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An Unknown Soldier of World War I by Joanne Gass His Granddaughter
Christmas 1996 For my sisters, Janice Orr and Judith Christensen and our children: Richard and Jeffrey Gass, James and John Orr, Charles and Margaret Christensen
The story I am about to tell you is true--at least it is true to me. It is the story of my grandfather’s experiences fighting in France in World War I. At any rate, it’s the story of his experiences as I imagine them to have been, for I never knew my grandfather; he died the year before I was born. And that is why I call him an ‘unknown soldier’; not because he was one of the hundreds of thousands of young men who never returned from the Great War, as it was called, and were never identified, but because he is unknown to me and to my sisters. So this is a romantic story; the story of a granddaughter’s quest to know the grandfather she never had. And why might a granddaughter want to set out on such a quest? Because, as Anita Brookner says in Incidents in the Rue Laugier, "it is . . . true that most lives are incomplete, that death precludes explanations. How then can one not be intrigued by the unfinished story? . . . any notation, any record is better than none [and that] tells me that life is brief, and that it is memorable, that the trace it leaves behind is indelible" (233). Brookner insists that every life is important, no matter how brief or unrecorded; I want to make Charley Sowell’s life signify to me, to my sisters, and to our children. Besides, you cannot know where you’re going until you find out where you’ve been. My quest began, I guess, when I inherited Charley’s battle medal, awarded to all of Pershing’s troops who participated in the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne--the deciding battle of the war. I realized, when I looked at the medal, that I knew virtually nothing about the man who received it. My mother adored him--I knew that--, and she talked about him a great deal when I was a child. But I have forgotten most of her stories; I have only the memory of her great love. But mother never talked about his service in the war, and others have told me that he did not talk about it very much. What I have learned, though, in the course of my research, is that Charley, who played the fiddle, passed on to Mother, who passed them on to me, the songs of World War I. "Over There," "K-K-K Katy, beautiful Katy," "In Apple Blossom Time," "In Picardy," and, no doubt, many other now forgotten songs, all came to me from my grandfather through my mother. But, those songs do not quite convey experience so much as hope and nostalgia. Therefore, circumstances force me to recreate him and his experiences. In order to do that, I have gone to a number of sources: his Army records, charred around the edges and smoke damaged by the 1973 fire which swept the Army Archives in St. Louis, local newspapers, history books, and a very few still-living persons, including my father, who knew him. I visited the battlefields around Verdun and the Argonne forest--twice. I read Paul Fussell’s great work, The Great War and Modern Memory, which analyzes the literature of World War I and examines the war’s influence on the twentieth century imagination. And I read Martin Gilbert’s fine history of World War I, Barbara Tuchman’s two splendid books, The Proud Tower and August 1914, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, and Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory, his powerful and wrenching account of the Battle of Verdun. I have gathered as many of the facts as I can; but facts cannot convey essence. How then, could I retrieve my grandfather’s experience? He does not figure in the complex histories; he was a foot soldier, one of millions who slogged through the mud, the barbed wire, the bullets and the artillery shells. History does not consider the individual soldier; he makes no momentous decisions; essentially, he is paid to die so that the momentous decisions may be carried out. So where does one find the individual and his experience? In letters and in literature. Unfortunately, a fire which destroyed the old Sowell family ranch house in the late 1940's, destroyed also my grandfather’s letters, military records, and possessions. Because we have no personal records, literature, then, must be my source because literature speaks of the individual’s experience. I read the literature of the war--Hemingway, Dos Passos, Remarque, Owen, and Blasco Ibañez--, and through it I hear my grandfather. So, first I will tell you the facts as I have been able to collect them; then I will try to recuperate the experience--the essence--through the poetry and prose of the war. Remember, it is my story of my grandfather; history is always the reconstruction of its author. I cannot, nor do I want to, write ‘objectively’; Charley’s war is necessarily my war. Charley Isac Sowell ( the spelling of his name here conforms to his signature and the typed name on his physical examination form, filled out and signed by him on January 30. 