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

Great War Poets

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

This is what I love about the Internet. On Monday morning I was reading the New York Times and this headline caught my eye on the front page: ”A Well-Written War, Told in the First Person.” Elisabeth Bumiller had written a lovely piece about some of the fine poetry and prose coming out of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was especially taken by the work of Brian Turner, whose poem “Here, Bullet” Bumiller discussed.

I Googled Turner and found more poems of his online describing “a murder of crows” looking down on a row of body bags and a man named Hasan who tried to commit suicide by leaping off a balcony, only to be rescued, temporarily, by a clueless soldier, and an American PFC named Miller who succeeded in committing suicide by putting a bullet through his mouth—“nothing can stop it now, no matter what/blur of motion surrounds him…” A little more Googling and I learned that Turner’s work is included in the Voices in Wartime anthology that my friend Andrew Himes put together and that a recording of one of his poems is available on the Voices in Wartime website. So that was a good morning on the Internet in an otherwise frustrating stretch of days.

But this thread gets even better. Reading Turner’s verse got me thinking about the poetry that came out of the Great War and how all the really good stuff was written by Englishmen—Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, T. E. Hulme. The only American poets of note I could think of off-hand were Joyce Kilmer (“I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree…”) and Alan Seeger (“I have a rendezvous with Death/At some disputed barricade/When Spring comes round with rustling shade/And apple blossoms fill the air.”).  Memorable enough, but let’s face it, tarnished by time.  So back to Google I went and entered the words “World War I American poetry” and bingo, I found a website called Poetry of the First War which features write-ups of e.e. cummings, Archibald MacLeish, John Reed, and yes, Seeger and Kilmer. Scrolling down, I came across an entry devoted to a writer I’d never heard of named John Allan Wyeth. What caught my eye was a blurb of Wyeth’s book This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets:  “Let the trumpets sound for John Allan Wyeth!” wrote British poet and critic Jon Stallworthy.  “At overlong last, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, an American poet takes his place with the British in the front rank of the war poets’ parade.”

The original 1928 cover of John Allan Wyeth’s sonnet series

Two more clicks and I arrived at an essay by poet and former National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia which told the story of why it took nine decades for those trumpets to sound. Wyeth, the son of a prominent New York City surgeon and a graduate of Princeton, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 with the rank of second lieutenant, shipped out to France in 1918, and spent the duration of the war with the Interpreters Corps of the 33rd Division. He returned to live and work in Europe after the war and published his slim sonnet collection to moderate acclaim in 1928. Shortly afterward both he and the book vanished into obscurity. Eighty years later, This Man’s Army fell into the hands of Dana Gioia, who instantly recognized Wyeth as “the missing figure in the American literature of World War I—a soldier poet still worth reading.”

Gioia notes that Wyeth’s sonnets chronicle with “documentary exactitude” “the poet’s journey through the war.” Places, song lyrics, the sound of incoming shells and muttered conversations, even the weather—Wyeth conveys it all in minute detail. But what makes this verse stand out is Wyeth’s loose, jittery, colloquial style and biting tone. None of Seeger’s sonorities or Kilmer’s misty-eyed piety.

We passed
two soldiers, pain-white, and a man they bore
between, blind twisting head and drunken knees,
—like Christ.
“Come on, Bud—There—You just been gassed.”
(from Through the Valley)

Every war has its own patois—a jaunty muttered soldier’s slang set to the beat of whatever music blared through headphones, loudspeakers, or from the throats of marching men. I’ve heard the American version of the Great War patois in the prose of John Dos Passos (Three Soldiers, the USA Trilogy), e.e. cummings’s The Enormous Room, in Fix Bayonets!, the lightly fictionalized stories of Marine battles by Lieutenant Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., and the superb memoir Suddenly We Didn’t Want To Die by Marine enlistee Elton E. Mackin.  But never before had I caught that peculiar note—weary, young, wised-up, pissed-off—in American verse.  Stallworthy is right: John Allan Wyeth is a cause for celebration. Thank you, Dana Gioia. Thank you, Internet.

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Your Stories: Isidore John Vogelman

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

When I first started this blog back in the autumn, I encouraged readers to write in with their own family stories of immigration or military service.  The notes that follow come from Seth J. Vogelman, a North American transplant to Israel.  Back in 1981, Mr. Vogelman wrote his undergraduate thesis at McGill University on the Americanizing effect of military service on Jews during World War I.  I wish we had been in touch when I was researching The Long Way Home – we clearly have a lot in common.  It appears that Mr. Vogelman’s thesis was inspired by his own family history, because his grandfather Isidore John Vogelman was a Jewish immigrant who served in the Navy.

Mr. Vogelman recently sent me these notes about his grandfather, which I’m happy to post as the first of what I hope will be a series of stories contributed by readers of this blog.

