America’s WWI Memorial — They answered the call.
The Woodsman’s War
News of the Great War in Europe had hardly reached the backwoods hills of western Kentucky. Folks thereabouts tended their own business and paid little attention to the doin’s of flatlanders and foreigners. But one day at a trading post an illiterate young hardscrabble farmer and woodsman asked the clerk to read him a page from the newspaper. The headline read “Your Country Calls You,” and he said it “struck him like a stone.”
His country was calling him? He dearly loved his country — the part and people he knew, anyway — and his country had “never before asked for a red cent nor a drop of sweat.” But now she called. That’s what he told his family, and announced he was “Goin’ for to be a soldier and fight the Hun.”
He walked and hitched over 100 miles to enlist in Black Jack Pershing’s Army. They made him a machinegunner and sent him to France. There, his unit replaced the decimated wraiths of a battered French regiment in the freezing, shell-blasted mud of the trenches. And there, on one side of the cratered moonscape of No-Man’s Land, he and his fellow “doughboys” lived and died and were sometimes buried alive in their collapsing bunkers.
The woodsman’s war consisted of keeping his machinegun running amid the muck, sometimes gunning down ghostly gray lines of patrolling Germans caught in flare-light, and once shooting down an enemy observation blimp which had broken its tethers and drifted west. Otherwise, he learned to burrow like a rat when the shells fell — and they did, constantly.
Unable to read or write, he occasionally got another Yank to pencil a brief letter for him. His family said he never complained other than to say “It’s hard here; hardest for the city boys and younguns.” Then the letters stopped.
The Last Fight
Envision a broad valley — No-Man’s Land — between rows of hills, with German trenches on the northeast and American trenches opposite. A reconstituted French force approached from the southwest, coming to relieve the Yanks — and the Germans knew it. They unleashed a hellstorm of artillery rounds on the Americans, blasting them with high explosives and the dreaded mustard gas. Then gas-masked infantry assaulted the Yank trenches, bayoneting survivors and then moving on, sweeping up the northeast-facing slope behind the Americans. Silence settled.
Unknown to the approaching French, the Germans held that high ground, in perfect position to cut them down like wheat as they marched up the treeless southwest slopes. But they had missed a few Yanks — one of them, the woodsman.
Almost blind, blasted full of shrapnel, badly burned both by fire and mustard gas, he crawled to his machinegun. It had been blown into the air and come down on the southwest side, facing the wrong direction — except now, it was the right direction. He opened up on the Germans’ backs. Without cover, they scattered — or fell.
Alerted by the angry stutter of a Yank machinegun and Germans fleeing over the crest, the French deployed and attacked.
For uncounted months the woodsman lay unidentified in a French hospital, unable to speak more than “croaking like a crow.” The Armistice came and went. The French gave him a Croix de Guerre, and finally, America gave him a voyage home.
The Woodsman Returns
Eighteen months after the homecoming parades, the woodsman limped into his family’s yard and up the porch, where he dropped into a rocking chair. Pelted with questions, he waved them away.
“That Kaiser Bill,” he croaked, “He was a rough ’un” — and he never spoke of the war again. Over decades, family members were able to fill in some details. He lived, raising corn, beans and two sons, who went back to fight the Hun again. The woodsman had his Croix de Guerre made into a watchfob. He died just after V-E Day, 1945, and his dying words were:
“Don’t get beat, ever, by anything; anyone. You might get killed, but never get beat. Don’t never, ever give up. If your country calls, you answer her! And never ask for nothing but God’s light to see by.”
On Veteran’s Day, November 11th, if you haven’t got anyone else to honor, remember the woodsman. I will.