On November 11, 1918, at 10:59 am in Lorraine, France, 23-year-old Baltimore native Henry Gunther fixed his bayonet and marched into history. Against the orders of his superior officer, Gunther, himself a demoted sergeant, led a one-man charge against German lines in the final minute of what was then the bloodiest war in European history. The Germans, informed of the armistice signed at 5:00 am that day that would take effect in only a few moments, tried to wave the American off. But Gunther, determined, continued his advance, taking shots at the enemy lines. He was cut down in a hail of fire from an emplaced machine gun, and became the final casualty in a war that claimed fifteen to nineteen million lives from Europe, its colonies, and allied nations around the world. To permit the symbolism of the war’s end on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a curiously high number of eleven thousand soldiers died in its final six hours.
This year, to a less-than-overwhelming level of public recognition, America marks the 100th anniversary of the war that ended the old order of Imperial Europe and paved the way for the apocalyptic events of the 1930s and ‘40s. The November 11 date coincides with Veterans Day, originally marked as Armistice Day in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson. Its current name and symbolism were adopted in 1954, recognizing the veterans of all past and present American conflicts – in itself, a sad commentary on what was once thought of as “the war to end all wars.”
Joan Schack, commander of Woodstock VFW post 5040 (now moved back to its old address at 240 Throop St.), says that the group has no particular plans to mark the World War One centennial itself, though they will be holding their traditional ceremony outside the Throop St. building and providing a free meal to all veterans on November 11. Other local events include the Northwood Veterans Day Assembly at 2 pm on Thursday the 8th, a 9 am recognition ceremony on Friday the 9th at McHenry County College (this year’s keynote speaker, decorated Sgt. Major Thomas Morrissey of Woodstock), and a public recognition of Hearthstone Village veterans at 11 am on Monday the 12th at 840 North Seminary Ave. Three events will be held for both Veterans Day and the Armistice Centennial at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, IL, home of WWI veteran Robert McCormick’s First Division Museum – the “Doughboys of Cantigny” oral histories narrated by curator Bill Brewster on the 9th, the benefit “Brew It Forward” beer tasting on the 10th, and on the 11th, a ringing of the “bells of peace” at 11 am to commemorate the armistice.
But if Woodstock has a somewhat indifferent attitude toward the Great War in November 2018, then the scene a hundred years ago couldn’t have been more the opposite. An article that month in the Woodstock Sentinel describes how residents were woken up at 3:30 in the morning by whistles and telephone bells, with throngs of people “grabbing anything that would make a noise” and marching down to the square to celebrate the just-received news. A band led by a local professor spontaneously joined in, and with almost no one in town showing up for work (“the only man at the Oliver [typewriter] factory who seemed to have shown up for work was the fellow who blows the whistle,” the article states), a parade was organized and on the move by 2:00 in the afternoon. Weldon’s marching band, Civil War veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Women’s Relief Corps and Women’s Auxiliary, St. Mary’s school students, the Girl’s Patriotic Service League, the Boy Scouts, trucks from the Oliver Typewriter Company and the Fire Department, and close to a hundred decorated cars were all led around the square by parade marshal and former McHenry County Sheriff George Eckert (Eugene Debs, his friend and former charge, was not in Woodstock that day – though he would be back in prison a week later, sentenced for a speech earlier in the year denouncing the draft).
On June 10 the next year, Woodstock held its homecoming for the men of Company G, with a crowd of thirty thousand welcoming a thousand soldiers back from the war. A triumphal arch was erected over Main Street, patriotic flags covered every building from the train station to the opera house, paraffin wax was poured on the cobblestone streets to allow dancing, and a film crew led by B.W. Bailey made an eighteen minute motion picture documenting the event, shown later at Woodstock’s Princess Theater and at movie houses around McHenry County (the film can be seen today at the Woodstock Public Library’s YouTube page). The only footage not taken in Woodstock is a shot of King George V awarding the British Military Cross to Woodstock Lieutenant Harry Yagle, who also received the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross for bravery at the Battle of Le Hamel, July 4, 1918 – Yagle and three other soldiers, two of them from Australia, successfully rushed a machine gun nest from 200 yards, capturing it and taking eight prisoners.
Like Lt. Yagle’s action, America’s part in World War One was short, but decisive. Germany, at war with Russia for Russia’s declaration of war on Austria-Hungary, at war with France in anticipation of its alliance with Russia, and at war with Britain for violating the neutrality of Belgium to launch an unsuccessful knockout-blow against France, had gained an unexpected advantage between March and December of 1917. Popular protests had led to the Czar’s abdication, and by the end of the year, the Russian monarchy had been overthrown by Lenin’s Communists in the Bolshevik Revolution. A peace between Russia and Germany was signed shortly afterward, and Kaiser Wilhelm II could turn the full strength of the already strained German army onto the western front.
In that time, however, Germany had made a new enemy – the United States, formerly neutral since the war’s start in 1914. With American merchant ships caught in the crossfire of a naval blockade of Britain and France, and the revelation of a German telegram to Mexico offering a military alliance and the chance to retake the Southwest, President Wilson called for war on Germany, and Congress gave it to him. The alliance with Britain and France turned the flow of American supplies from a trickle to a flood, and by summer 1918, a draft of three million men was sending 10,000 American troops to the front lines every day. America demonstrated its strength as a world power for the first time, and five and a half months after the first American victory at the Battle of Cantigny, Germany was forced to capitulate.
But while Woodstock and the rest of the country “was witnessing and joining in the celebration of the birth of a real world democracy” (as The Sentinel put it), the seeds of an even more horrific conflict were being sown. With Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire both dismantled, Germany, the only major Entente power left, was declared the sole guilty party for the war. In the Treaty of Versailles, signed after an eight month blockade following the armistice, it was forced to cede its colonies to the Allied empires, give up large chunks of its home territory to Poland and France, reduce its army to a fraction of its former size, withdraw troops from its heavily-populated western provinces, and pay crippling reparations that would ruin the German economy for a decade and a half.
Witnessing all of this, with a growing anger readily reflected in the rest of Germany, was another World War One veteran, a corporal who had seen some of the worst of the fighting. His name and his later place in history have become synonymous with all the evils that the Great War itself was promised to end – to the point that neither one now needs any reprinting.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 