1918) was born in the Illinois Valley of Southern Oregon on May 30, 1896. He was one of eight children who survived of Joseph and Sarah Sowell, who owned a small, not very productive ranch, in the hills above Kirbyville, Oregon. Joe and Sarah both came from pioneering families. His father, John Harrison Sowell "was one of the earliest settlers and miners on . . . Althouse Creek [where the first gold was found]. [Charley’s] maternal grandfather, Isaac Skeeters, was one of the discoverers of Crater Lake, he being with John Hillman’s party of discovery, June 12, 1853" (Illinois Valley News, Jan. 6, 1941). John Harrison Sowell, at the age of twelve, was kidnaped by Indians in the Texas territory, rescued by Sam Houston (the story goes), and later served as wagon train scout as he moved from Texas to the Oregon territory. The family was quite poor, a condition exacerbated by Joe Sowell’s tendency to leave Sarah and the children and disappear for months at a time, only to return, impregnate ‘Sal’ and leave again. He, like the rest of his family, was gold-struck, and forever looking for the ‘big strike’ which would make them rich. Charley grew up, by all accounts, a good-natured kid dominated by his mother, who depended upon her children to support her and her growing brood. For example, older brother, Lee, began to drive the stagecoach from Kerbyville to the Oregon coast when he was about ten years old, he told me, to help support the family. And the family was known throughout the Valley because they were talented musicians--fiddlers and piano players--, and they frequently played for dances; only sister Lu received music lessons; all the others, my mother included, played by ear. Unlike his older brothers, Lee and Decker, who never learned to read or write, Charley went to grammar school and did learn both to read and to write. By the time he was drafted in June of 1918, Charley listed his occupation as ‘farmer’ although his last pay book lists him as a ‘miner.’ Presumably, he worked in the chromium mines in the area, since the gold mines around Takilma had about run out by then, and the war effort needed chromium. Like nearly all of the men who served the United States in World War I, Charley was drafted. Beamish and March report that "Volunteer recruiting was not a success in the United States" (55); therefore, on May 15, 1917, "Congress passed the Selective Service Law, which called for the registration of all males in the United States between the ages of twenty-one and thirty years, inclusive" (Beamish and March, 56). Registrations took place on June 5, 1917, June 5, August 24, and September 12, 1918. Charley joined the first group of nearly ten million other young men, who registered on June 5, 1917, an event which Beamish and March unironically describe:
I don’t know how enthusiastically Charley entered into this national act of patriotism (since the call for volunteers failed so miserably), but my story is a romance; therefore, I’ll assume that he, too, responded to his country’s call with fervor. When he registered, he received a registration blank which "contained twelve questions covering among others, name, age, address, nationality, birthplace, occupation and concluded with the question: ‘Do you claim exemption from draft (specify grounds)?’" (Beamish and March, 59). His registration card was taken by a local board which consisted of three persons appointed by the president.
What followed was a national lottery. The lottery consisted of two parts: first "the serial numbers for each of five thousand districts were placed in a jury wheel" and numbers were "drawn one at a time until the requisite number was attained." Each number drawn corresponded to a number in each district; consequently, almost five thousand men could be drafted at one time.
After this initial step, each registrant was assigned a "red ink" number, "because they were marked in red ink." Each number was placed in a black celluloid capsule which was then placed in a glass bowl. Then, an official drew the capsules, one and at time, handed them to an announcer who withdrew the number from each capsule and called it out; three tally clerks then recorded the number on a huge blackboard, and the numbers were then telegraphed to every town in the United States. On January 30, 1918, Charley reported to the "Local Board for the County of Josephine, State of Oregon, Grants Pass, Oregon," for his physical examination. Joseph C. Smith, the examining physician, reports that he weighed 144 pounds, stood 66 ½ inches tall, had normal hearing and vision, was slightly flatfooted, and not only had all of his teeth, but they were also in good condition. Dr. Smith and James Martin, a member of the local board, both certified that he was "physically qualified for general military service." Charley’s number, and the numbers of twenty-nine other men from Josephine County, Oregon, was drawn on June 5, 1918, and he was ordered to report to Camp Lewis, Washington, "within the five day period beginning June 24, 1918" (Rogue River Courier, June 5, 1918). At 7:00 a.m. on Monday, June 24, Charley and his fellow draftees assembled on the platform of the train station in Grants Pass, Oregon. They were met by the Josephine County Council of Defense and "a very large number of local citizens," given a free breakfast, and sent off with the following words from L. Myron Boozer, who was introduced by Judge C. G. Gillette:
A "heartfelt prayer on behalf of the departing boys," from the Rev. Charles R. Drake, a patriotic march played by the band, and the cheers of friends and relatives sent them on their way. I imagine that they arrived in Camp Lewis the next day, where they began their training at a cost to the government of $142.00 per soldier (Rogue River Courier). From his government, Charley received $33.00 per month and a $10,000.00 War Risk Insurance policy, the premiums for which were $6.50 per month. In return, he endured a rigorous training schedule. Wallace Coutant, a draftee from Grants Pass, wrote his parents:
