“Their Fame Will Increase With The Years:” Jimmy Drake & Vivian Slaughter – Virginians in the London Regiment, B.E.F.

Part One of Two

Continuing with the theme of Virginians who served in World War I, this series of posts will focus on two remarkable young men who left lives of leisure and comfort to join the British army in the early days of the conflict. James H. Drake, Jr. and Dr. Vivian Slaughter were close friends who met while attending the University of Virginia in the early 1900’s. By 1914 both men had lucrative careers – Drake was a Richmond attorney and Slaughter was a doctor with a successful medical practice.

Yet when the guns of August first sounded they were willing to lay aside their personal ambitions and join a cause they deemed bigger than themselves. They sailed for Europe within weeks of each other in 1915, and they would die within four days of each other in the waning days of the war. UVA President Edwin A. Alderman was so moved by their service that he told his alumni – “I believe that their names and their fame will increase with the years, for they have done the finest thing that a man can do in this world.”

We will start with the life and service of James Hodges Drake, Jr.

“Jimmy” Drake was born on February 22, 1881 to James H. Drake and Elizabeth Ott Drake of Richmond. One of six children, he descended from a Revolutionary War hero also named James Drake of North Carolina. If that wasn’t enough to interest him in military affairs, he attended the University School in Richmond as a young man. The school’s founder was William Gordon McCabe who fought with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War. McCabe sought to “make his boys in a genuine sense both gentlemen and scholars.” Building upon this foundation, Drake attended the Virginia Military Institute in 1897 as a member of the Class of 1901. After leaving VMI, Drake aspired to get his law degree at the University of Virginia, where he would befriend a young native of Orange, VA named Vivian Slaughter. Drake graduated from UVA in 1903 and moved back to Richmond to establish his law practice the same year.

He practiced law and served with Richmond’s premier militia unit, the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, for twelve years. He was known as an idealistic social reformer, with one acquaintance praising:

Day after day his service was at the command of the poorest and lowliest man or woman, white or black, who had been wronged and despoiled. He was a practical, quiet, tireless and dauntless reformer and champion of the weak and helpless and miserable against ill-gotten riches.

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Drake was outraged by news concerning the “rape of Belgium” and decided to combine his passion for justice with his prior military training. He embarked for Newport News and departed for England on April 10, 1915, hoping to reconnect with his college pal Vivian Slaughter who was already in Europe serving in the American Red Cross.

Drake arrived in France in late April and eventually made his way to England, where he offered his services to the British Army. The British gladly accepted his offer and gave him the rank of 2nd Lieutenant on June 5, 1015. Since Drake already had experience drilling troops, his first duty was to teach new recruits the rudimentary arts of being a soldier.

In July he wrote of his situation:

Busy, interested, tired at night, hungry at mealtime. A good bunch, a good camp—in fact, I'm lucky, very, very, lucky.

The British praised Drake for his ability to “give us some valuable hints in the matter of camp sanitation” and rewarded him with service in a front line unit – 1/24th Battalion, London Regiment (The Queen's.) In August of 1915, the he sailed for France and immediately went into the front lines. He quickly rose to become the Battalion Bombing Officer and saw heavy fighting at the Battle of Loos. His commanding officer, Lt. Col. William Parker, would write of his service:

Lieutenant J. H. Drake, when acting as Battalion Bombing Officer, was attached to the companies then under my command, during the operations following on the German attack on the “Hairpin,” near the Hohenzollern redoubt, Loos Salient, on December 30, 1915. During this very trying period he displayed the most tireless energy, and it was largely due to his skillful dispositions that all attempts against the sector held by the Twenty-fourth Battalion were without result to the Enemy.

The Alexandria Gazette reported that Drake was officially recommended for the Victoria Cross for this desperate action.

In 1916 a combination of cold weather, dampness, and gas exposure caused Drake to succumb to a bad case of “trench fever” that resulted in him leaving the front for a few weeks. Keeping up on events in his native country, he wrote home to mock the American preparedness movement, stating that “the present hysteria in America is rather amusing, or would be, were it not so pathetic in its aspects of futility.”

