The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War - Softcover

Nelson, James Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312650418 ISBN 13: 9780312650414

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010

Synopsis

The Remains of Company D follows the members of Company D, 28th Infantry Regiment, United States First Division in World War I, from enlistment to combat and the effort to recover their remains, focusing on the three major battles at Cantigny, Soissons, and in the Meuse-Argonne and the effect these horrific battles had on the men.

James Carl Nelson's important and powerful tale of the different destinies, personalities, and motivations of the men in Company D and a timeless portrayal of men at war.

About this title

About the Author:

James Carl Nelson is a journalist who has worked as a staff writer for The Miami Herald is the author of The Remains of Company D and The Five Lieutenants. He is a member of the Great War Society and the Military Writers Society of America. He lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
A Doughboy
He never made it to Berzy. Hell, he never even made it to Ploisy.
He went lights-out somewhere just beyond the Paris-Soissons Road, while the air rained bullets and his company—the survivors, anyway—rolled on through the German line, shooting and yelling and swearing and falling, and disappeared into the smoke and dust and fading evening light of a hot July day.
He took his last look at them, at their sweat-stained, khaki-clad backs and their tin hats, as the shadows began to lengthen across the wheat, as the pup-pup-pup of the machine guns rose to a ghastly cacophony, as the rolling barrage he was chasing raced farther out of reach, like a carrot on a stick, and as a single machine-gun bullet pierced his blouse just above his left pelvic brim, bounced off his spine, rattled through his intestines, and then exited above his right hip.
And it was then, as he would tell some insurance clerk in 1919, he fell unconscious in the wheat, as his “unit”—to which he’d belonged for just a month—stepped over him and continued its advance down the sloping, deadly vale into the village of Ploisy, and slightly beyond.
He would awake hours later to the sound of—what? “Intermittent machine gun fire,” one report says. To the sounds of a blubbering confession, my father would tell me many years later, as another from his company who lay paralyzed, too, there in the wheat poured out to the Old Man his confessions to having performed every kind of criminal perversion, rape and murder and God knows what.
In the morning, as the sounds of battle rose steadily with the sun, John Nelson had been roughly kicked by an Algerian stretcher-bearer searching for life among the brown clumps of young Americans in the wheat, and he had groaned, and achieved his random salvation on, and his escape from, that terrible battlefield, the one just south of Soissons, where the tide of war was turning in the Allies’ favor even as he was being hustled to the back lines.
He was carried to a field station in a cave at Missy-aux-Bois, and then trucked to Field Hospital No. 12, in the village of Pierrefonds-les-Bains, where blood-spattered, exhausted surgeons plied their scalpels and bone saws in an old hotel and, before the battle was done, on tables spilled into the streets.
Once he had been patched together, there ensued an odyssey through hospitals in France as well as the United States, and on April 1, 1919, the army deemed him okay, and handed him $60 and an honorable discharge, and a swift kick out of the gates of Camp Grant.
He returned to his $32-a-week job as a painter in Chicago, to which he’d first traveled in 1911, after leaving Sweden and hopping the Lusitania from England to the gates at Ellis Island. And he would live long enough to send his own son into another, second, world war, and to wear lime-green pants with white shoes and to watch men walk on the moon, and to have six grandchildren, of which I was the last.
But in all the days I knew him, he never talked about them, never mentioned his fellow Swede, Swanson, whose body wasn’t found until 1933, just a collection of bare bones by then, wrapped in burlap and scattered with three unknowns in a shallow grave in Berzy-le-Sec.
He never mentioned the Norwegian, Eidsvik, whose body went home by boat though the fjords in 1922, nor did he talk of Ralph Pol or Orville Ballard, or any of those with whom he had crossed the Paris-Soissons Road that day and who had also lived—Baucaro and Bronston and Vedral, the tough Bohemian sergeant. He talked a little about that day over the years, but words weren’t his currency, and so he had left us with the happy ending, and no beginning or middle, and kept the seamy part, the details of that day, to himself.
On the day he turned one hundred years old I surprised him, and found the ancient doughboy daydreaming in his tiny cell at the retirement home. He was stretched out on his bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling when I walked in. He had never weighed more than 150 pounds, and he was shrunken now with great age, his body a tiny island in the sea of his bed, and lost as well in the blue wool sweater he always wore, no matter the season.
His senses were shot, his eyesight blurred with cataracts, but his mind was still sharp, and he knew someone was there. He startled and sat up as if he’d been caught doing something wrong, and directed me with a wave of his hand to a chair, on which sat a box full of cards and letters. “Read them to me,” he said.
There were cards from the few old Swedes back in Chicago who hadn’t yet faded away, some from old neighbors, some from God knows who, and it struck me for the first time that he’d lived a whole life I knew little of, though I’d known him thirty-six years by then.
All of those names, all of those unknown well-wishers, added up to a map of where he’d been, touchstones gathered over a century, remnants of his small immigrant drama, people who’d somehow been touched by him enough to remember a birthday and buy a card and walk it down to the post office and acknowledge an old man imprisoned by time, and by his memories.
And now that I know some of the story, more than he ever let on, I wonder what it was he’d been thinking of when I walked into his room, just a few hours before the little party, with coffee, and cake, and balloons, and all the family, even his wife of seventy years, Karin, who was mostly confined to a separate, darker wing of the home since a series of strokes had taken most of her memory.
I wonder now if he’d been thinking of them, the others, the ones who hadn’t ever figured in his short, sweet story of near death and salvation on a foreign battlefield long ago; I wonder if he was conjuring the faces of the other boys and all that he saw at the Paris-Soissons Road, images caught from the corner of the eye while running headlong to oblivion: the dead ones, the wounded, the dying horses, and perhaps a broken, smoldering tank.
And I wonder if he was retracing his last few steps, going over his tracks in the wheat, following a wave of khaki soldiers stretched out from north to south in front of him, some stumbling, some toppling, some staggering back with hands to their throats, others on their knees, bleeding.
I wonder now if his one hundred years had been condensed into those few terrifying snapshots, images he’d tamped down over the years into his subconscious, demons let loose like a creeping barrage only in moments of weakness, of which I believe he had very few, though I know now that he had some.
I wonder if he was thinking of these things that day, of the other boys, of Misiewicz and Ballard and Cole, and of the great turn that had been made in his fate, and of how strange and wonderful it had been that he had made it through. I wonder if he was thinking of these things, but of course now I’ll never know.

