Unsung Valor: A GI's Story of World War II

Introduction

Introduction I am staring at Paul Baumer, who is leaning against a parapet of sandbags at the front of a trench. Bright sunshine is drying up the surrounding sea of the battlefield's glutinous mud. This beautiful spring morning, like most days on the front line, is quiet; only the nights leap alive with patrols and the drumbeat of artillery. How depleted Paul must be! Pained by the loss of his comrades and resigned to the war's horrors. After four years in the German trenches, he awaits still more fighting. In the stillness and comforting silence of the early morning, Paul sees, at the cluttered edge of the dirty trench, a butterfly flitting from one empty tin can to another. He reaches tentatively across the top of the parapet to touch the butterfly's quivering colored wings, the fragile reminders of his peaceful childhood hobby. But wait! Now a French sniper takes careful aim through a telescopic sight, before cracking the silence with a sharp, dry rifle shot. Paul's fingers tense, then relax; only his limp hand and arm betray that the sniper's bullet snuffed out his young life. On the screen, the movie All Quiet on the Western Front fades in a montage of ghostly transparent images of Paul marching with his old comrades—all now dead—floating over and past the long rows of white crosses in a military cemetery. The year was 1934.1 was ten years old, sitting between buddies in a theater in Little Rock, Arkansas, trying to hide the tears I shed for the lost lives of the young boys on the screen and filled with hate for war, XV in or out of the movies. For the horrors of the Great War hadn't ended in my neighborhood on Wright Avenue, where three veterans relived the conflict through their injuries and memories and told me their personal stories, impressing images on my mind more terrifying than those on the screen. One veteran and his wife rented space for their trailer home in the vacant lot next to my dad's grocery and market, where our family was living in the rear of the store during part of the Great Depression. For many months, the couple remained parked in the lot beside us, often inviting me to visit and share cookies and cocoa with them. Their invitations and sweets were irresistible, even after the man's talks took a darker turn and he described fighting in the trenches in France. He showed me a pamphlet with photographs taken on the Western Front by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, featuring dead, wounded, and crippled men on battlefields, mutilated and decaying corpses in cemeteries, disfigured faces and bodies of survivors at hospitals , the rubble of village buildings, and the scarred French countryside . His other booklet War Against War was in German and had similar pictures. Stirred by the pacifist's stories and the photos, I cowered in the same scenes in my terrified dreams. Awake, I observed the maimed body of another veteran of the Great War who came each month to sharpen utensils used in the meat market at my father's store. The veteran's arrival in his miniature green wagon, pulled by goats in a leather harness jingling with shiny brass bells, attracted all the neighborhood children living near the Park Street intersection. Only for me it wasn't the veteran's tiny wagon and his goats' decorated harness that enthralled but his injury and horrifying tales. The cutler sitting in his little wagon's high driver's seat looked like a normal man at a distance. But when he lowered himself to the ground with his muscular arms, you saw he had no legs, only stumps protected by a padded apron of leather. On his hands, which had become his feet, he wore heavy leather mittens, and he lifted and pulled himself forward "walking" around the wagon to unload the xvi Introduction grindstone to sharpen my father's knives, cleavers, and saws. How the legless veteran turned the whetstone I can't recall. Yet his stories of fighting in the trenches and being cut down by an artillery shell when attacking the Germans were branded upon my mind. In what now seems an eerie coincidence, a female veteran of the Great War lived directly across the street from us. Mrs. Keith, the wife and mother in...