Stories of My Life

The farmhouse was on the side of a hill, and the spring that provided water and the springhouse that provided refrigeration were many feet below at the bottom of the hill. For every meal, the milk, butter, and buttermilk had to be carried up to the house and leftovers returned afterward. Water for drinking, cooking, washing, and bathing also had to be carried up the hill. It was a great day in the Womeldorf household when their forward-thinking father bought a ram, an invention that, using gravity, pumped water up to the house. The farm seems to have been a wonderful place to grow up. There were sleigh rides in the winter and, in the summer, so many peaches that they left the farm by the wagonload. And what didn’t go out by wagon was peddled by the children. One of my favorite memories of the farm was the hand-cranked ice cream using the rich cream from the cows, and peaches from the orchard. The milk was so rich, in fact, that it caused my grandmother’s butter to lose a blue ribbon at the fair. The judges thought she must have added coloring to make it that yellow. My Calvinist grandmother was incensed to have her integrity so impugned.

My father’s high school years were spent at the Ann Smith Academy, where the principal was a scholarly gentleman by the name of Harrington Waddell, whom my father greatly admired. This was despite the fact that Mr. Waddell gave him his only demerit. It seems a certain Billy Cox, who sat behind him in class, had stuck a needle between the sole and upper part of his shoe, and he used his homemade weapon to

give Raymond a jab in his nether regions. Raymond jumped to his feet ready to give Billy a blow to the jaw when Mr. Waddell walked into the classroom.

There had been four Williams in his older brother’s high school class, so all of them took the names of Caesar’s generals. His brother was dubbed Titus Labienus, shortened to Labby, a nickname my father inherited when he entered the academy and which followed him through college and into the army. No other memories of high school seemed quite as vivid as the case of the lone demerit, but he did recall being in both the junior and senior class plays and was the salutatorian at graduation.

My grandparents were hardworking and devoted Presbyterians. Grandfather was an elder, and church services and Sunday school were a big part of every Sunday. They traveled by horse and buggy to the old Timber Ridge Presbyterian Church. Even after they moved closer to town, they continued to drive the eight miles back through every kind of weather. I’m not sure when they moved their membership to the church in town, but I think it was before my father left the farm for World War I.

Some of my father’s earliest memories were of gathering around the piano in the parlor and singing hymns while his mother played on one of the first pianos in the area. After supper every night there were evening prayers, which consisted of Bible readings—beginning at Genesis, a chapter a night until the end of Revelation. As each of the nine children learned to read, he or she was expected to read a verse. Then they all got down on their knees while their papa prayed. This custom continued until Cora B. and Florence, the last family members, were in their nineties and unable to kneel. We grandchildren spent a lot of time on our knees trying not to giggle.

Being strong Presbyterians, every child was expected to learn both the Child’s Catechism and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. So after Sunday dinner dishes were washed, the children got down to memorizing. The denomination awarded New Testaments for memorizing the Child’s Catechism and Bibles for the Shorter Catechism. It didn’t matter that the latter was written by the Westminster Divines in England in 1640 and adopted by the Church of Scotland in 1648; every properly brought up Presbyterian child could repeat its questions and answers by heart.

The catechism tradition lived on after my grandparents’ deaths. I got my Bible in 1941, as my aunt Katherine, who was known as the champion catechism teacher in the Lexington Presbytery, was determined that her namesake be the youngest pupil she had ever coached to receive the coveted Bible. She had me follow her around the hen house while we gathered eggs. She knew all the questions by heart, of course, so she would call out: “What is God?” To which I had to immediately reply: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” Or “What is sin?” To which I would cry over the clucks of the hens: “Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.” Neither my father nor I remembered catechism sessions as unpleasant or taxing and we were both inordinately proud of our Bibles. I still have mine with Katherine Clements Womeldorf embossed in gold on the worn leather cover.

The Womeldorf family loved music, and one of Daddy’s happiest memories was of the day his father came home from town bearing a morning glory horn Edison phonograph with round cylinder records. “How on earth could that contraption sing and play lovely music?” he remembered marveling. The family considered it the wonder of the age and loved listening to it.

My father entered Washington and Lee University in the fall of 1913, walking the two miles from the farm every day. I once asked my father why he didn’t ride a horse to school during his four years there. “I’d have to fool with the horse once I got there,” he said. “It was easier just to walk.” Once he took us to W and L, where we paid respects to General Lee’s recumbent statue in the chapel and to the skeleton of his horse, Traveller, in the museum. My father told us that when he was in school, the skeleton of the famous horse was in the biology lab along with a skeleton of a colt. He related with great glee how student tour guides taking visitors through the buildings and grounds would point out Traveller’s bones, and, then, when they got to the smaller remains, would add, “And this is Traveller as a colt.” Many visitors seemed to accept this, much to the delight of the students.

While the actual Traveller bones were in the biology lab, on a day when the professor was late, the boys decided to autograph the skeleton. The ink was washed off soon afterward and the skeleton removed to the museum, but my father had signed the inside of a rib and that day we visited, he grinned mischievously and pointed out his unmistakable scrawled signature.

He entered the university the fall of 1913, and World War I began in Europe the summer after his freshman year. In 1917, at the end of his senior year, he joined the W and L ambulance corps. Training took place in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Raymond, who had never driven a car before, was placed behind the wheel of a Model T ambulance and told to drive it between two stakes. “I thought,” he said, “that the point was not to knock down the stakes, so I didn’t.” By so doing, he had unwittingly passed his driver’s test. He did plenty of marching after that day, but that single maneuver through the stakes proved to be the end of his driver education course. The next time he found himself behind the wheel was on the outskirts of Paris. “I wished many times during that drive across Paris that I’d had the sense to knock down those stakes.”