Drake continued to serve on the front lines until late 1916, when the combination of wounds, gas exposure, and shell shock rendered him a “physical wreck.” He was sent home to regain his strength in October of 1916 and stayed at his parents’ home in Richmond. Seeing his frail condition firsthand, his friends and family implored him to ask for an honorable discharge and stay home, but to no avail – he left for Europe on November 1st.

Following his return to England, he was assigned to a training camp near London as a Bombing Instructor, an assignment he would remain at throughout 1917 and early 1918. However, his health continued to deteriorate and he was invalided from the service on April 16, 1918. For the next few months Drake sought a commission in the American Expeditionary Forces.

Sadly, Drake suffered a massive stroke in September that left him paralyzed. A British surgeon took the time to write home to Drake’s parents that “he was in a critical condition, but that he had warm friends who would do everything that was possible for him.”

One of those warm friends, as luck would have it, was Vivian Slaughter who had gone on from his medical work to serve as a line officer in 2/20th Battalion, London Regiment. Slaughter had been fighting in Palestine with his battalion before they were transferred to the Western Front, giving him just enough time to visit Drake on his sick bed before moving out. The record of their brief conversation has been lost to history, but it must have been bittersweet for Slaughter to see his old companion reduced to the mere shell of a person.

Drake fought for life as best he could, but his weakened body finally gave out on September 23, 1918.

When word reached Richmond of his death, an old friend eulogized:

It was in accordance with his character and career that he left home and safety and ease and friends and crossed the sea to offer his life for the allies, when their prospects were darkest and there were no signs of help for them from his own government. That was “Jimmy” Drake exactly. What he believed to be right he was ready to die for and sacrifice himself for, and without stopping to measure odds or ask terms…No death could be sweeter than his was, or could have been more desired by him—death from the dedication of his manhood, his courage and his all for the good cause of the stricken and wronged against the strong, and the news of victory ringing in his heart with his last throbs.

Drake was 37 years old when he died.

In my next post I will relate the story of Drake’s friend and fellow warrior, Vivian Slaughter.

Virginians at War: Lt. Herbert R. Hordern, B.E.F.

Hordern's VMI Class Picture

As we enter this centennial year of American involvement in the First World War it is my hope to write up a series of short biographical profiles highlighting the service of forgotten servicemen and women from my home state of Virginia. These are stories that I have encountered in my research going back to 2009 when I first spent a lengthy amount of time in the files of the Virginia War History Commission.

This first set of profiles will focus on Virginians who took the bold step of going “over there” before the American declaration of war in 1917.

We will start with the tragic tale of Warrenton native Herbert Hordern, who rose to become an officer in the Second Battalion of the Irish Guards, B.E.F.

Herbert Radcliffe Hordern was born on June 12, 1892, the son of the son of Radcliffe and Grace Harriet Nesbitt Hordern. Herbert was descended from what his Alma Mater described as “distinguished English ancestry,” which may partly explain his decision to join the British ranks in 1915.

In 1908 Hordern enrolled in the Virginia Military Institute, where he earned such distinguished nicknames as Count, Herbo, and Scrooge. Hordern struggled with academics and eventually graduated in the Class of 1914, prompting the yearbook author to quip:

All records of matriculation of this Stone Age representative have long since crumbled to dust, and it is only by careful examination of the hieroglyphics, recently excavated, that we can discover anything concerning him.

Apparently Hordern wanted to carry on Virginia’s cavalier tradition, which resulted in more ruthless taunting in his yearbook:

His highest ambition is to be a dashing cavalry officer, and we earnestly hope that Uncle Sam, in his leniency, will examine his nether extremities through a magnifying glass and let him in.

Two months after graduation Europe was embroiled in war, and Hordern wasted little time in crossing the Atlantic to join the British Expeditionary Force. Hordern was able to gain a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion of the Irish Guards in August of 1915.

Writing in 1917 his mother recalled:

His dearest wish ever was to be a soldier; and when this War came he felt from the first the most intense desire to go to the front in any capacity.

