About noon Monday at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, an ancient soldier will stand among some of his few remaining comrades and recite poet John McCrae’s classic World War I elegy, “In Flanders Fields.”
McCrae’s poem tries to make sense of the slaughter of one of the war’s early battles, an encounter in poppy fields in which thousands died. It is a favorite among the dwindling number of veterans of the war, who treat the poem as their anthem as well as an epitaph for those already dead:
If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/in Flanders Fields.
At least 100 veterans, all now in their 90s and 100s, are expected at the Cantigny ceremony. It has been designated as the only official national commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the end of the war, even though the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918. Each will receive a medal.
“Because of frail health and advanced age, we didn’t want to bring these people when the cold November winds are blowing,” said Muriel Sue Parkhurst.
As the executive director of Veterans of World War I of the U.S.A. Inc. for the last 19 years, Parkhurst has organized the national conventions for the veterans and their women’s auxiliary. This year’s convention opens Sunday at the Marriott Hotel in Oak Brook.
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“This (the 75th anniversary) is the big one for these men and women,” said Parkhurst, who, at 47, is half the age of the veterans.
“Some of them still like to raise some hell at these gatherings, and I have to run around the hotel at night and tell them to get to bed, that they need their sleep,” she said.
“Realistically, it can’t continue indefinitely,” Parkhurst said. “When you stand with them at these events now and look to the man on your left and then to the man on your right, chances are only one will be here next year.”
Of the 4.7 million men and women who served with U.S. forces during the war, only an estimated 35,000 remain alive, and they are dying at a rate of 25 a day. Most of those who are alive are too physically or mentally infirm to travel to conventions.
Perhaps because so few of them remain, the World War I vets seem almost lost in the shuffle this year as 8.2 million living World War II vets busily commemorate 50th anniversaries of their battles.
“Unless you have some connection with World War I, we’re a forgotten group,” said Orville Rummel, 94, of Woodburn, Ore., a Chicago native who enlisted in the Army here in March 1918. Serving in France in the Army Signal Corps, he ended up in Seattle as a telephone executive after the war. Now widowed and retired, he is returning to Chicago for the convention.
“This isn’t sour grapes, but the country, the politicians and the young people don’t know what we did,” Rummel said.
Jesse Brown, U.S. secretary of veterans affairs, and Gen. Gordon Sullivan, Army chief of staff, will present the commemorative medals to the veterans attending the Cantigny ceremony. Forty thousand medals were struck, and the rest are being distributed by mail to all eligible veterans throughout the country.
The men and women (1,400 of the surviving veterans are women) being honored were part of one of the great, watershed events that irrevocably changed the world and the nation.
It started in 1914 as the great European powers arrayed the most massive armies in history. They were equipped with machinery and deadly new weaponry that had more lethal punch than anything warfare had seen before: airplanes, tanks, submarines, poison gas, flame throwers, rapid-firing artillery and improved machine guns.
While millions died in deadly trench warfare, the U.S., favoring the allied troops of Britain, France and Italy against their principal foe, Germany, looked on with grim, silent fascination from 1914 to 1917.
“We were our own kings and queens, we were all isolationists,” said Winston Roche , 95, whose father moved him and his family from southern Indiana to Los Angeles when he was a small boy. Much decorated from his stints in four major battles in World War I, he is now a retired engineer in North Hollywood, Calif.
Roche said he had just graduated from high school and had been accepted to study engineering at the University of California at Berkley when
Congress declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917.
The U.S. instituted a draft that, in 18 months, sent 2.8 million men into the military.
One of them was Floyd Horton, 101, who was a 25-year-old farmer outside Antioch when he was drafted early in 1918.
“When they called you, you went, that’s all,” said Horton, still an Antioch resident whose laconic, cadenced speech and vocabulary is itself a living relic of his 19th Century prairie settler ancestors.
“I had to take a train to Camp Gordon, Ga., near Atlanta,” Horton recalled. “We trained with sticks to start with because there weren’t no rifles for us yet.”
Shipped overseas on an old, slow boat previously used to ship Australian cattle to England, he arrived in France in time to fight in several of the biggest battles of America’s war in Europe.
Indeed, America sent its boys off to Europe with great, patriotic enthusiasm. In the summer of 1917, the first trains of volunteers and inductees left American cities and towns as bands played, for lack of anything more specific, old Civil War tunes. Within months, the war had added plenty of new entries to the American songbook, such as “Over There,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning” and “When the Boys Come Home”.
But when American “doughboys” got their first real taste of combat in the early summer of 1918, whatever romantic notions they brought with them to Europe quickly died.
Nearly every American who experienced combat was bombarded by poison gas, either mustard gas or phosphine. The lucky ones who got on their gas masks in time suffered little more than burns and blisters on exposed areas of their face, hands and arms. The unlucky ones who got caught went through the terror of going blind for two to three weeks, suffering painful burns and respiratory damage that, if it didn’t kill them, stayed with them for years.
“It was a new kind of warfare,” said University of Wisconsin historian Edward Coffman, who, before he retired recently, specialized in World War I.
“Gas was not intended to kill, necessarily. If you killed a man, you took one man out of commission. If you injured a man with gas, you would temporarily take three or four men out of commission to take him to the rear, and then you would tie up the attention of others while he convalesced,” Coffman said.
Before the war was over, Americans were involved in some of the biggest battles of its military history, still rivaled only by the greatest undertakings of World War II.
The biggest was one of the last, the Meuse-Argonne campaign that began late in September 1918 and kept more than 1 million American troops continuously engaged for the next 40 days. The battle killed 30,000 of the 116,000 Americans who died in the war.
It was the battle in which Antioch’s Floyd Horton was hit in the right elbow by an exploding bullet.
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The wound sent him out of the war. And despite two years of operations and hospitalization, it caused the permanent loss of any practical use of the arm for what has proved to be a very long life.
But the weight of the American effort was telling on the Germans, who, six months before the Meuse-Argonne campaign, seemed poised to capture Paris and win the war.
After the war, German Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg ruefully assessed the damage done by the fresh, aggressive American troops on his own armies, tottering from exhaustion:
“Unlike the enemy, we had no fresh reserves to throw in. Instead of an inexhaustible America, we had only weary allies who were themselves on the point of collapse.”
The guns fell silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. It was a moment once familiar to American schoolchildren every year who used to stand at silent attention at that time on the Nov. 11 Veterans Day.
The doughboys, much sobered by their war experiences, came home to a grateful nation that feted them to some celebratory parades and little else. Each man got a new uniform, new shoes and $60 as he was mustered out. Men with serious disabilities such as Horton got free medical treatment and a pension; the rest, nothing.
Still, they were glad to be back. Horton and his wife, Clare, have supported themselves on farm work and odd jobs that Horton could handle with one arm. Until earlier this year, he walked a mile each way every day to check on and clean the Antioch American Legion post, where he is a 66-year member.
“I can’t complain a stick about what my government and the Army done for me,” said the last living veteran of the war in Lake County. “They couldn’t cast me a new arm, so what are you going to do? You got to get used to it, and I did.”