I

The war in Europe that changed the world in such drastic fashion need hardly have concerned Harry Truman of Grandview, Missouri, much beyond what he might have read in the Kansas City papers or some of his favorite magazines. Had he chosen, he could have played no part in it, and nobody would have expected him to have done otherwise. He turned thirty-three the spring of 1917, which was two years beyond the age limit set by the new Selective Service Act. He had been out of the National Guard for nearly six years. His eyes were far below the standard requirements for any of the armed services. And he was the sole supporter of his mother and sister. As a farmer, furthermore, he was supposed to remain on the farm, as a patriotic duty. Upon the farmers of the country, said President Woodrow Wilson, rested the fate of the war and thus the fate of the nation and the world.

So Harry might have stayed where he was for any of several reasons. That he chose to go, almost from the moment of Wilson’s call to Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917, was his own doing entirely and the turning point in his life. He left the responsibility for the farm and care of his mother to his sister Mary Jane, who, later, would say simply and dutifully, “We got through,” but whose own life as a consequence was not to be the same.

She had grown into an attractive young woman with a bright smile and even disposition. Some people thought her the best looking and, overall, the most appealing of the Trumans. In a studio photograph made for Harry to take with him to war, she posed in a big picture hat with an expression that seemed to combine both strength and gentleness. She was twenty-eight the summer he left for Camp Doniphan. She was still unmarried and without serious prospects for marriage, but popular. From that point on, she was to have little life of her own or any society much beyond Grandview. The worries and responsibilities that had weighed so heavily on Harry since their father’s death were all now hers, and she would be more alone than ever he had been, a point he seems to have felt deeply after a time. “It was quite a blow to my mother and sister,” he conceded years afterward. His idealism and “overzealous conduct” got him “into things” before he had a chance to realize what the consequences might be to others. Mary Jane, who adored him, also thought he had grown a bit self-preoccupied and conceited.

Bess Wallace’s response to his decision was to say they should be married at once. Harry, almost unimaginably, said no. She must not tie herself to a man who could come home a cripple or not at all, he said. They would wait until he came home whole.

In an effort to explain why he went, he offered most of the reasons given by hundreds of thousands of American men in that emotionally charged time. He still disliked guns, he had never been in a fight of any kind or risked his life over anything. But it was “a job somebody had to do.” It would make a man of him. He would not be a “slacker” no matter what, however old, blind, or untried he might be, and no one who understood him or cared for him should expect otherwise. Besides, he would say, there wasn’t a German bullet made for him and the war would soon be over, once Americans were in the fight. He would remember feeling “we owed France something for Lafayette,” and being “stirred heart and soul” by the war messages of Woodrow Wilson. Greatest of all was the sense of joining in a noble crusade across the sea, “over there” in old Europe.

He played it now on the piano, along with the other rousing and sentimental songs—“Good-bye Broadway, Hello France,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” Trying long afterward to describe the emotions of the time, he would stress that most Americans responded as he did, “stirred by the same flame that stirred me in those great days.”

The hard truth was that human beings had never been slaughtered in such numbers or so rapidly as in this hideous war. Nor with less to show for it. The machine gun, automatic rifles, massed artillery, poison gas, flamethrowers, the airplane, and the tank made a mockery of old-style textbook stratagems and old-style battlefield heroics. In the previous year, 1916, there had been 2 million casualties on the Western Front, the line of battle that reached all the way from the North Sea to the Swiss border, 350 miles in length, and despite such appalling butchery the line had hardly moved either way. In just four months at the Battle of the Somme, between July and October 1916, the Germans alone lost more men than were killed in all four years of the American Civil War. That spring of 1917, as Harry Truman, feeling “all patriotic,” helped organize a new Missouri artillery battery, a frontal assault by the British at Ypres gained 7,000 yards at a cost of 160,000 dead and wounded in five days.

Initially, the common view had been that the fighting wouldn’t last long. It was a war that would be quickly over. But from the summer of 1914 the slaughter had continued year after year, consuming a whole generation of English, Scots, French, and Germans. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,” Woodrow Wilson had said, stating the harsh reality, in his famous war message. Yet it was a war like the Civil War, the imagined pageantry of bright legions and banners flying, and such ringing words as Pétain’s at Verdun, “They shall not pass,” that stirred the souls of the young Americans signing up to “make the world safe for democracy,” the noble phrase of Wilson’s that people remembered above all.

Harry Truman felt, he later said, as if he were “Galahad after the Grail, and I’ll never forget how my love cried on my shoulder when I told her I was going. That was worth a lifetime on this earth.”

His convictions made him an effective recruiter. He painted the Stafford automobile bright red and went dashing about Kansas City in it wearing his new uniform. He lived in uniform. Nothing even remotely so exciting had ever happened to him before. Every day had focus now.

He had little trouble rejoining the National Guard and went immediately to work organizing a new artillery battery, Battery F, expecting to be made a sergeant. Instead, he was elected a first lieutenant, officers in the Guard then still being chosen by the men as in Civil War days. It was one of life’s great moments. He had never been elected anything until now.

Drilling began in May in the streets of Kansas City across from Union Station and inside Convention Hall. When the 2nd Missouri Field Artillery, as they were known, became the 129th Field Artillery of the 60th Brigade attached to the 35th Division, Harry had to face a regular Army physical for the first time. He was stripped, weighed, measured, examined for hernia, gonorrhea, piles, fallen arches, and defects of vision. He managed to pass the eye examination, according to his brother Vivian, by memorizing the chart. (Harry, Vivian liked to say, couldn’t see over the fence without his glasses.) The actual record of the examination shows that Harry had uncorrected vision of 20/50 in the right eye, 20/400 in the left eye, which theoretically meant he was blind in the left eye.

According to the same record he also stood 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 151 pounds, which made him 10 pounds heavier and an inch taller than the average recruit. His chest measured 33 inches “at expiration,” 37 inches “at inspiration.” All else was categorized “normal.”

The first units of the American Expeditionary Forces were by now in France, under the command of General John J. Pershing, who as every true son of Missouri knew was Missouri born and raised. On July 4, 1917, when Harry turned up at Bess Wallace’s house in full uniform, sporting silver spurs and a riding crop, American infantry of the 1st Division were parading through Paris to a tumultuous welcome.

In September Harry was on his way to Doniphan, a huge new tent encampment on a windswept plain adjacent to Fort Sill, at Lawton, Oklahoma, within the old Comanche Indian Reservation. There was not a tree, and Lawton, a prairie tank town, was twenty miles away. Except for some barren hills to the west, the hard country was as flat as a tabletop. Approaching trains could be seen for miles. The camp had been named for Alexander Doniphan, a Mexican War hero who had led a band of eight hundred Missouri volunteers on one of the longest marches in military history, more than 3,000 miles from Santa Fe to El Paso to Chihuahua to Buena Vista, while defeating several larger Mexican forces en route.

Reveille was at 5:45, breakfast at 6:30 A.M. Drill began at 7:30. Nights were surprisingly cold and the wind that blew almost constantly day or night was described in one formal account as “misery-producing.” “It was sure enough cold and still is,” Harry recorded early in October. Soon the dust storms struck. “A tent fifty yards away is invisible. Dust in my teeth, eyes, hair, nose, and down my neck.” The men were saying they would give Oklahoma to the Germans and call it even. On the rare days when the wind didn’t blow, Harry reported, “we are all very happy.”

The truth was he was happy under nearly any conditions. Bess was not to worry for a minute. He was too busy to be down in spirits or getting into any “meanness,” he told her, by which he seems to have meant troubles with women of the kind soldiers were known to be susceptible to. (In one letter he said she need not worry about him thinking of anyone but her, since there were only Indians in Lawton and “ugly ones at that,” but then, thinking better of what he had written, he quickly added that it wouldn’t matter if “all the Lillian Russells and Pauline Fredericks in this Republic were down here for I don’t like but one style of beauty and that’s yours.”)

His duties with the men included instruction in the handling of horses—about which he knew more than most new officers—trench-digging exercises, and artillery training with 3-inch guns which were few in number. He tried to accustom himself to thinking and figuring in the metric system. Most artillery terms were already familiar from his earlier days in the Guard: Defilade, “Protection from view by an object in front, such as a hill, a wood or building….” Enfilade, “To rake a line lengthwise from the side, by rifle or shell fire….” Field of fire, “The area which is within range of a gun or battery and not protected by intervening obstructions or defilade.” He stood inspection, played his part on the drill field. “I have been squads east and squads sideways, arms up and hands down until I can’t open my mouth without telling someone to straighten up and get in step.” He could march perfectly at the prescribed cadence of 120 steps a minute, 32 inches per stride. He was also acquiring an ability to curse like Captain Kidd, he said, and wondered if he might sometime have to face a high reckoning for it.

Each evening officers assembled for “school” on artillery fire and field service regulations, or to hear someone report on operations in France. “I learned how to say Verdun, Vosges, and Belgium, also camouflage,” he wrote after a lecture from a French officer. Another night, having listened to an English colonel who had been on the Western Front, he wrote to Bess, “He made us feel we were fighting for you and mother earth and I am of the same belief. I wouldn’t be left out of the greatest history-making epoch the world has ever seen for all there is to live for….”

