by Mark Dunn
“Of course not. Our job is to get this war over with and all of our young men sent back home.”
“With or without their limbs and faces.”
“That sentiment, Bailey, is loathsome. I can’t possibly understand why you’ve taken such a stance. Do you not realize that once anti-sedition legislation gets signed by the president talk of that kind could put you behind bars?”
“If I’m not mistaken, sir, the First Amendment guarantees me freedom of speech.”
McCalley shook his head. “In times of war we are required to surrender a few of our freedoms for the good of the cause. That’s the way it’s always been. Otherwise, national morale is undermined and the war lost. Do you wish to live beneath the yoke of German tyranny for all the rest of your days?”
“That’s what I wanted to see you about, Mr. McCalley, and thank you for reminding me.”
“Remind you of what?”
“The particulars of your Memorial Day editorial.”
“What’s wrong with it? I thought it rather good. I wrote every word of it myself.”
Dennis drew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and read from it: “On this Memorial Day we do more than commemorate those who died more than half a century ago in the cause of preserving this Union. We honor as well those American men who will soon be sacrificing their young lives upon French soil to preserve the union of all the civilized people of the Earth. The problem of Negro slavery which pitted Blue against Gray in our homeland could never, even in its worst instances, be compared with that savage inhumanity represented by the slavery presently imposed upon the people of Belgium and Serbia and Armenia.”
“You own to this, Mr. McCalley? Really? Every word of it?”
“Dear boy, we are fighting for the cause of liberty—not just for our own people, but for all the peoples of the world!”
“Most of whom live under oppressive monarchies. Sir, I cannot in any stronger words tell you how objectionable I find this editorial. Not only what it says—downplaying, for example, the inhuman subjugation of the American Negro in antebellum times—but the very fact that you felt impelled by the present jingoist, militarist climate to actually write it.”
“You’re skating on very thin ice, Mr. Bailey.”
Dennis stood. He combed his hand through his mussed hair. The look on his face was that of a man upon the horns of an all-too-familiar dilemma: to stand proudly on principle with all manner of negative consequences in attendance, or to abandon principle for purpose of self-preservation. “I take it you mean thin ice with regard to my employment here.”
“That in the short run, yes—but far more cautious men than you will find themselves ostracized for saying quite a bit less than what you’ve said to me this morning. I don’t believe you to be a traitor to this country, Dennis, but others will. It would be the end to your writing career as well. Do you seek it? You have a wife, three children.”
“That’s right.”
“And Juliet, always in such poor health, and all of those doctors’ bills.”
Slowly, Dennis Bailey returned himself to the chair he had previously vacated.
“This is not a good time to be a socialist, Bailey. Or even a Progressive, for that matter. In times of national crisis, we are called upon to kiss the flag even though it may have stopped representing in totality all those things we have been taught that it stands for.”
Much of the fire was now gone from Dennis’s delivery. “I don’t see the war the way you do, Mr. McCalley. I don’t believe German troops have the wherewithal to invade this country, or that the Kaiser is any more of a monster than those men who will manufacture our own murderous armaments for enormous profit. And I well know why you included that reference to American slavery. I’ve worked with you long enough and have seen you often reward your 100,000 Southern white readers for their allegiance to the Companion—those Sammie and Rastus cartoons, this illusion you put forth on our editorial pages that all is harmony and bliss between the races in the South. I believe I’m reaching the end of my allotted ten minutes. I will think about what you’ve said and talk it over with my wife.”
“And you’ll rework your story so that the young man goes off and fights valiantly for his country?”
Dennis stood. “And comes home without his legs and blinded by the mustard gas?”
“If that was said in jest, Bailey, you’ll notice that I’m not laughing.”
Dennis didn’t answer. He stared out the window at busy Columbus Avenue. It was nearing lunchtime. The street was thick with cars and vans and the occasional horse-drawn delivery wagon. The sidewalks were filled with people bustling here and there—businessmen in suits, working men in overalls, shop girls and female typists wearing monochrome and serge—all seemingly unmindful of the fact that the country they loved, the country which they had always felt had only their best interests at heart, was about to engage in a war which would leave nearly 117,000 of its citizens dead and another 205,000 wounded. In Great Britain, in France, in Germany and Russia they would count their dead and wounded in the millions. The age of modern warfare had arrived. McCalley’s friend Teddy Roosevelt would be left on the sidelines, holding the reins to his obsolete mount.
“This war will be a terrible thing for us all,” Dennis finally said, “while upon the pages of this magazine which has employed me for the last ten years will be found only stories of battlefield heroism, of young boys marking off the days on their calendars until they are old enough to take up arms themselves. You’ve already said in so many words to me that there will be no place within this magazine for exposing the degenerate side of war—the side which sanctions the killing and maiming of others and creates without apology widows and orphans on the home front.
