Remembering veterans

I think of Veterans Day largely as a remembrance for World War I vets, like my Grampa Clinton Foster in the photo at left taken at Camp Custer, Battle Creek, Michigan, 1917. Standing behind him, far left in the white dress is my Gramma Edith Deits. She was 21. He was 25. They would be married six years later. (Also in the photo is Grampa's sister Agnes and Gramma's younger sister, Mary.) 

Grampa was the oldest sibling left at home to work the farm when the war broke out. His father spent a lot of time away from the family as a timber assessor. When Grampa reported for duty in 1918, it was September, and several of his letters home show he was worried about the corn crop:

You did not say if the corn got ripe, and I have not seen any signs of frost here yet & it stays damp nearly all the time. 

Did you folks find the pumpkins I carved my name on in the cornfield? It is on the north side in about the 4th row. Is the corn ripe yet?

I saw an airplane land, and it was sure fine! It was the first seen since I have been here. 

Grampa had a lot of experience with horses and mules from working the farm and in the Michigan lumber camps where he worked winters sometimes. When he first got to Camp Custer, he didn't have much use for mule training: 

I have been under the weather for 4 or 5 days but feel better now, but was excused from drill this p.m. It is the next thing to the grippe, and lots are in the same boat. It is just because we are drilled in the cold rain taking notes on how to groom Old Adam's jack ass.

They transferred a bunch into the infantry this a.m., including 2 corporals, so I may go [overseas] next, but I don't give a darn. The more mules I see, the more I cuss the Kaiser.

However, Grampa was turned out to be a crack mule trainer and he was promoted to corporal:

Tell Father that we were out with the mules & carts and went through places that would make the banks & gullies on the Clam River [at home] look like a pavement. We had to help the mules in some places & in others we had to lock the cart wheels. It was quite exciting & I liked it, too. Sgt Rutledge said that if he told the First Platoon to put them mules up a tree he would be damned if he wouldn't believe we'd do it!

When he wasn't training mules, Grampa worried about his War Risk Insurance, a policy issued to all soldiers for $4,500 (about $100,000 today) to cover death or disability. There was no Veterans Administration until 1930, so the War Risk Insurance might be the only benefit a soldier or family received:

I was sure surprised and I can hardly believe that Kenneth [a cousin sent overseas] is dead, but we all have the same thing to face & they tell us here that they would rather lose several men than one piece of a machine gun. 

I wish you would let me know immediately whether you have ever received my insurance policy or not. If you have not, I will look the matter up. I have been thinking about it quite a lot lately. 

Later-- In regards to any insurance, I guess there is no need to worry as it surely was made out all right, and it seems that none of the boys who came with me have heard about theirs, so I presume they are held up in Washington. 

Grampa, as it turned out, was so good with mules that he was stationed stateside for the duration of the war toughening up the mules with marches over mucky terrain and getting them used to artillery noises by shooting blanks over their heads. 

Grampa's brother-in-law, Martin Keehn, was not so lucky. He was hit in the leg in a trench in France. He said he was lucky not to get gangrene or to get gassed, and he used to get out his Purple Heart for the kids to look at on November 11. 

After the war, Grampa went back to his family farm. Gramma had saved a lot of money to buy her own farm, and Grampa tried to make it work. But by 1936, he was sick of farming and got a job as a letter carrier. Gramma sold the farm and they moved into town. By the time I came along, Grampa was a taciturn old man who enjoyed cats, chain smoking, reading Westerns, and tippling from the whisky that Gramma made him keep in the garage. That's him with my brother in 1960 at right.

Grampa was not an introspective person. If he thought anything about the politics or moral aspects of World War I, he never talked about it. I suspect that wars, like droughts or a horse with a broken leg, was just something you learned to deal with. It was accepted that there were parts of life you couldn't do anything about. You did what you were told and hoped your War Risk Insurance went through. 

I sometimes wonder if Grampa ever read the British War Poets and what he would have made of Wilfrid Owens' poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, a piece I taught for many years that never failed to grab students. I'm thinking of it today:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick boys!--An ecstacy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.