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COMPANY D |
Who were the doughboys? “A cross-section of the nation,” the 1st Division’s Captain Charles T. Senay would remember. “There are rich men’s sons and underprivileged boys. There are young men of great talent and dullards. There are the weather-beaten matured professionals and the eager young neophytes. They may be from the farm or from the slums of big cities. They may be from the lowlands, the mountains or the seaside. They are young men, often striplings adapting to a disciplined, exacting environment.” Company D’s ranks were likewise a microcosm of America in the early 20th Century – a mix of farmers’ sons, small-town heroes, big-city immigrants, and backwoodsmen from Appalachia and the West. They fought, bled, died, and disappeared forever while facing some of the most horrific and ferocious combat the Western Front had to offer -- the stories of their lives, and often heroic deaths, lost until now. The Remains of Company D resurrects and honors their sacrifices and the sacrifices of all doughboys – and in its pages you will meet: |
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Lt. Jason Lloyd Bronston, Garnett, Kansas. “Lloyd Bronston was old enough to have skipped the war, clocking in at the age of 31 when war was declared, and with the draft age set at 21 to 30, and with a wife and a one-year-old baby, he perhaps should have passed, considering all of the ways in which he could have died in the ensuing two years. But Lloyd, a burly and jocular two-fisted brawler who as a younger man had had part of an ear bitten off in bar-room fight, up and left his little family back in Garnett in April of 1917. After Lloyd had quickly signed on for the great adventure, the local newspaper would report that he did so for ‘purely patriotic reasons;’ his grandson Jason Bronston would tell me that his grandfather ‘just liked a good fight.’ ” |
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Lt. George E. Butler, Arkansas City, Kansas. “Twenty-five-year-old George E. Butler, had also jumped, enrolling in officers’ candidate school. The son of a rural mail carrier in Arkansas City, Kansas, Butler had graduated from Wesleyan University, and by the time war was declared the strikingly handsome, strapping, and single six-foot-four, 200-pound Butler was working as an attorney in Indianapolis, where he also threw his considerable weight around – for that time – playing semi-professional football. Handily, Butler’s assignment kept him in town, he being assigned to the school at nearby Fort Benjamin Harrison, at which the nucleus of Company D would be formed.” |
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Lt. John Huston Church, Gleniron, Pennsylvania. “Once on the plateau, and fully exposed on the open ground, the Germans began bringing to bear all they had from machine guns and artillery, one round knocking Lt. John Church -- who as a general some twenty-seven years hence would lead Task Force Church in another assault on the Germans, this one into the Fatherland itself –senseless as he led his platoon to its consolidation point east of Cantigny. ‘A big one exploded within a yard of me, blew me ahead about 10 ft.,’ Church later wrote. ‘God was with me, and was not badly hurt.’ After coming to, he headed to the rear for aid; recovering, he stumbled forward, overtaking Company D’s castaways as they dug in amid plumes of earth and the skipping and pinging of machine-gun bullets.” |
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Pvt. Paul William Davis, McCammon, Idaho. “There might have been more, more letters, more stories to tell upon returning to that dirt-roofed hovel outside of McCammon, and perhaps while sitting on that porch out at the White place, Annie by his side, more talk of the wonders of France and all that he had seen, and whispers between them of betrothal and marriage, and perhaps of the crops he was going to raise, and how many children might be enough to help him do that; but on the very eve of the A.E.F.’s first offensive, Paul Davis was transferred into Company D, a replacement for one of those who had fallen on May 14th. And just days later Paul Davis was one of them who stepped out to Sorensen’s whistle, one of them who went over the top and through Cantigny and onto the plain beyond.” |
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Pvt. Rollin Livick, Edgerton, Wisconsin. “They say Rollin Livick was one of the nicest boys in town, the town being Edgerton, Wisconsin, a bucolic oasis in the state’s verdant and prosperous tobacco belt south of the capital of Madison. They say Rollin was steadfast and true, at just five-foot-three and 133 pounds small in stature but large of heart, an all-American who despite his small physical size had quarterbacked his high school football team, had excelled at basketball, and baseball; that he had been vice president of his junior class in 1916, acted in the class play, and edited the sports page in the Crimson, the school newspaper, in his senior term. And they say as well that Rollin Livick was one of the first to appreciate the ‘German menace,’ that he had ‘the stuff that heroes are made of,’ a ‘fighting spirit, a spirit which chafed at the thot of the wrongs which the Hun was visiting on the world.’ ” |
