Tag Archives: 1919

Song of Worry

01 Thursday Sep 2022

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Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

After the Armistice in November 1918, Americans worried that exposure to big, bad Europe would change (corrupt?) their boys. A hit song of 1919 addressed that fear: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” In the song, which strikes a lighthearted mood, a farmer grins slyly as he tells his wife their boy will come back restless, thirsting for what he’s glimpsed in France.

Albert Wilfred Barbelle’s sheet music cover, 1919 (courtesy http://libx.bsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ShtMus/id/725 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But you have to ask whether the father’s good-humored acceptance reflects rural attitudes or those of city slickers who wrote popular music.

The slickers in question were composer Walter Donaldson and lyricists Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis; the publisher was Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co.—Berlin, as in Irving Berlin, who gave us “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and a bazillion other standards.

“How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em” appeared on the vaudeville stage and at the Ziegfeld Follies; an early jazz band, James Reese Europe’s 369th Infantry Band, performed the song regularly and cut a hit record. Two well-known singers followed suit.

But not every soldier thought Europe a swell place (or, as Twenties slang later would have it, the gnat’s eyebrows). In April 1919, the Seattle Times interviewed a Washington infantryman who said he was glad to come home to a “real country” and criticized the Belgians for not “dressing like us” and “clinging to their old ways.”

However, if he ever wished to buy an alcoholic drink or a condom, he might have paused to reconsider Europe’s advantages: Both transactions were criminal acts in his home state.

Firing a Seattle teacher

30 Thursday Jun 2022

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Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In late February 1919, the Seattle Times reported that someone had run an advertisement attacking a West Seattle High School history teacher for being a “Hun” and “un-American.” The first charge almost certainly stemmed from ignorance concerning his name; he was Swiss, not German. As for his “Americanism,” he had declined to salute the flag, a refusal he ascribed to the ceremony itself, and which he’d later recanted.

However, he was also an avowed conscientious objector; his enemies said he “fed ideas” to his classes.

A blind poll among his ninety or so students showed a twenty-to-one margin of support. Nevertheless, the school board fired him, saying that they couldn’t have a conscientious objector as a teacher; what if everyone had been a conscientious objector when the nation declared war?

The newspaper reports leave much unsaid, as they always do. But you sense that the teacher’s real crime was encouraging his students to think critically, which the vast majority of them appreciated.

Men registering for the draft in New York City, June 5, 1917 (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s more, according to the Selective Service Act of 1917 and its revisions, he’d most likely done nothing wrong. If he’d passed his thirtieth birthday, he wouldn’t have had to register for the draft until mid-September 1918, and not at all if he’d reached the age of forty-five. Further, failing to register would have attracted attention and left him open to punishment, yet the newspaper reports said nothing about this. Finally, the act did allow for conscientious objection, though only on religious grounds.

Consequently, I’m guessing this teacher’s viewpoint was entirely theoretical, maybe spoken of in class to spark discussion. With nothing else to hang him for, his enemies fixed on it, and the school board went along.

So much for academic freedom and the war to make the world safe for democracy.

Not just a parade

26 Thursday May 2022

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Here’s a nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

To soak up the historical background, I read several months’ worth of the Seattle Times from 1919 and learned about a parade in late April welcoming home some four hundred soldiers from Over There.

But it wasn’t just a parade. It was as though a phalanx of hopes, attitudes, prejudices, expectations, and flat-out misconceptions marched through Seattle that day, not just men from the 361st Infantry Regiment, 91st (“Wild West”) Division. And the pride, earnestness, gratitude, awkwardness, and ignorance on display provide a stew of conflict in which my protagonists, a man and a woman, have to swim.

The parade organizers mixed solemnity with “stunts,” a word typically applied then to party games or entertainments. The soldiers, supposedly the stars of the show, made up the rear. Next came white horses drawing a large gold star, to commemorate the fallen. Farther up, young women in white rode the running boards of cars and strewed white flower petals along the route.

Ahead of them walked Elk Lodge brothers dressed in feather headdresses and war paint, while leading the column were police officers wearing chaps who fired off blanks from their pistols. Cowboys and Indians; a Wild West “stunt.”

