Today we remember the dead of all wars; a day designated by the end of the First World War when all combat ceased at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. A total of 10 million combatants died. Think of that number.
Before the United States entered the war, a group of volunteers from all over the world supported Great Britain, France and other countries in their fight against the alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Death and disability came to these volunteers.
Waldo Peirce was one of the volunteers. Born in Bangor in 1884 and living in Paris as an artist at the start of the war, Waldo felt drawn to volunteer as a driver for one of the ambulance services that transported the wounded in modified Model T Fords from the bloody battlefields to field hospitals. The work was hazardous and frightening, yet the men (there were a few women) displayed remarkable courage and esprit de corps. Letters home to their families were published in book form as well as appearing in local newspapers. These descriptions of the fighting and the tragedies of war were instrumental in swinging U.S. public opinion over to entering the war on the side of the Triple Entente.
Teddy Roosevelt wrote of the gallant volunteers in the foreward of “Friends of France”:
“The most important thing that a nation can safeguard is its amore proper and these young men have helped our country save its soul. There is not an American worthy of the name who has not incurred a deep debt of gratitude towards these young men for what they have done.”
Waldo Peirce worked as a volunteer driver for two years, first in the Alsace region during the initial French offensive, and then later in the epic battle of Verdun. Waldo was awarded the Croix de Guerre “for conspicuous bravery,” one of France’s highest honors.
One Christmas Eve 1915 on Hartmannsweilerkopf in Alsace, Waldo’s fellow ambulance driver, Richard Hall, was blown up and killed while answering a call to transport wounded down the mountain. Hall was the first American ambulance driver to die in the war. Six months earlier he had graduated from Dartmouth College.
Waldo wrote of this tragedy:
“Gentlemen at home, you that tremble with concerns at overrun putts, who bristle at your partner’s play at auction, who grow hoarse at football games, know that among you was one who played for greater goals — the lives of other men. There in the small hours of Christmas morning, where mountain fought mountain, on that hard-bitten pass under the pines of the Vosgian steeps there fell a very modest and valiant gentleman.”
If one visits Hall’s grave in the small village of Thane, you will find two small flags on the well-kept site — one American, one the French tricolor. There are no other Stars and Stripes in this French military cemetery. Ernest Hemingway, a close friend of Waldo’s, penned these lines in his memoir of Paris, “A Moveable Feast”:
“People came to the Lilas [a café] and some of them wore Croix de Guerre ribbons in their lapels … and I watched how well they were overcoming the handicap of loss of limbs, and saw the quality of their artificial eyes and the degree of skill with which their faces were reconstructed, and we respected these clients more than we did the savants.”
Waldo lost other friends and comrades in the war, and his other writings express his love for these men. It is difficult for men and women who have never served in combat to understand the depth of feelings that develops between men who together experience the nightmares of war. Perhaps John Keenan, the historian, expresses best this bond in his classic “The First World War”:
“Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any friendship made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of life.”
So today we all should honor the living and the dead of all wars and make an attempt to understand.
William Gallagher, M.D., is a physician in Bangor.