Hell, Heaven, or Hoboken by Christmas: An American Soldier in the First Gas Regiment

By Robert Lambert

This book chronicles the experiences of a young farm boy from Schuyler County, Illinois, as he participated in the three main American campaigns of World War I, or as it was known then, the Great War. The main body of the book contains the daily entries into his diarymemoirs that he wrote later during the 1970s and my own commentaries. The diary entries are apparent because they are generally dated and presented in a distinctive typeface. Diary entries for February, March, and the first two weeks of April are written in the past tense because they were not written until the second week of April 1918. The end of the diary contains a section where amusing incidents and remarks were recorded. Most of those have been presented in the text in places that seemed to fit the situation the best (for some, it was obvious, and for some, it was just speculation). There is also a section from the diary, which is presented near the end of the book, that was undated, but it seems to have been written during December 1918.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543420838

Robert Lambert

Rob Lambert is a gifted communicator and leader at the Recovery House of Worship (RHOW) Bronx church. His love for Christ, coupled with compassion and the enthusiasm to reach and serve the recovery community, has led him to impact people across the country and around the globe. Rob was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, to parents who were tormented by substance abuse. As a result, he started down the same path at the tender age of eleven. In 1988, while caught in the grips of a crack cocaine addiction, Rob attended his first 12-step recovery meeting. After a struggle to maintain long-term clean time, he finally became free from drugs in 2005. However, his flesh continued to lead him down a road of destruction, ravaging his life and the lives of those around him. Except now, he couldn’t blame the drugs! In 2009, with four years clean and desperately searching for something greater than himself—his Higher Power--Rob left Massachusetts. He moved into the Recovery House of Worship (RHOW) in Brooklyn, New York, to participate in the Faith-Based Men’s Recovery Program. Shortly after, he surrendered his life to Christ! Since 2009, Rob has faithfully served in various ministries with RHOW Brooklyn, Bronx, and online churches. In 2013, Rob completed a three-year Certification Program in Pastoral Theology from Urban Academy (URBACAD) and is a passionate student of the Word. He is a singer/songwriter, actor, and playwright, most noted for the off-Broadway musical “Born in Brockton Born Again in Brooklyn.” Rob is married to Wanda, who supports him unconditionally by being the ministry “behind the scenes.” They have a beautiful dog named Nhgee, a bunch of nieces and nephews, and a never-ending love for Jesus, pizza, and ice cream.

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Copyright © 2017 by Robert Lambert.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2017907172

ISBN:                      Hardcover                      978-1-5434-2081-4

                                Softcover                         978-1-5434-2082-1

                                eBook                              978-1-5434-2083-8

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Rev. date:12/15/2017

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FROM THE MEMOIRS AND DIARY

OF

GEORGE MAURICE THOMPSON

1898–1979

PROLOGUE

This book chronicles the experiences of a young farm boy from Schuyler County, Illinois, as he participated in the three main American campaigns of World War I, or as it was known then, the Great War. The main body of the book contains the daily entries into his diary, memoirs that he wrote later during the 1970s, and my own commentaries. The diary entries are apparent because they are generally dated and presented in a distinctive typeface. Diary entries for February, March, and the first two weeks of April are written in the past tense, because they were not written until the second week of April 1918. The end of the diary contains a section where amusing incidents and remarks were recorded. Most of those have been presented in the text in places that seemed to fit the situation the best (for some it was obvious, and for some, it was just speculation). There is also a section from the diary, which is presented near the end of the book, that was undated, but it seems to have been written during December of 1918.

The sections that I wrote are presented in italics. Some of these sections include stories that were told to me by Mr. Thompson, who was my grandfather, and they were written as they were told to me (in the first person). These stories were placed according to what seemed to be the most likely context, but by the time that I began assembling the book, I was unable to obtain definitive confirmation. As I was helping my grandfather to edit and organize his memoirs, some of the details in his handwritten text were changed without any notes being made in the original copy, because I simply made the changes in my first draft copy. Also, I was working with several drafts of those memoirs. The separate drafts often contained details in one version that were not presented in another version. I have added details about the course of the war, in order to present the overall context of the events. The introduction to the book describes the complicated antecedents to the war.