I doubt that Charley felt differently and would not have "like[d] it for a regular diet" either. After basic training with the 33rd Company, 9th Battalion, 166th Depot Brigade, Charley was sent to Camp Kearney, California, on July 11, where he joined Company H, 157th Infantry, 40th Division:
Charley must have arrived with the last group in August. On Sept. 10, he was promoted to Private First Class, and on Sept. 15, he was transferred, as a combat replacement, to Company A (or B, the records are contradictory here), 109th Infantry, 28th Division. Known as the "Keystone Division," the 28th came principally from Pennsylvania, and entered the action on July 1, 1918. It was "one of the attacking divisions in the offensive [of the Meuse-Argonne] of Sept. 26th, pushing as far as Châtel Chehery, where it was relieved on Oct. 9th" (Beamish and March, 570-1). The Keystone Division required, during its time on the front, many replacements--it suffered more than 16,000 casualties, of which 2,531 died (Beamish and March, 571). On Sept. 24, Charley was promoted to Corporal and probably entered the Meuse-Argonne offensive with the 109th on Sept. 26, 1918. On Oct. 1, 1918, Charley became one of the 13,746 soldiers in the 28th division wounded in the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, a wound in his "left foot dorsum . . . also shown as Traumatism by piece of shrapnel," for which he received the Purple Heart, awarded on January 29, 1936 (Military Record). He was treated for his injury from October 1 to December 24 at Base Hospitals #9, #36, #115, and #109, respectively. (I have not, as yet, been able to locate a record which shows where these hospitals were actually located.) How he received this wound, where exactly he was, and what he did, I’ll never know. I do, however, have a letter from Pvt. Francis Speake, a Grants Pass boy who was drafted in the same group, sent to Camp Lewis, and assigned to Company D of the 109th Infantry. Private Speake was wounded in battle at about the same time, and on Sept. 30, 1918, he wrote A. S. Coutant of Grants Pass:
I expect that Charley’s experience paralleled Private Speake’s, for his wound seems not to have been devastating, and I expect that he would have written home in the same tone and vein. Whatever real trauma he might have wished to convey would probably have been censored, anyway. What Charley did between December 24, 1918 and April 22, 1919, I’ll probably never know. After the Armistice, the 109th "went to the divisional training area," wherever that was; it had trained in May of 1918 with the British "in the vicinity of Nielles les Blequin," then with the French in Gonesse , and finally "to a sector near the Marne" (Beamish and March, 570); consequently, Charley could have spent his last days in France in any of these places; my guess is that he spent them near the Marne. I’d love to know what he did for nearly four months--did he get to ‘see’ any of France; did he go to movies, which ones; what did he think of the French (his granddaughter loves France and the French)--, but I can’t know and I probably won’t ever know. His records show, however, that he left France on April 22, 1919, and arrived in the United States on May 3; I don’t now what ship brought him home or where it sailed from, but I hope someday to find out. His unit was transferred to Camp Dix, New Jersey on May 12. I have a picture of his unit taken by a professional photographer during his stay there. His last pay warrant was issued on May 20, 1919. When he was discharged, his character was described as "excellent," and he received the following items: "Shoes Field 2 pr. H. W. Socks Size 7 ½. Shoes Russet 1 Pr Cot. Socks Size 7, Rct. Kit, Red Cross Sweater Issued". He returned to the Illinois Valley shortly thereafter, and, so far as I know, remained there until he died in 1941. These are the facts, as I have collected and arranged them. But where is Charley Sowell among all these facts? He remains an ‘unknown soldier’ of World War I. Charley participated in that great battle which produced the Rainbow Division, the Lost Battalion, and Sergeant York. Books, movies, and poems have celebrated their feats; they are part of American myth--heroes played by Gary Cooper and John Wayne. We know everything about them. Our heroes are larger than life figures who take their places in the pantheon of American mythology. But World War I was about something more than heroes and heroism. Most historians, artists, philosophers, and critics agree that World War I was the defining event for the twentieth century; the recent PBS series, The Great War, certainly asserts its importance. It destroyed traditional concepts of heroism, meaning, faith, and optimism and replaced them with alienation, fragmentation, disillusionment, and skepticism. Charley’s experience, I imagine, partook of alienation and skepticism, as well. I base my conclusions upon the three details that I do know about Charley’s war. With these three bits of information and the help of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Erich Maria Remarque, and Wilfred Owen, I hope to reconstruct Charley’s war--not a hero’s war, but the war of the ordinary infantryman. No doubt Charley’s first experience with alienation occurred in training camp. How was he, a good-natured country boy, to reconcile the patriotic rhetoric of his departure from home with the reality of training camp? He told my father, James Wells of Grants Pass, Oregon, "We were treated cruelly and fed horrible food; they wanted to make us mean, so that we would kill." On the transport ship to France, probably a converted cruise ship, he must have felt the cruelty even more sharply. Several thousand infantrymen were herded into the ship’s hold while the officers enjoyed the staterooms above. John Dos Passos, in "Going Over" from his novel Three Soldiers depicts a scene in which his infantryman, Fuselli, undergoes the terror and misery of crossing:
