The echoes of an armistice
As a child, I naively desired to glean the valor of a 'great war.'
It was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month and the guns were supposed to fall silent.
Six hours earlier, in the French forest commune of Compiègne, Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch watched as a delegation of Germans, gathered in the French general’s railway car, signed a document calling for the cessation of hostilities later that morning.
“At eleven o’clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars,” declared David Lloyd George, British prime minister, in London. His hope would be dashed then and forever.
Two days earlier, the Kaiser had gone into exile in Holland. But peace negotiations would drag on for another eight months. Border clashes continued for years. Germany found itself in what was essentially a civil war, while full civil wars continued in Russia and Ireland.
During that first world war, millions of men were permanently disabled physically. ‘Shell shock,’ as it was called, affected many more.
How many died during the war? The numbers are staggering. The kinetic clashes claimed an estimated 10 million combatants. A silent killer, a global epidemic of influenza, known as the Spanish Flu, sent tens of millions of soldiers and civilians to their deaths.
It was the ‘war to end all wars.’ It might have better named ‘the war that never ended.’ The treaty that would be signed in 1919 at the Versailles royal palace would lead to a second world war.
The president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had lofty ideas — backing a League of Nations, supporting ethnic self-determination and collective responsibility. He had clout as the representative of one of the Big Four Powers. And the British also desired a treaty that would bring stability to Europe. The French, though, had other ideas. Determined to humiliate the Germans, the French successfully demanded reparations for the damage done to France and Belgium. The price tag was 132 billion gold marks. Adjusting for inflation that would be $600 billion in today’s money.
“The First World War killed fewer victims than the Second World War, destroyed fewer buildings, and uprooted millions instead of tens of millions – but in many ways it left even deeper scars both on the mind and on the map of Europe. The old world never recovered from the shock,” wrote the historian Edmund Taylor.
The widespread anger in Germany, more than a decade after the treaty, especially about the reparations, would help the National Socialist Party come to power. The subsequent European, Asian, Pacific and African bloodshed set off on the orders of Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo would lead to the deaths of as many as 85 million people.
None of this could have been foreseen by a 28-year-old soldier stationed in a forest near Le Mans at that eleventh hour on Nov. 11, 1918. His rank was so low — private — he had no rank insignia. The only patch on the olive-drab jacket of his "Doughboy" uniform was on the left upper sleeve, signifying he was part of the Advance Sector, Supply of Service — essentially the quartermasters
The soldier, who had worked as a waiter in the dining cars on the Canadian National Railways, left behind at 79-9 South Maple in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a Scandinavian wife named Lola, whom he had married in 1915, and a toddler, Dolores, who was born a year after the marriage.
William Benjamin Jaeger was fortunate to survive the war and the pandemic, but he never saw his daughter again after enlisting on Feb. 25, 1918. The girl died less than a month after the Armistice, but Ben — as everyone called him — would not get discharged from the Army until mid-July of 1919. The marriage would not survive. Was that because of the war, the death of the baby, or the combination of both?
Ben did not fire a weapon in anger during his time in France, as best we can tell. He was part of the 20th Engineers, among the first to arrive over there and the last to leave. Known as the Forestry Regiment, the 20th (which had merged with the 10th) was responsible for logging and lumber production to supply timber for the Allied forces.
Ben’s unit, the 44th Company, operated in numerous forested areas across France, providing essential materials for roads, railroads and shelter construction in support of military operations.
Ben’s assignment during the war was in a field kitchen.
That was all I was ever to find out from him about his war service. Intrigued by the photograph of him in uniform that sat in my mother’s parent’s living room in Golf Manor, in Cincinnati, nearly a half century after he stood for the portrait, left hand in pocket, I repeatedly questioned him about his adventures in war.
All he ever told me was that he was a “buck private” and “a cook” in France. Any further interrogation was deflected. Was his war experience terrifying or possibly bucolic in the French countryside? I persisted over the years trying to glean something substantive. One of Ben’s sons and my mother’s brother, Morrie, had nicknamed me “the little professor,” for my verbal curiosity. He did not mean it as a compliment.
Ben was reticent but polite, akin to one of his other sons, Ivan, who had gone to war in Korea — working in a MASH unit where amputated limbs were constantly being tossed out of the tents. War had been father and three sons’ formative experiences 35 years apart. It obviously had not been pleasant and there was not much desire to wax nostalgic, even at the behest of a younger generation, especially when the television —adjacent to framed pictures of father and sons in uniform — relayed from Vietnam grainy scenes of Americans in combat in a less noble war.
Ernest Hemingway, at his typewriter after the ‘Great War,’ decided it was “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up or fought.” Men died with industrial efficiency, some of them exterminated by chemical weapons, as if they were bothersome insects and not human beings.
Grandpa Ben’s role, a cog in a vast military machine, was as critical as any of those men who fired bullets at the Huns. The logistical feats performed by his regiment gave the Allies the strategic advantage. And the meals that Ben cooked were the thrice-daily morale boost that gave soldiers the necessary calories and the will to fell timbers and, if needed, the enemy.
Ben continued to serve after he was demobilized, returning to the railroad for some years. When the Second World War erupted, he dutifully registered again. Then in his early 50’s he would not return to Europe or again wear khaki. But he did serve and in uniform as a civilian waiter in an elegant restaurant in one of America’s most pre-eminent hotels, the Netherland Plaza in Cincinnati.
Every time I am back in hometown I try to drop in for a meal or at least a drink at the hotel’s bar to raise a toast to my grandfather’s 20th century service in war and in peace.