Hordern served as an adjutant and received a slight wound at Loos before being transferred to the 2nd Battalion (the same unit that Rudyard Kipling’s son John served with). According to his mother, he, “made good from the first; and those warm-hearted Irish adopted their American ‘Sammy’ with sincere affection.”

1916 brought the Battle of the Somme, and with it the incident that would forever alter Hordern’s life. At the beginning of August, Lt. Hordern was put in charge of a small party of men tasked with digging new trenches near the embattled village of Thiepval. Hordern and his detail left their main camp on August 1st and had to take trucks to a bivouac near where they were to start digging. The next day they set about their task and soon came under the fire of German artillery. Hordern was in the middle of directing his small detail when a shell exploded that wounded Hordern and eight other men in his party.

Rudyard Kipling chronicled the incident in his classic work, The Irish Guards in the Great War:

2nd Lieutenant Hordern was dangerously and eight men were slightly wounded by one shell while at work…The machine had taken possession of their lives and fates, and as they went from trench to bivouac and back again they could both see and hear how extremely little a battalion, or for that matter a brigade, mattered in the present inferno. The fortnight's battle that had opened on the 14th of July had finished itself among erased villages and woods that were already all but stumpage, while the big guns were pounding the camps and bivouacs that held our reserves, and one stumbled on old and fresh dead in the most unlikely and absurd places.

Hordern was evacuated to a hospital directly behind the lines where he underwent the first of two surgeries before being sent to London, where his mother paid him a visit and recalled:

In November [1916] another operation was performed; and, after many anxious weeks and agonies of pain unspeakable, he began slowly to creep back to life. He is still in Hospital, but convalescent, and we are now hopeful he may in time be well. Whether he will again be with his beloved regiment, we can not yet say, but he has no other hope than to get back to his work. He has been brave—never a murmur.

It would be nearly three years before he would leave the military hospitals to rejoin his family. On January 26, 1918 his mother reported:

He is, I am most happy to tell you, very much better, can now walk about in the house, and even get up steps, with his sticks. He is still under his medical board, at a convalescent home for officers at Brighton (Tie Herbert Samuelson Hospital, 2 Sussex Square), and spends most of his days in the wonderful bracing air of that charming place.

One month later he would be placed on the half pay list because of his inability to serve.

By war’s end, he would finally be sent home. During his time in the B.E.F. Hordern earned the Mons Ribbon of Service and was recommended for the Victoria Cross for his bravery on August 2, 1916. He received a full commission into the Irish Guards August 29, 1916 with seniority from the date of his wounding and was promoted to 1st lieutenant on November 27, 1916.

When he returned to the United States he lived with his family in Pennsylvania, but was never able to recover from the Somme. On September 23, 1929 he died from complications from his wound.


He was 37 years old.

Hordern was brought back to Virginia to be laid to rest, and is buried in Warrenton Cemetery in Fauquier County, Virginia.

I Will Hold: An Interview with James Carl Nelson

Greetings everyone and sorry for the dearth of posts as of late – as it turns out, helping to create a national museum dedicated to the U.S. Army is a very time consuming task!

Happily, I get to break my silence today with an interview I recently conducted with James Carl Nelson about his latest book I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates, from Belleau Wood to Victory in the Great War.

I vividly remember when Mr. Nelson burst upon the scene of First World War literature back in 2009 with The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War, which was given an Editor’s Choice Award as one of 2009’s seven best history books by Booklist. I was working on what became the exhibit Ready To Do My Part: Henrico County & World War I and was voraciously consuming anything that had to do with the AEF and World War I. To say that The Remains of Company D stood out would be quite the understatement.

Nelson went on to publish Five Lieutenants: The Heartbreaking Story of Five Harvard Men Who Led America to Victory in World War I in 2012 and his latest book tells the story of Clifton B. “Lucky” Cates’ exploits with the United States Marine Corps during World War I.

I’d like to thank Mr. Nelson for taking the time out of his busy schedule to do an interview with me and I think you’ll enjoy what he has to say!

JP: Please tell us a little bit about yourself – what is your background?