INTRODUCTION

The causes of the Great War were complex, and many countries can take a share of the blame. However, for those people who like simple answers, virtually every text on the subject will point to the assassination, in the Bosnian capital, of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by Gavrilo Princip as the spark that set off the war.

If there was one single cause for the war, it was fanatical nationalism expressed by expansionist policies of nearly all of the European countries. Those countries that chose to participate, even though they were not directly threatened, include the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The United States, Great Britain, and the Ottomans participated for a variety of personal, political, and economic reasons. The Italians and Bulgarians, seizing opportunities for territorial gains, attacked what appeared to be weaker neighbors, when the fortunes of war appeared to be turning to one side or the other. While the French could claim that they were threatened by the German mobilization, for years they had, in fact, been maneuvering for a fight with the Germans to gain revenge for their humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was the first to actually declare war, but they didn’t expect any other countries to intercede in their war with Serbia. If there was one country to blame, it was Imperial Russia. Although the Serbian government was responsible for their war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was the Russian government that turned it into a world war. Germany entered to war to protect the Austrians from Russia, and the French were bound to the Russians by treaties and massive economic aid that had been used to build up the Russian railroad system. While the Russian government was utterly destroyed by the war, nationalism continued to flourish, and was the driving force behind the Treaty of Verdun. This treaty set the stage for World War II, because of its adherence to goals that were designed to promote the short-term, narrow self-interest of the victors, rather than promote an equitable and lasting peace.

Why?

Why could such a seemingly small spark set off a conflagration that engulfed half of the world, and why was the archduke assassinated? On a personal level, there were few in Vienna who felt a great sense of loss when they received news of Ferdinand’s assassination. However, even though Kaiser Franz Josef had some degree of personal animosity toward his nephew for marrying a commoner, regicide was a different matter entirely. This was a blow aimed directly at the heart of the Habsburg Empire.

By 1914, Kaiser Franz Josef had been on the Austrian throne for sixty-six years (since 1848), and few Habsburg subjects could remember any other ruler. Archduke Ferdinand was his heir apparent, and could expect to replace the eighty-four-year-old monarch in the very near future, so his assassination was a political act that could be compared to the assassination of a president-elect in our own country. He was targeted for assassination partly because of his narrow, nationalistic bigotry, and partly because he was planning a diplomatic move that would have effectively defused the Pan-Slavic movement. Within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a conglomerate of many ethnicities, Ferdinand disliked the Poles and Czechs (even though his wife, Sophie, was a Czech herself), and even the co-ruling Magyars of Hungary. Additionally, he had a very low opinion of the Italians who were allies of the empire. And most importantly, he opposed the concept of a Greater Serbia. Even though Slavs made up 47 percent of the empire’s population, with Ferdinand’s plan, their voice in government would remain secondary, and the Slavic states along the southern border expected that this plan would win away the loyalty of many Slavs within the empire.

Ferdinand had become frustrated that the Magyar king often would not go along with Austrian plans. In order to diminish the power of this co-ruler, Ferdinand began an effort to change the nature of the empire from a dual monarchy to a triple monarchy, by bringing Slavic representation into the circle of power. On the surface, this appeared to be a more republican form of government, but the actual effect would have been greater control for the Austrians, because it would result in an opposition that was fragmented.

Ferdinand’s visit to the Bosnian capital was done with relatively modest security precautions, because he believed that his political efforts would make him a hero to the Southern Slavic people. Unfortunately for him, most of them were completely unaware of his efforts. It is quite likely that the conspirators who were assigned to do the actual killing might have backed out if they had been aware of Ferdinand’s plan.

Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian who was essentially a high school student, was obviously the pawn of a political conspiracy. While many people could have been on the preliminary list of suspected conspirators, the trail eventually led back to the head of Serbian military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, Europe’s foremost expert on regicide. The assassination team had been trained by the Serbian army and financed by the Russian military attache to Serbia, V.A. Artamonov, with the knowledge of the Serbian government. However, the Austrian bureaucracy bungled the investigation, failing to rally world opinion behind them. Had these facts been known in England and the United States, it would have been very difficult to rally public sympathy to the Allied cause.

