Prologue Chapter for Katharine Lee Bates: from Sea to Shining Sea Copyright by Melinda M

“Tears on Their Faces” [1] Prologue chapter for Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea Copyright by Melinda M. Ponder, 2016 Places in the text where interactive material could be inserted in an electronic book version are denoted with alphabetical footnotes. I. When Katharine Lee Bates—poet of “America the Beautiful,” world traveler, social activist, foreign correspondent, mentor to Robert Frost, and Wellesley College English professor—went to sleep on Sunday night, November 10, 1918, American soldiers were still fighting in Europe’s Great War. Only three days before, she had watched “the world and the college” go “wild” when a New York reporter mistakenly had announced the war’s end.[2] But after four years of bloodshed and thousands of dead, wounded, and missing soldiers, when would Katharine and other Americans be able to celebrate the end of “the war to end all wars”?Would Germany finally agree to a cease-fire now that the other Central Powers had surrendered? II. November 11 had already arrived across the Atlantic on the hills above infamous Verdun, France. In drizzling rain American soldiers also awaited the cease-fire that would end their exhausting days and nights of German shellfire, poison gas, ratholes, lice, and deep mud.[A] Part of the massive Meuse-Argonne offensive line, at that time the largest American military operation ever attempted, the Yankee Division—National Guard troops from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine—had been ordered to continue holding off as many German troops as possible and to attack night and day, without any letup. In the last two days of fighting, 2,454 American Army troops had died in Europe’sbombarded villages and blasted fields.[3] [B] Near Verdun, American artillery had boomed along the entire front all night to show that the war was still on, in spite of the peace rumors.[4] An ancient Roman garrison, Verdun had been a strategic military fortress for centuries, overlooking a long stretch of the Meuse River at the point where the historic highway from Rheims crosses toward Metz. By 1918, in this “modern” war, Verdun’s battlefields were covered with more dead bodies per square yard than any others. In farmyards near field hospitals, corpses were sometimes buried with empty wine bottles in their arms, their names sealed inside to identify them long after their dog tags had rusted away.[5] The grisly scenes were seared into the memories of survivors, such as Katharine’s young Harvard friend Robert Hillyer, who wrote in his poem, “Dead Man’s Corner, Verdun,” about driving wounded soldiers through one of the bloodiest battle areas, Le Mort Homme: “Here is the crossroads where the slain Were piled so deep we could not pass. [….] ‘Doucement, doucement!’ I hear The wounded gasping through their blood; The ambulance with grinding gear Lurches in shell-holes, sinks in mud. […] The Mort Homme darkens all the ground. […] With cracked and beaten lips that taste Commands like acid but obeyed, We still with leaden nightmare haste Convey our shadows through the shade.”[6] Although the armistice had been signed at 5:30 a.m. that day, orders came to continue fighting until 11 a.m., the moment for the truce to go into effect. Officers and doughboys alike were shocked: “Why snatch from some men the last chance they had of coming through the war safely?”[7] Bedraggled soldiers grabbed their gas masks, helmets, and guns, and stumbled forward in the fog.[C] Their boots falling apart, their uniforms tattered, their few remaining horses emaciated, and their equipment broken down, they inched forward through minefield craters of thawing mud, crawling over skeletons of soldiers still entangled in shreds of old uniforms.[D] Amid empty shell cartridges clanking onto the ground and pungent odors of gunpowder, poison gas, explosives, hot metal, and oil drifting up from the ravines, they dug in to mark their positions. With only shell-hole water to drink, they were freezing cold, hungry, and wet from two days of rain that had soaked even their bread. Worse, frozen mist enshrouding the stump-filled underbrush had socked in their air support. With deafening explosions and vivid flashes of German artillery assaulting them—shells whizzing over their heads and bursting open with smoking bits of steel—the Yanks sent their own deadly replies shuddering back through the dense air, their ear-splitting reports echoing across the ravaged hillsides and ravines.[E] But as the mist began to dissolve, the soldiers could hear the faint drone of Allied planes flying northward toward them, and then, a few minutes before 11 a.m., shouts of “Truce! Truce!” came from the rear lines.[8] While the gunners continued to shoot, counting the shells as the time approached, the infantry advanced, looking at their their watches, and all along the front the batteries prepared for their final salvo. The artillerists joined hands, forming long lines at the lanyards for their final blasts. Two hundred men each held five large firing ropes, waiting for a dropped handkerchief to signal the moment for their final shots of the Great War.