JCN: Even as a child I was interested in military history, and at age seven I even had a notion to try to get into West Point. The remainder of the 1960s and the early 1970s pretty much wiped that idea from my head – as did the fact that I’m terrible at math. I grew up in a Chicago suburb, and always having had some talent for and a strong interest in writing, I gravitated towards journalism while at the University of Minnesota, where I worked for the student paper, and then upon graduation headed off to a job in The Miami Herald’s Keys bureau. I’ve been in my present job as a journalist for 30 years.

JP: How did you come to be interested in the First World War?

JCN: I actually had a personal interest – my grandfather, a Swedish immigrant to Chicago, was drafted in 1917 and sent to France as a replacement soldier. He was assigned to Company D, 28th Regiment, US 1st Division after its assault on Cantigny in May, 1918 – and then he was shot through the abdomen by a German machine gunner on July 19, 1918 during the Soissons offensive while he and his battalion were assaulting the village of Ploisy. He laid on the field all night, then was rescued by a couple of French Colonial troops – he always said they were Algerians, but I think they were more likely from a West African nation – who brought him to an aid station. He spent nine months recovering, but he lived to be 101. After his death, I became consumed with trying to discover what had actually happened to him, and his small story, and the larger story of the men with whom he briefly served, became the basis for my first book The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War, which was published in 2009.

JP: The book opens, “He has already spent one night sleeping almost atop the bodies of dead men, French and German, dead for days and weeks and thankfully unseen now in the blackness, though there was no mistaking their odious, putrid smell.” Quite an introduction! Could you give us some insight on how you go about the process of crafting such evocative writing? How do you “get in the zone,” so to speak?

JCN: I believe in grabbing the reader right away, and that means jumping into the story at the greatest dramatic point. With I Will Hold, there were many such points, but I liked the imagery of the dead bodies – it just really evoked the brutality and the slaughters of the Great War and what Clifton Cates and the Marines experienced. I worked from several descriptions of that night that are out there, and then put my own imagination and words to the horrific scene. As for getting into the zone, it’s hard to describe. I usually don’t have to labor over such scenes because often the words just come to me, from where I don’t know for certain. It’s just the artistic process, I guess.

JP: What in particular drew you to the story of Clifton Cates?

JCN: I actually had a great interest in a stand-alone book about the battle of Soissons – which involved the 1st and 2nd Divisions, including the Marine Fourth Brigade -- and threw together a 50-page proposal over one weekend in 2012 and sent it to my literary agent, James D. Hornfischer. He had just published his third book Neptune’s Inferno, about the naval battle off of Guadalcanal in 1942, and the name Clifton Cates was familiar to him. He suggested I get away from the 1st Division – my second book Five Lieutenants focused on a small group of officers who also served in the division in WW1 – and he was the one who suggested a biography of Cates. A quick check revealed that Cates has a large collection of papers at the Marine archives in Quantico, and so off I went. I was very happy and enthused to tackle the Marine experience in WW1, though starting out I knew very little of it outside of Belleau Wood. Ironically, I actually stumbled across Belleau Wood in 2008 while in France researching my first book, but still had only a very sketchy idea of exactly what went on there.

JP: Readers of I Will Hold may be surprised to learn that that United States Marine Corps of 1917 didn’t have the same reputation as an elite fighting force that the modern Corps enjoys. Cates himself once recalled of his pre-war training, “Outside the rifle range part of it, there wasn't any of it any good." How was Cates able to have such marked success on the battlefield, given the steep learning curve that faced his Marines when they were deployed on the Western Front?

