gratefully accepted and climbed into the backseat beside her. The kind lady prove
d to be the Austrian opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who had had sons fighting both for Germany and the Allies during the war.
Several years later when Raymond was in seminary, Madame Schumann-Heink came to Richmond to give a concert. He had no illusions that the famous contralto would remember the ride in New York, but he was eager to see her again. So he went to the concert, and afterward, stood at the back of the formally attired stage door crowd to get a closer glimpse of her. Suddenly, he heard a cry: “My son! My son!” and she made her way through the surrounding fans to give him a warm embrace. It was my mother who told me the story, regretting as she did that he hadn’t taken her to the concert.
After his stay in New Jersey, he was transferred to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. Here he met another noted woman, one who may have saved his life. She was Mrs. Lathrop Brown, whose husband had been special assistant in the Department of the Interior and was currently high up in the Wilson administration. People in the Interior department gave a small portion of their salaries each week to support a convalescent home that was run by Mrs. Brown and a nurse. Mrs. Brown had been a New York debutante, her husband had been Franklin Roosevelt’s roommate at Harvard. Needless to say, the eleven fortunate veterans whom she selected for residency received extraordinary treatment. In the summer, she even took her invalids to the Browns’ summer place on Long Island for fresh sea air. My mother always believed that left in the crowded wards of Walter Reed, my father would have died. Raymond was under Mrs. Brown’s care for several months, living, in his words, “the life of Riley.” By the end of October, however, the doctors feared that the gassing may have given him tuberculosis. He needed, they felt, to be isolated and treated for TB.
The friendship with Mrs. Brown did not end when he had to leave the Interior Department’s Convalescent Home. She remained in touch with my parents until her death. Every year she would send to us in China a carton of wonderful children’s books, a great treasure for a family living “up country” who had no way to purchase books in English even if they’d had the money. She often wrote and even came to China once to visit us. If we were to designate a fairy godmother of our childhood, it would be this gracious lady who saved our father’s life and enriched us all. In 1938 when we arrived in New York as refugees, Mrs. Brown was on a trip to Europe, but she had arranged for her chauffeur to meet us at the boat. We must have received our share of startled looks from the crew and other passengers—this seven-member family emerging from their third-class lower deck and climbing into a waiting chauffeur-driven limousine.
Stories of My Life Page 4