Front page, Seattle Times, April 26, 1919. Note the soldier’s evergreen shoulder patch, emblem of the 91st Division, and the “361” on his cap. Note too the hero-worshiping sister/wife/sweetheart.

I tried beginning my novel with this scene and wound up cutting it. But my male protagonist is a soldier who thinks the hoopla insults his dead friends and wonders what country he’s come home to. That newspaper article was a gold mine.

My debut novel, Lonely Are the Brave

19 Thursday May 2022

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I’m delighted to tell you I’ve realized the dream I’ve nurtured for more than a half-century: In April 2023, Cynren Press will publish my novel, Lonely Are the Brave. So, starting next week, in addition to my regular book reviews, I’ll periodically post about the novel’s historical background, with occasional sidelights as to how I incorporated those facts or events into the narrative — or tried to and failed.

But for today, let’s stick with the premise:

In 1919, scandal stirs Lumberton, a small (fictional) logging town amid the evergreens an hour outside Seattle: War hero Rollie Birch, whose wife died while he was overseas, turns at-home father; and Kay Sorensen, the timber baron’s daughter, dares defy her politician husband to pursue a business career.

Almost overnight, Rollie goes from town celebrity to pariah. Nobody will talk to him, gossips snicker that his infant daughter isn’t his, and even his beloved sister wishes he’d give up his crazy idea. Meanwhile, Kay fears her tyrannical husband, running for state legislature, will make her leave the job she loves, and wonders if his bizarre public attacks on Rollie, who served in his platoon during the war, somehow explain what’s gone wrong in her marriage.

Discreetly, she begs Rollie to tell her what her husband did during the war, to which he reluctantly agrees, provided Kay reveal what she knows about his late wife’s possible infidelity.

But trading wartime secrets has unexpected consequences, not least for fragile, lonely hearts and cherished beliefs—and the ensuing public storm threatens to destroy Kay and Rollie both.

……………………….

More to come.

Vienna Blood: The Second Rider

08 Monday Apr 2019

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Review: The Second Rider, by Alex Beer
Translated from the German by Tim Mohr
Europa, 2018. 319 pp. $17

When police Inspector August Emmerich stumbles across a corpse while pursuing a black-market ring in 1919 Vienna, he refuses to do what his superiors tell him. That’s nothing new, apparently. Emmerich, a gifted detective who longs to work in homicide, the elite police unit, has made no secret of his ambition or his contempt for idiotic rules and the men who make them.

Karl-Marx-Hof,, a tenement built during the Socialist era in Vienna (courtesy © Bwag/Wikimedia)

Unfortunately for August, however, the mayor has been leaning on the police to break the black marketeering that has caused such misery in this freezing, starving, ill-clad, impoverished postwar city. Which means that even though the dead man August happens on couldn’t have committed suicide the way the coroner insists — the deceased was a shell-shocked veteran with such a debilitating tremor, he couldn’t have loaded a pistol and held it to his head — the inspector’s under orders to leave that case and crush the black market.

Naturally, his disobedience gets him into trouble, which happens about every half hour. You can’t blame him, exactly, because his superiors are much less competent than the criminals, an irony that leads to an unusual alliance. But Emmerich’s troubles aren’t always of his own making. Beer spares him nothing, so that whatever loss or indignity he can possibly endure will no doubt come his way, and soon. “No — and furthermore” doesn’t simply live here; these pages are that concept. Money trouble? Absolutely. Physical pain? He’s got it, limping from an old war wound that he dares not reveal, for fear that he’ll be farmed out to a desk job.

At times, the plot spins a little too often, too neatly, and many, many bodies fall. But Beer’s adept at testing her hero’s flair for getting out of tight spaces, and the results are often hilarious. (My favorite is the time he’s forced to impersonate a medical student during hospital rounds, during which Emmerich proves ingenious as well as lucky.) Most of these situations occur because, after sizing up the incredible risks he faces, he goes ahead nevertheless.

Along the way, he tries to train his newbie assistant, Ferdinand Winter, a young man whose sensitivities, desire to follow the rules, and privileged background earn his boss’s disdain. Winter’s grandmother, who openly mourns the kaiser and seems to blame Emmerich for his abdication, adds a little spice — and thievery — to the relationship between the two men. But Emmerich, who’s had a hard life, is compassionate at heart, showing regard for anyone in Vienna struggling to get by, especially veterans like himself, so you sense that eventually, he’ll warm to Ferdinand.