JCN: Yes, Cates was also somewhat derisive about the training, saying most of it wasn’t worth a “hoorah,” but the Marines AND the leaders of the American Expeditionary Forces were certain that once Americans got to France in large enough numbers the stalemate of the trenches would quickly be broken. The Marines in particular espoused the theory that massed rifle power would provide a breakthrough. But the reality was that the machine gun and powerful, massed artillery was king Over There. Cates and the Marines found that out at Belleau Wood, Soissons, and St. Mihiel, but by the battle of Blanc Mont in October, 1918 and then in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in November, the Marines had learned the value of employing a standing artillery preparation followed by a creeping barrage that was followed closely by the men. As for his personal success, he was known as “Lucky Cates” for the numerous bullets and shells that hit him but did not kill or severely wound him – this happened at least 10 times -- which wasn’t the case for many men in his company, the 96th, which took more casualties than any other American unit, or for the Marine Brigade in general, which lost 1,342 men killed in action and another 8,292 to wounds. But Cates’ success was due also to his smarts, his dash, his utter bravery and his frame of mind. One Marine called him “the most optimistic man I have ever met.” He was just a natural-born leader – he was one of those combat leaders who are most clear-headed in the thickest part of the action.



Cates in 1918

JP: Cates went from not even knowing what the Marine Corps was before joining to a lifer who was instrumental in World War II and rose to become the Corps’ 19th Commandant. He even took a reduction in rank to Lieutenant General when he could have retired. Was his love for the Corps cemented in his battlefield experiences in World War I?

JCN: Despite his wartime success, Cates actually was planning to leave the Corps after the First World War and had resigned in 1919. He probably would have become an attorney – he had a law degree from the University of Tennessee -- but the then-commandant of the Corps, George Barnett, convinced him to stay and made him his assistant. That shows how highly valued he was regarded in the Corps. But as I say several times in I Will Hold, I really believe Cates found himself, and his calling, on the battlefields of World War 1. He loved the action, he loved and cared for the men of his company, he loved the camaraderie, and he certainly loved the Marines – but as one Time magazine writer said simply when Cates finally retired from The Corps, “He liked the work.” 

JP: What are your thoughts on the centennial commemoration thus far?

JCN: I have to be honest, I’m not really that up on the plans for the commemoration. I guess I feel my three books are personally my own best commemoration of the American experience in World War 1. But I’m very happy that efforts are being made to note the centennial. World War 1 has in the U.S. always been something of an afterthought, and existed too long in the shadow of World War 2; when I was working on The Remains of Company D I can’t tell you how many people told me that people didn’t want to read about the Great War. That’s obviously not true, at least anymore, as we can see by the constant stream of excellent books that have come out in recent years, among them Mitch Yockelson’s Forty-Seven Days and Matthew Davenport’s First Over There. A new generation of writers is discovering the many terrific, untold stories from within that war and are now carrying them forward and, happily, publishers are showing more and more interest in their books.

JP: What are you working on now?

JCN: I have discussed an idea – also World War 1 – with my agent, and one of these days I’m going to get off my rear and write a proposal for it. It has something to do with an American division in the war that isn’t the 1st or 2nd, and that’s all I want to reveal right now.

An Interview with Mitch Yockelson on Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I

If you’re a First World War enthusiast, chances are you’ve noticed a new title flying off the shelves of your local bookstore entitled Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I.

Lucky for you, the author of this excellent study just so happens to be my former graduate school advisor and a person I feel lucky to call friend.

Mitchell Yockelson, recipient of the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award, is an investigative archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration, as well as a former professor of military history at the United States Naval Academy. He currently teaches at Norwich University. One of America’s foremost experts on the First World War, he holds a doctorate from the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield University, in the United Kingdom.  He has written biographies of Douglas MacArthur and Ulysses S. Grant and his first book – Borrowed Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918 – belongs on the bookshelf of every serious student of the First World War.

I recently caught up with Mitch to see how he was doing and to interview him about his exceptional new study of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign.

JP: Please tell the readers a little bit about yourself – what makes you “tick”?

MY: I have a strong curiosity about the past and why events happened how they played out. As a young boy I developed a passion for history and devoured every book I could find on military history. As I grew older and entered college, it was clear that I was going to major in history and focus on topics related to the U.S. military. Although I never served in the armed forces, I have a great admiration for the men and women who wore a uniform during previous generations and those who currently protect our country and are often in harm’s way. I have had the privilege of meeting many veterans through my work at the National Archives, as well as teaching for several years at the Naval Academy and through the Norwich University Masters of Military History program where I still teach.

