THE SELF-MADE HERO

In May 1915 Arthur Guy Empey, a 31-year-old recruiting sergeant with the New Jersey National Guard, was sitting in his office in Jersey City. It was a warm, pleasant spring day, and through his window, Empey—a sturdy man with an animated, energetic manner—could hear a street musician turning the crank on a hurdy-gurdy and playing a popular melody of the time, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

For Empey, the tune clashed discordantly with the top headline in the newspaper on his desk: lusitania sunk! american lives lost! He looked to a massive wall map of Europe; small flags pinned to it showed the positions of the German and Allied armies along the Western Front in France. A National Guard lieutenant silently went over to his desk, took an American flag from his drawer, and solemnly draped it over the map. “How about it, Sergeant?” the lieutenant said to Empey. “You had better get out the muster roll of the Mounted Scouts, as I think they will be needed in the course of a few days.” The two men worked into the evening, preparing telegrams telling guard members to report for duty so that the messages could be sent as soon as word came from Washington, D.C.

But the orders they were waiting for didn’t come. After a few months, Empey’s lieutenant, sighing with disgust, took the American flag and put it back in his desk. Empey took the dusty stack of telegrams and pitched them in the trash. He felt depressed and uneasy.

Empey found that life in the trenches was a mix of squalor and unnerving experiences.

A native of Ogden, Utah, whose family had moved back East, Empey had spent most of his adult life in uniform. After high school, he started out as a sailor in the U.S. Navy, where he’d nearly been killed in a turret explosion. He’d then enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry, where he’d attained the rank of sergeant major, become an expert marksman and equestrian, and patrolled the border during the Mexican Revolution. Now, he was spoiling for a fight with the Germans. One day,