Meanwhile, though, the pair witness a city still reeling from the war, suffering hopelessness, tuberculosis, pervasive crime, and crushing poverty. It’s enough to break anyone’s heart:

As he had feared, inside they encountered the most miserable squalor. The dwelling — this form of lodging didn’t deserve the name home — was a dark hole with barely any air to breathe. Passing through the musty kitchen, its walls covered with mold, they entered a room that served as the living room, bedroom, and work space. It was perhaps four strides across, six strides long, and dimly lit by a flickering petroleum lamp. That was it. No other space.

The atmosphere in which Beer immerses her characters provides more than background. The homeless shelters (five-night limit), the incessant thievery, degradation, and sickness contrast sharply with the few oases of wealth and privilege. Beer knows her postwar Vienna thoroughly, selecting just the right details, and you breathe the same foul air as her characters, smell the same vile odors.

The Second Rider (which, by the way, refers to the Four Horsemen) introduces a series. If the subsequent installments are anything like this one, I predict many successful adventures for August Emmerich.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Less Is More: The Wilson Deception

22 Thursday Oct 2015

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Review: The Wilson Deception, by David O. Stewart
Kensington, 2015. 266 pp. $25

As I mentioned in my review of Robert Goddard’s novel, The Ways of the World (August 30), I’ve always wanted to read a first-rate thriller about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. So when The Wilson Deception crossed my path, I grabbed it.

That bad news is that this book isn’t what I’m looking for. Melodrama afflicts The Wilson Deception with a high fever, which, in its delirium, spawns a very far-fetched plot, full of talking heads of state repeating commonplace information, and whose French is sometimes less than grammatical. Even the novel’s protagonist, Major James Fraser, an army doctor, feels like a cardboard cutout who’ll topple in the slightest breeze off the Seine. Tending horribly wounded men has left its mark, but the narrative says so more than it shows him feeling it. He’s estranged from his wife and adult daughter, but that too feels handed out rather than enacted, and when the women arrive in Paris, the chance for reconciliation unfolds with little process. It’s not earned.

However, the good news is that the talking heads include the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George, with Lawrence of Arabia trying unsuccessfully to lobby them. As a historian of that era, I’m a sucker for Clemenceau in particular, and Stewart has a good time letting the French premier unleash his witticisms. For instance, when a would-be assassin wounds him, he tells American visitors to his sickroom:

Yes, it was a shameful episode. A Frenchman stands not ten feet from me and fires seven times. Yet he hits me only once. Who will respect French marksmanship? Our honor is forever stained. It will cause men in Berlin to think about invading France again. . . . Of course, men in Berlin need very little encouragement to think such thoughts.

Stewart also tries to turn Robert Lansing from a footnote into a person, and I like that too, or at least the attempt. Lansing became secretary of state in 1915 when William Jennings Bryan resigned, and he should have been the chief negotiator in Paris. But Wilson, who had never let Lansing do his job–the president even typed his own diplomatic notes–wasn’t about to unchain him now, given Wilson’s oversized ego and the chance to act on the world stage. The novel captures Lansing’s frustration at being pushed aside, which gives the supposedly dry-as-dust lawyer the chance to fire off his own bons mots: “Wilson’s had such a charmed political life that he’s afflicted with the optimism of the consistently fortunate.”

Robert Lansing, Wilson's second secretary of state (Courtesy Library of Congress).

Robert Lansing, Wilson’s second secretary of state (Courtesy Library of Congress).

However, the author hasn’t decided where the story lies. Lansing offers possibilities, but he’s there only because of his nephews, Allen and John Foster Dulles (whose relationship to Lansing was news to me, and piqued my historian’s interest). Since Allen would later direct the CIA, for which he seems to have been practicing, he serves Stewart’s purpose, in a way. But dragging him in requires a connection to the negotiations, which covers acres of ground, the promontory of which seems to be Lawrence’s attempts to create an Arab state in the Middle East. Linking these pieces would be a stretch in any narrative, but that’s only half the trouble.

