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| US WW1 poster by Gordon Grant |
The United
States entered the Great War in April of 1917, but spent much of that year recruiting
and training troops. Most American doughboys didn’t begin to head “Over There”
until the spring of 1918, yet by the end of May, over one million American
soldiers were in France. On May 28th, American 1st
Division troops attacked the Germans at Cantigny, taking the town and then
resisting seven German counter-attacks, at the cost of 200 American dead and
over 1600 casualties. Less than one week later, American 2nd and 3rd
Division troops, including a brigade of U.S. Marines, repulsed the German
spring offensive in ferocious fighting at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. American
casualties neared 10,000, and of those, 1,811 died. Marine Sergeant Major Dan
Daly reportedly said to his men prior to charging German positions at Belleau
Wood, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”*
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| US Marines Memorial, Belleau Wood photo Battlefield Historian, via Flickr |
The formidable gap
between the glorious ideal of war and the reality of battle yawned wide, but in
1915, two years before America entered the war, New York City writer Richard
Butler Glaenzer had warned against naïve militarism.
Sure, It’s Fun
What fun to be a
soldier!
-- Everykid
Sure, it's fun
to be a soldier! Oh, it's fun, fun, fun,
Upon an iron
shoulder-blade to tote a feather gun;
To hike with
other brave galoots in easy-going army-boots;
To pack along a
one-ounce sack, the commissary on your track;
To tramp, tramp,
tramp, to a right-and-ready camp!
Fun? -- Sure,
it's fun, just the finest ever, son!
Yes, it's fun to
be a soldier! Oh, it's fun, fun, fun,
To loaf along a
level road beneath a cloudless sun
Or over fields
of golden grain, kept cool by puffs of wind and rain;
Then richly,
more-than-fully, fed, to stretch upon a downy bed
And sleep,
sleep, sleep, while the stay-at-homes weep!
Fun? -- Sure,
it's fun, just the finest ever, son!
Oh, it's fun to
be a soldier! Oh, it's fun, fun, fun,
To catch the
silly enemy and get 'em on the run;
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| Lyle Justis illustration from Toward the Flame |
To here and
there blow off a head with just a bit of chuckling lead;
To bayonet a
foolish bloke at hide-and-seek in trench and smoke;
To shoot, shoot,
shoot, till they've got no legs to scoot!
Fun? -- Sure,
it's fun, just the finest ever, son!
God, it's fun to
be a soldier! Oh, it's fun, fun, fun
To lie out still
and easy when your day's sport's done;
With not a thing
to worry for, nor anything to hurry for;
Not hungry,
thirsty, tired, but a hero much-admired;
Just dead, dead,
dead, like Jack and Bill and Fred!
Fun? -- Sure,
it's fun, just the finest ever, son!
—Richard Butler Glaenzer
A sergeant from
the 1st Division, Boleslaw Suchocki, recounted his experience of soldiering:
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| Lyle Justis illustration from Toward the Flame |
Into
the village of Cantigny we go. There
remained nothing but ruins. We passed on
through to the other side of the village.
Here we encountered barbed-wire entanglements, but it was our good
fortune to get through these without any mishap. But once across I noticed that the boys were
falling down fast. A shell burst about ten yards in front of me and the dirt
from the explosion knocked me flat on my back.
I got up again but could not see further than one hundred feet. I heard someone yell “Lay down.” I knelt on
one knee and wondered what would come next… We laid down and started to shoot,
and it was our good fortune that the second wave reached the place at this
time. About twenty Dutchmen came out of
the holes, threw down their rifles, and stood with their hands up. The doughboys didn’t pay any attention to
this, but started in to butcher and shoot them.
One of the doughboys on the run stabbed a Dutchman and his bayonet went
clear though him. The German artillery
was in action all the time…. I stopped at a strong-point and asked the boy in
the trench if there was room for me to get in. ‘Don’t ask for room, but get in
before you get your [!#%&] shot off,’ a doughboy said.**
And Hervey
Allen, a 2nd lieutenant with the 28th Division who fought
in the July attack at Château-Thierry, concluded,
Men
who have faced death often and habitually can never again have the same
attitude towards life. It is hard to be
enthusiastic about little things again. The fact that everybody is soon going
to die is a little more patent than before.
One sees behind the scenes, the flowers and the grave-blinds, the opiate
of word read from the Good Book, and the prayers. For there is Death, quiet,
calm, invincible, and there is no escape.†
When Glaenzer
published his first book of poetry in 1917, reviews were mixed. The Boston Transcript named “Sure, it’s fun”
as “one of the recent flashing bits of verse brought forth by the war [that] shows
how well Mr. Glaenzer can succeed in being poetical,” while the Springfield Republican criticized the
volume, writing, “Mr Glaenzer delights in cynicism. His lyrics are tinged and also tarnished by
this trait.”-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* The quote
appears in Floyd Gibbons, And They
Thought We Wouldn’t Fight, George H. Doran, 1918, p. 304, and it is attributed
to an unnamed gunnery sergeant. Daly himself claimed his actual words were,
“For Christ’s sake men—come on! Do you want to live forever?”
** Sergeant
Boleslaw Suchocki, 28th Infantry, 1st Division, quoted in
Lost Voices: The Untold Stories of
America’s World War I Veterans and their Families by Martin King and Michael
Collins, Lyons Press, 2018, pp. 167-168.
† Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame: A War Diary, Farrar
& Rinehart, 1926, pp. 120-121.
†† Both reviews
appeared in Book Review Digest, vol.
13, edited by Margaret Jackson and Mary Katharine Reely, H.W. Wilson, 1918, pp.
220-221.
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