In a twenty-four-hour exercise under “actual battlefield conditions,” he spent a night in the trenches and observed for the first time the famous rapid-firing French 75 in action. At special instructions on gas protection, he learned to put on a mask, then sat in a so-called “gas house” for ten minutes. When a rainstorm in January 1918 turned to snow to sleet to the worst blizzard he had ever seen, it made him think of Grandpa Young and all he had endured on the plains. For weeks the temperature stayed at zero or below. The bread froze and had to be cut with a saw. He was still living in a tent, heated by a Sibley stove of the kind used by the Army in the time of the Plains Indian wars.

After a day on horseback in February he decided he must be getting pretty tough, since he wasn’t the least tired. To find he could also make men “toe the line” seems to have come as an even greater revelation.

In addition to his regular duties, he had been assigned to run the regimental canteen—a dispensary for candy, sodas, cigarettes, tobacco, shoelaces, writing paper—and it was this that soon made him known to nearly everyone in camp. (Virgil Thomson, the future composer, who had also enlisted in the 129th and was at Doniphan at the same time, would remember Lieutenant Truman years later as “one of our most effective officers.”) To help make the operation a financial success (as most Army canteens were not) Harry took on a partner, Sergeant Edward Jacobson, a former clerk in a Kansas City clothing store. “I have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson and he is a crackerjack,” he told Bess, as if that were all the reason anyone would need to expect a profitable outcome. And it was indeed Jacobson who ran things, as Harry was always first to acknowledge.

They became fast friends. “Each day Harry would write a letter to his girl, Bess Wallace,” Jacobson remembered, “and I would write one to my sweetheart Bluma Rosenbaum…and when I went into town [to replenish supplies], I would mail them.” Harry had brought the Stafford to camp and had it stripped down to serve as a truck. The bright red car, with Truman at the wheel, Jacobson beside him, became a familiar sight rolling through camp, trailing a column of dust.

To finance the canteen every man in the regiment was assessed $2, which produced an instant capitalization of $2,200. In no time Truman and Jacobson had a “grand, rushing” business, taking in $500 to $900 a day. A barbershop and a tailor shop were added. After six months business was so successful overall that the canteen paid dividends of $10,000, which made Truman and Jacobson extremely popular and led them to conclude they were an unbeatable business combination. Some of the other officers began kidding Harry, calling him a “lucky Jew” and “Trumanheimer.” “I guess I should be very proud of my Jewish ability,” he said.

His one private worry was that he might somehow fail to measure up as an officer and be disqualified and disgraced. Rumors of an imminent departure for France had by now become commonplace. Faced with another physical exam and a doctor who twice refused to pass him because of his eyes, Harry simply kept talking until the doctor relented. He supposed he could put on a “real good conversation when circumstances demand it,” he told Bess. But it had been a close call.

He missed her terribly. “Jacobson says he’d go into the guardhouse thirty days for one night on Twelfth Street. I’d go for forty days if I could see you thirty minutes.” After a flying visit to Independence during which he was able to see her for little more than an hour, he wrote, “I didn’t know how crazy I was about you until I went to leave.” His letters, however, carried none of the old anguish over what he might make of himself in life. There was no more self-doubt, or self-pity over his supposedly bad Truman luck. Except for an attack of what he discreetly described as “indigestion,” he remained in perfect health, and even the indigestion ended quickly when a young Catholic chaplain, Father L. Curds Tiernan, came to the rescue with a bottle of whiskey.

Sergeant Jacobson and Father Tiernan were among the half dozen or so he counted now as his real pals. The others were fellow officers, including three from Independence, Edgar Hinde, Spencer Salisbury, and Roger Sermon. Another, James M. Pendergast, was the nephew of the Kansas City politician T.J. Pendergast. When Lieutenant Pendergast was called before a board of inquiry after the death of three of his men in the explosion of a live shell they had found on the reservation, it was Lieutenant Truman, as a member of the board, who did the most to defend him and to see that he was exonerated.

It was also at Harry’s urging that two of his superior officers, Colonel Karl D. Klemm and Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Danford, joined the Masons and this, too, he felt, helped greatly to expand his influence. Both Klemm and Danford were West Point graduates, Class of 1905, which would have been Harry’s class had he been admitted to the Academy. Klemm, a Kansas City man, was efficient, humorless, and, like Harry, had been elected to his position. Considered a strict, “Prussian type” officer, he would, as time went on, cause Harry and others considerable grief. “We elected Klemm and then were sorry we had,” Harry later admitted.

Danford, by striking contrast, had all the qualities in a leader that Harry most admired and hoped to cultivate in himself. Danford knew what he was talking about (he had helped write the artillery manual), and while an exacting disciplinarian, he knew also to treat those under him with kindness and understanding. Though Harry would serve under Danford but briefly, and only in training, he was never to forget him and the example he set. “He taught me more about handling men and the fundamentals of artillery fire in six weeks than I’d learned in the six months I’d been going over to the school of fire and attending the regimental schools.” While other instructors seemed determined to make a dark mystery of the mathematics involved, Danford, who had taught military science at Yale, emphasized that the point was to make the projectile hit the target. That Danford was among the few officers who also wore, eyeglasses must have provided still further reason to admire him.

The closest friend, however, was First Lieutenant Ted Marks, who was nothing like the rest of the Missouri men, but an Englishman with what seemed a natural military bearing, a pleasant, open face, and protruding ears. Two years older than Harry, Marks was a Kansas City tailor in civilian life whose beautiful custom-made suits sold for as much as $75. He had been born in Liverpool, ran away from home at age sixteen, and served three years in the Grenadier Guards before coming to America. He and Harry had first met more than ten years earlier, in 1906, when Marks walked into the National Guard offices to join up and found a bespectacled young corporal named Truman officiating behind the desk. As Marks would always remember, Harry had asked him how long he had been in the country. Marks said six months and Harry responded, “You speak pretty good English for the time you’ve been here,” which led Marks to wonder what sort of a country he had come to after all.

On one of the bitterest of Camp Doniphan’s bitter cold days, Marks, Truman, and another lieutenant, Newell Paterson, went for examination for promotion before General Lucian D. Berry, a hard-bitten old Army martinet who, with his big mustache, looked like a figure out of a Frederic Remington painting, and had a reputation for chewing up National Guard officers. By his lights, they were no better than “political officers,” unworthy of rank or respect. Once, when Truman’s captain, also a Guard officer, submitted an efficiency report full of praise for Harry Truman and recommending promotion, General Berry sent it back with the comment, “No man can be that good.”

The three lieutenants stood in the numbing cold outside Berry’s office waiting their turns. The temperature was near zero. When Lieutenant Paterson was called first, Marks and Truman remained standing for another hour and a half. When Harry’s turn came, the general and three colonels took him “over the jumps” for more than an hour, Berry becoming so loud and rough that Harry had trouble remembering anything. If he had the right answer, it only made Berry more angry. If he was unable to answer at all, Berry would stalk up and down the room pulling on his mustache and shouting, “Ah, you don’t know, do you?” or, “It would be a disaster to the country to let you command men!”

Harry came out flushed and angry and fearing the worst. Then, because it was nearly the lunch hour, Marks was kept only thirty minutes. As it turned out, all three lieutenants were passed, though Harry was not to learn of his promotion for another several months. He was told only that he and Paterson would be going overseas in advance of the others, as part of a select group of ten officers and one hundred men to be given further training in France, which he knew to be a high commendation.

“I suppose you will have to spend the rest of your life taking the conceit out of me,” he wrote Bess. “Mary is fully convinced that I am overloaded with it, although I never thought so.”

On the eve of departure, not knowing what else to do about his automobile, he sold it for $200.

The night of March 19, 1918, he was “moving out at last,” by troop train, the ride so rough he could hardly complete his letter to Bess. “I’d give anything in the world to see you and Mamma and Mary before I go across,” he wrote. “…You can write me Detachment 35th Division, 129th F.A., Camp Merritt, New Jersey, and I’ll probably get it.” When the train stopped briefly in the Kansas City yards, he was out of the car in an instant, running down the tracks in the dark looking for a telephone. A switchman in a shed told him to help himself. “The phone’s yours,” Harry would long remember the man saying. “But if she doesn’t break the engagement at four o’clock in the morning, she really loves you.”

On leave in New York before sailing, he and four other officers put up at the McAlpin Hotel on Broadway, and “did the town” as best they could in the little time available. They saw a vaudeville show at the Winter Garden, rode the subway, walked up Broadway after dark, up Fifth Avenue the next morning. By high-speed elevator they went to the top of the fifty-eight-story Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest skyscraper. They crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, ate in a Chinese restaurant. Harry, who had expected to be overwhelmed with admiration for New York, found it all very much overrated. The show at the Winter Garden was a flat disappointment. The celebrated lights on Broadway looked no different to him than those on 12th Street in Kansas City. The McAlpin was no better than Kansas City’s Muehlebach (which he spelled Muleback). And besides there were too many Jews. He called it a “Kike town” in a letter to Bess, and to the Nolands explained that in addition to the millions of “Israelitist extraction,” there were millions of “wops” as well. As for pretty girls, Kansas City had twice as many.

Only the Woolworth Building lived up to expectations. The view from the top was well worth the 50-cent admission.

Shopping on Madison Avenue, he was touched by the patriotic feelings of an optometrist who charged him just $17.50 for two pairs of aluminum-framed glasses, much less than he would have had to pay at home. To be on the safe side Harry was going to France with six pairs of glasses, all pince-nez.

“I imagine his vision with glasses is 20–20, but without the glasses he couldn’t recognize his brother twenty feet away,” another officer named Harry Vaughan would later explain. They had become friends at Doniphan. “So, he always has had several pair on hand in case…he would be so helpless without them, and he was advised that he could not wear the ordinary glasses with the side pieces over the ears in action, because it would interfere with wearing your gas mask, you see. It would leave a hole on either side that you would be able to get gas through. So he brought…I believe he said, four or five of his lens prescriptions in pince-nez.”

The George Washington, a confiscated German luxury liner with seven thousand troops aboard, sailed the night of March 29, 1918, Good Friday, nearly a year to the day since the President’s declaration of war. “There we were watching New York’s skyline diminish and wondering if we’d be heroes or corpses,” Harry remembered. He and Lieutenant Paterson stood at the rail for some time talking about German submarines and “a lot of things ahead.” Then they went below and, as Harry recalled, passed the rest of the night playing poker.

The weather was clear the whole way across, perfect submarine weather. The ship was part of a convoy, sailing a zigzag course once it reached the submarine zone. There were endless lifeboat drills and calisthenics on deck. Life preservers were worn at all times. At night, the ship was dark, smoking on deck forbidden. No one had much space. Officers were sleeping six to a cabin. As the time passed, Harry, who did not know how to swim and had never seen an ocean, wondered why anyone would ever want to be a sailor. He ached for home. The water was either blue or lead-colored, he noted, depending on whether the sun was out or in. The only variety in the panorama came at sunrise or sunset, and the sunsets weren’t half as good as back home.

II

The George Washington steamed into the crowded harbor of Brest the morning of April 13. The day was warm and sunny, and First Lieutenant Truman thought the town looked “quite wonderful.” It wasn’t Paris, but if Paris was as much livelier as it was bigger, then Paris had to be “some town.” Bands were playing, welcoming crowds lined the shore, thousands of people cheering and waving flags.

The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France by this time numbered nearly a million men, a figure that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. Only the summer before, on July 4, when the first American infantry unit marched through Paris, there had been just fourteen thousand American troops in all of France. Now, the seven thousand “doughboys” who came down the gangways from the George Washington were but a fraction of the monthly total. That April, 120,000 arrived. Soon there would be 250,000 landing every month until eventually there were 2 million American troops in France.

Four hundred miles away from the docks at Brest, to the northeast at the Belgian border, one of the most savage battles in history was raging. Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff had launched a massive frontal assault on the Allied lines along the River Lys, near Armentiéres. With Russia out of the war since December, after the fall of the czarist regime, the Germans were free to concentrate on one front, as they had wanted from the beginning, and this was intended to be their deciding offensive. The losses were appalling. Only the day before, April 12, the British commander, General Sir Douglas Haig, issued his famous order: “With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.” The Battle of the Lys lasted three weeks until the Ludendorff offensive was stopped. Winston Churchill would consider it the critical struggle on the Western Front and, thus, of the war. Yet to Lieutenant Truman and the thousands arriving with him, none of this was apparent. What they saw their first days ashore and for weeks, even months to come, was the France that was not the war. As Harry wrote to the Noland sisters, he felt like Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad, as much a tourist as a soldier.

Being an officer in the AEF, he found, meant accommodations such as he had never known or expected. At the hotel in Brest he had a room to himself larger than any in the Gates mansion. There were double lace curtains at the window and a white marble mantelpiece with a seventeenth century Dutch clock under a glass case, a beautiful affair even if it didn’t run. Chairs were upholstered in red plush, floors polished smooth as glass. He admired a crystal water decanter and a mahogany wardrobe with a full-length mirror in which he could also admire himself in his new overseas cap and Sam Browne belt.

For nearly two weeks he did little more than enjoy himself. If he had been disappointed by New York and the Atlantic Ocean, France more than made up for it. He enjoyed the food (the bread especially) and the wine. He admired gardens so well cultivated and cared for that there was hardly a weed to be seen. The whole surrounding countryside with its irregular patchwork of fields and hedgerows made him wish he were a painter, he told Bess. “The people generally treat us fine and seem very glad to accommodate us in any way they can.” Later he wrote, “I’m for the French more and more. They are the bravest of the brave.” They also knew how to build roads as smooth and solid as a billiard table “and every twenty meters there are trees on each side.” Nor could he get over the way audiences at the movies clapped and cheered during the love scenes. “They are the most sentimental people I ever saw,” he noted approvingly. If ever he had to give up being a Missourian, he decided, he would be a citizen of France, though so far he hardly dared try the language other than to say, “Je ne comprends pas.”

Good food, wine, and cognac were all plentiful and an American soldier’s pay went far. Harry calculated that his came to 1,100 francs a month, enough nearly “to retire on over here.” A fine meal cost about 10 francs. Wine and cognac were a comparable bargain. Most of the 35th Division, having been too long in Oklahoma, seemed determined to drink France dry. But they were certain to fail, he also noted, the supply being “inexhaustible.”

As he did not report to Bess, women, too, were plentiful. Temptation beckoned in Brest, as it would later in every interior city he went to in France. One American lieutenant wrote in his diary, “Wandering through dark streets. Ever-present women. So mysterious and seductive in the darkness…. A fellow’s got to hang on to himself here. Not many do.” But apparently Harry did.

“Personally, I think Harry is one of the cleanest fellows…the cleanest fellows morally that I ever saw, or know,” First Lieutenant Edgar Hinde of Independence would remember. “I never saw him do anything out of the way that would be questionable in the way of a moral situation. He was clean all the way through. I always admired him for that quality and you know when a man’s in the Army, why his morals get a pretty good test.”

“Wish I could step in and see you this evening,” Harry wrote to Bess the night of April 17, after five days in France. “Have only seen one good-looking French woman and she was married to some French general or admiral or something, anyway he had seven or eight yards of gold braid on him.”

At the end of April he was assigned to an elite artillery school 500 miles to the east, near the hilltop town of Chaumont, in Lorraine where Pershing had his headquarters. The first-class coach Harry traveled in was upholstered like a Pierce Arrow limousine, he reported happily to Ethel Noland. No wealthy civilian on tour ever had things better.

His new quarters were even more splendid than anything he had yet seen, a seventeenth-century gray stone chateau set in a lovely, walled park in the middle of a picture-book village called Montigny-sur-Aube, this in turn set in a gently sloping valley. There was a magnificent garden, a moat, stone walls six feet thick, tile floors, marble stairs, hand-carved woodwork, “everything you like to read about,” he told Ethel. “You’d never think that a war was raging in this same land, it is so peaceable and quiet and pretty.” Spring had arrived in full glory, with soft, fragrant air and trees along the brows of near fields all a delicate green. His one problem was the bells that kept him awake the first few nights. The church clock would strike eleven, “and then the clock on the Hotel de Ville would strike eleven five minutes later and then five minutes later some clock that I haven’t been able to locate yet would strike eleven. By that time the church clock had started on eleven fifteen and it was one continual round of pleasure all night long.”

Forbidden to give his location, he was able to say only that he was “somewhere in France.”

The first week at the artillery school was the most difficult ordeal he had ever experienced. After that, the work got harder. He felt he was in over his head, having never been to college, and worried constantly that he would fail. The mathematics was all at the college level. He studied surveying and astronomy. There was no time for anything but work, from seven in the morning until ten at night. There was hardly time to get from one class to the next. He had no idea what was happening in the war and of the outside world, he said, he was as ignorant as if he were in Arkansas.

Training in the classroom and on the firing range centered on the French 75-millimeter gun, a small, rapid-fire, rifled cannon known for its mobility and phenomenal accuracy. It had been developed twenty years before, its technology guarded by the French as a military secret. The slim, 6-foot barrel was of nickel steel and other alloys that were kept classified. The breechblock, gun carriage, and hydropneumatic recoil system were all of special design. Because the gun recoiled on its carriage, it stayed in place with each shot, and thus no time was lost correcting its aim between shots, which was the secret of its rapid fire. It could get off twenty to thirty shots a minute and had an effective range of five miles. Being light in weight compared to most cannon, a little over a ton and a half, and maneuverable with its high-spoked wooden wheels, it was considered ideal for trench warfare. The fire from a battery of four was murderous.

It was called the marvel weapon. The French would later say it won the war for them. No American or British-made fieldpiece could compare and American units relied on it almost exclusively. (Virtually no American fieldpieces-or American airplanes or tanks-were used in the war, for all the troops supplied by the United States.) To the Germans, it was the “Devil Gun.”

On Sundays he attended services at the Catholic church, where the air was chill and he was unable to understand a word. France was a grand place for Frenchmen, he had decided, and he didn’t blame them for fighting for it; “and I’m for helping them, but give me America, Missouri and Jackson County for mine with the finest girl in the world at the county seat,” he wrote on May 5, three days before his thirty-fourth birthday.

One of his examinations given on a Saturday in May would have driven the president of Yale University to distraction, he reported. The Sunday after, with little to do, he discovered volumes of music-Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann-and a “dandy” piano in a YMCA that had once been the home of a wealthy local family. He played at length while the other officers listened. “It sure was a rest after the week’s work.”

After five weeks, his ordeal over and feeling extremely lucky to have “slipped through,” he was ordered to rejoin his old regiment, which by now had arrived in France and was stationed at Angers. Heading west again by train, he seldom took his eyes off the passing scenery. Like so many American soldiers, he was astonished not only at how beautiful the country was but how very old. A young officer traveling with him, Arthur Wilson, remembered being amazed at Harry’s knowledge of French history. “He had maps and he knew where we were going. It didn’t mean anything to me….” During a wait at Orleans, Harry insisted they get out and see the city’s famous cathedral and the equestrian bronze of Joan of Arc in the main square.

At Angers, to his total surprise, he learned he had been made a captain months earlier. No one had bothered to tell him. He only found out when he saw it reported in The New York Times.

As adjutant of the 2nd Battalion, he was assigned to teach the other officers what he had learned. “I just barely slipped through at the school, and now they’ve got me teaching trig and logarithms and surveying and engineering,” he told Bess. Didn’t she think it amusing that an “old rube” from Missouri was handing out such knowledge to the Harvard and Yale boys? In another letter, he said he had never known how valuable a university education was until now.

She wrote to him faithfully, as did Mamma, Mary Jane, and Ethel Noland. Their letters took a month or more to reach him and arrived usually in batches of six or seven. “Please keep writing,” he told them. Knowing how they worried, he said nothing upsetting, never a word of discouragement or serious complaint. “No I haven’t seen any girls that I’d care to look at twice….” He was eating well, walking as much as fifteen miles a day. He never felt better, nor looked so good with his new captain’s bars. “I look like Siam’s King on a drunk when I get that little cockeyed cap stuck over one ear, a riding crop in my left hand, a whipcord suit and a strut that knocks ’em dead.” (“That was one of the things about this war,” Willa Cather would write, “it took a little fellow from a little town, gave him an air and a swagger….”) He had Arthur Wilson take his picture sitting on a horse. Like every good American soldier, Captain Harry Truman conceded, he had an “insane desire” to let the home folks know how he looked.

In the chest pockets of his tunic he carried three photographs. In the right pocket were Mamma and Mary Jane in her picture hat. In the left, over his heart, was a wistful portrait of Bess that he adored more than any ever taken of her. She had written on the back for him: “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France.”

The first week of July the 129th Regiment moved from Angers to what had once been Napoleon’s artillery base, Camp Coëtquidan, near Rennes, for final training before going into action. Again to his enormous surprise, Captain Truman learned he was to be a battery commander. He was summoned before Colonel Karl D. Klemm and told to begin at once. It was his highest ambition come true and he was scared to death. He would have command of 4 guns and 194 men.

Thursday morning, July 11, 1918, shoulders back, head up, he walked out onto the parade field to face for the first time Battery D of the 2nd Battalion, 129th Field Artillery, “Dizzy D,” by reputation, most of them Irish Catholics from Kansas City. “They were a pretty wild bunch of Irish, I’ll tell you that,” remembered Lieutenant Hinde. “They had [had] one captain named Charlie Allen and they had two or three others there, none of them could handle them, and finally they assigned Truman to command the battery. He was a third degree Mason in a Catholic battery and we thought he was going to have a pretty rough go of it….”

He was not at all what the men expected. One of them, recalling the scene, said he looked like “a sitting duck.” Another remembered “a stirring among the fellows…. Although they were standing at attention, you could feel the Irish blood boiling—as much as to say, if this guy thinks he’s going to take us over, he’s mistaken.” A private named Vere Leigh would recall “a rather short fellow, compact, serious face, wearing glasses. And we’d had all kinds of officers and this was just another one you know.” To others Harry looked, with the pince-nez spectacles, like a store clerk or a professor and totally out of his element. “Yes,” said Private Edward McKim, “you could see that he was scared to death.”

Harry, who would remember the moment more vividly than anyone, said he had never been so terrified. He could feel all their eyes on him, feel them sizing him up. “I could just see my hide on the fence…. Never on the front or anywhere else have I been so nervous.”

According to Private Albert Ridge, who later became a judge in Kansas City, the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them. As he was to confess long afterward, writing about himself in the third person, “He was so badly scared he couldn’t say a word….”

At last he called, “Dismissed!” As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer. (“And then we gave Captain Truman the Bronx cheer, that’s a fact,” said Vere Leigh.) As the day wore on, they staged a sham stampede of their horses. After taps, a fight broke out in the barracks and several men wound up in the infirmary.

In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were “busted” in rank. “He didn’t hesitate at all,” remembered Private Leigh. “The very next morning this was on the board. He must have sat up all night…. I think the First Sergeant was at the head of the list.”

Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. “I didn’t come over here to get along with you,” he said. “You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you right back now.” There was no mistaking his tone. No one doubted he meant exactly what he said. After that, as Harry remembered, “We got along.” But a private named Floyd Ricketts also remembered the food improving noticeably and that Captain Truman took a personal interest in the men and would talk to them in a way most officers wouldn’t.

He proved a model officer and extremely popular with “wild Irish” Battery D. “Well, I would say that his major characteristic was great friendliness, that he had such warmth and a liking for people,” recalled Arthur Wilson. “He was not in any way the arrogant, bossy type, or Prussian type of officer. A lot of us youngsters, you know, when they put gold bars on our shoulders, why we thought that we sort of ruled the world. And he had, as an older man, a very quiet sort of a way of serving as a leader…. And he was a disciplinarian but he was very fair. I don’t know, I can’t describe what the personal magnetism was except that he had it.”

“You soldier for me, and I’ll soldier for you,” Harry told the men. “Soldier, soldier all the time,” his favorite colonel, Robert Danford, had said at Camp Doniphan.

For one month he drilled the men on the firing line, trying to teach them everything he knew about the French 75. They thought the weapon a wonder and, with practice, claimed, in Missouri style, that they could pick off a sparrow on a wire at 9,000 yards.

Working them hard, insisting on strict behavior, making them “walk the chalk,” and driving himself no less, he found his satisfaction in the task, his pride in the men, as well as his own newfound sense of power, were like nothing he had ever known. “Talk about your infantryman,” he boasted, “why he can only shoot one little old bullet at a time at the Hun. I can give one command to my battery and send 862 on the way at one round and as many every three seconds until I say stop.” Whatever dislike or fear of guns he had known before appears to have vanished. He knew how much was riding on his judgment now. “You’ve no idea what an immense responsibility it is to take 194 men to the front,” he told Bess. Were he to get them killed, he would never be able to look anyone in the face again.

How brave he might be once the high-explosive shells began flying weighed heavily on him. He kept thinking of a man Uncle Harrison once described who had the bravest kind of head but whose legs “wouldn’t stand.”

Enthusiasm in the camp was fueled now by daily dispatches of Americans in action at last. Through most of that spring, while Captain Truman was at Montigny-sur-Aube, the numerical superiority of the Germans on the Western Front had become clear. The great question was whether American forces would arrive in time and in sufficient strength to make the difference. By June the Germans were back again on the banks of the Marne, within cannon shot of Paris. The situation was grim. The leaders of France, Italy, and Great Britain warned Woodrow Wilson of the “great danger of the war being lost” unless American forces became available as rapidly as possible. Pershing had been bound and determined to commit his troops only as a separate American command, but because of the emergency more than 250,000 Americans were rushed to the front to support the French under the command of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The Americans fought bravely at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Then, on July 15, the Germans unleashed another huge offensive aimed at Paris, the Second Battle of the Marne, sending fifty-two divisions against thirty-four Allied divisions, nine of which were American. In three days, from July 15 to July 18, the tide of battle turned. To Ludendorff, American forces had been the “decisive” factor, and the German chancellor later confessed that “at the beginning of July 1918, I was convinced…that before the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals…. That was on the 15th. On the 18th even the most optimistic among us knew that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.”

But for the Americans, the worst was still ahead.

In the time allotted, Captain Truman had transformed what had been generally considered the worst battery in the regiment to what was clearly one of the best, as was demonstrated in conspicuous fashion the day of their departure for the front, on August 17. The 129th Field Artillery began moving out from a nearby railyard, one battery at a time. To a very large degree the war was fought with railroads. The movement of troops and equipment by rail was ever critical, hence great store was set on how well officers and men managed things when the time came to go. For artillerymen especially, “moving out” was a terrific undertaking. The trains for each of the batteries were comprised of some seventeen flat-cars, thirty “dinky” French boxcars (these marked “40 Hommes, 8 Chevaux”), and a single passenger coach for officers. Everything needed had to go aboard—troops, guns, caissons, field kitchens, horses, harness, hay, feed, battery records, extra supplies of every sort—in the quickest time, with the least wasted motions possible.

As it was, each battery managed to get on board and under way in about an hour. The time for Battery D was 48 minutes, a record.

They were rolling by eight in the morning and the trip lasted two days, their train passing close enough to Paris that they could see the top of the Eiffel Tower. Beyond Paris, except for the scars of war, the rolling countryside might have been Missouri or eastern Kansas. Then they were beside the Marne, traveling past Château-Thierry, scene of a great American victory, then along a narrowing valley, past Epernay, in the heart of the champagne country. They turned southeast. For mile after mile, in a landscape of broken wooded hills, one small village after another looked much alike with their orange tile roofs and single church steeples.

They were heading for the beautiful Vosges Mountains, in Alsace, nearly to the Swiss border, which was the extreme eastern end of the front. Long the sleepiest sector of the war, it was, the American high command had decided, the ideal place for green troops to get some experience holding the lines, as a preliminary to an all-out American offensive. The first American battle casualties had been suffered in the Vosges, the autumn before, and in the time since one division after another had been moved in and out.

The end of the line, hours later in the dark, was the town of Saulxures, by a swift little river in a mountain valley. In mid-August, on the night Battery D arrived, the air outside the train was sweet with the smell of giant firs and patches of purple thyme along the river banks. Harry would remember, too, how good the local beer tasted.

The following morning, August 20, puffs of white smoke could be seen in the sky five or six miles to the east, and, in the middle, a moving speck. It was anti-aircraft shrapnel being fired at an enemy observation plane, and the first real sign of war. But by then Harry was already on his way into the mountains.

III

“It was just a quiet sector to give the boys a little indoctrination in trench warfare,” recalled Sergeant Frederick Bowman, one of the small detachment that went with Captain Truman to locate a gun position. They traveled by truck at first, over twisting roads to a tiny, picturesque village called Kruth. Then, with horses and accompanied by a French officer who spoke no English, they began a hard, steady climb into the fir-clad mountains, up logging roads as steep as a roof. It was terrain such as the Missouri men had never seen, with rushing streams, beds of green moss inches deep, great granite boulders heaped on all sides, and everything heavily shadowed beneath the huge, shaggy trees. The enemy’s batteries were on an opposite mountainside. As Sergeant Bowman said, the topography was “kind of a V-shaped affair,” and so wild and rugged, it appeared, that either side might fire away endlessly and do no harm.

The sky was clear, the day warm and sunny, visibility excellent—not ordinary conditions in the Vosges—but the men and horses were well concealed under the trees. At one point only, when they came to an open ridge in plain view of the Germans, did the French officer have them go at intervals, one man at a time.

They found the spot they wanted at the edge of the trees at an elevation, Harry reckoned, of more than 2,000 feet above the valley. The men would remember making a meal of cold beans and beef, hardtack and a mess kit full of wild red raspberries picked en route, these topped off with champagne provided by the French officer.

Camping in the woods, they spent several days getting set up. Then the rest of the battery began the long, hard climb from below, hauling the guns. “It was surely some steep hill,” Harry wrote. Once, a can of lard broke loose from a wagon and bounced the whole way to the bottom. Clouds had moved in on the mountain, meantime, shrouding the trees in mist. The chance of being seen was no longer a worry, but in the damp air now even the least sound carried. To muffle the wheels of the guns Harry had them wrapped in burlap, which struck some of the men as silly. And indeed, the whole struggle of hauling everything into place seemed doubly absurd when, after days of doing nothing in the clouds, then days of rain, the battery was told to pack and move on again.

Harry had been ordered to take up a position about a mile closer to the German lines and prepare to fire a gas barrage. So his first action would be to shell the enemy with poison gas.

The battery moved after nightfall, horses, guns, and men laboring up and down roads now slick with mud and rain. And it was raining still the next afternoon when they took their new position, everyone exhausted from no sleep but also extremely excited and eager to commence firing for real at last. The targets were some German batteries four miles distant. The barrage was to begin after dark and to be what in artillery parlance was called “fire for neutralization,” to “suppress the activities of the enemy” without necessarily destroying his position.

When the command was given at precisely 8:00 P.M., August 29, four batteries of the 129th opened up. The piercing crash of the 75s went on for half an hour. Battery D fired five hundred rounds. “We were firing away and having a hell of a good time doing it,” remembered Private Leigh, “until…[we] woke somebody up over there.”

The barrage over, the night was suddenly still. There was only the sound of the rain. At this point the battery was supposed to move out with all speed, to take a new position before the Germans had time to return the fire. Horses were to be brought up at once from the rear, the guns hauled away. But the first sergeant in charge of the horses was nowhere to be found. The job of first sergeant was assigned on a rotating basis and the first sergeant that night was Glen Wooldridge, who didn’t appear with the horses for nearly half an hour. Then, with everybody charging about in the dark rushing to make up for lost time, things became miserably scrambled. Fearing the Germans would retaliate with a gas barrage of their own, the men had their masks on. Some were struggling frantically to get masks on the horses.

When the first German shells came screaming over, Harry was up on a horse trying to see what was going on. A shell burst with a shattering roar not 15 feet from him. His horse was hit—or slipped—and went over into a shell hole and rolled on top of him, pinning him down helplessly. By the time he was pulled free by a big, heavy-shouldered lieutenant named Vic Housholder, his breath was nearly gone—Housholder remembered him “gasping like a catfish out of water.” Meantime, half the horses and two of the guns had charged off in the dark, over a hill in the wrong direction to become hopelessly mired in the mud. Then all at once, the same unfortunate Sergeant Wooldridge, in panic, began yelling at the top of his voice for everyone to run, saying the Germans had a “bracket” on them.

Wooldridge himself took off. Others ran after him, though how many is uncertain. No one could see much of anything in the black night and pouring rain, and with such wild confusion all around. With their masks on, telling who was who was nearly impossible, even at close range. Private Walter Menefee said later there was only Captain Truman and maybe three or four others who didn’t run. “I led the parade!” Menefee admitted. Vere Leigh thought hardly anyone took off except Wooldridge.

In any event, Captain Truman stood his ground, and once having recovered his breath, let fly with a blast of profanity that had stunning effect chiefly because it came from the officer who, heretofore, had seemed so proper and reserved. “I got up and called them everything I knew,” was how Harry himself remembered the moment. He was livid and terrified.

For years afterward at reunions in Kansas City, with whiskey flowing, there would be much lighthearted banter and kidding over this first encounter with the enemy, Battery D’s so-called “Battle of Who Run.” But there was nothing the least comical about the situation at the time.

With his blistering verbal barrage and the vivid example of his own fierce courage under fire, Captain Truman succeeded finally in getting things in control. Two horses were dead, two others had to be shot. The guns, in mud to their axles, were impossible to move with manpower only. They could be rescued later, he decided, and marched the men back to base position through the dark and the continuing downpour.

At about four in the morning, after a hot meal, he went to his tent, collapsed, and slept for twelve hours.

He was worried sick, sure he was disgraced. But his superior, Major Marvin Gates, told him reassuringly that green troops often behaved badly their first time and to forget about it. Gates recommended only that Sergeant Wooldridge be court-martialed at once. Unable to bring himself to do that, Harry had Wooldridge broken to private and transferred to another battery, where, as it turned out, he later performed well and bravely.

In a letter to Bess, Harry said it had not been until the day after that terrible night that he figured out what had happened. “The men think I am not much afraid of shells but they don’t know I was too scared to run and that is pretty scared.”

Because no one had been killed in the melee, the men decided that Captain Truman—Captain Harry—besides being cool under fire, was good luck. When time came to go back for the abandoned guns, a potentially perilous mission, every man in the battery volunteered. Harry, deeply touched, did the job with only the necessary men and horses.

At first light, September 3, the regiment was on the move again and in full battle dress—helmets, gas masks at the ready, blanket rolls, and full packs that weighed as much as 70 pounds, or more than half the weight of some of the men. A sign on Grand Avenue, Kansas City, had said: “Join the Artillery and Ride.” Now, to save the horses on the steep roads, everybody was on foot, officers included.

Harry was struck by the beauty of the mountain valleys. Hay and grain were being harvested, but by old people and children, the old women all in black. “It was literally true that the manhood of France was in the army,” wrote a lieutenant named Jay Lee. “Only the very old and the crippled were exempt from the army, but not from the work.”

At the village of Vagny two days later, the regiment boarded another train, this bound north. The next night, at Bayon on the Moselle River, a curious incident occurred that frightened Harry more than he let on. At the station a young lieutenant colonel from a Missouri infantry division told him to get his men off the train and find cover fast, before daylight. The whole area, he said, was under bombardment from German planes. In the dark Harry could make out the carcasses of two dead horses beside the platform. The colonel introduced himself. He was Bennett Clark, the son of Speaker of the House of Representatives Champ Clark of Missouri, who had been one of John Truman’s favorite Democrats. Colonel Clark said he would hate to see Harry and his men suffer the same fate as the horses. “Well, I was scared green,” Harry later wrote. “I was in command of the train and there was absolutely no one to pass the buck to. I simply had to unload that battery and find a place for it before daylight.” Guns, horses, ammunition were off the train and into the pine woods in the least time possible, everybody moving with breakneck urgency. But as the morning passed and no German planes came, Harry walked back to the station, where he found Clark grinning. The joke was on Harry, Clark said. There had never been any German planes. When Harry asked about the dead horses, Clark said they had been shot by a veterinarian.

Harry appears to have taken this in good spirits, partly because his men had enjoyed a much-needed rest and a chance to bathe in the river. He and Bennett Clark were to have a great deal to do with one another in time to come, but for now neither had any reason to expect to see the other ever again.

By dusk the regiment was on its way on foot. They marched most of the night and the following day. In a pocket diary Harry marked their progress: “September 10. Leave Coyviller at dark. Rain…September 11. Leave Bosserville at 7:30 P.M. Rain Rain Rain Went through Nancy dark as hell.”

“Who can ever forget the impression of those night marches!” Lieutenant Jay Lee would write after the war, in a privately published history of the 129th Regiment.

They were part of the first big American push, half a million men on their way to Saint-Mihiel, south of Verdun.

“American drive begins,” Harry scrawled in his diary on Thursday, September 12. “Heard first roar of American artillery.”

They were held in reserve short of Saint-Mihiel for several days, horses harnessed, everything ready to move at a moment’s notice. It was now that Harry felt himself in “the great adventure” at last. In long lines, thousands of bedraggled German prisoners marched past. “We are doing our best to finish the job and get home,” he wrote to Bess, “but we can’t leave until it’s done. In fact, we don’t want to leave until it’s done.”

Among those in his command he had come to depend on were Sergeant Edward Meisburger, who in the midst of the chaos at “Who Run” never flinched, and Sergeant Ralph Thacker, who, though only nineteen, had the judgment and staying quality of a much older man. Lee Heillman, the cook, Frank Spina, the barber, were the best in the Army. Harry Kelley, the instrument sergeant, was “very, very bright,” an “excellent soldier,” who could figure the firing data quite as well as Harry could.

The night of September 16, in bright moonlight, they began the forced march that none of them would forget. Orders had changed. Saint-Mihiel had been a sudden, resounding American victory. The Germans were overrun in two days. So the 129th was en route to the Argonne Forest.

“It was march all night and part of the day, grab a few hours sleep and march some more,” Harry wrote.

The Supreme Command had decided on a colossal, all-out offensive to end the war. The attack, infinitely greater than any that had gone before, would extend along the entire Western Front from Verdun to the sea. The sector allotted to the American Army ran from the Meuse River, north of Verdun, to the Argonne Forest, a distance of twenty-four miles. The American objective was to cut the German rail lines at Sedan.

This great Meuse-Argonne offensive, as it would be known, was the largest action in American military history until then. No larger American army had ever been seen than the one now on the roads. Fifteen divisions were moving up—600,000 men, nearly 3,000 artillery pieces, trucks, tanks, supply wagons, more than 90,000 horses—a logistical problem of staggering proportions that had been worked out by an exceptionally able officer on Pershing’s staff, Colonel George C. Marshall. Infantry and ammunition were carried by big, lumbering, chain-drive trucks, but because the horse-drawn artillery moved so much more slowly, the order of march was mixed, to keep solid columns. Discipline on the road was poor, congestion often a nightmare. Everything was moving up by just three roads and much of the time the traffic was two-way, with the French troops that were being relieved coming back from the front. Furthermore, to keep the Germans from knowing what was happening, nothing could go forward or back except under the cover of darkness. Officers in charge of the roads had often to brandish revolvers to keep traffic moving. And after the first moonlit night, a fine rain fell nearly all the while, turning the roads to rivers of mud. Many horses were in such poor shape by this time that they began dropping in their traces and had to be destroyed.

To lessen the burden on the horses, the artillerymen carried all they could. “And there was an order out,” Private Floyd Ricketts remembered, “that we cannoneers who were walking and following the guns were not to hold onto any part of the gun or caissons so as not to put any more burden on the horses. But walking along almost dead on your feet, you could hardly resist grabbing a hold of the caisson to help you along.”

Colonel Klemm, in a state such as the men had never seen, kept riding up and down the line shouting orders “like a crazy man” and at one point senselessly ordered an advance at double-time up a long hill. Had he not been wearing a yellow rain slicker, some of the men later speculated, he might have been shot in the back. But because Father Tiernan had on the same color coat no one would have risked making a mistake in the dark.

Harry took the men off the road to rest. Klemm found out and demanded to know what he was doing. “Carrying out orders, sir,” Harry answered, after which, it is said, the men adored him as never before.

Later, Harry let a man with a twisted ankle, Sergeant Jim Doherty, ride his horse, which was against orders. Klemm, seeing Doherty, flew into a rage and ordered him down. Harry told Klemm that as long as he, Harry, was in command of the battery, Doherty would ride. Klemm, furious, turned and rode off, but not, apparently, before telling Harry what he thought of him.

“The Colonel insults me shamefully,” Harry wrote in his diary. “No gentleman would say what he said. Damn him.”

(Reminiscing about the march long afterward, some of the men would speculate that Klemm really had gone crazy for the moment, or was drunk. Klemm would remain a troubling memory for years. In 1925 in his Kansas City business office, he shot and killed himself.)

The march went on for a week. “The weather was bad, rainy, and we would sleep in the daytime in thickets or in woods and then take off at dusk and march all night,” said Private Ricketts. They passed places called Ourches, Loisy, and Rembercourt, which were nothing but ruins. Sometimes Harry and Father Tiernan walked together at the head of the battery, talking about “the history of the world and I don’t know what all,” Harry remembered. If all priests were like him, he told Tiernan, there wouldn’t be any Protestants.

The morning of September 22, they pulled off to sleep in a rain-soaked forest opposite Rarécourt, close to their final position. From here on they would travel light, free of their supply train, and as rapidly as possible, everybody riding.

Harry’s diary entry for Monday, September 22, says only, “Wild ride to position tonight.” Later, for Bess, he wrote this vivid account:

It had been a forced march of nearly 100 miles and they arrived on time. Indeed, the whole massive move to the front had been a total success. Incredibly, not a single unit failed to reach its appointed place on schedule. The 129th Regiment’s designated position was Hill 290, a gradual slope half a mile from a crossroads village called Neuvilly, which consisted mainly of a ruined stone church that would serve as a field hospital and where a much-published photograph would be taken of the wounded in stretchers crowded beneath a huge painting of the Ascension that had miraculously survived and still hung on the shattered wall above the altar.

Captain Truman and Battery D were assigned to a clump of saplings near a fair-sized wood across a field of mud. They arrived in pitch dark at 3:00 A.M., the rain still coming down, men and horses exhausted. Only by hitching twelve horses to each gun and having every man push were they able to get all four guns in place by daylight. In the distance, across an open No-Man’s-Land, was the German strongpoint of Boureuilles.

The next three days were spent in preparation for “H-Hour.” Trenches were dug, ammunition stacked, trees cleared for a field-of-fire. From time to time, German shells came screaming over. The second night several hit the exact spot where Harry had slept the first morning and would have made small pieces of him, as he said, had he not shifted locations. The evening of Wednesday, September 25, in Colonel Klemm’s dugout, the battery commanders received their orders. The offensive was to begin in the morning, “H-Hour,” at 5:30 A.M. Each battery was to fire 1,000 rounds an hour. This meant six rounds per gun per minute, since each gun would need ten minutes every hour for cooling off. The first hour, before the infantry moved out, would be “preparation” fire, to destroy barbed-wire entanglements. Afterward, at “H-Hour,” would come a two-hour “rolling” barrage during which the range of fire would have to advance steadily, 100 meters every four minutes, over the heads of the advancing infantry. Thus even a small mistake by battery commanders or gun crews could bring down disaster on their own troops.

“Everything was now in readiness, with the quiet which precedes the storm,” wrote Lieutenant Jay Lee in his formal history. “Late in the afternoon Captain Roger T. Sermon, Regimental Personnel Officer, paid the men, according to routine, a ceremony that never failed to arouse general interest, even on so eventful an occasion as this.”

Harry, Lieutenant Housholder, and Sergeant Kelley were up all night going over their final computations.

At a different point along the line, a swashbuckling American tank commander, Lieutenant Colonel George Patton, impatient for morning, wrote to his wife, “Just a word to you before I leave to play a part in what promises to be the biggest battle of the war or world so far.”

The bombardment began long before daylight when the air was chill, at 4:20 A.M., the morning of Thursday, September 26, 1918. Two thousand seven hundred guns opened fire all along the front with a roar such as had never been heard before. In three hours more ammunition was expended than during the entire Civil War—and at an estimated cost of a million dollars per minute. The American air ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who took off in his plane before daybreak, said, “Through the darkness the whole western horizon was illumined with one mass of jagged flashes.” From Hill 290 it looked as though the sky was on fire—“as though every gun in France was turned loose,” said Harry.

At 5:30, “H-Hour,” exactly on schedule, the rolling barrage opened up. “That gun squad worked just like clockwork,” remembered Corporal Harry Murphy. “It was—it was a sight, they just were perfect. They just got those rounds off so fast that—unbelievable.”

“My guns were so hot,” wrote Harry, “that they would boil [the] wet gunnysacks we put on them to keep them cool.”

When the barrage ended all was still except for distant machine-gun fire that sounded oddly, Harry thought, like a typewriter.

The infantry had pushed off into a charred, cratered landscape with no visible landmarks, then disappeared into a thick white fog. The first phase of the fighting, as George Marshall would write, was “confusing in the extreme.” The Germans, though greatly outnumbered, were solidly dug in on high ground, ideal ground defensively, and a nightmare for those on the attack. Up the center ran a huge hogback, heavily wooded, with high points where the Germans had all the advantage, after four years of work on their defenses. Most of the American divisions being hurled at them had never had contact with an enemy before. Some troops had never handled a rifle until now.

The 129th Field Artillery was ordered forward, to follow the infantry. Captain Truman and Major Gates went out ahead trying to spot enemy gun emplacements and for a while were pinned down on a road by machine-gun fire. From where they had started to the sheltering woods on the other side of No-Man’s-Land was only about a mile and a half, but hauling the guns through the shell-blasted muck, craters, and twisted barbed wire was a long day in hell. The crossing took twelve hours, the struggle lasting into the night. Men and horses pushed and hauled under nearly constant fire. The German shells came over with a sound like the scream of air brakes, then hit with a terrific explosion, throwing up dirt and pieces of iron in all directions. Yet so exhausted were the men as night wore on that some of them were falling asleep on their feet.

The next day, after some confusion in orders, they started forward again. They saw the dead now, scattered here and there, and nearly all were Americans, since the retreating Germans carried their dead and wounded back with them. At a crossroads near Cheppy, heaped in a pile, were seventeen American dead, infantrymen, while down the road a dozen more were lying “head to heel,” all “shot in the back after they’d gone by,” Harry surmised. He would remember how quiet his men became at the sight and the sergeant who spoke up, “Now you sons-of-bitches, you’ll believe you’re in a war.”

West of Cheppy the battery moved into a peach orchard. Harry and one of his lieutenants, Leslie Zemer, Sergeant Kelley and Corporal William O’Hare went out ahead to establish an observation post, stringing a telephone line and advancing, unknowingly, several hundred yards beyond the infantry. About dusk, from the crest of a hill, Harry saw an American plane drop a flare off to the west, then turning his field glasses on the spot, saw a German battery pulling into position on the left flank, across a small river in front of the 28th Division, which was beyond his own assigned sector. Standing orders were to fire only at enemy batteries facing the 35th Division. Harry decided to disregard that.

“Truman didn’t panic,” remembered Private Leigh, “he let them [the Germans] take their horses away from the guns, which was exactly what he should have done. If it had been me I would have hollered for D Battery to start firing as soon as I saw them. He didn’t do that, he let them get into position, get all set to fire, with their horses by this time a couple of miles away. Then he had his firing data exact. It’s no good to have a man up there if he don’t know what the hell he’s doing….”

“Truman sent back the data,” Private McKim recalled. “We went into action and he said, ‘Fire at will, fire as fast as you can,’ and we just poured them in there.”

The decision undoubtedly saved lives in the 28th Division, and though an outraged Colonel Klemm was on the phone almost at once, threatening Captain Truman with court-martial for violating orders, nothing came of it.

A German plane, meantime, had spotted the battery in the peach orchard—the pilot had actually flown in at about 300 feet and lobbed down a few German “potato-masher” hand grenades—so Harry, back with his battery, ordered everyone to pull out at once. German artillery fire, a “lot of heavy stuff,” came soon after. “You know,” said Vere Leigh, “when you’re in the artillery they don’t shoot at you with machine guns. You’re back from the line, and they shoot at you with that heavy stuff. They wiped that peach orchard out.”

This was on September 27. Later that same night, as the battery moved on, Harry was on horseback when he was hit in the face by a low-hanging branch and suddenly found himself without his glasses and unable to see. The horse kept moving with the column. Harry turned frantically in the saddle to look behind, only to find the glasses sitting nicely on the horse’s back.

In his diary he had time for the barest record:

One soldier wrote, “The artillery fire has been something awful for the past two days. Shells are screaming over our heads constantly. The Germans shell us quite often, and we are continually hugging the earth, making ourselves as thin as possible. I feel like a man of fifty….”

On the afternoon of the 29th, reports came that the infantry was losing ground. American stragglers began streaming past. The Germans were about to counterattack. Harry’s immediate superior was Major John Miles and as every man knew there were just two possible orders to give for a position about to be overrun. One was “direct fire”—point-blank fire into the advancing enemy—and then stand by the guns to die or be captured. The other was to abandon the guns and fall back. “Well, men,” Miles said. “Get ready and we’ll give them direct fire.”

The German attack never came. Still, as Lieutenant Lee would write, “The coolness, the steady courage, the readiness to stand fast to the last, evidenced by Major Miles and his men on that anxious afternoon, were none the less inspiring that they were not pressed to the final sacrifice.”

Casualties among the infantry were heavy—as high as 50 percent in the 35th Division. Litter cases at the dressing station at Cheppy numbered in the hundreds. Fourteen ambulances loaded with wounded had been sent to the rear from that one station in a single day. On September 30 thousands of men were being fed there, most of whom had been wounded or gassed. Father Tiernan was busy burying the dead under fire all afternoon. One ambulance company alone suffered more than fifty casualties.

The Meuse-Argonne offensive was to have been another swift, smashing American victory, like Saint-Mihiel, but it was not. Sedan was ultimately taken, but at appalling cost. The Meuse-Argonne was the battle that produced the so-called “Lost Battalion,” an infantry unit that was trapped for five days and suffered casualties of nearly 70 percent, and also the most appealing American hero of the war, infantryman Alvin York from the hills of Tennessee, who single-handedly captured 132 Germans in one day. In all, in 47 days of fury, there were 117,000 American casualties. In the military cemetery on the Romagne Heights, at the center of the battlefield, 14,246 dead would be buried, making it the largest American military graveyard in Europe.

“It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it’s bad enough,” Harry wrote Bess in the first week of October. The heroes, he added, are all in the infantry.

The regiment was pulled back for rest. His own men looked like scarecrows and their respect for him had never been greater. “He was the Captain, he was the head man,” Vere Leigh said later, “and he was treated as such, we respected him, and he earned it. That’s why we respected him, because he earned it…. He’s not a dramatic type or anything like it. He’s no Patton, you know. He might have been a better soldier than Patton, but he was not a showoff.”

Harry had lost 20 pounds. He could hardly believe what he had been through. Terrible as it had been, it was also “the most terrific experience of my life.” He couldn’t help feeling proud. His men were alive and in one piece.

In mid-October, with the weather still cheerless and colder than before, the regiment took up new positions on the bleak heights east of Verdun, above the Meuse River Valley, in preparation for what was to be the final drive. Days were spent laying telephone wires, digging new dugouts, and camouflaging. His battery was soon so perfectly concealed that Harry himself had trouble finding it after dark. His dugout, down the road, was a “palace,” with stove, table and chair, a telephone beside his cot—“all the comforts of home except that I’ll have such a habit of sleeping underground that I’ll have to go to the cellar to sleep when I get home.”

Lieutenant Harry Vaughan, who was in a different regiment and who had been out of touch with Harry since Camp Doniphan, was seeing more of him now and puzzled how, after weeks in the trenches, any man could look so consistently clean and dapper.

Before Battery D, in the distance, rising on the grim horizon like the hump of an evil subterranean monster, was the famous bastion of Douaumont, once the showpiece of French defenses, the greatest fortress in the world. Harry thought it and the surrounding landscape comprised the most dreary prospect he had ever looked upon. Shattered dead trees stood like ghosts. The ground everywhere was a mass of shell craters. In Verdun itself not a building remained undamaged. The ancient city had caught the full force of the war. The civilian population had long since fled. Harry tried to imagine the same panorama before the war, with everything as cultivated and beautiful as the rest of France he had seen.

To stem the German tide in 1916, France had sent an unending column of men and artillery to Verdun. The fury and horror had been like nothing in history. The French, Harry was told, had put their 75s “hub-to-hub” for direct fire at the advancing enemy. The battle lasted ten months, the longest ever. Casualties on both sides came to 900,000 men. The ground everywhere was still a rubbish heap of weapons, shells, shreds of clothing, and no one knew how many dead. In a letter to the Noland sisters, he described a field a short distance to the west of his position “where every time a shell lights it blows up a piece of someone.” In none of his letters did he complain. In none did he even begin to describe the truth of the horrors he had seen. Like nearly every man writing home, he tried to put a good face on things. Only now did he seem to waver somewhat. He couldn’t shake the presence of the dead from his mind. “When the moon rises…,” he told Bess, “you can imagine that the ghosts of the half-million Frenchmen who were slaughtered here are holding a sorrowful parade over the ruins.” He did not, however, mention the smell or the rats everywhere.

To Ethel Noland he sent a poppy he found among the rocks near his new observation post, close to the German lines, at the end of a four-mile, zigzag hike through the trenches. He had brought back two flowers, the other for Bess.

The men were kept busy working on their positions, gas-proofing dugouts, moving ammunition, standing guard. The shelling continued. Guns boomed somewhere, near or far, almost continuously.

The weather turned colder. There was more rain. A day with sunshine was an event worth noting in his diary. “Fine day,” Harry wrote October 28. “Very fine day,” reads the entry for October 29. Before dawn on November 1 came another “show” like the one at the Argonne, as every battery opened up on the German lines for five straight hours.

For weeks there had been rumors of peace. A German pilot shot down just behind Battery D said the war would be over in ten days. On November 7 a United Press correspondent, Roy Howard, sent a cable from Paris saying hostilities had ceased at two o’clock that afternoon. The news was false.

On November 9 the infantry went forward once more, after an hour-long barrage. Harry’s friend Captain Ted Marks, and Battery C, were ordered forward in support of the infantry. The next day the drive and its artillery support continued. The morning of November 11, Battery D was firing again when, at about 8:30, Captain Truman was notified by headquarters that in exactly two and a half hours, at 11:00 A.M.—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—the Germans would sign an armistice agreement.

Sergeant Meisburger was called to Captain Truman’s dugout, where he found the captain stretched on the ground eating a blueberry pie, a wide grin on his face. “He handed me a piece of flimsy and said between bites, ‘Sergeant, you will take this back and read it to the members of the battery.’ ” What puzzled Meisburger was where Captain Truman had obtained the blueberry pie.

“My battery fired the assigned barrages at the times specified,” Harry wrote. “The last one was toward a little village called Hermeville…. My last shot was fired at 10:45.”

A lieutenant named Broaddus of Battery F had been up in a balloon directing artillery when the cease-fire came. Below him, he remembered, “people went so wild celebrating that they forgot to pull me down…and I sat there for two hours.”

“You’ve no idea how happy we all were to have the war end,” wrote Harry to Ethel Noland. “You know that the continual and promiscuous dropping of shells around you will eventually get on your nerves considerably and mine were pretty tightly strung by 11 o’clock November 11. It was the most agreeable sigh of relief I ever have [had] when word came to cease firing.”

The Great War was over and to the victors it seemed a triumph for civilization. It was left now to the statesmen to make a lasting peace. In less than a month President Wilson was on his way to France on the George Washington, the ship that had brought Harry and so many thousands.

For the 129th Field Artillery the war had been the Meuse-Argonne offensive and it had cost the regiment 129 battlefield casualties. Battery D suffered only three men wounded, one of whom later died, but they had been on a special detail with an ammunition train at the time, not under Captain Truman’s command. “We were just—well, part of it was luck and part of it was good leadership,” said Private Vere Leigh. “Some of the other batteries didn’t have that kind of leadership.”

IV

Two weeks and two days after the Armistice, Captain Harry Truman was on leave in Paris dining at Maxim’s. At a nearby table he saw the prettiest woman he had laid eyes on since coming to France and to his delight found she was an American with the Red Cross. After dinner he and several other officers went to the Folies-Bergère, where the “little ladies” clustered about them during the intermission. (Years later he would call the show “disgusting,” but at the time he told Ethel Noland it was about “what you’d expect at the Gaiety only more so.”) He saw Notre Dame and Napoleon’s Tomb. At the Arc de Triomphe, his trench coat belted tight against the November air, he posed for a snapshot beside a captured German cannon. He rode a taxi the length of the Champs-Elysees, up the Rue Royale, down the Madeleine, back up the Rue de Rivoli, over the Seine by the ornate Alexander III Bridge. He visited the Luxembourg Palace, the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre, strolled the Boulevard de l’Opéra, “and a lot of side streets besides.” All in twenty-four hours.

From Paris they took the train to Nice. Paris, said Harry, was “as wild as any place I saw.” Nice was “ideal,” with the Mediterranean on one side, the foothills of the Alps on the other. His hotel, “a dandy place,” overlooked the sea. “The view from my window is simply magnificent…. There is no blue like the Mediterranean blue,” he told Bess, “and when it is backed by hills and a promontory with a lighthouse on it and a few little sailing ships it makes you think of Von Weber’s ‘Polacca Brillante,’ which I am told was composed here.” She was all that was needed to make the place heaven.

He saw his first palm trees, walked in the sunshine, ate like a king, and in the first days of December drove to Monte Carlo, where he was startled to see a real-life princess drinking beer. He and Major Gates hired a car and drove to the Italian border, returning to Nice by way of the Grande Corniche, “the most beautiful drive I ever had.”

In Paris again, his leave about over, he and Major Gates went to the opera, to a performance of Thaïs by the French composer Massenet, which was then immensely popular in France. The Place de l’Opéra was ablaze with lights, as it had not been since 1914. After his days on the Riviera, with his longing for the woman he loved, the sensuous music stirred him deeply. It was “beautifully sung and the scenery [more palm trees] was everything that scenery can possibly be.” This, he emphasized in his letters, was the “real” opera. He would have paid the admission if only to see the gilded glory of the building.

He returned to a division encampment near Verdun notable only, he said, for its copious mud. The wait to go home became endless. “To keep from going crazy we had an almost continuous poker game,” remembered his friend from Independence, Captain Roger Sermon of Battery C. When news of the influenza epidemic at home reached camp, Harry became so alarmed he hardly knew how to contain himself. Bess and her brother Frank had both been down with the “Spanish flu,” he learned, Mary Jane and Ethel Noland as well, all through the weeks he had been on leave, and though all four were on the mend he kept worrying. “Every day nearly someone of my outfit will hear that his mother, sister or sweetheart is dead,” he wrote. “It is heartbreaking almost to think that we are so safe and so well over here and that the ones we’d like to protect more than all the world have been more exposed to death than we.” By the time the epidemic ran its course, vanishing mysteriously early in 1919, the number of deaths in the United States reached 500,000, including 25,000 soldiers, or nearly half the number of American battlefield deaths in the war. At Camp Doniphan alone fifty-one had died.

When in late January Harry learned that his favorite battery clerk, Sergeant Keenan, had died in the base hospital of appendicitis, he wrote in his diary, “Would as leave lost a son.”

General Pershing and the Prince of Wales came for a division review. Pershing shook Captain Truman’s hand and told him he had a fine-looking bunch of men and to take them home as “clean morally and physically as they were when they came over….” Harry took the order quite to heart.

He was thinking constantly of home and what was ahead for him. He wrote in his letters of returning to the farm, but he mentioned also the possibility of running for political office on his war record—for eastern judge in Jackson County, possibly even for Congress. After what he had seen of peacetime Army life, he said, he would give anything to be on the House Military Affairs Committee. Like a great many of his fellow reserve officers, he had acquired a decided bias against West Pointers. He thought most of them pompous, lazy, and overrated, and couldn’t imagine himself living under such a system. “I can’t see what on earth any man with initiative and a mind of his own wants to be in the army in peacetimes for,” he wrote. “You’ve always got some fossil above you whose slightest whim is law and who generally hasn’t a grain of horse sense.” As a boy, he told Bess, he had “thirsted for a West Point education…only so you could be the leading lady of the palace or empire or whatever it was I wanted to build.” All he knew now for certain was that he longed to get “back to God’s country again,” to “the green pastures of Grand Old Missouri”; that, in fact, he had no place to go but home; that he was broke, and in love—“I love you as madly as a man can”—and eager to be both out of the Army and married just as soon as possible. He dreamed of walking down North Delaware Street. He dreamed of owning a Ford and touring the country with her. “Maybe have a little politics and some nice little dinner parties occasionally just for good measure. How does it sound to you?”

“We’ll be married anywhere you say at any time you mention,” he wrote in another letter, “and if you want only one person or the whole town I don’t care as long as you can make it quickly after my arrival.”

“You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to,” she wrote in response, in the earliest of her letters to have survived. “I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.” Her mother, she said, hoped they would move in with her at 219 North Delaware. “Just get yourself home and we won’t worry about anything.”

He hated the waiting. He wished “Woodie” (Woodrow Wilson) would quit his “gallivanting” in France and depart, so every American soldier could, too. Saving the world was of no concern any longer. “As far as we’re concerned,” he told Ethel Noland, “most of us don’t give a whoop (to put it mildly) whether Russia has a Red Government or no Government and if the King of the Lollypops wants to slaughter his subjects or his Prime Minister it’s all the same to us.”

In March, the regiment moved south to Courcemont, near Le Mans, where the officers were again quartered in luxury at the Château la Chenay, once the home of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the great canal builder. Harry had one more chance at a flying visit to Paris, during which he saw Woodrow Wilson ride by and, in a shop on the Rue de la Paix, he bought a wedding ring. Then on April 9, 1919, with the 52 other officers and 1,274 men of the 129th Field Artillery, he sailed for New York on the former German liner Zeppelin.

On this homeward voyage, the last act of his great adventure, the returning hero was violently seasick nearly the whole way. For a time he wished he were back at the Argonne where he might die honorably. Yet he could bear any agony, he knew, given the direction they were heading.