Fuselli loses his illusions amid the stench of thousands of seasick men. And, like my grandfather, he learns that "It’s part of the system. You’ve got to turn men into beasts before ye can get ‘em to act that way" (Dos Passos, in Löhrke, 466). When he reached France and learned that he would be assigned to the Meuse-Argonne campaign, Charley must have received yet another shock. Charley came from southwestern Oregon, a mountainous area covered, then, by primeval pine, cedar, and fir forests whose floors were carpeted by wildflowers, moss, and ferns and cut through by wild rivers and sparkling streams; this pastoral vision of Southern Oregon is obviously mine, but I think it is fairly close to the truth. What must he have thought when he saw the landscape around Verdun:
Confronted by this wasteland, what must he have thought of the ‘heroic’ cause he had come to defend? And when he did reach the forest, he saw, not the orderly, carpeted pine forests of the Pacific Northwest, but "a tangle of wooded hills, separated by a marshy valley, having no ordered system, no central ridge, no dominant hill stretching from east to west . . ." The forest became a maze, smashed by artillery, splintered by rifle fire, and a shelter for the enemy. "They struggled through woodland after woodland only to find fresh forests on all sides" (Simonds, 275). And then, there were the elements. In the chaos of war, death, injury, and dismemberment threatened, but a foot soldier’s constant companions were rain, mud, and rats. Charley told my dad that a soldier’s most important belonging was an extra pair of dry socks. He said that it rained constantly (Wells, 1995), and photographs show that the men marched through seas of mud, sometimes waist deep. The troops moved into position at night when they either boarded trucks or started out on foot--neither mode of transportation was comfortable:
As if the mud and arrogant officers weren’t enough, they were plagued by rats the size of large cats which were so vicious that they made few distinctions between living and dead flesh. When a man’s existence is reduced to a constant struggle, not with a human enemy, but with trench foot, mud, and rats, he tends to focus upon these realities rather than grand abstractions. Ernest Hemingway, who in A Farewell to Arms elevated rain to a universal symbol, gave us Frederick Henry, who described the effect of rain on abstractions:
Surely Charley understood Frederick Henry’s alienation in the face of the rain, the mud, and the rats. Charley’s alienation must have increased when he was taken to the field hospital for treatment of his rather minor wound. He, unlike many transported there, would have been fully conscious, fully aware of the scene of suffering he entered into. Vicente Blasco Ibañez, in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, describes a German field hospital on the Marne. Desnoyers, the old man whose castle the Germans have made into a hospital, watches as the casualties begin to arrive:
Because Charley’s wound was minor, he, like Desnoyers, would have been fully aware of the scene around him. He must have felt, as does Desnoyers, that he was in hell. Finally, Charley told a man I know that during the fighting he was pinned down by enemy fire between the rails of a railroad track. Lying there, flattened between the iron rails, he discovered that he was surrounded by ants. In order to keep them away, he spit tobacco juice on them. Irvin Johnson, the man he told this story to, said that Charley never talked about the war; however, this time he chose to share a wry, ironic detail from what must have been a terrifying moment when he feared for his life. That detail, nevertheless, provides us with the elements of irony, ambiguity, and paradox, which we identify with Modernism. These tropes play upon discrepancies, discrepancies which disguise the truth by creating distance between what is said and what actually occurs. Thus, veterans like Charley could, in essence, ‘talk’ about the war without really talking about it. They created a distance between themselves and the horror of lived experience. Charley’s story is paradoxical in that it appears not to be about the horrors of war, and yet it represents a microcosmic moment in the macrocosm of the war. Charley becomes every infantryman caught in the absurdity of a war which had no meaning, no purpose. Simultaneously, he reduces his existence to that of the ants held at bay by streams of tobacco juice indiscriminately spat upon them by an impersonal force which mindlessly annihilates its victims. His tale tells us just how thoroughly Charley understood his situation, and underlines once more his sense of alienation and disillusionment. Blasco Ibañez, too, explores the experience of being pinned down by artillery barrage and rifle fire, and in doing so, he chooses much the same metaphor of the overwhelming, impersonal