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Author writes of forgotten soldiers of WWI

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OVER THERE

The Men of the 

West Texas Plains 

in World War One

They were known and loved. The Henry and Durham families of Blackwell, in Nolan County, knew John Pate because their children had gone to school with him. 

Over in Hawley, John Newton grew up with Tracy Galbraith and Barney Perkins, and in Merkel Roger Banner went to high school with Emzy Burroughs and Charley Barker. Guy Taylor of Albany was supposedly sweet on Lilly Boyd, two farms over, and in Swenson everyone knew Dr. Brockman’s sons Ivan and Ralph. 

Boys like George Ride-nour of Buffalo Gap and Clyde Shaw of Ovalo rode into Abilene with their parents to get necessaries, including treatment from Dr. Arthur Brown. Pat Williams worked for the Magnolia Oil Company in Ballinger; Ewing Taylor worked on the family farm. 

All these young men and more lived in a cluster of towns and counties that stretch across the Texas plains in a rough square bounded by Throckmorton, Aspermont, Ballinger, and Cross Plains with Abilene, Hamlin, Haskell, Buffalo Gap and Albany inside. These were small towns where everyone knew its young men. But all of these and many others would vanish in just a few short months.

President Wilson had won the presidency in 1916 on the platform of keeping the United States out of the war in Europe, one that by 1917 had already killed some seven million. 

America’s standing army was only 127,000 men, two-thirds of whom were in the Philippines and most of the rest on the border of Mexico, trying to keep the revolution from spilling over. 

But Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare on merchant shipping to sink the food and arms that the United States sent to support England, then tried to lure Mexico into the war by offering to return Texas and the American southwest. The United States declared war. 

Building a new army wasn’t easy; by the end of 1917 only 105,000 men had been sent to France. Still, several millions were drafted and millions more volunteered to fight, not merely for patriotism but to go to Europe to wage the war that would end all wars. America threw up 37 training camps and by May of 1918 there were more than a million men over there. 

By September the number had ballooned to more than two million. Although inexperienced, American troops stopped the German advance on Paris in June-July, 1918 and had begun to push German divisions back along the Marne, Somme, and Aisne rivers, but at terrible cost: in just four months the United States suffered 26,000 combat deaths and over 110,000 wounded. 

Among them were Press Rogers of O’Brien and Guy Taylor of Albany, who died at Belleau Wood, and Ewing Taylor, now a major, who survived only to die from wounds he received in the Meuse-Argonne in October.

The Meuse-Argonne offensive of the war’s last six weeks defined the American army. All the new soldiers from Aspermont, Colorado City, Roby, Winters, and every town in between found themselves alongside men from the Panhandle, South Texas, and the rest of the United States, all crowded in among more than one million Americans, fighting the Germans in a tiny wedge of river and forest not much larger than any of the counties they came from. All were engulfed in the largest battle in American history, so large that in every American household someone knew a man in the battle. 

It also was the deadliest battle in American history. In the end, more men died and were wounded in the Meuse-Argonne offensive than in all other World War 1 battles combined, more than in the World War 2 battle for Normandy, four times as many as at Iwo Jima, far more than in Gettysburg or Antietam or any other Civil War battle. 

In just six weeks, more than 27,000 Americans were killed and another 95,000 were wounded in an area half the size of the rectangle of counties from which the boys of the Texas plains had come.

Clyde Shaw fell in the Puvanelle Forest on Sept. 13; when his father received the news, he died the next day. Roger Banner was shot Oct. 9, 1918, in a tangle of barbed wire in front of Saint-Étienne-à-Arnes; Dr. Brown perished in an artillery barrage a mile further back the same day. 

Pat Williams survived three more days, dying in the attack on Attigny; Benjimin Barclay of Cross Plains was wounded there, only to die weeks later. One day before the famed Sergeant York captured dozens of machine gun nests at Chatel Chehery, Ralph Brockman gave his life there; his brother Ivan died the next day, only two miles away, of the Spanish flu. 

And John Pate, missed in Blackwell, fell near Aubervilliers on Oct. 26. And, as the papers talked of a possible armistice, more died. George Ridenour was killed near Verdun one week before Nov. 11; Charles Isaacks of Runnels County and Robert Wilson of Atwall died the next day and less than a mile away. 

All in all, almost 80 men from these counties died in the war, almost half of them from the flu. Some are still in France, buried in the Meuse-Argonne or Aisne-Marne American cemeteries. Press Rogers, Guy Taylor, William Wells of Roby, and at least five others vanished in artillery barrages. Three died in torpedo attacks at sea.

Now, 100 years later, all of them seemingly are forgotten. Why? Perhaps because their war did not end all wars, or because of other catastrophes that followed, the Spanish flu, Prohibition, the Depression, and World War II. But they went over there, for us, and died there, honorably, heroically, and victoriously. 

Forty-six thousand Americans are over there still, buried in America’s World War I military cemeteries, among the least visited places in France. Let’s remember each one of them on Nov. 11, one hundred years after the end of the war they fought to end all wars. It’s the least we can do.

[Jack Woodville London, a graduate of Groom High School, West Texas State University, and the University of Texas Law School, studied creative writing at Oxford. He is the Director of Writing Education for the Military Writers Society of America and will be the liaison at the Meuse-Argonne American Military Cemetery in France for its memorial service on the one hundredth anniversary of the end of World War 1 on Nov. 11. His next book, Children of a Good War, will be published on Nov. 8.]