JP: What initially drew your interest to the First World War?

MY: As a young boy I sort of knew who Pershing was because of a street named for him near my home. Then I read a brief biography of Alvin York written for young adults, but it really wasn’t until I became the World War I records subject area specialist at the National Archives in 1962, a position I held for 16 years, that my interest in World War I really took off. At that point I commenced reading every book I could find about the role of the U.S. in the war and was especially taken by Edward M. Coffman’s The War to End All Wars, which after almost fifty years remains the single best volume on the subject.

JP: What inspired you to write Forty-Seven Days?

MY: I had visited the Meuse-Argonne battlefields on a few occasions and had read up on the various aspects about the battle, but couldn’t really get a grasp on what happened over the course of those forty-seven days. I especially wanted to understand the role of General Pershing in the battle and why he relinquished command of First Army to Hunter Liggett. So when I started to conduct preliminary research for the book it became even more confusing and I realized that I am having trouble understanding the battle, then perhaps the same can be said of others. Now it became a personal mission to write a narrative for the general public on General Pershing and how he led the Americans during the largest battle in U.S. history.

JP: Many prominent historians have viewed the American contribution as a mere footnote in the larger narrative of events, but you write that, “When the smoke cleared, and the battle and the war were declared over, the American soldiers had carried the Allies to victory.” Could the Allies have won without the contributions of the Doughboys?

MY: Absolutely not. The Allied ranks were depleted after almost four years of war. While the same could be said about the Germans, they showed no signs of giving up. Even after the Americans started coming over in droves, the Germans were still putting up a strong fight.  But when the Americans launched the Meuse-Argonne battle on September 26, the Germans knew the end was near. Even though the American doughboys were largely inexperienced, they had tenacity and a willingness to learn how to fight on the Western Front. With more than two million Americans in Europe by the autumn of 1918 and another two million ready for deployment overseas, the U.S. was becoming the bulk of the Allied forces and were overwhelming the enemy,

JP: How would you rate America’s preparation for the centennial of U.S. military participation in World War I? Do you think Americans in 2016 can relate to their forbears of 100 years ago?

MY: The U.S. World War One Centennial Commission is up and running with dedicated volunteers across the U.S. There are all kinds of programs in the works that are designed to teach Americans about what happened 100 years ago during a conflict that brought the country into the modern age, but is now mostly forgotten. Unfortunately, in 2016, I think most Americans cannot relate to what happened during World War I, but I believe this will change when numerous public programs, exhibits and books appear in 2017-2018.

JP: What are some subjects pertaining to American involvement in WWI that need to be written about?

MY: This is a tough question to answer. I am not sure if anything needs to be written. But there are certainly topics on battles like the Meuse-Argonne that received previous attention that could be re-interpreted like I did. I am sure there are hundreds of stories dealing with home front in every city and town that could be explored. Few books discuss the German-Americans living in the U.S. and how they felt and were treated by other Americans. As the cliché says, the sky’s the limit.

JP: What books and/or projects are you working on now?

MY: Right now I don’t have plans for another book, at least on World War I, but that could change. I am happy to sit back and rest on the heels of Forty-Seven Days and see how it does. 

I'd like to sincerely thank Mitch for taking the time out of his hectic schedule and encourage you again to go and get yourself a copy of Forty-Seven Days -- you won't be disappointed!

From Molleville Farm to Memorial Day

Being a Civil War historian who lives within a ten minutes’ drive of four major battlefields of that great conflict, I have grown accustomed to inadvertently stumbling upon historic markers or headstones that pertain to my line of work.

But this past Memorial Day, I had an unexpected encounter with the First World War right in my own back yard.

I had purchased some patriotic red, white, and blue flowers and took my two oldest children, ages 5 and 4, to Fredericksburg National Cemetery to decorate the grave of a fallen soldier. Determined to teach them to be good citizens, we tramped up the hill in the stifling heat, looking for a neglected grave to decorate.

