The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Service and Sentiment

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

Last Sunday I stumbled on a review in the New York Times Book Review of a new book about the First World War called The Remains of Company D by James Carl Nelson.  Reviewer Elizabeth D. Samet, an English professor at West Point and the author of Soldier’s Heart:  Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, was not impressed, but to me the book sounded promising.  Nelson, a journalist fascinated by his grandfather’s service in the Great War, set out to reconstruct whatever he could about the battlefield experiences of the men in his grandfather’s unit, Company D, 28th Infantry Regiment, First Division (the same division, incidentally, in which my great uncle Hyman Cohen served; both Uncle Hyman and Nelson’s grandfather Pfc. John Nelson were wounded at Soissons in July, 1918 – in Hyman’s case it was exposure to mustard gas, which seared his lungs and left a permanent scar on his chin).  The Remains of Company D is clearly a labor of love and imagination – an endeavor to breathe vivid life into archives, old newspaper accounts, letters, regimental histories.

Samet found little to admire in Nelson’s book; but what struck me most in the review was the stinging slap she delivered in the closing paragraph:  “Nelson ultimately falls victim to the civilian’s temptation to sentimentalize someone else’s war – to imagine that mysterious ‘nightmares and knowledge’ must inevitably texture the veteran’s every moment.”  This hit a nerve.  The pain I felt for Nelson got me thinking about my own endeavor to write about “someone else’s war.” It seems to me that this “temptation to sentimentalize” arises, ultimately, from gratitude, from a sense of humility mixed with a little shame:  they served, I didn’t – at the very least I owe them respect.  If that respect verges into reverence, if it triggers the civilian writer to imagine a soldier’s private nightmares, well so be it.

Maybe the fundamental problem for civilians who write about war is that we don’t know the answer to the nagging question of how we would behave under fire.  We devote years of our lives to finding soldiers to write about, following in their footsteps, reading their diaries and letters, poring over their unit histories, seeking out and standing by their graves.  We squeeze our eyes shut and try to imagine what it was like for them – and inevitably, what it would have been like for us.  What would I have done the first time a shell whistled down in my vicinity or the first time I heard what one Doughboy described as the “queer zeep-zeep, like insects fleeing to the rear” of machine-gun fire?

The civilian writer stands at the graveside and wonders.  We can’t know.  We can’t not ask.  If asking leads us into the temptation to sentimentalize – well, maybe that’s an occupational hazard.  Better too much imagination devoted to the veteran’s “nightmares and knowledge” than too little.  We learned that lesson after Vietnam – at least we citizens did.  Some members of our government, including those who voted to send troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, have decidedly not learned that lesson.  Take Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, commonly known as Senator No, who opposes passage of a bill to aid wounded veterans and their strained families unless the money to fund it be offset with immediate budget cuts.  “Now he is demanding balanced books for wounded vets?” fumed the editorial page of the New York Times on November 15.  “Sheer embarrassment should drive the senator into retreat as he trifles with veterans’ needs and burnishes his petty role as Dr. No.”

I agree with Elizabeth Samet that “sentimentalizing someone else’s war” is deplorable if it means getting misty over patriotic service while you vote to deprive veterans and their families of improved care.  But if it means finding out everything you can about when and why and how your grandfather was wounded in a wheat field in France 91 years ago and writing about it with reverence and love – then I’m all for it.

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Interviewing Private Pierro

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

Here in Seattle Veterans Day coincides with the height of the rainy season, which seems fitting given the wretched weather that the soldiers endured in France in the weeks leading up to the 1918 Armistice that Veterans Day commemorates.  “During the night, a cold penetrating rain began,” one soldier wrote of conditions on the first day of the Argonne offensive that ended the Great War.  “We couldn’t build any fires.  We had no overcoats, and had left our blanket rolls in the Bois de Sivry.  Some found overcoats and blankets left by the Boche, and rolled up in those.  The army slicker is as good as nothing, as far as heat goes, and as to turning water – well, we who wore them in the Argonne, knew what they were worth.  The moisture from one’s body collects on the inside of the coat, and as soon as the wind strikes you, you are cold for the rest of the day.”

Such was life in France in the fall of 1918.  The rain and wind outside my window seem blessedly benign by comparison.  But I really wasn’t intending to devote this blog to the weather but rather to the back story of one of the 12 immigrant soldiers featured in my book.  When I started researching in earnest in the summer of 2006, two foreign-born World War I veterans were still, miraculously, alive – 106-year-old Sam Goldberg and 110-year-old  Antonio Pierro.  Naturally, I wanted to meet both of them as soon as possible.

I don’t recall exactly how I tracked down Tony Pierro, but I do remember that a radio producer named Will Everett was extremely helpful in the process.  At the time, Will was taping interviews with the surviving World War I veterans for a radio program called The World War I Living History Project that he was putting together, and he had just spent a long, productive, if sometimes frustrating day taping an interview with Tony at the Pierro residence in Swampscott, Massachusetts.

I have learned over years of research and writing that some people jealously guard everything they know about a subject, while others share freely, even with perfect strangers.  Will was one of the latter.  When I called to pick his brain, he told me that the best way to set up an interview with Tony was to contact his nephew Rick, he advised me to use a loud clear voice in asking questions, and he warned me that I shouldn’t expect too many combat stories – after all the guy was 110.  Will added that my best chance of getting Tony to talk freely was to bring a pretty young girl along to the interview.

This last bit of advice amused me – 110 and still an eye for the ladies! – but Will was insistent so I pressed my oldest daughter Emily, who fits the bill nicely, into service.  I can’t say that Tony opened up much – he seemed to be dwelling peacefully deep inside himself and far back in the past.  But, with Emily sitting beside him and intercepting the occasional shy courtly smile, Tony talked some about the snakes in his family’s vineyard back in Forenza in the south of Italy, the dangers of dodging exploding shells in combat, and a French girl named Magdalena he had loved nine decades ago.  When we got up to leave, Tony took Emily’s 21-year-old hand in his 110-year-old hand, leaned over and kissed it.

I listened to Will’s documentary on Veterans Day, 2006 and was blown away.  Walter Cronkite hosts the program, and Will’s interviews with the dozen centenarian veterans are absorbing, surprising, and moving beyond words.

It never occurred to me when I set out to write The Long Way Home that I would be able to interview two veterans who had served when Woodrow Wilson was commander in chief.  It saddened me that both men died before my book was finished, Sam Goldberg on December 10, 2006, and Tony Pierro on February 8, 2007.  In fact, of the 12 men Will interviewed for his documentary, only one is still alive:  Frank Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia, is the last of the last.  Even wonderful old Walter Cronkite passed away this past July.

If you’d like to hear the voices of these veterans and share in their memories, I urge you to get hold of a copy of Will Everett’s brilliant program.  I’d like to end this blog by again thanking Will and Rick Pierro for their help.  And I want to acknowledge Tony Pierro and the 4.3 million other Americans, half a million of them foreign-born, who served in the Great War that ended 91 years ago.

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