Although the Russians were determined to bring about war between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia, they needed the acquiescence of the British to join in the war themselves. The secret negotiations that grew out of the Entente of 1904 bound up the British, French, and Russians into a secret alliance that guaranteed that the next European war would be fought on an immense scale. The British were not inclined toward war, and privately advised the Serbs to accept the Austrian demands that followed the assassination, apparently unaware of the level of complicity of the Serbian and Russian governments.

The potential for conflict between the Habsburgs and the Serbs, who lived both in the empire and along its southern border, is readily evident, considering that Bosnia-Herzogovina, a province with a large Serbian population, had been annexed by the empire in 1908. The Russian interest in the Balkans, however, is less obvious.

Russian Expansionist Policies

For 200 years, the Russian Empire had been expanding its borders at a rate comparable to the growth of the United States. Their expansion into Siberia and central Asia had not been opposed by any great power, but southern expansion had been at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, and Russian access to the Mediterranean had been a long-term goal, which had been blocked in the Crimean War (1853–56). The English and French had been enemies throughout modern history, but if the Russians seized the Straits of Dardenelle, it would mean the complete destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and neither the French nor English were willing to allow a power vacuum of that scale to develop in the Middle East. As long as the Ottomans only lost small sections of territory, the English and French had the resources to keep the other countries from participating in the land grab that resulted. After the Crimean defeat, the Russians eventually developed a strategy of bypassing the Ottoman center in favor of gaining a warm water outlet on the Adriatic, by asserting their efforts at the edges of the slowly crumbling empire. As the Slavic population of the Balkans began to agitate for independence from the Ottoman Empire, the Russians called for Pan-Slavic unity. Although the Russian Empire contained many different ethnic groups, they were often separated by vast distances, and this appeal to nationalism was only a minor risk to their own empire.

Nationalism

The Prussians had provided a successful model for them at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they had successfully rallied most of the German people against Napoleon, by appealing to a sense of nationalism. The French had responded with their own form of nationalism, which became intensely anti-German after their humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The modern Italian nation was built on this new surge of nationalism. For Great Britain, nationalism was a delicate matter, because of the Irish question, but they were adept at using their separateness from the European continent to create a feeling of difference and superiority that was essentially no different from other types of nationalism.

Only in the Austro-Hungarian Empire did the growth of nationalism threaten the very foundation of the state. The fundamental reason for the existence of the empire, by the nineteenth century, was to provide a governing umbrella for the multiple ethnic nationalities of the region. This meant that the Russian call for Pan-Slavic unity was not only an attack on the Ottoman Empire, but also a threat to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Balkan Wars

The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 were set off by a series of events related to European colonial expansion in Africa. In 1911, France sent troops into Morocco for the purpose of protecting the lives and property of French citizens within that country. In response to this action, the Germans decided that they should also have a military presence in Morocco. The Italians also had dreams of an African Empire, and so they felt compelled to make a show of force.

The Ottoman Empire, which was held together mostly by inertia, had a lot of North African possessions that looked like easy targets to the Italians. The Italo-Ottoman War of 1912 clearly demonstrated the Ottoman weakness, and as a result, the Balkan states decided that it was time to assert their independence. The Balkan League threatened to drive the Ottoman forces completely off the European continent, until in 1913, Bulgaria tried to grab territory away from their former allies of the First Balkan War. Although Bulgaria had itself only been independent since 1908, she could not resist the temptations of expansionism. This fractured the Russian-supported Balkan League, and initiated the Second Balkan War. Serbia, which had gained its independence from the Ottoman sultan in 1878, had been the natural leader of the Balkan League, and during the Balkan Wars, Serbia emerged as a powerful military force. This, along with Bulgaria’s fall from Russian favor, solidified the Russian patronage to the Serbs. The Russians, of course, recognized the upheaval in the Balkans as an opportunity to wedge themselves between the two weaker and ethnically diverse empires (Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian).

Austrian Allies

Austria was a member of the Triple Alliance, which also included Germany and Italy. However, while Italy made yearly pledges to the alliance, neither the Austrians nor the Germans considered the Italians to be a reliable ally. Although the Austrians had fought a disastrous war with Germany during the early years of Franz Josef’s reign, Bismarck, the German chancellor, was such an adroit statesman that he was able to annex one of Austria’s richer provinces without creating a lasting antipathy. In fact, Bismarck’s long-term objective was to transpose Germany from being Austria’s junior partner to being the senior partner