“But I will not be a part of it. I don’t need to talk this over with Juliet. I’ve made my decision already: I am not for this war. I am not for any foreign war. I see no glory in needless bloodshed and no honor in fighting for a nebulous or even specious cause. You are right, sir: no one will hire me. At least not until this country returns to its collective senses. Until then, I will have no choice but to set down my pen, for I have no desire to write for Mr. Eastman’s Masses. I wish to write for the true American masses—those I see below—those whose allegiance to this country has become nothing more to you than a commodity to be traded upon the open market.”
“You don’t have to set down your pen, Bailey, if you will but bend a little.”
“I can’t write things that I don’t believe, Douglas.”
And with that, Dennis Bailey turned and walked out of the office of the man who only a moment earlier had been his employer. The departure ended a decade of stories from the imaginative pen of Dennis Bailey—adventure tales, tales of the sea, stories of the breaking of the plains and the taming of the American West, narratives of muscle and valor, of knights of old who fought for vaulted ideals, of American patriots who took up muskets to win their freedom from colonial servitude.
Of those stories about America’s war for independence from England, one in particular, “A Riotous Little Tea Party,” had been adapted for the stage and was set for production in New York City in the fall. Unknown to Dennis on this day was the fact that investors were being quietly asked to withdraw their financial backing. Such a play, said the war propagandists, would send the wrong message about the relationship between the United States and its present ally, Great Britain. Particularly injurious to the cause of an Allied victory was the fact brought out in both the story and its theatrical adaptation that America, in its infancy, had come only one vote shy of making its official language…
German.
Sometimes the past must be ignored to achieve the goals of the present. Everything now was about the war message.
And The Family Companion would do its part, with or without Dennis Bailey.
1918
TREPID IN FRANCE
Oh God, did I hate that infernal gas mask. The straps itched and burned. The rubber
tube made my jaw ache, and after a while I began to drool like a baby. Running while wearing the blasted thing winded me to the point of near suffocation. I cursed the Goddamned Boche for introducing these deadly gases into this war, along with everything else to which my fellow doughboys and I found ourselves rudely subjected. War is hell, as they say, but this diabolical twentieth-century war was especially hellish in ways you cannot imagine: lousy food and tepid coffee, always being cold and always being wet, sharing bedding with rats and lice, and the possibility of permanent hearing loss from all the shelling.
Did I leave out death and bodily dismemberment?
I was a nobody—a lowly private in Uncle Sam’s army. We were there to finish the job that the British and the French could not, the Tommys and the Poilu who loved us for showing up and hated us for taking so long to get there and for our Yankee arrogance. But who was I to make an opinion? All I wanted was just to get the thing over with and hightail it back to Mom and Pop and Sis—to put myself back behind the counter at the family candy store and back into the arms of my girl Suzie, with whom I’d cuddle and coo on the front porch, serenaded all the while by the cicadas and the nightingales. Nothing chirred or sang in this part of France. Everything that didn’t carry a bayonet or skitter and crawl with parasitical designs through the trenches had left this place in one way or another auld lang syne, as the skirt-wearers say.
At thirty-one, I felt like an old man. A few steps closer to death among all those pups.
For several days our artillery units had been intermittently bombarding the German lines. It wasn’t the first time I’d been exposed to the sound of modern heavy artillery, but this was the loudest by far. With each thunderous blast, everything in the trench clattered and shook, the attendant vibrations traveling up my feet and through my entire body. Along the several-mile front held by Allied troops in this region of northern France great guns were speaking, and the German army was being forced to listen. I resigned myself to listen, too, and to spending the rest of my life—should I be so lucky as to survive—half-deaf with a brass ear trumpet stuck in one ear like my ancient Aunt Ernestine.
Over the last couple of days, the skies in the east had turned gray and overcast, made darker still by the brume of war. Great clouds of airborne dirt marked where each new shell was being detonated. Billows of black and white smoke competed for prominence in the middle distance. It was deadly to poke one’s head over the top of the firing trench, but even from my vantage point tucked below in the support trench I could see lace-like shrapnel wreaths hanging low above No Man’s Land, blossoms of artillery clouds dissipating for fleeting moments to reveal the contorted skeletons of once-proud trees, the tops of bullet-perforated posts marking the location of our defensive wire entanglements, distant chalk bluffs riddled and riven by trench mortars and French-made 75 mms.
On the third day of the bombardment, near the end of a three-hour shelling, I had an interesting encounter with a young man from our companion platoon—a fellow private.
The blasts had become more powerful as the shelling went on. With each explosion the ground shook, clods from the revetment falling around me as I sat upon a muddy wooden crate and leaned uneasily against the dirt wall.
War, to me, can best be described as waiting and waiting, and then something unspeakably horrific happens, and then if you’re still alive you go back to waiting again.
There was little that one could do during this period but count off the minutes until the tumult was scheduled to end. Earlier, some of the other boys and I had passed around our letters from back home. Some were scented. It was odd smelling something so fragrant and appealing in such a putrid place. Suzie never perfumed her letters. They always smelled of whatever her mother had been cooking as she scribbled away at the kitchen table.
