The Great War

 For the week of Memorial Day

(Updated information on Kay Tusing and Egbert Beach, 5-30-26) 

 

 The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of Nineteen Eighteen.  The end of the war to end all wars.  The war to make the world safe for democracy.  We mustn't forget.  Neither the war nor the propaganda.

Three of my relatives were killed in that war:  Pvt. Kay Tusing, Pvt. Charles Kayser, and Lt. Egbert Beach.  All were killed in France.  Pvt. Kayser and  Pvt. Tusing are buried there still.  Lt. Beach was brought home after the war and buried in the family plot.

Immediately above is a remembrance card for Private Kay Tusing, my 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. Checking with Dept. of War records, he was killed in action on the 16th. The person who penciled in the correct date was probably his sister, Mrs. Effie Canfield. 

Kay was drafted in the summer of 1918 and served with the 80th, "Blue Ridge," Division. On October 16, 1918, the Division was engaged in a brutal, multi-day struggle to capture the Grand Carré Farm and clear the southern edges of the Bois de Bantheville. This was part of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in which the division faced grueling combat against entrenched German troops who had occupied the area for years. Fighting in densely wooded terrain, the division suffered heavy casualties from German machine-guns and relentless artillery barrages. The Bois de Bantheville was strongly fortified by the Germans as part of the Kriemhilde Stellung (the last of the Hindenburg Line's defensive positions). The woods and farm areas were subject to constant enfilade fire and poison gas attacks. I do hope Kay was not killed by poison gas.  What a horrible way to die.

Second Lieutenant Egbert Beach survived the sinking of his troop transport by a German U-Boat the night of February 5, 1918, (267 American troops and 10 ship's crewmen drowned) making it ashore to the Isle of Islay in the Irish Sea from which he was rescued and sent on to France.

Beach was killed on April 27, 1918.  While mapping out trenches near the village of Villers-Tournelle for an infantry working party, he died when a German 155 mm artillery shell exploded nearby. At the time of his death, he was serving with Company B of the 1st Engineering Battalion of the 32nd Infantry ("Red Arrow" Division). The area near Villers-Tournelle was an active, heavily shelled front line trench warfare sector enduring daily high-explosive bombardments and gas attacks. On this exact day, units recorded sustained heavy shellfire across their trenches, leading to numerous casualties. 

Beach had graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and enlisted when America entered the war.

 Private Charles Kayser was killed in September, 1918, on the 29th. I know something of his 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 the 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.

"You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next Spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there.
I repeated my thoughts to my wife, but she said it was not difficult to understand about battlefields: The blood of the men killed on the field, and the bodies buried there, fertilize the ground and stimulate the growth of vegetation. That was all quite natural she said.
But I could not agree with this, too-simple, explanation: To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible."

~ William March, Company K

 March served as a sergeant in Co F, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, 4th Brigade of Marines, Second Division of the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force. He saw his first action at Verdun near Les Éparges. He fought at Belleau Wood, where he was wounded. He participated in the battles of Soissons and Saint-Mihiel. He received the French Croix de Guerre with Palm and the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Cross for valor.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

 ~ Wilfred Owen

2nd Lt. Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal.