We have seen many prisoners taken and have hauled quite a number of wounded Boche.
I have changed my mind about the quiet night, because they have commenced to go both ways as thick as hops. Perhaps more work tonight.
The souvenir gatherers should be here. They could find anything from a Boche tank to cartridges and the like. I have seen so many helmets, etc., that I would like to get to a place where there are no souvenirs. You have seen the pictures of the forests, how they are torn and ruined; well those are no exaggerations. I saw this afternoon one tree between three and four feet in diameter cut off. And the smaller trees are lying in a tangled heap everywhere. Now and then there will be a shell that did not explode in a tree, while some of the trees are so full of shrapnel and bullets that they are well loaded.
We are well. Our headquarters are in a small town where it was impossible to find enough of good roof left to keep the cooking stove dry. So you see we must sleep in our cars or in dugouts, which are very damp, especially after several rainy days that we have had. Such is life in a place that wherever you and your “Lizzy” keep together you are at home. You never worry about getting back, you are always there. . . .
The wheat, what is left, is very fine indeed, if it could be harvested.
Censored by 1st Lt. A.A.S. Your brother,
Raymond
P.S. How does that Overland run now? Ride over and I will race you in my Ford. I know you all enjoy it very much. R.W.
Roth’s memoir includes many details of the 534. Of the dangers they regularly underwent, of the seemingly useless taking, losing, and retaking of decimated villages, of the night drives on rutted roads with no lights burning, and the wasted countryside. In my father’s own brief memoir, which he wrote for us children, he says: “It is useless to speak of the horrible slaughter of these fronts.”
One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn’t finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason. When I hear men bragging about their war experiences I wonder just how much they actually witnessed. The people I have known who, like my father, were in the thick of the horror rarely spoke of it. I finished writing Rebels in 1982 and took the manuscript to my father for him to read, but he shook his head and said he’d rather wait for the book. He died a few months before it was published. So I wasn’t to know how he would react to the terrible scenes of war that I had imagined but he had lived through.
With fall the section moved up into Belgium, and it was here, on October 31, that my father, who was waiting to take the wounded from a dressing station in Wantgren, was hit in the leg by a shell fragment. Soon afterward the area was gassed, and he pulled off his gas mask in a frantic effort to cover his wound. He knew that if gas got into it, it would soon become gangrenous. In telling of the incident, Roth says: “He was an excellent and fearless driver.” When I learned as an adult that my father had been wounded on the day that was to become my birthday, I wondered how he might think of that anniversary. He never mentioned the coincidence. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember that day in 1918, or maybe he remembered and didn’t want to spoil my birthday by speaking of it.
Womeldorf family. My father is the tall one in the back row.
Dad before being wounded.
Raymond was taken to a French hospital, which was an old cathedral, where he lay for two weeks. He remembers lying there, unable to speak or move and hearing the doctor who was leaning over him say: “You can forget this one. He’s gone already.” So he strained every muscle in his body to move something to show the doctor that he was still alive and managed to wiggle a toe.
He and others were shipped to an American hospital, only to find that it was not there. So they simply lay on their stretchers in tents for days until they were finally sent on by freight car to a casino in Boulogne, France, where it was necessary to amputate his right leg just below the knee. His earlier attempt to save his leg had failed and only resulted in damage to his lungs.
On a post card provided by the French army, he wrote:
My dear father and mother and all. I am getting along as well as could be expected. Now don’t be all worried and stirred up.
Your devoted son,
Raymond
Dad at the hospital.
In Hospitals
Finally, after weeks of recovery in the casino, my father found he could sit up and see across the channel to the White Cliffs of Dover. At Christmastime the nurse brought him a gift of fruit that she said a kind person in Virginia had sent the money for, hoping it could be given to some wounded soldier from Virginia. The donor turned out to be one of his high school teachers. He always cherished this happy coincidence.
“Well,” he wrote home, “I’m getting along all right; of course it is a slow process. You should see my rosy cheeks. Every day the sun shines four fellows pick up my bed and carry me out on the veranda. Yesterday I was out in time for a band concert. Everyone is as nice to me as possible. My nurses brought one day steak and mushrooms, another chicken and often fruit from their own mess.”
At length he was sent to England, where he was in hospitals in Dartforth and Liverpool before finally being shipped back to the United States and to a hospital in New Jersey.
I think it was while he was at that hospital that he decided to try to visit New York City. He hadn’t yet been fitted with an artificial leg, so he was painfully trying to make his way on crutches when a limousine pulled up to the curb beside him and a plump, middle-aged woman with a heavy German accent leaned out and asked him where he was going and if he would like to have a ride. He gratefully accepted and climbed into the backseat beside her. The kind lady prove
d to be the Austrian opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who had had sons fighting both for Germany and the Allies during the war.
Several years later when Raymond was in seminary, Madame Schumann-Heink came to Richmond to give a concert. He had no illusions that the famous contralto would remember the ride in New York, but he was eager to see her again. So he went to the concert, and afterward, stood at the back of the formally attired stage door crowd to get a closer glimpse of her. Suddenly, he heard a cry: “My son! My son!” and she made her way through the surrounding fans to give him a warm embrace. It was my mother who told me the story, regretting as she did that he hadn’t taken her to the concert.
After his stay in New Jersey, he was transferred to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. Here he met another noted woman, one who may have saved his life. She was Mrs. Lathrop Brown, whose husband had been special assistant in the Department of the Interior and was currently high up in the Wilson administration. People in the Interior department gave a small portion of their salaries each week to support a convalescent home that was run by Mrs. Brown and a nurse. Mrs. Brown had been a New York debutante, her husband had been Franklin Roosevelt’s roommate at Harvard. Needless to say, the eleven fortunate veterans whom she selected for residency received extraordinary treatment. In the summer, she even took her invalids to the Browns’ summer place on Long Island for fresh sea air. My mother always believed that left in the crowded wards of Walter Reed, my father would have died. Raymond was under Mrs. Brown’s care for several months, living, in his words, “the life of Riley.” By the end of October, however, the doctors feared that the gassing may have given him tuberculosis. He needed, they felt, to be isolated and treated for TB.
The friendship with Mrs. Brown did not end when he had to leave the Interior Department’s Convalescent Home. She remained in touch with my parents until her death. Every year she would send to us in China a carton of wonderful children’s books, a great treasure for a family living “up country” who had no way to purchase books in English even if they’d had the money. She often wrote and even came to China once to visit us. If we were to designate a fairy godmother of our childhood, it would be this gracious lady who saved our father’s life and enriched us all. In 1938 when we arrived in New York as refugees, Mrs. Brown was on a trip to Europe, but she had arranged for her chauffeur to meet us at the boat. We must have received our share of startled looks from the crew and other passengers—this seven-member family emerging from their third-class lower deck and climbing into a waiting chauffeur-driven limousine.
After Raymond’s time in the convalescent home, there followed a couple of TB hospitals—one in Connecticut and one in the Adirondacks. The current treatment for TB patients was quite literally fresh air—the colder the better. So my Virginia father found himself at a Saranac Lake “cure cottage,” where the patients were rolled out on the porch to breathe in the mountain winter air for most of the day. He had lived through gangrene, amputation, and gassing, but now he thought he would surely freeze to death. Among the patients was another veteran from Virginia—a graduate of the University of Virginia. This man realized that illiterate veterans were being taken indoors for an hour or so every day for reading lessons. He proposed that the two of them feign illiteracy and gain a welcome break from the cold.