The Vogelman family came from Radom (a city in what is now central Poland, but which before World War I was part of the Russian Pale of Settlement) and arrived in 1907 in NY. When the U.S. entered the Great War, my grandfather lied about his age to get into the Navy and get some steady income.  The story goes that he was underweight, so he went home and drank water and ate bananas for three days to make it.  He only went in in September 1918, saying he was 18 when really was only 17.

My grandfather was named Yonah Yitzhak Vogelman, but he became Isidore John Vogelman (though known as John) and immediately affected a southern accent to “blend in.”  He served as a Yeoman and Quartermaster on the USS Manchuria, a tramp steamer that brought the boys to and from France.  It was in the Navy that he also ate bacon for the first time, but didn’t really like it (my family was not religious even in Radom). He was not the oldest, but the only one to serve in WW I.

When mustered out in 1920, it was supposedly because he needed a better job, but in reality, his older brother was doing well in the fabric trade and he went to work with him.  There is a more interesting story, lost to history, about my wife’s father Aaron Beiner.  He was in the Rainbow Division, and he was even gassed. Aaron Beiner refused his pension, saying he was simply grateful for being in America.

–Seth J. Vogelman

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Frank Buckles Turns 109

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Sometimes history is not about what happened but about what has disappeared or quietly ceased to exist while no one was looking.  One of those silent erasures is occurring right now with the passing of the generation of soldiers that fought in the Great War.  Some 4.7 million Americans either enlisted or were drafted to fight in the war to end all wars – but Frank Woodruff Buckles, a West Virginia farmer who celebrates his 109th birthday today, is the last of the last.

Buckles would be the first to admit that he was not a major player in the conflict that killed more than 9.5 million soldiers and set the course for modern history. Fibbing his way into the army (he was underage) in August, 1917, he shipped out to England in December, 1917 and spent the duration of the war driving officers around and delivering their messages far from the front lines.  “I wasn’t disappointed that the war ended,” he told a reporter recently, “but I would have liked to accomplish what I had started out for.”

Still, though he didn’t see any action, Buckles conveys a visceral sense of what it was like to serve when Woodrow Wilson was commander in chief.  Until someone invents a time machine, nothing in the historian’s bag of tricks can match this experience of living through it.  Four years ago, a dozen American World War I veterans were still alive, so the visceral sense of the past was that much richer in texture, detail, anecdote and emotion.  At that time, I had just embarked on research for a book about the immigrant experience in the Great War – and learning that two of these surviving veterans were foreign-born, I moved heaven and earth to meet them.  These were encounters I will never forget.

Italian-born Antonio Pierro, 110 at the time of our meeting, reminisced about the snakes in his family’s orchard back in the southern Italian province of Basilicata, shuddered at the memory of the shells that fell near him in the Argonne forest in the autumn of 1918, and smiled wanly when his nephew mentioned the name of a French girl he had fallen in love with.  The young Pierro was stunned when someone called him a “wop” on the chow line at training camp.  Nonetheless, he went on to fight bravely with the 82nd  Division’s field artillery.  He died on February 8, 2007, a few months after our interview.

Samuel Goldberg, a 106-year-old Russian-born Jew, harbored a fierce engagement with a past he remembered in minute detail.  Like Buckles, Goldberg had to wiggle his way into the army – at 104 pounds he was underweight, but Uncle Sam was hungry for soldiers in the spring of 1918, and Goldberg secured a waiver.  The skinny eighteen-year-old intended to sign on with the Signal Corps, but the recruiting officer convinced him he’d be better off in the cavalry.  Goldberg told me that on his first day of boot camp at Fort Oglethorpe the drill sergeant did a double-take when he got to his name and snorted, “Jesus  Christ, a Jew in the cavalry.  I’m surprised they let a little guy like you in.”  But nobody was snorting when they saw Goldberg drilling with a saber.  Ninety years later, he was still proud of the respect he commanded and muscles he acquired. Goldberg died on December 10, 2006.

What I took away from these interviews was the sense of the melting pot in action.  “Regular” American guys entered the army expecting immigrants to be lazy, cowardly, untrustworthy, clannish and incomprehensible.  But after enduring mud, gas, shelling and machine-gunning side by side with Jews, Italians, Poles and Slovaks, most American-born Doughboys came to accept foreign-born recruits as one of them.  The immigrants themselves, fully one-fifth of the American armed forces, assimilated by serving.  They weren’t citizens, many of them spoke only halting English when they enlisted or were drafted, their deepest loyalty was to family, religion, or the heritage of their culture of origin.  But the army made them Americans.  The ethnic slurs continued despite the army’s attempt to stamp them out; but the names lost their sting when they were tossed around by buddies.

Tony Pierro and Sam Goldberg did not have any insights to share with me into military tactics, politics or diplomacy:  but in the course of the hours we spent talking, they did powerfully summon up the tensions, hopes and aspirations of a time when American soldiers from 45 different countries marched to the front singing  “Over There” and “K-K-K-Katie” in unison.  When Frank Buckles passes, the last reverberations of those grand old tunes will pass with him.

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