I had ventured from the relative safety of the dugout, where I was being bivouacked here on the front lines. I had tired of my earthen cave—a dank and stifling place, odoriferous in a variety of ways, including most offensively the overriding stench of stale feet. I preferred the slightly less noxious air of the open trench. Adjustments had been made to the usual rotation of troops from the front trenches to stations offering temporary relief and recuperation behind the lines. Fewer of the men were being removed to relative safety in the rear, our commanders fearing a German counter-assault upon our defensive positions that could be compromised by a depleted troop presence. Like everyone else, I wondered if at some point the Huns would have their fill of our deadly artillery assault and climb from their trenches to retaliate en masse.
The young private I met this day, whose name I later learned was Cantwell, didn’t even try to speak—not that I could have heard him if he did. He looked ill; a bit deranged, upon closer inspection. As he approached me, I wondered what he was up to. I had heard about the very young ones, new to the fighting. The ones who gave in to their fears, who reverted to frightened children. Even the more seasoned soldier could be alert and fully functioning one moment, and the next—as if someone had flipped a switch—suddenly be shut down to all thought and feeling, removed, as it were, from all engagement with his surroundings. Still others would remain active witnesses but spend their time screaming hysterically until they, too, succumbed to merciful catatonia.
I wondered what it was that this young man wanted from me. Surely, he wasn’t in his tortured mind mistaking me for a Boche raider and making ready to plunge his bayonet into my side. Yet I readied my hand upon my pistol and held still to my position, lest movement on my part be cause for some frenzy-fed attack upon me. The young man—he didn’t seem much older than twenty-one—moved slowly, almost hypnotically, toward me. With each new blast his whole body jerked like a clumsily manipulated marionette, his head turning first this way, then that, but his eyes always returning their penetrating gaze on me alone.
After reaching a spot about three or four feet away, the boy let his rifle slip from his grasp and fall to the ground, almost as if he’d forgotten it was in hand. Then in one sudden, fluid move, he drew up beside me. He curled himself next to me upon the oversized crate, burying his face in my tunic.
He began to cry, gushing sobs rocking his entire body.
I didn’t know what to say to him.
There were men in my company who would have denigrated him for such a “show of obvious cowardice”—who would have used this display to, by convenient contrast, build up their own reputations for battlefield bravery (or bravado). I could have told him that for this reason alone he needed to fight the fear that had reduced him to sniveling and quivering. It betrayed the honor of his manhood before his fellow soldiers. But I said nothing. Even if he had been able to hear me, I couldn’t bring myself to attempt to restore manhood to a man whom fear had already defeated. And so I let him sit next to me and draw strength from me—such as he was able. Perhaps he saw in me someone he had always trusted—an older brother, perhaps, or an uncle. (I was, obviously, much too young to be the age of the soldier’s father.)
Eventually, the guns retired for the day and relative quiet returned. The boy stopped shaking, his sobs subsiding as well. Yet I did not seek to extricate myself from his presence. Nor did I stop patting him gently upon the shoulder.
In time he fell asleep. I soon grew groggy as well and retreated to the dugout. As I was walking away I saw something of my younger self in that boy. No one is without fear, I thought. It is what we do with fear in the course of overcoming the obstacles that have been placed in our way that defines who we are and tell of what we’re made.
Two days later, the Germans had had enough. They decided to give back as good as they got. That morning, hell visited the AEF’s front lines. Fatigue parties had spent most of the night repairing and fortifying the firing trench with additional sandbags. Still, we all wondered if we could withstand the kind of shelling that we had been dishing out to the Huns all week. We were at stand-to when the first mortars came over. All along the opposing lines, German artillery of every description head
ed in our direction. The German command had figured out our game and was set on preempting our anticipated attack with all the firepower in their arsenal.
The waterproof sheets that had been protecting our machine guns from night dew were pulled away. Our Maxim guns answered the German assault. We stood at the parapet and strained our eyes to see through the early morning shadows, to find and nail our targets. Shrapnel burst above us, around us. Exploding shells flared intensely white, dull orange. Here and there explosions of other colors—no beauty in this fountain of detonated shells and signal bursts, the coloration of the deadliest kind of war known to man. Through the general cacophony one could distinguish the singing of machine gun bullets, the whiz of the whiz-bangs. High explosives cratered our front trenches. I saw men go down to the left of me and to the right, limbs blown off, heads opened like smashed cantaloupe, brains and blood splattering us all. The worse was yet to come: a barrage of German cannon fire that shook the ground with earthquake intensity. Hundreds of shells landed in straight rows, short of the trench, behind the trench, squarely within the trench.
The captain signaled retreat into the communication trenches. If this deadly counter-barrage kept up, there would be no men left to mount the troop assault. A potentially catastrophic error in planning had now become evident. The multiple-days’ bombardment hadn’t hurt the Germans to nearly the degree that we had hoped. There was fire and fight left in them.
We prepared for our inevitable attack. Thousands of other men crushed toward us, the communication trenches filled with soldiers—shoulder to shoulder, checking the luminous dials of their radium wristwatches, steadying their rifles, stuffing more wads of cotton into ears already stuffed, passing assault ladders overhead.