My outfit started advancing on July 18 and moved forward several miles in the first two days. About six o’clock on the 19th I was struck by machine gun fire from our flank, was knocked unconscious and did not come to until about midnight. Was picked up by stretcher bearers in the morning and taken to a first-aid station.
What was left of John Nelson’s division, the 1st, was home and parading in Washington on the day he told the above brief story of woe and near disaster to a clerk with the department of war-risk insurance.
Broken, and still hobbling on that day in 1919, he’d come to seek recompense for having crossed the Paris-Soissons Road and seen the things he saw, and for having spent that long night in the wheat among the dead and dying. It wasn’t until after he died that I found the record, and it struck me how little the story had changed, how so very little had been added to it, in the seventy-five years he’d had to tell it, again and again.
He had never shown much weakness, even for life, always displaying just the tough crust developed in another century, another millennium, enveloping layers that had their start in childhood, on a small farm in southern Sweden, where he was born on March 15, 1892, the sixth of eleven children sired by Nils Jonsson, who in maddening Scandinavian symmetry was the son of Jon Nilsson, who was the son of Nils Jonsson, who was the son of yet another Jon Nilsson, the son of a Nils whose last name is lost to history, all of whom had labored on a small patch of ground called Kangsleboda, outside of the flyspeck village of Langhult.
This had gone on for generations, at least since 1735, when John Nelson’s great-great-grandfather and namesake had been born at Langhult. All I know of this Jon Nilsson was that he lived to be eighty years old and that when he died in 1815 he had amassed a fortune consisting of twenty-four clay pots, no cash, no silver, fourteen animals, a smattering of copper, brass, and iron tools, and two books—one, no doubt, being a Bible.
The local church records say that it all went to his wife, Ingeborg, and his son Nils and daughter Sophia. “Widow to keep all except husband’s clothes that now belong to the folks to auction off,” his will said, and someone had added the note: “Sophia is lame. She cannot take care of herself. Nils has decided to take care of her and her property as well as he can. If not some other relative to do so.”
Hard times hadn’t softened much by the time Kangsleboda was passed to Nils Jonsson, my great-grandfather, in the 1870s. He had by then married Ingrid Kristin Bengtsdotter, who was the daughter of Bengt Jonsson, who of course was the son of Jon Bengtsson, son of Bengt Jonsson.
The couple’s firstborn, Pelle August, arrived in 1876, and lived just two years. Bengt—who else?—followed, as did Pelle Johan, Axel, Amanda, Olivia, Jon, Carl Olaf, Viktor, Ernest, and lastly Sven Alfred, spit out when the well-worn Ingrid was forty-six years old and...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0312650418
• ISBN 13: 9780312650414
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400