Perhaps I will see you one last time before the veil is pulled permanently across my young life. Or I shall pray for a miracle — that your mere presence will snatch me from the abyss and my strength be restored in the warmth of your blazing smile. Soon, I pray, I will be gamboling about like a frisky fawn — gamboling with you, my love, with health returned and eternal happiness assured. A miracle it would surely be. And so I live on hope even as life slips out of me like sand from a splintered hourglass.
Get home safe.
Yours truly,
Beryl
15. “After a Chaplin one reeler came news from the front, followed by a two-hanky Gish blubbertale, interrupted by the spiel of one of those dreadful four minute men.” In his letter to Jonathan, dated 16 October1918 (JBP), former college chum and fervent socialist activist Findley Sanders described the theatre’s four minute man’s pitch for war bonds as “absolute spread-eagle lunacy.” Sanders, who, incidentally, would be arrested only one week later for his antiwar activities, reported that the war booster also urged his audience to give up hamburgers for the “duration” and send all the town dachshunds (“dog-huns”) to the local abattoir. Sanders added with undisguised relish that one woman, an obvious inveterate dachshund-owner, made her opinion of this idea known by hurling a box of Cracker Jacks at the man, nearly putting his eye out. She was discourteously escorted from the theatre, and, no doubt, charged with “disloyalty and sedition.”
Such was the climate of the times.
16. Jonathan struck up several friendships “over there.” Some friendships endured for many years after the war. Others did not. Among the latter was his relationship with Arliss McKeon, whose incredible talent at least deserves brief mention here. Skilled at word-perfect textual recall, McKeon delighted and amazed his fellow doughboys before going on to enjoy several successful years on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, declaiming as “Mr. Mnemonic” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, and hundreds of other orations he had committed to memory with apparently very little effort. Although he spent most of his later years as a rouged salon palaverer and social sycophant, McKeon continued to perorate from his repertoire right up to the moment of his death in 1972 at the age of 76. Awaiting the arrival of the ambulance following an ultimately fatal coronary arrest, McKeon is purported to have mumbled his way through a good portion of the notoriously lengthy thank-you speech given by Greer Garson at the 1943 Academy Awards banquet, as well as random sections of Richard Nixon’s televised “Checkers” speech, his final breaths expelling the haunting words “respectable Republican cloth coat.” Lynette Klein, He Remembered it All (San Francisco: Puppage and Sons Publishers, 1982) 378-80.
17. Jonathan saw serious fighting in the last weeks of the war. Jonathan Blashette to Addicus and Emmaline Blashette, JBP. The full text of Jonathan’s letter home follows.
October, 1918
Dear Mother and Father,
I am writing you from the front. I’m not sure when this letter will reach you. We have had a time of it.
I miss you both. I miss dry socks. I miss clean drawers. I miss good eats. (We did finally get some chocolate bars yesterday courtesy of the Y.M.C.A. after a full week of rock-hard French bread, salmon and water). They also sent along some cigarettes. Yes, Mother, I have begun to smoke. We all smoke. It is what you do here in the trenches. My buddy Max is the exception. Max lost his face yesterday. He offered me his fags as they were rolling him onto the stretcher. “I can’t smoke these any more,” he said, “because I have lost my mouth.” Or maybe I imagined this is what he said. I imagine things a lot. I have not slept in days. The shelling doesn’t stop. Whizz-bangs, 77’s. The Whizz-bangs come in low. You can’t get out of the way. The shrapnel can take an arm off. I can’t even describe the concussion.
I am no coward, but this war is hard stuff. I try to think of things that will keep me sane. I try to think of the two of you, of sweet Lucile and funny, funny Beryl who wants me in the worst way! And I try to think how much I want to help win this thing and come home and never have to think of it again. A good buddy of mine was killed yesterday. A Heine sniper picked him off for doing nothing but taking himself a Goddamned stretch. (Mother, pardon moi my “parlez vous.”) He wasn’t thinking. You don’t always think. Sometimes it can get you killed. Sometimes you get killed anyway. Every bullet has a name on it. Some of the bullets find their marks. I don’t know if I’ve dodged mine yet or not.
I want to come back from this war. And all in one piece if that isn’t asking for too much. (Unlike these other fellows, I could lose a leg and not be put out too much.) See, I want to start a business. You will laugh. This is the rankest- smelling place on the face of the earth. The stench of death gags you. The waft of mustard gas (even though we haven’t faced a frontal assault of the damned stuff yet) makes you want to wretch. Unwashed humanity. B.O. with a capital B. The ladies have their perfumes and their rose water and their Mum-cream. I’m going to make something for the fellows. A deodorizer for the male underarm. That would be a good start, right? I told this to my chum Luddy. He says it’s a dandy idea. I say that sounds like a swell name. Dandy. Dandy-de-odor-o.
Sarge says we’ll be going over the top soon. There will be an end to this. One way or another.
Your loving son,
Jonathan
18. “Seein’s how they got all us doughboys to wearing those sissy wrist watches, maybe Jonny won’t have such a tough time of it convincing us all to perfume our armpits.” Luddy Greco’s Diary, 17 November1918, private collection of the Sherman Greco family.
19. “Now that the war is over, I have big plans.” Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 19 November 1918, private collection of Bloor’s grand-nephew Christopher Paton (hereafter referred to as AnB).
20. Each took a different path. Though the three trenchmates swore lifelong allegiance to one another, they would ultimately drift into orbits that rarely intersected. Reunited years later at the Bonus March on Washington D.C. in 1932 (q.v.), the three men came to realize how far they had grown apart, and beyond memory of their crowded hour at Château-Thierry, how little they had in common. Luddy Greco heartily embraced socialism and, later, communism. Fate sent Darrell Delehanty to the opposite political extreme. Both of these men found easy reason to exercise strong suspicion and mistrust of one another, and of Jonathan as well. In Greco’s mind, Jonathan had become capitalistic and bourgeois. Delehanty, who would become a rising star in the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, found Jonathan, conversely, far too progressive and much too embracing of the “intolerables” for his taste.
Incidentally, I discovered a document that sheds a bright light on Jonathan’s strong distaste for the Klan: it is a transcript of an exchange between Jonathan and Imperial Kleagle Edward Y. Clarke, recorded from just outside the door to Clarke’s office by Jonathan’s friend and corporate lieutenant Harlan Davison. Jonathan had been directed to Clarke for purposes of making a sizeable contribution to the Roosevelt Memorial Association (for which Clarke served as officer) and quickly found himself the target of a high-pressure sales pitch for membership in the KKK. True to form, Jonathan quickly shored up his composure, then proceeded to have great fun at Clarke’s expense. Davison allegedly shared the transcript with Governor Al Smith during his 1928 run for the White House. Smith confessed to never having been so thoroughly entertained. Harlan Davison’s Diary, Harlan Davison Papers (hereafter referred to as HD).