Remember Fraser, the army-doctor protagonist? He, as an influenza expert, is called in to examine Wilson and winds up trying to clear a young African-American soldier from a trumped-up charge of desertion. So there’s yet another complication or three. The friendship between Fraser and the soldier’s father, who shows up in Paris for a conference on race, is never explained and seems unlikely, though it does lend a counterpoint to Wilson’s bigotry, on full display here.

Consequently, The Wilson Deception fights itself, with too many threads tugging the reader’s attention. I’ve always thought the conference provides plenty of drama, with even minor figures looming larger than life, as with Lawrence. If they’re the story, why shoehorn in a separate, unbelievable plot? Or, if Fraser really is the story, put the leaders in the background, just within the periphery, and devote full attention to the medical man and the young soldier he’s trying to protect.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Burdens of Intimacy: The Ways of the World

30 Sunday Aug 2015

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Review: The Ways of the World, by Robert Goddard
Grove/Atlantic, 2013. 404 pp. $25

Halfway through this engaging thriller, a Japanese diplomat observes, “An invisible opponent is the hardest to judge. Is he cleverer than we think or not as clever as we fear?”

To his listener–and the reader–that’s the rub. While investigating his father’s suspicious death, James Maxted is working blind, whereas every move he makes stands out as plain as day to an ever-increasing array of interested onlookers. Are they friends or enemies? Or could they be both, depending on the circumstances?

But let’s start at the beginning. The time is March 1919; the place, the Maxted family estate, near Epsom, England. James, known to all but his family as Max, has recently been repatriated from a German prison camp, where the former fighter pilot spent a lengthy stint. However, it’s a tense homecoming, for Max has never gotten along with his family, and his father has just died. Sir Henry Maxted, a career diplomat working in a minor capacity at the Paris Peace Conference, has fallen off a roof, in what the Paris police are wont to call an accident. James and his elder brother, Ashley–Sir Ashley, now, and proud of it–are to fetch his body home for burial.

Now, you don’t really believe that an experienced member of the Foreign Office would just happen to tumble off a seven-story Montparnasse apartment building while–coincidentally–the great powers were meeting to reconfigure the postwar world? I didn’t think you would, but what’s important is that James doesn’t, either. Despite his elder brother’s impatience–nothing must encumber Sir Ashley’s smooth inheritance of land and title–James sets out to learn the truth.

Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and President Woodrow Wilson, in Paris, 1919 (Courtesy Library of Congress).

David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the United States, in Paris, 1919 (Courtesy Library of Congress).

And what a complicated truth it is, which reveals to Max more about his father than he’d have ever suspected, and of the often dirty profession he followed. First of all, there’s Corinne Dombreux, the lovely, young woman who lives in that Montparnasse apartment. Her late husband was spying for the Russian monarchy. Or was it the Bolsheviks, and was he playing a double game? Either way, the French security service considers Mme. Dombreux a potential enemy; her connection to Sir Henry opens up all sorts of unfortunate scenarios, as Max only gradually becomes aware.

This is where Goddard excels. He unfolds his narrative like a jeweler, one facet at time, and just when you think you might have glimpsed the extent of the stone, he shows you another facet, and another, until you’re not sure just how big it is, or how many reflections it casts. That, of course, is Max’s viewpoint too, and just as you don’t know whom to trust, neither does he. First appearances always deceive, except concerning Max; his unpleasant brother and sister-in-law; and Sam Twentyman, his former sergeant and would-be business partner. Reversals and double-crosses, the necessary “no–and furthermore” I so admire, spill from the pages.

Yet The Ways of the World doesn’t satisfy me, and though I’m glad I read it, I’m unlikely to follow the series further. (Both the cover and the last page promise more adventures.) I share Goddard’s love for intricacy, and I’m always ready for a good yarn, but I think the author gets ahead of himself, so that, at times, the machinery of The Ways of the World clanks like a rough-firing engine, when it should tick like a watch. For instance, many, many bodies fall, which feels both excessively gruesome and a pat way of ratcheting up the tension. Also, I thought Goddard rescued the good guys rather too easily a couple times, and the ending feels like a cop-out.