When we had reached the opposite end of the cemetery and my children began to complain of the heat, I abandoned my search for the “perfect” unmarked grave and looked for the nearest headstone of someone - anyone - who had died in wartime.

After taking a few more steps, I was stunned when the grave in front of me bore the inscription “116 INF., 29 DIV.” and the date of death was October 15, 1918.

The grave belonged to Fredericksburg native Pvt. Robert L. Jenkins who served with Co. K of the 116^th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Division. Company K was one of two units recruited out of Fredericksburg (the other being the 10^th Company, Coast Defenses of the Chesapeake Bay.)

The date that Jenkins was killed in action was significant to me as well.

One year prior to this family visit my essay "Storming the Heights of the Meuse: The 29th and 33d Divisions Fight for Control of the High Ground, 8–16 October" had been published in Edward G. Lengel's A Companion to the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, so I knew exactly where this man had fallen – an awful death trap called Molleville Farm.

A key position east of the Meuse River, the 29^th Division first encountered Molleville Farm on October 11, 1918. The Division had been in sustained combat for three days, so the division commander had to lean heavily on the 116th Infantry Regiment in order to gain this objective. One of the chief problems with attacking Molleville Farm was that it could not be flanked – the only way to take it would be a head-on frontal assault.

A modern view of Molleville Farm, courtesy of "Nunthatch" at pbase.com

Pvt. Jenkins was killed on the day that the fight for Molleville Farm reached it brutal climax, with the 29ers finally taking the farm and enduring vicious German counterattacks for the rest of the day.

I had little trouble deciding that this would be the grave that we would decorate on Memorial Day. After spending a minute placing flowers on the grave, my daughter asked if she could say a prayer. I agreed, and after another brief moment, we began the long walk back to the car.

My oldest child, praying at the grave of Pvt. Jenkins

Pvt. Jenkins was one of five men from Fredericksburg who were killed in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, and I am extremely grateful to have had the chance to honor him with my children. For that brief moment the horrific hour of Jenkins’s sacrifice reached across the 96 year chasm that separates us and touched our lives.

With the 100^th anniversary of American involvement in the First World War just around the corner, it is my hope that many families across the country will have at least one such interaction during the commemoration.

“Everything has to start again:” Some Thoughts on the Centennial of the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

Today, as many of you know, marks 100 years since the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his maligned wife Sophie on the streets of Sarajevo.

While some marvel at the passage of 100 years, as I sit and reflect on the impact of what most historians say was the spark that ignited a global war, it may as well have been one thousand years ago…on another planet.

A lifelong fascination with the First World War has brought me no closer to understanding the plump Austro-Hungarian dupe whose very existence seemed offensive to people even within his own royal family. Similarly, the world which he inhabited seems made up – the past is indeed a foreign country when I place myself at the scene of the crime and look back at the “Proud Tower” of the preceding years.

Indeed, the whole assassination has a comedic flair to it:

- The half-witted coward Nedelijko Cabrinovic throwing a bomb that bounces off the hood of Ferdinand’s’ car and then yelling “I am a Serbian hero!” as he is tackled and led away – the Archduke and his wife looking on and seemingly shrugging their shoulders as they tell their driver to move along.

- Ferdinand’s driver, taking a wrong turn, informing the royal party that the car has no reverse gear and thus needs to be pushed back onto the correct street, where the wormy waif Gavrilo Princip is waiting.

- The sickly Princip managing to get off two shots, both of which strike and kill their targets.

Add the fact that nearly no one even liked Ferdinand to begin with – in a recent book on 1914, Max Hastings could only bring himself to say, “It is sometimes suggested that Franz Ferdinand was an intelligent man” – and it’s no wonder that students find themselves scratching their heads and asking, “now how did this lead to the deaths of 37 million people again?”

As I have grown older, the only chink in the armor that I have found to empathizing with this man comes from the knowledge that he was a loving father who doted on his children. His dying words, “Sophie, Sophie, don’t die – stay alive for our children!” are especially potent for parents.

But other than this insight, Franz Ferdinand remains more caricature than character from history.

