University Place

The Art of World War I Corporal Francis Webster

– Welcome to University Place Presents. I’m Norman Gilliland. We’ll begin at the end. Corporal Francis Webster was killed in action on the morning of October 14th, 1918, somewhere in France, hit by a piece of German shrapnel. And yet, when we look through his letters, his diary, and his artwork, we can’t help somehow hoping that he was going to live through the war after all. And in a way, he did because those works of art and those letters and the diary entries all bring him back to life again and give us a window onto what he experienced in the trenches in France in World War I. With me is the editor of The Letters, Diary, and Artwork of Francis Webster. It’s called Somewhere Over There, and the editor is Darrek Orwig. Welcome to University Place Presents.
– Hey, thank you, it’s great to be here.
– How did you come across this trove of art and letters and diary entries from Francis Webster?

– So I was at the Iowa Gold Star Military Museum which is located at Camp Dodge, just on the north side of Des Moines, and I was actually doing research on Francis Webster’s regiment, the 168th Infantry, which was a federalized National Guard unit. So I’m there and I’m doing research, I’m goin’ through other letters, other images that are in their collections, and then I start speaking with the curator, and he shared with me a collection that was coming in, and this was Francis Webster’s collection. And it was boxes that were still addressed from the family. They were being sent in from across the nation from his family who had moved a few states away. And as I took a look at it, I saw a variety of his artwork, illustrations that had been submitted to a Des Moines area newspaper, and they had been curated by that newspaper then given to the family after the war. There was also Webster’s diaries, some of which pre-date to when he was in college and when he was first starting to have a relationship with Ding Darling, the famed political cartoonist. And other boxes were some of things that were with him when he fell in action. So it was a very large collection, and I was able to gain access to it, and I realized right away, this is a story that would really tell the big story of America’s involvement in World War I through a much smaller one.

– Did he have to go into World War I? Was he drafted?
– He was not drafted, he was a volunteer. So at the time the war was declared, he was serving as a superintendent in a rural community school district, and he had served one year, had done a lot with community development and really had a lot of support from the community. After one year, he was chosen to have a contract renewed, and so it came with a significant pay raise. But right around that same time was when America declared war, and he chose to be a soldier. He had a chronic lung condition, he had arches that were startin’ to fall a little bit, and he had weak ankles, so he enlisted and went in very enthusiastic to serve his nation.

– But he was already a cartoonist of some note, and did he play on that at all to get himself into uniform?
– He didn’t quite play on it when he was enlisting, but a short period after he enlisted, his company commander, Captain Fleur, realized he had incredible artistic talent, and they were using it at first for like military-type purposes, he was practicing mapping and communication of physical features on the landscape. And then, as Webster was drawing, he started reaching out to some of his contacts in the Des Moines area. He attended college in Des Moines, and this is where the regiment was mustering, this is where they were forming up at, there at the state fairgrounds. So as he’s training and learning the drill and learning how to do all the things that he needs to, he realizes that the folks on the home front, the families of the loved ones he was serving with didn’t quite understand what they were doing. So he started doing these illustrations, started using those connections with these Des Moines area newspapers, and they start running his artwork.

– And so he’s actually just barely out of college at this point.
– Yeah, so he was only about a year out of college or so. He had went to college when he was 16, still fairly young, and his first year of college was in the 1913, 1914. He takes a summer off, and he has this moment where he really decides, or he has this transitionary-type moment where he decides he really wants to focus his life on helping other folks, and he starts trying to learn all the traits that he can, really studying how he can self-improve himself. And as he goes into his sophomore year, that’s after the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated.
– Which started World War I.
– Exactly, yeah. So in those months in that first part of the fall semester, there’s news comin’ back from the battlefields of France and Europe talking about substantial casualty losses, and people are anxious to learn more news about that. So Francis starts working with Ding Darling, this famed political cartoonist who’s workin’ with Des Moines Register and starts, initially it’s kinda freelance work, you know, he’d do some concepts of illustrations and then he’d give those over. And so he was very involved with documenting the war and being involved with that prior to enlisting.