I was further disappointed not to see Paris. There are plenty of place names and métro stations, but those details don’t make up the city; the narrative could have taken place anywhere. Not everyone can be Alan Furst or Robert Harris (or should be), but I’d have liked color, sense of 1919–and fewer French characters who happen to speak impeccable English.

I’d love to find a first-class thriller about the Paris Peace Conference. The Ways of the World isn’t it; it’s good, but I doubt it will stay with me.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Facing Life After So Much Death: The Heroes’ Welcome

04 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Heroes’ Welcome, by Louisa Young
Harper Perennial, 2015. 263 pp. $15

The Great War has ended only five months before, and Riley Purefoy bears its scars in the most obvious spot: At the Somme, part of his jaw was blown away. Reconstructive surgery has worked marvels, yet children flee from him, he can’t speak clearly, and must drink his tea from a brass tube. Nevertheless, his prewar sweetheart, Nadine Waveney, marries him, trusting to their mutual honesty and understanding to carry them through. No physical wound can obscure from Nadine the kind, courageous, caring man beneath, and she served as a nurse, after all–though she worries, to herself, whether he’ll ever be able to kiss her or make love. The newlyweds’ parents don’t know what shocks them most: Riley’s appearance, that the young couple married without telling them, or that they married at all. Isn’t it obvious Riley’s in no condition to be anyone’s husband or provider? And what of their class differences, since she comes from money, and he, from nothing?

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, British sailor wounded at Jutland, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive reconstructive facial surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Before-and-after pictures of Walter Yeo, wounded British sailor, 1917. He is said to be the first patient to receive plastic surgery. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, his close friend and commanding officer, Peter Locke, has returned from war outwardly whole but a psychological wreck, victim of what today would be called post-traumatic stress. He drinks constantly, has recurrent nightmares about the men he commanded who died in battle, and shuts himself away from his wife, Julia, and their toddler son, Tom. He’s a hard case, Peter, but Julia’s too shallow and self-absorbed to help him. Having sensed their growing estrangement during the war, she decided that she, and not the stress of war, must be the cause, and applied carbolic acid to her face as a beauty treatment. Naturally, she doesn’t get the results she wanted.

The juxtaposition of the two disfigured characters, one of whom can see inside himself and others, while the other sees only surfaces, is a brilliant stroke. It’s one of many in this excruciatingly painful, tender, lyrical, and, by turns, uplifting novel. All four main characters, plus Peter’s cousin Rose, a maternal woman who thinks her role is to pick up the pieces that others let drop, have well-drawn inner lives.

Nadine and Riley come across most clearly, and their wakening to one another and the world where beauty and love for life still exist makes for a satisfyingly real romance. For those interested in such things, Nadine means “hope,” and Riley, “courageous,” while Purefoy suggests the French for “pure faith.” (Contrast with the Malfoys of Harry Potter fame.) Nadine and Riley live up to their names, but only with struggle. Riley hates even the suggestion of pity and is so determined to accept nothing that could even remotely imply charity that he tries the patience of everyone who cares for him. As for Peter and Julia, they’re not finished with each other, despite what it looks like, though it take a while for even a glimmer of hope to show itself.

The Heroes’ Welcome makes difficult reading, at times. The grimness of Riley’s appearance and prospects hit hard, early, putting the reader in the parents’ and in-laws’ places, seeing him for the first time since his wound. Peter’s nightmares are duly horrific, and his behavior hard to take. But I sensed a wave of warmth, compassion, and zest for life gently lapping at the characters’ pain, so that their suffering is by no means all you see. As Nadine observes about art treasures she visits on her honeymoon to Italy:

 

This educational voyage, arranged by a most knowledgeable guide, was peeling mud and sorrow off her soul. She remembered suddenly, one morning, wounded soldiers arriving from the battlefields after days of travel caked in mud, in a dried-out carapace that had to be chipped off them . . . a clay shell like a gypsy’s roasted hedgehog, and God knows what wounds and damage you’d find inside. Every day the cities and the paintings exposed to her long, deep unities of humanity, strong living channels that emerged from the depths of the past like crystal streams bursting from a cavern.

 

Such lyrical prose, with frequent, ironic metaphors (facing facts, or putting a good face on things), is another satisfaction of this terrific novel. I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.