“I’m always
interested in Cather, and then when I saw the paragraph about her cousin who
died in World War I, I stopped at the name ‘Cantigny.’ My mother’s first
cousin, James Palache, was killed at Cantigny on May 18, 1918. We have a
first-hand account of his death. His friend who wrote it felt it was in a sense
suicidal – he had given up and no longer wanted to live.”
My paternal
grandfather and my mother’s stepfather both fought in World War I. I never knew
the former but knew the latter well. His name was James Aloysius Kelly and he told a few war-related memories. In France, he and other doughboys, to relieve
the monotony, tore up a farmer’s field and had a beet fight. He pronounced
Ypres YIP-pers. And while still
stationed at an Army camp in the U.S., he remembered a sign on a restaurant in the nearby town:
“No dogs or Irish.” My reader has not read Cather’s One of Ours (1922), her novel in which the main character is based
in part on her cousin, Lt. Grosvenor “G.P.” Cather. She writes:
“I found
[Cather’s] phrase ‘that glorious title “killed in action”’ upsetting. However, the Wikipedia account shows that in her cousin’s particular case it may not have
been misplaced.”
The youth and
naïveté of the doughboys is appalling. In his poem “Doughboys: Photograph c. 1917” (“--found among my grandfather’s papers”), R.L. Barth writes:
“Around a
folded blanket seven doughboys
Intently
watch the dice turn six the hard way.
Like
pre-noir tough guys, three or four clutch sawbucks
Half curled,
ready to shell out or increase
A conscript
private's base pay. One, raffish,
Tilts his
campaign hat like an old salt.
All seven
would shame Bogart with the angle
Of dangling
cigarettes and arched eyebrows.
But they're
not tough guys, just heartbreakers all,
Stunning the
viewer with impossible youth.”
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