– He’s enlisted in what, like the Iowa National Guard?
– Absolutely, yeah, so he’s with the Iowa National Guard. He enlists, but the problem is there’s only a few hundred thousand troops in America, and they need millions to be able to fight on the Western Front. So he arrives there, they’re short on firearms, they’re short on all the material they would need to fight a modern war. There’s also a shortage of uniforms. So he writes back to his parents. He served as an assistant Scoutmaster, and he writes back to get his Boy Scout uniform so he has some look of being a soldier anyway, some kind of uniform. So his company commander kinda takes pity on him. He’d been in the service for a number of years and loans him a number of uniform items then until uniforms could be actually issued.
– And so from then Iowa National Guard, he somehow becomes federalized?
– Yeah, so at first it’s a state unit. You know, that’s kinda they’d followed in the Civil War and with the Spanish-American War. They realized that they were gonna need a lot of soldiers in World War I, so you had the regular Army, you had the National Army, which is mostly conscripts and draftees, and then you have the federalized National Guard soldiers who are these citizen soldiers that are workin’ on farms and mills and store shops on Main Street, and then they’re drilling on the side, just like today’s modern National Guard.

– I gather it takes him a while, though, even once he’s in uniform, to actually feel that much like a soldier? I mean, the typical story would be that we spent hours a day just marching and doing these kind of routine things stateside.
– Yeah, so he enlists, and it’s kinda a very surreal-type experience ’cause they’re not at a traditional military base. What they are, is they’re at the state fairgrounds. So they’re out there, and they’re training, they’re staying in some of the buildings that they would be showing livestock in, and the State Fair happens, so there’s kids showing sheep, and then Henry, or Francis and his comrades, they’re marching and drilling and doing a lot on show for the folks who were coming.
– As an artist, then he worked in what media? He was a cartoonist.
– He was! Yeah, he was a cartoonist, so he did a lot of pen-and-ink-type drawings. Real early on, he’s developing concepts for Ding Darling, and then later on, he’s involved with Ding Darling. So when he’s at the state fairgrounds, he starts reachin’ out to these newspapers, and there’s some of his real early ones, he’s depicting life there at the state fairgrounds. He’s illustrating soldiers comin’ in from the country who maybe weren’t used to modern plumbing, you know, indoor plumbing, and so he’s talkin’ about soldiers who might not have been used to bathing on a regular basis. He’s doin’ cartoons about the supply sergeants who are gaining quite a bit of weight.

– Norman: While everybody else presumably is losing.
– Exactly, yeah, yeah. He’s learning how to be a bugler as well. He enlisted initially as a bugler. Later, he’s promoted as a corporal. So he’s trying to get used to the military bugles, and he does one cartoon where he’s showing his bugling being so bad, the Germans just, “Give it up and surrender,” so yeah.
– Sam: We left Camp Mills a week ago last Thursday and traveled 1100 miles toward France, and the boilers on our ship went bad, and we had to leave our convoy and the other transports and come back. We were crowed on the ship and were seasick but had a pretty good time nevertheless. We are in a fine camp here. We got here last night, and tents were waiting for us. We are in a harbor just a little ways from the Statue of Liberty.
– They leave the state fairgrounds, and they head over to New York, to Camp Mills, and then from there, they start journeying across the Atlantic. They get out there in this captured German boat that retrofitted for American soldier transporting, and the boilers go bad, they have to limp back in, and they have to get on another ship. And this one’s a British ship, which was a pretty typical experience for a lot of American soldiers heading over to Europe. There was just a shortage of good transport ships, so they were relying quite a bit on the British. And then they arrive in there in England, and then they start, they arrive at the ports, and they start marching through the villages, and people are out, they know people are standing in the doorways, they’re lookin’ out the windows at ’em, and–
– Norman: They’ve kind of seen it before.
– Yeah, absolutely. In 1914, as soldiers are marching off to war, this is a very similar-type experience. And the British, they had suffered quite a bit during the conflict already. The Battle of Somme, just a little over a year earlier, about 57,000 men were wounded in one day. Another 20,000 were killed in one day. So just substantial casualties were being suffered, and the troops that were marching off to the Western Front from England at this point weren’t the same type that they had back in 1914. They’re younger, they may not have been the best fit to be soldiers, you know, a few years earlier, but they were rounding ’em up and bringin’ ’em up there to the Front.

