Unknown Soldiers: The American Expeditionary Forces in Memory and Remembrance

“The Price Was Made and the Price Was Paid”: Grandpa’s Scar and Other Memories of the AEF

3 I never knew my maternal grandfather and, based on what my grandmother told me, I am not sure if I would have wanted to meet him. Grandpa abandoned my grandmother and her two-year-old daughter in 1923 for parts unknown—worse yet, he illegally remarried despite the absence of a divorce decree. Nonetheless, I still had a tad of admiration for the old fellow because of his honorable service in the First World War. When I was young, my grandma told me that her husband had been wounded and gassed in the great Argonne battle. She even described his nasty-looking scar, left by a German shell fragment. A child, I had no idea where the Argonne was or even when the battle was fought. However, I never forgot that my grandfather had spilled blood there; maybe the trauma from his battle wounds had adversely affected his mental stability, perhaps even his sense of manhood. Maybe, just maybe, grandpa left his wife and child because he was too shell-shocked to cope with his family responsibilities. I have no personal memories of my grandfather, only what has been passed down to me. Those are ugly and ragged except for that one “honorable” moment in his life: he had served his country in the Great War, and he had paid for that service with his blood. Unfortunately, I later learned that even that moment was a fabrication. According to his Veterans Administration records, the scar grandma remembered was from a hernia operation, and his only other wartime malady was a bout of gonorrhea. Not only had he not fought in the Argonne Forest, he had never even left the country: his entire stint in the military was as a sheet-metal worker in the Army Air Service on Long Island, New York.1 “The Price Was Made and the Price Was Paid” Grandpa’s Scar and Other Memories of the AEF Mark A. Snell 4 / unknown soldiers Several decades and academic degrees later, I found myself leading a tour of the Belleau Wood battlefield, near Château-Thierry, France. There, on June 6, 1918, the U.S. Marine Corps suffered what would be the bloodiest day in its history until the sacrifice at Tarawa Atoll a quarter of a century later. There were several former and retired marines in our group. Some were quite intimate with the details of the battle, while others only knew that Belleau Wood is an important part of Marine Corps heritage, as significant as Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir, and Khe Sahn. They gathered around the granite Marine Corps memorial for a photograph; some filled small vials with the sacred soil of the Bois de la Brigade de Marine; all drank from the “Bulldog Fountain” at an old chateau in the village of Belleau. Their collective memory, cultivated during three months of boot camp at the Parris Island or San Diego recruit depots, told them that Belleau Wood is hallowed ground, a place sanctified by the combat deaths of young marines so many years ago. Somehow, they sensed, it was their duty to remember what had happened there. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a place well known in American history, a small marker sits in front of a memorial tree planted fifty years after World War I by veterans who had been posted to Camp Colt, which in 1918 served as a training ground for the fledgling Tank Corps. Located on the terrain where Pickett’s Charge had occurred in 1863, the sprawling camp was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower, the recipient of a temporary promotion, was not happy to be in command of a stateside training camp while his contemporaries fought in France. His own memory of the First World War would be much different than those of three other officers of his generation—Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, Colonel George C. Marshall, and Colonel George Patton—who distinguished themselves as part of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). The marker and the tree go unnoticed by the millions of visitors who come to Gettysburg to learn about an earlier war. If anything, the tree obstructs the visitor’s view as he or she stands on Cemetery Ridge and tries to imagine the Confederate legions charging toward the gaping muzzles of the Union cannons. Since the premiere of the film Sergeant York in 1941, several generations of Americans have watched Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Alvin York, the most famous U.S. soldier...