G. Raymond Womeldorf’s college picture.

Over There

Although my father died many years ago, a vivid reminder of his ambulance days recently arrived in a large box on my front porch. Inside was an old leather medical bag. It had come from the son of my college professor G. Parker Winship. David wrote that he had found the bag in a shop in Abingdon, Virginia, noted the unusual name, and sent it to me thinking I might know to whom it belonged. On the side in indelible ink was printed: R. G. Womeldorf, Lexington, Va, USA. The recruiter in 1917 had mistakenly listed my father as Raymond G. Womeldorf rather than G. Raymond—an error that caused a lot of headaches when my father applied for veteran’s benefits under his correct name. What David had sent me was obviously my father’s World War I medical bag. It is now in the collection at Washington and Lee.

My father never talked much about his time at the front, but I once got a glimpse of what it felt like to him. He was visiting us and we turned on Masterpiece Theater to watch Upstairs, Downstairs, a series to which we were somewhat addicted. The son of the household had gone to war and as the scenes of the trenches of World War I began to play on the small screen, my father stood up abruptly and left the room. I followed him out. “Is this hard for you to watch?” I asked. “Yep.” It was all he said.

The Washington and Lee Ambulance Corps, also known as Section 534, landed in France on February 4, 1918. It was a month before they met the twenty adapted Model T Fords they were to drive. My father took #13 because no one else would. That next couple of weeks were spent learning how to take the engines of their “Tin Lizzies” apart and put them back together. Then the section drove from Paris to the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. The great fountains were all sandbagged; still, King Louis’ palace was quite impressive to a farm boy from Virginia.

They were to be attached to the 12th French Army that had been so decimated in earlier battles that they had been withdrawn to recruit and regroup before they were once again called into action. In the meantime the 534 was ordered on March 25, 1918, to head for the front to transport wounded French soldiers from the battle of Somme. They could hardly move their vehicles forward for the stream of men, women, and children jamming the roads, desperately trying to flee the slaughter.

The job of the 534 was to evacuate stretcher cases from the dressing stations near the front to hospitals that were often simply cathedrals or warehouses. They spent two weeks doing this, never having time even to take off their clothes, much less rest. When at last they were relieved for R & R, they stopped by the US headquarters in Chaumont, where the officer in charge threatened to throw them in the brig for wearing soiled uniforms, failing to shave, and having mud on their boots. My father mused that the newly arrived Americans had never seen men from the front before. But had they known their presence would receive that kind of welcome, they would never have stopped there.

We children were brought up in a teetotaler household, but it occurred to my brother that our father might not have always been abstemious. “Daddy,” he said, “when you were attached to the French army did you ever drink wine?” My father looked at him in amazement. “You don’t think I would have drunk water, do you? It would have killed me.”

William Roth, a teacher from Wisconsin who had been added to the W and L unit, wrote a memoir of the 534. In it he recalls an occasion when he and Labby Womeldorf went to a water fountain near the camp kitchen only to find a notice reading “eau non-potable.” They filled their canteens with the dry red issue wine and, because they were so thirsty, gulped it down. Since neither of them was used to alcohol they could only make it back to their billets by holding on to the buildings along the way.

Once the two of them visited an old invalid who had been a dancer and entertainer. They took a morning glory phonograph and cylindrical records they had salvaged in the Somme and played them for the old man, who sat up in bed and beat time to the music with his arms. Around this same time they helped an elderly couple they had met by hauling in their hay and were rewarded with a lunch of bread, cheese, and wine.

Months after that Roth tells of a walk he and Labby were taking when they came upon an enormous unexploded shell with German markings on it. “Let’s end it up and ta

ke our pictures beside it,” said my father. While two French soldiers nearby shook their fingers and yelled “Non! Non! Non!” the crazy Americans, after a couple of tries, were able to upend the heavy shell. It stood shoulder high and, Roth guesses, weighed over a thousand pounds. Roth and Labby each took a picture of the other holding up the shell. When it didn’t explode, the French soldiers came running over to have their pictures taken, but Labby shook his index finger and said “Non! Non! Non!” and tipped the shell back onto to the ground.

“It seemed,” says Roth, “that Labby liked to take risks. During the Marne-Aisne Offensive he gave me a demonstration on how to explode the detonating caps of German hand grenades (potato mashers). Also he liked to toss pennies on condition that restitution was made after the games. In the dud episode there would have been no restitution if we had lost.” I knew my father harbored more than a streak of mischievousness, but I was somewhat taken aback by his obvious daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother’s hair gray.

But very little of those long months in France was given over to fun and games.

Here are parts of a letter he wrote to his brother William on the 28th of July 1918 after the second battle of the Marne.

Dear Brother and all,

As we have been on the go for over a week there has not been much time for writing. But as I don’t expect to be called out tonight I am taking the time to write a short note. Perhaps you may be able to read it as I am in my bus along the road writing on a cushion on my lap by candlelight.

We are getting along fine and are again as busy as at first. But are on a front that is moving in the other direction above the old chateau that has made quite a bit of American history of late. We have been going day and night for four days now. But the work is much better at least it seems so when things are favorable. The Americans that were on this front did some excellent work and not only manned their artillery but when they captured a lot of German artillery, just turned the guns around and fired them, also as much ammunition was also captured. That was quite a stunt and has been practiced by others since.