– Sam: At present, we are in a small village, and are billeted by barns. The houses and barns are all of stone with red tile roofs, and the peasants live in the same buildings with their cattle and chickens. Nearly all of the men we see are in some sort of military uniform, and we have seen soldiers from a good many nations since we left the States.

– So this is, again, he’s maybe 21 years old and probably hasn’t traveled much outside of Iowa, and suddenly, he is in the world.
– For sure, yeah. They arrive in France, and they see all these different nationalities. There’s Serbians there, there’s Russians, French, British, you name it, this very global experience as they land. And they’re only there for a short period, and so as they start goin’ off on the trains to get closer to the front lines, they’re seeing their first German soldiers, as well. They’re out, they’re prisoners of war who are out workin’ in the fields. And so they see them, it’s the first glimpse of the enemy, and as they keep travelin’ by train, they arrive in these villages where they can be billeted at. There wasn’t very large camps for them to train, so what they’re doing is placing ’em in these villages. It’s some stone architecture, red clay roofs. And then something that he noted, and a lot of others did, too, was that they were seeing these massive piles of manure out in front of these barns! And they realized that that was a sign of wealth for these French farmers that if you had a big pile, you had a lot of animals, and therefore, you were fairly wealthy.

– And what kind of equipment, then, did he have by the time he got to France?
– So after receiving some initial training, they bring him into the trenches, and atop his head, he’s wearing, they would wear a steel helmet. For Francis Webster’s regiment, a lot of ’em are British-style helmets. America was still struggling with making its own type of helmet and a lot of its own gear. It wasn’t quite ready for this modern-type warfare. So on their chests, they’re wearing a British gas mask or a small respirator. They’d be strapped right onto their chest when they’re close to the front lines. Across their waists, they’re carrying a belt that would carry a .45 caliber pistol, some extra clips or magazines, and then a canteen. They’re also wearing rubber boots as well because the conditions in the trenches, it’s a little lower, and with snow and the frost leavin’ the ground, it’s getting pretty mucky and pretty wet. So they go in there, there’s some American technology there, but there’s a lot of foreign stuff at the beginning. As the war proceeds and the American industry catches up, then there’s a lot more American-type equipment.
– More standardized would be helpful–
– Absolutely, yeah.
– In combat situation.
– For sure.

– Sam: Got up at two a.m. and helped Corporal Morrison make out his reports. Went to sleep for a few minutes. We were awakened by a heavy bombardment, and Captain Fleur called us out. Some of us went to a bombardment cave where we got the gas alarm. Then we went out to gun number 16 and found Captain Fleur. Helped carry sandbags to the squads that were fighting. Battle ceased at about six a.m. Went to Post 14 and 18 with Captain Fleur. Corporal McKee was killed at Post 18 this a.m. Shrapnel tore a hole through his helmet. I saw his body at the infirmary.
– When he sees that hole torn through the helmet, he had to wonder, we’re by no means invincible even in our state-of-the-art combat gear.
– It was likely his first Allied causality that he had seen at that point. You know, it was a guy he’d served with. It was a guy in his company from Des Moines. This raid was, what happened was, there was very highly trained Bavarian Stormtroopers who came across specifically for the purpose of capturing American soldiers to bring back to parade about for PR purposes. And so they came across these National Guardsmen from Iowa who are also highly trained, and they were able to repel the attack. And they suffered quite a few casualties. There was an officer from Des Moines who was direct hit, struck his trench shelter and caved it in and killed him. There was a couple other men who with a mortar group. They were hit by a shell, and a few of the men, they’re still missing today. They never found ’em, they just disappeared after the shell hit. So I think it was very much a reality check of what they were in for here on the Western Front.

