1919

District of Columbia

The weather had been rotten.

Rain spattering on the roof, somewhere nearby, must have reminded him of riding the train in Germany: that steady muffled, repetitive beat, and of being uncomfortably asleep amid luggage.

In his dream, he would speak occasionally to the few rail passengers in the car, sometimes in German, but those better educated and informed invariably spoke English.

Through his sleeping befuddlement, he had missed his connection. There was too much luggage and he could not quite read the station signs as they moved past.

There was the conductor approaching and he struggled to find his ticket, a ticket that had no destination stamp but was merely one of a series of the same low-value tickets issued for short trips.

He did not know where he was going, or how he would get home: someone nearby said the train was nearing Poland.

* * *

On waking, he knew the date and the day of the week immediately.

It might have been his wife, or years back, his mother who had told him the first thing a first responder asks a patient just recovering consciousness, was day and date. It was a simple test of whether the patient had had a stroke.

A moment later, with two steaming mugs, one for coffee and the other for grits, he settled into that comfortable den amid a degree of promising chaos.

When the room with the guttering fireplace was spotless and orderly, it indicated that no work was being done. Productive writing brought out books, and maps, and stacks of note cards carefully ordered by date but perhaps scattered from being inadvertently nudged onto the floor. Had he noticed, there were shoes and boots scattered on the floor, and the coverlet of the couch knotted in a heap at one end or the other.

It was as if the focus and intensity of mind chased all disorderliness out into the room while the creative spirit was on inside.

He would write like a locomotive roaring ahead some mornings, reach a point of stall and need to check a fact from a book opened and face down on the couch or on top of the cluttered desk. He might need internet which was unreliable at best at the farm, and his train of thought would be lost.

The darkness at the windows and night rain, the wood smoke and the weeks of miserable December weather all brought him to the same place, a certain productive moodiness of things past and other lives lived.

…Somewhere in France…

It was the way soldiers serving in France a century back were censored as to the location from which they wrote home.

He could see it in his mind’s eye each winter season, and it would be a story somewhere between two uncles that had survived, one of whom had been a privileged Ivy League lawyer assigned to military planning courses at Staff College at Langres where he roomed with a Roosevelt cousin. By the results of an entry exam, he had attended Cornell at the age of sixteen, graduating in 1903.

The lawyer’s trove of meticulously kept letters home to his wife Harriett from May 1918 until March 1919, and a complete set of maps and military logistic exercises, had turned up in the attic of the farm house.

It was only in the lull after harvest and between milling jobs, he had a chance to sort through.

Most of the materials had not been touched since 1919.

It was not this veteran, but another younger one of more modest station that was the more compelling.

At declaration of war, that second uncle had been a bronco buster on the Tongue River in Montana. His experience with horses led, on enlistment, to the Sixth Field Artillery as a stable sergeant. At some point, the young man had transferred to Tank Corps and found himself swept up in the twin maelstrom of St. Mihiel and Argonne Forest where he was badly wounded in early October.

The key to the slowly evolving war stories of both men, was one George S. Patton, under whose direct command the younger man had served.

* * *

October, November and December at the Virginia farm, brought to mind each and every cliché of the …Somewhere in France…. genre: it was the weather and the splintered trees downed by wind; it was the rain and fog; and the mud and the way the chill crept inside the wool of a well-worn work shirt.

It was the way the complaining gears of a tractor negotiating a muddy hillside, brought to mind the notion of the first small tanks in the Argonne.

C’est le guerre.

The experience in France fashioned many of the great writers of the last century.

Most did not dwell on it, but some were forever captives of their traumatic service. Many moved on to other things.

It was not so much the action reports of combat officers that were discovered among the Patton papers in the Library of Congress. The most interesting side stories often came to light as peripheral to what a writer considers his main thrust.

It transpired that the younger uncle had been a frequent visitor to the Patton household in Washington, D. C., after the troops were demobilized in 1919.

Patton’s Tank Corps was defunded, disbanded and its officers returned to their prior occupations when the recession of 1920-21 arrived.

Displeased when Congress reneged on a promise of financial support for unemployed veterans, hundreds of thousands of men made their way to Washington, D. C. to protest and riot, forming a tent and shanty city on the D. C. Mall.

To break up the riots, the National Guard was called in.

There had been tanks in the streets of Washington, D. C.

Among all the other sidelines the work uncovered, that vague intimation was what he followed.

* * *