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Private First Class John Nelson, Almhult, Sweden and Chicago, Illinois. “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.” |
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Captain Soren C. Sorensen, Lina, Denmark and Omaha, Nebraska. “He had left as his emergency contact a ‘Mrs. S.C. Sorensen,’ of Grand Island, Nebraska; his DSC citation mentioned that he’d entered the service from the Black Hills mining town of Lead, South Dakota; a letter in his burial file mentioned a mother, Christine Christensen, of Long Beach, California; the same letter gave the name of a brother, G.P. Sorensen, of Hollywood; immigration records had him arriving in New York harbor on the U.S.S. State of Indiana on July 2nd, 1885, just two years old and toddling down the gangplank after his mother, Kristen, and father, Andrew, both 29 years old, two Danes come to seek their fortune in the New World. And I don’t know why but I remember wanting him to live, as I pursued his ghost, I wanted him to have survived the war and to have returned to his Mrs. S.C. Sorensen at 421 East 13th Street in Grand Island..." |
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Lt. Marvin Everett Stainton, Laurel, Mississippi. “Marvin Stainton’s problem that June was the opposite: He was trying to get in to France, into it, into the war, and as the long months spent training black troops in the backwaters of Arkansas had dragged on, Marvin at every opportunity had sought a way to France, and had grown increasingly despondent about his chances. ‘As for me going to France, I want to go very bad,’ he wrote his mother on April 18, 1918. ‘Everyone that goes to France are not killed, some people say that if you are once in France you are gone. I think they are all wrong. No I am not willing to stay behind while the others do their bit, the hardest and most dangerous part.’ |
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Sgt. Willard Storms, Dwight, Kansas. “Just a month after his father’s death, Willard made his first stab at enlisting in the Army, but because of some undisclosed medical condition, the army wouldn’t take him. Seeking help for his problem at St. Francis Hospital in Topeka (where he would become smitten with a pretty nurse named Willa May Estus), Willard – tall and gangly, with boyish good looks that belied his 29 years -- underwent some sort of equally undisclosed operation. On June 4th, he was accepted into the Army, and given his choice of joining the 28th Regiment at El Paso, or the 10th Regiment at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis. He took ‘the east.’ ‘I’m into it now and going to give all I have in me to whip the Kaiser,’ Storms would write Willa that summer (with what was for him uncharacteristic grandiosity, no doubt hoping to tug the heartstrings of his new paramour). ‘I don’t expect to come back from the front if I ever go, but I’ll know at the last that I’ve done something for my Country, and Humanity.’ His mother, Jessie – ‘a plucky little woman’ -- had these last words to her departing soldier son: ‘Goodbye, son. Be a man, and do a man’s duty.’ ” |
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Lt. William D. Warren, Auburn, New York. “Laconic, ironic, and detached, Bill Warren would find endless bemusement in the situation in which he found himself in 1918. The embodiment of a separate, and usually upper, class of young lieutenants in the A.E.F., young men who’d memorized their Voltaire and Rousseau and their Pliny, who went sightseeing to Gothic churches in their off-hours and could expound about the situation in the Balkans and the decrepit Hohenzollern dynasty, Warren was one of those who never quite got over the absurd and almost laughable irony that he, of all people, had found himself in the Army now, and leading men into mortal combat.” |
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Pvt. Leigh Ellsworth Wilson, Janesville, Minnesota. “And among them was Leigh Ellsworth Wilson, just 18 and his life’s blood draining into the earth, his mother Anna long up by now and perhaps writing him again, writing to make sure he’s okay, and then walking the few short blocks to downtown Janesville, Minnesota to post the letter, post yet another letter to Pvt. Leigh E. Wilson, Company D, 28th Infantry, APO, Tours, France, and walk back home and wait for word of him, wait for word and try not to think of all the things that could happen to the boy who’d left home against her will, to get out of that house with all of those women.” |
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