The Last of the World War I Vets Speak
No soldiers survive the first Great War. But the author of The Last of the Doughboys talked to some of the last vets before they passed.
This is an excerpt from Richard Rubin’s The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, the story of a decade-long odyssey to recover the stories of the forgotten world war. Rubin interviewed dozens of American World War I veterans for the book, including William J. Lake, a private in the U.S. Army’s 91st (“Wild West”) Division who was drafted in 1917 and served with a machine gun crew in France. At the time of the interview, in October 2003, Lake was 107; he died in June 2004. The Last of the Doughboys is being published this week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Pvt. William Lake and the rest of the Wild West Division trained at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., he told me, for nine months before they boarded trains for Camp Merritt, N.J., whence they would head up to New York and ship out for France. According to the unnamed author of The Story of the 91st Division, published in 1919, the land portion of the trek took about six days. It was early summer; they traveled through a lot of areas that were probably quite hot at the time, and I doubt there were showers on those trains. Nevertheless, it was a spirited journey:
"After witnessing demonstrations from coast to coast, the men of the 91st felt that they were backed by an undivided nation. The motherly gray-haired old woman standing in front of her little cottage on the broad prairie of Montana, alternately waving a flag and brushing away the tears she could not restrain, contributed as much to this feeling as did the impromptu receptions tendered the men in the great cities through which they passed."
If it sounds like the men of the 91sthad a grand old time crossing the country by rail, Pvt. William J. Lake, at least, did not. He was sick the whole way across, was sick even before he left Camp Lewis.
“I got the measles,” he explained.
Eighty-five years later, that continued to mystify him: “I don’t know where I got them,” he told me. “Still don’t know where I got them!” No one else seemed to have them; there was no word of measles in the camp, or on the train. Not even from him: Bill Lake traveled six days on a hot, crowded troop train, from Washington to New Jersey, sick with measles—and never told anyone. “I didn’t say anything until we got on the boat,” he confessed. “I was out on the water.” The boat, he recalled, was the Empress of Russia, a British/Canadian mail ship that was used as a troop transport during the war
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked him.
“Because I know if I did,” he said, “and it leaked that I did have something, I might be out of the company or something, and I didn’t want that, so I didn’t say nothing.” He smiled, and then laughed.. read more:
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