machine which reduces men to ants. He describes the artillery barrage as "a strident explosion like a stupendous blow from a gigantic axe--an axe as big as [a] castle [which causes to fly] through the air entire treetops, trunks split in two, great chunks of earth with the vegetation still clinging, a rain of dirt that obscure[s] the heavens" (366). "The ferocious wood-chopper, in destroying this woods, had also blindly demolished many of the ants swarming around the trunks" (418). Charley, perhaps, could not tell the ‘truth’ of his experience. Paul Fussell says of the returning soldier, "Perhaps his own psyche ha[d] providentially erased a host of memories that might do him harm: ‘It is almost as if the inner recording eye had fixed itself on phenomena that the mind would be able to live with in the future without too much distress.’ But ‘history remembers it’" (The Great War and Modern Memory, 334-5). Fussell calls this the pattern of "innocence savaged and destroyed" which modern literature has given coherence and irony to (335). Charley never did tell what he really saw, felt, did; he left it for the poets and novelists to tell. And they have told us a cautionary tale which, at the end of the twentieth century we would do well to heed. Erich Maria Remarque, in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, spoke, in the voice of a German foot soldier, for my grandfather and many of his compatriots:
Nine million military personnel died, for apparently no good reason, in World War I, and through literature, "the imagery of [it] has remained for eighty years and through several generations. A relatively short time, a war that lasted for four years and three months has inspired, puzzled and disturbed the whole century that followed" (Gilbert, xxi). "‘Millions died or suffered in the mud . . . between 1914-18. Who remembers them? Even those with names on their graves are by now unknown soldiers’" (Gilbert, xxi). We will remember them if we pay attention to the artists and writers who have said to us what my grandfather could not say to me. And we must remember them; Anita Brookner, whose literary output consists almost exclusively of novels about people trying to reconstruct or resurrect their pasts, says:
All life is good, even if it is fictitious. And the lives of those we love must hold some meaning for us, and if that meaning is withheld, who can blame the survivor for his or her curiosity, even it that curiosity holds as much mourning as celebration?
My search has been for my grandfather; in the process, I have tried to make him ‘memorable’ for my sisters, our children, and myself; can I be blamed for my curiosity or for my interpretation? Facts, after all, have no essential meaning; they are given meaning by those who embed them in a narrative, as I have done. Along the way, I have also tried to make his experience serve as a reminder that what happened then could happen again. To forget my grandfather is to forget what pride and arrogance and nationalism cost us. And so, I would like to close with a poem written by a soldier who did not survive the war. Wilfred Owen was killed the day after the signing of the Armistice. Nevertheless, his poem, "Dulce Et Decorum Est," tells us the story that we must hear and remember, but which my grandfather could not and would not tell: 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.
Works Cited Beamish, Richard J. and Francis A. March. America’s Part in the World War. 1919. Blasco Ibañez, Vicente. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Trans. Charlotte Brewster Jordan. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918. Brookner, Anita. Incidents in the Rue Laugier. London: Random House, 1995. "Charley Issac Sowell." Illinois Valley News. Jan. 6, 1941. Coffman, Edward M. The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986. "Co. Has 30 Men in Draft Quota." Rogue River Courier. Wed. June 5, 1918. "Cost of Making Soldier Varies." Rogue River Courier. Nov. 18, 1917. Coutant, Wallace. "Soldier Letters." Rogue River Courier. Wed. Aug. 26, 1918. Dos Passos, John. Nineteen Nineteen. New York: Penguin, 1969 (1932). "Drafted Men Leave Monday for Camp Lewis." Rogue River Courier. June 23, 1918. Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the First World War. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. ---. The First World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford UP, 1975. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957 (1929). Johnson, Irvin. Interview conducted December 26, 1995, in Klamath Falls, Oregon. "Josephine Drafted Men Leave for Camp." Rogue River Courier. Mon. June 24, 1918. Löhrke, Eugene, ed. Armageddon: The World War in Literature. New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930. "Oregon Boys in Argonne Fight." Rogue River Courier, Thursday, Nov. 14, 1918. Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce Et Decorum Est" in Silkin, ed. Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. New York: Heritage, 1969. Silkin, John ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Second ed. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1979. Simonds, Frank H. History of the World War, Vol. 5. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1920. Speake, Pvt. Francis. "Soldier Letters." Rogue River Courier, Thursday, Nov. 8, 1918. Wells, James N. Interview conducted December 26, 1995, Grants Pass, Oregon.
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