[9] Northeast of Verdun, just before eleven o’clock, American artillerymen wrote “Good Luck” on a ninety-pound shell and loaded it into a six-inch howitzer.[10] After a few seconds of silence, a command rang out: “‘Eleven o’clock! Fire!’” The final shells exploded, “like a final thunder crash at the clearing of a storm…. As the barrage [of firing died], ending in a final husky rumble in the distance from the big guns, runners [sprang] along the firing line. “Instantly comprehending, the whole line of doughboys leapt from the trenches, fox holes, and shell craters, splitting the unaccustomed silence with a shrill cheer.”[11] The armistice that the Germans signed that morning in General Foch’s railway carriage command headquarters, hidden in a forest in France, had finally stopped the fighting.[F] On the battlefields, a bewildering silence fell. Like the two million other American soldiers in France, the Yankee Division stood speechless, staring at one another. And then they began to sing. III. Back in New England, when the sun rose on November 11, Katharine Lee Bates heard church bells pealing and the shrill whistles of the nearby Boston-bound train. After the peace rumors, the joyous noise “told the truth this time.”[12] [G] The nightmare of war was over. Soon this short, matronly woman, dressed in the long dark skirts of the nineteenth century, climbed aboard a crowded train at the Wellesley train station. Behind her spectacles Katharine’s brown eyes may have characteristically twinkled as she joined the many Wellesley College students who had broken “loose … without signing out” from their strict campus to join the throngs of people in Boston.[13] It was an ideal day for a celebration, with temperatures surprisingly on their way up to 60 degrees. When her train pulled into the old Huntington Avenue Station in Boston’s Back Bay, she was only a few blocks from where the Yankee Division had drilled before it left for France.[H] She had recently submitted her poem, “‘Died of Wounds,’” about the heroism of a young American soldier who had dragged a wounded French comrade “from one / Grim shell-hole to another,” to the nearby offices of the popular Youth’s Companion magazine.[14] Now, on the streets around her, Boston was “lifting its lid” with a bang—horns tooted, church bells rang out, and flag-waving crowds of ecstatic people surged toward Boston Common—“Every One Striving to Make the Most Noise”—beating tin-pan drums, blowing fish horns, and yelling themselves hoarse.[15] [I] The city’s celebration had begun a few hours after midnight, when the Associated Press flashed the State Department’s announcement of a peace agreement over its wires, and by 3 a.m. newsboys shouted out the headlines plastered on the windows in front of the excited crowds along Washington Street’s “Newspaper Row,” where printing presses rolled out extra editions.[J] They trumpeted President Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation: “My Fellow Countrymen: The armistice was signed this morning. Everything for which America fought has been accomplished. It will now be our fortunate duty to assist … in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world.” [16] [K] The Boston Globe declared it “THE DAY OF DAYS—THE GREATEST DAY IN THE HISTORY OF BOSTON.” Before sunrise, Boston’s mayor had greeted elated crowds as he made his way from the docks up along the narrow winding streets, once seventeenth-century cattle paths, to stately City Hall. Factory whistles blew to celebrate this wondrous day. A few hours later, bedlam reigned on Boston streets all around Katharine. But everyone was good-natured, “in everything except the sentiments expressed towards the Kaiser.” Women, whose “hats were pulled to one side,” smiled for happiness. [17] Crowds pushed uniformed soldiers and sailors into automobiles, taking them for rides amid wild cheering. Boys and young women perched on “every conceivable part, including the engine hood” of the cars crawling along the streets. [18] [L] Girls waved flags with one hand, made noise with watchmen’s rattles with the other, and blew horns gripped between their teeth. Along Washington Street, “staid business men” did snake dances that hinted of “past celebrations on college gridirons,” grabbing up tin cans, sheets of metal, old boilers, horns and rattles, anything that could make a satisfactory din.[19] “The masses of people gone wild … seemed to melt into one gigantic, hilarious, chaotic procession … intent on making more noise than ever before,” reported Katharine’s newspaper, the conservative Boston Evening Transcript.[20] Parades of workers marched past City Hall late into the afternoon in “almost an unbroken line” to the beat of a big bass drum a block away on Tremont Street, its “noise like the crack of doom.”[21] And on Beacon Hill, a minister exhorted his listeners to think of the starving victims of the war and quoted Katharine’s words in “America the Beautiful”—to “confirm” America’s soul “in self- control.”[22] She joined in this huge outpouring of relief at the war’s end for as long as she could before returning to Wellesley.

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