bigwheelzip
Absent Comrade
[New York Times, Op-Ed page, September 29, 1980]
To My Buddy Jim ---
Killed, Sept. 29, 1918;
Buried, Somme: Plot A,
Row 32 Grave 3
By F. H. Doane.
SHERMAN, Conn. – Well, Jim, it’s exactly 62 years ago that we stepped off the barrage tape together. I never dreamed that an ‘apple knocker’ from Upstate could lift that Lewis Gun shoulder high and blaze away. Of course, you drew a lot of fire. When you fell, the gun landed on its tripod with you on top, with a bullet through your head. Whittle rolled you over, picked up the gun and kept going. Then Whittle fell and we lost both him and the gun and got pinned down in Lone Tree Trench where the Germans threw some potato-masher grenades at us. Affatato won the D.S.C. for throwing them back.
We were on the extreme left flank, so we covered the gap while the whole 27th and 30th Divisions pivoted on us as they broke through the Hindenburg Line. New York’s 107th had more K.I.A’s in one day than any other regiment in American History. Company C lost 51. Five weeks afterwards, the Kaiser ran away and it was all over, although we came back 25 years later to finish off another “beast of Berlin”.
You should have seen our welcome home. O’Ryan led us up Fifth Avenue, platoon front, but the crowds pushed out into the street so we had to squeeze through in squad formations. What a reception! Front-page stories! Pictures all over the rotogravure sections of the Times and Tribune. Everybody in uniform was a hero!
But there came a time when the glory of the uniform faded like an old Khaki shirt. We got messed up in Asia and it was tough marching off to war with a mob yelling: “Hell, no we won’t go!” And tougher coming home to a brawling society of war-resisters, draft-dodgers, section-eights now called “gays,” screwballs called “hippies” and “Yippies” and some assorted terrorists. And then, when there were no more alarums and excursions, these hand-wringers took to the steets chanting ”No more nukes!” That’s an appellation for a scientific discovery of such awesome magnitude that defining it is beyond me. And someone more erudite will have to explain how I was able to sit at home and see and hear men walking and talking on the moon. Not some celestial creatures, mind you, but Americans.
As for the Army, you wouldn’t know it today, Jim. There is not a horse nor a mule on the post and we got weapons that make “Big Bertha” look like a popgun. Buck privates get $448.80 per month compared to our stipend of “another day-another dollar”. There’s no reveille and no taps, and civilians do most of the KP. There are no more colored units, either; we’re all mixed in together now, and that includes women, too. Not “Mademoiselle from Armentiers” but women soldiers in uniform. Can you imagine some young chick with corporal stripes ordering you to “suck in your guts, soldier!”. It’s a part of what’s called women’s liberation. They won the right to vote two years after the Armistice. Now, they openly smoke cigarettes, sit on bar stools at McLaughlin’s, ride straddling the horse like men, and even wear pants without being arrested.
But I haven’t changed. Whenever I’m in France, I drive up to the Somme military cemetery and go out to Plot A, Row 32, Grave 3, and there’s your headstone. And when I see so many of my old comrades sepulchered here and think of those still missing in action and bivouacked somewhere out there beneath the flowering fields of France, I grope for noble words and find them in these lines from Nora Hopper’s poem:
“Blow, golden trumpets, mournfully,
For all the golden youth that’s fled;
For all the shattered dreams that lie,
Where God has laid the quiet dead,
Beneath an alien sky.”
Well, Jim, I’m pushing 84, so it won’t be long now. Then I’ll be waiting for the last reveille that some call “the Resurrection,” some call “The Day of Judgment,” and others call “The Second Coming,” but as for me, I like best the way some poet puts it:
“Somewhere afar,
Some white, tremendous daybreak and the light,
Returning, shall give back the golden hours.”
So long, Jim.
This letter was written to WWI KIA Pvt James Spire by Francis H. Doane Jr, Lt Col (Ret), the father of our late forum member CYRANO, aka Colin Doane, Lt Col (Ret), 1933-2017.
Colin and I had been searching for information about his father until very recently.
I was struck that his father authored this letter at the age of 84, the same age at which his son Colin would pass. I'm posting it in sadness, as a sort of memorial to both father and son. God bless them.
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