George Rebane
My up close and personal introduction to WW1 came at the knee of my two early mentors Jack Maschmeyer and Ed Egold. Both were WW1 veterans who were sent ‘over there’ and didn’t come home ‘until it was over over there’. Both saw trench warfare at its most horrific and survived going ‘over the top’ several times. In 1953 we moved into an old house (built in 1830s) in rural Marion County, Indiana next to Ed and Mary who were in their early sixties. Today they would be mistaken for being in their eighties; they had lived a long life of hard work and it showed on most folks of that age in those days.
Ed hired the new tall and lanky red-haired teenage neighbor to do all kinds of odd jobs around his house and barn. He saw my dad and me working on rebuilding our old house, and decided that my skill set could also be put to use at his place. Besides the 50 cents an hour that was my pay, I would often linger after work on Ed’s back porch on hot and humid summer evenings and listen to Ed talk about the ‘old days in Indiana’ and his war experiences in Europe. Being a recent war veteran myself, I was very interested to hear the history of America’s involvement in WW1 since we Rebanes had partaken of America’s involvement in WW2. I suspect that not too many people took time to listen to Ed’s stories at that phase of his life, so that he was more than happy to pour his remembrances into my attentive ears. By the age of thirteen I was already expert at asking adults the right questions to keep them talking.
Ed took me through his entire ‘career’ in the Army, starting with being conscripted, through basic training, the travel to New York, embarkation on a troop ship to Europe, and marching to the western front in France. There he served with thousands of other American doughboys under the command of our General Pershing. Ed’s description of life in the trenches during the rains and artillery bombardments brought back my own wartime memories. This undoubtedly had an impact on my choice of artillery when I went into the Army – I’d rather be shooting those guns than being shot at by them.
The scariest time for Ed and his trench comrades came when they knew that early next morning they would be going over the top after our artillery was supposed to have softened up the Germans in their trenches about 100 yards across no-man’s land. Well, by 1917 after three years of war, everyone knew that trenches with dugout side cubbies were excellent protection against artillery bombardments; it would take a direct hit in the trench to do the killing and air bursts were pretty ineffective. So when the order came to go over the top, everyone knew they would be running through a hail of bullets from German machine guns rapidly deployed on the ramparts after the artillery fell silent. Seldom were such charges successful in reaching the enemy trenches, but always they left hundreds of dead and wounded in no-man’s land who often would be hauled back to their own lines under a short flag of truce. In those days wars still had mutually observed rules.
Ed came back a man, like thousands of others, who quietly lived with their private nightmares for the rest of their lives, for it was a time before the invention of PTSD, and ‘shell shock’ was something you just sucked up and got over after coming back home. Ed always stared into space when he talked about the war. I’m sure he was looking back in time, and I suppose his recounting some of it helped a little.
Jack Maschmeyer was a grizzled and wirey old guy, still with some residual good looks from his younger years, after a life of work as a truck farmer growing specialty crops on relatively small acreages. Jack’s wife was also named Mary who was a bit stout. They both worked equally hard in planting, pruning, harvesting, and preparing their produce for trucking to the local farm co-op. Jack and his crew of four or five teenagers (of which I became one) worked mostly in the fields, and Mary managed the production shed. Mary always sent all of us boys home with a pile of vegetables du jour after we finished work in the evenings. But sometimes Jack would invite some of us who lingered to join him on the front porch and have a Coke. There he would open up his past after a couple of carefully composed questions from his eager young audience.
Listening to Jack was a privilege for he was usually a no-nonsense man of very few words. When he taught you something new to do with a piece of equipment or how to handle a specific vegetable, he did it using a sparse language that in military communications is taught as being clear, complete, and concise. You had better listen carefully because Jack didn’t like to repeat himself, and when someone greeted Jack with a ‘How are you Jack?’, he would lock the person’s gaze with his clear blue eyes and respond with a crisp ‘Better!’. That reflected Jack’s total philosophy and perspective of life; for him the entire purpose of it all was to make things ‘better’.
When Jack got into the mood on those evenings, his tales would be told with more enthusiasm and vigor, as if he had just come from hearing his commanding officer’s pep talk to the troops before going into action. To him and many others of that age, the Germans were referred to as ‘Dutchmen’, a corruption of ‘Die Deutchen’. His stories tied closely with those told by Ed, with perhaps the only difference that Jack’s telling showed the Germans respect for their warcraft. Jack was more of a technician and a very smart guy who perceived the war in more than one dimension. But the terror and fear of the artillery and going over the top were the same for both men. When they got home, both Ed and Jack were convinced that they had been in the war to end all wars.
It is memories of those tales told long ago in rural Indiana that first extended my history of the 20th century, and put my own experiences into a more complete framework. In those days WW2 was not even ten years old, and we were all watching programs like ‘Victory at Sea’ on TV celebrating how the allies led by America had vanquished Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. We all were made aware that now we were in the middle of something called a Cold War that would now and again be interrupted by ‘little’ hot wars to stop communism like the one just ended on the Korean Peninsula. And as a young lad, fortunate to have sat at the knee of two weathered war veterans (and historical mentors), I was first made aware that on 11 November 1918 the armistice of a century ago did not really end that war or any wars, but merely served as a preparatory hiatus for an even larger holocaust that would erupt again after two short and tumultuous decades.
All of which asks us to consider what are we looking at today as we see the world again making preparations while America’s Left and libertarians are telling us to pull in (or cut off?) our horns, and assume the prenatal positions of 1914 and 1939 that gave birth to the biggest conflicts in human history.
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