The only person who seemed to mourn his loss was Kaiser Wilhelm, who bellowed “Everything has to start again!” when he learned of the assassination – a particularly telling phrase, given the events that followed. Besides the Kaiser (another malcontent who is difficult to be partial to), Ferdinand’s death occasioned scoffs, gasps, and the rolling of many royal eyes – even in death, Franz Ferdinand had the capacity to annoy.

And so today, students of history pause and reflect on the events of a century ago and continue to ask – “could this really have happened?”

With the Centennial commemoration officially under way, one hopes that this questioning will cause curious people the world over to dig deeper into this time period and find their own answers.

And if you happen to find any, please do share them – I, for one, would be very grateful. 

An Interview with Edward G. Lengel

Edward G. Lengel is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on military history, including To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 which the late John Keegan hailed as “a superior achievement.” A recipient of the National Humanities Medal, he has made frequent appearances on television documentaries and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. His latest offering is A Companion to the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, in which I was privileged to contribute an essay.

I recently caught up with him to ask a few questions about this new work and the state of First World War studies on the cusp of the Centennial Commemoration.

JP:   What initially drew your interest to the First World War?

EL: Back in the early 1990s I became interested in reading World War I memoirs. I started with the “big three” British memoirs cited extensively by Paul Fussell in his book The Great War and Modern Memory: namely, Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon; and Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden. I found them fascinating, but did not stop there. Digging deeper, I found and read hundreds of memoirs, diaries, and letters of male and female participants in the war from all of the belligerent nations. Many are obscure and largely forgotten today. Yet aside from being often great works of literature, these books provide tremendous insight into the human condition—put simply, how do people respond to conditions that try them to the core, and overturn their terms of reference to the world around them?

In the process, I discovered that Fussell and others who have generalized about the “war experience”—or who have created the now-clichéd narrative of naiveté, horror, and disillusion—have vastly oversimplified what World War I meant to the ordinary people who experienced it. In truth, each person reacted to the war as an individual, and sometimes men or women who experienced the same events interpreted them completely differently. For me, in reading how individuals lived through 1914-1918, World War I no longer became a gruesome tale of mud, blood, and despair; it became a compelling human story. I’ve been hooked ever since.

JP: What can readers expect to find in these essays that previous volumes on the Meuse-Argonne have neglected?

EL: These essays explore the campaign from every possible angle. Some narrate particularly dramatic and important moments from the soldiers’ point of view. Others discuss problems of supply, logistics, and military administration. There are essays on tanks, airpower, artillery, and communications. And—importantly, I think—there are essays exploring in depth French and German participation in the campaign. The essays are heavily based in archival research and thus scholarly; but nevertheless all are readable and accessible for educated laypersons.

JP:  Do you have high hopes for American participation in the worldwide centennial commemoration? Are there any events slated for the near future that you are particularly excited about?

EL: I will shortly be attending the inaugural reception for the American World War I Centennial Commission in Washington, D.C. I look forward to learning more about what is planned. I know that there are smart and enthusiastic people working on commemoration; but it remains an open question whether their good ideas will find an audience on Capitol Hill.

JP: If you had to pick two or three aspects of American involvement in WWI that most need further study, what would they be?

EL: First, American participants’ accounts—be they memoirs, diaries, or letters—need to be found, published, and made available to the public. The Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress is doing a good job of digitizing collections in its care and putting them online, but much more needs to be done. Second, every major American engagement needs to be thoroughly studied on the tactical level, making full use of the vast official records available at the National Archives in College Park, Md. (I hope to have made some progress toward this in my next book). Finally, it is my dream that some individuals or organizations would sponsor the research and publication of something amounting to an “official” history of American participation in World War I. Such a work has never been written.

JP: Do you have any other volumes on the First World War planned?

EL: I just finished a book tentatively titled “These Terrible Days”: The A.E.F. at War under French Command, November 1917-September 1918. If all goes well, it should be published next year by the University Press of Kansas.

I’d like to thank Ed for taking the time to answer these questions and for the opportunity to contribute an essay to the Companion! If you would like more information on the book, visit Wiley-Blackwell’s website at: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1444350943.html.