I thought I'd make applesauce cake today, so I got out my grandmother's old cookbook, published in 1942 by Good Housekeeping, to look up the recipe.
The book is more than 900 pages and crammed with all sorts of odds and ends placed between its pages -- newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, photographs, letters, bird feathers, four-leaf clovers and flowers -- accumulated through the generations. Sometimes I look at them, musing at the odd things I discover; other times I ignore them as almost a nuisance.
Today, the item above caught my eye. It's a remembrance card for my great- or maybe great-great uncle, who was killed in action in France during World War I.
The printed copy lists his date of death as October 1, 1918, but someone has penciled in a 6. I don't know if that means he was killed on October 6 or October 16.
Kay Tusing is the third of my ancestors that I know of who was killed in action during World War I. One of the others was killed in September, 1918, I think on the 29th. The other was killed in April. He survived the sinking of his troop transport by a German U-Boat in January, 1918, making it ashore to the Isle of Islay in the Irish Sea from which he was rescued and sent on to France where he was killed.
I don't know the circumstances of Lt. Beach's death, only that he had graduated with a degree in engineering from Stanford, enlisted when America entered the war and was assigned to the 1st Engineering Battalion of the 32nd Infantry.
I know something of Pvt. Kayser's death because his sister Henrietta wrote to his unit commander and asked what happened. Major Lucius Salisbury, 106th Infantry Sanitary Detachment, 27th Infantry, replied:
"Following over the top with the company, your brother stopped near the Knoll, and, exposed to heavy machine-gun and shell fire, had dressed the wounds of one man and started to dress those of another when a shell exploded and killed all three. Your brother offered his life for the cause without regard to personal danger...." There followed some lines of sympathy.
Reading a little bit of history of the war, I found that during the night of September 24 – 25, 1918, the 27th Division relieved the British 18th and 74th Divisions near Ronssoy, France. At 5:30 a.m., September 27, 1918, the 106th Infantry attacked as part of a major frontal assault in what was called the Battle of St. Quentin Canal, its assigned objective the capture of Bois de Malakoff, or as the troops called it, the Knoll. During that battle, more than 13,000 American doughboys became casualties. Pvt. Kayser had a lot of company.
Well, Pvt. Tusing, someone remembers you and wonders about your life more than a century after your passing, if that is any comfort to you. Oh, and the wars continue. Even the girls serve in combat these days. Trust me, I know. Progress!
(I may seem flippant in these comments, but my eyes have tears welling up as I type. I want to write more about what I feel, but I can't. I just can't. Listen to the song. Oh, and I lost interest in making an applesauce cake. Maybe tomorrow.)
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
~ Carl Sandburg
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| "On the Wire," by Harvey Dunn |