– Now, we’re going to, of course, be hearing just a fairly small sampling of these letters and journal entries of Colonel Webster, but what kind of personality do you see in him before he leaves, and how does the war affect the tone of his writing, do you think?
– So at the very beginning of it, he’s very enthusiastic to get involved. And he does an illustration that’s in the book where he talks about how he just can’t wait to get out of the state fairgrounds and get to the, get across the Atlantic and then from the Atlantic, getting into the trenches and then making contact with the enemy. And then at the very end of this illustration, he writes about how he can’t wait to just get home and eat one of his mom’s lemon pies. So there’s a lot of contemplation that’s happening there. They go back to the billets after this battle, and they realize just how horrible fighting can be. And this isn’t a major battle by any means. This is essentially a large trench raid, and there’s a lot worse that comes.

– Norman: Does he give you any sense of the psychological effect on the other soldiers, I mean, in the artwork in particular?
– Some of his artwork, he shows men sitting there thinking about what they went through, and they’re processing those experiences. His own writing, you tell as you go through his letters and through his diary entries, you can notice that his perceptions are changing a little bit. Not greatly, he’s still trying to be very upbeat with his artwork, especially what he’s sending back the Des Moines newspapers. There’s no doubt that he knew that reports of these battles were going back to families on the home front, and so he’s doin’ this artwork as a way of trying to find the humor. ‘Cause you get all these guys together, it’s not all gloom, you know. As they’re back, there’s those senses of camaraderie, there’s the practical jokes, there’s the fun that they’re having.

– And he’s not officially, we’ve said, a combat artist by any means. Well, what’s his actual official capacity as a soldier? – So as the war goes on, it doesn’t take long, he’s promoted from being a bugler up to being a corporal, and initially he’s with the platoon headquarter section of the machine gun company, then later on, he becomes a corporal of a machine gun squad. So what he’s doing is he’s serving as a soldier first, and then secondarily, he’s very motivated to draw images of what he’s experiencing on the Western Front. The American Expeditionary Forces, the American army that was over there in France, they had specific artists they had hired, a handful of ’em. These were professional commercial artists who went over there with the task to draw what was goin’ on and to do it in a very patriotic way that would kinda stir support for the war on the home front. There was an order that said they couldn’t be on the very front lines, though, so these guys, they’re documenting the war, and what they’re seeing is the aftermath of combat, so they’re seeing the crumpled bodies out in the fields, they’re seeing destroyed trenches, they’re seeing buildings that are just in ruins and guys being carried back on stretchers. Webster is up there on the very front lines, he’s doing these illustrations. these professional artists they hired, he’s actually, he writes back and complains in a letter how difficult it is to do quality drawings with only three hours of sleep and in rainy conditions, and here’s Webster who’s so motivated to share a story and make sure it’s gettin’ back to the home front and also documenting what his regiment’s going through, just because they’re citizen soldiers, and there’s, sometimes they weren’t viewed on the same level as a regular army, as professional soldiers.

– So in a sense, he had an advantage over, say, a professional combat artist in that as a cartoonist or as somebody doing sketches or even these watercolors, relatively simple, relatively easy to transport.
– For sure, and as the war progresses and they get less in the trenches and more out in the open areas, he’s more on the move, he does less watercolors and more pen-and-ink and charcoal-and-pencil-type drawings, just because it’s less gear to carry.
– And so you’re saying that he does not send any of these home if they have pictures of Allied dead.
– No, the artwork that he was sending back home was very much to create a positive spin on what they’re experiencing, and at first when he starts sending ’em home, there’s a very small censorship office. His commanding officer and a lot of the officers in his regiment, they’re supportive of him doing this artwork. His captain’s actually letting him sit at his desk to do some of it. And so he’s creating, he’s sending it home. The censorship office, though, starts expanding as the war goes on. There’s more soldiers, and they’re lookin’ for this kinda stuff goin’ back over that could provide damaging information to enemy spies and just the enemy in general. So he’s very careful to write in his artwork that he’s sending home “somewhere in France,” that way it’s very vague, and after some artwork gets gobbled up by the censorship office, he starts sending it to his parents so it doesn’t raise any alerts as it’s goin’ through. And his officers were very supportive ’cause they wanted to make sure the National Guard story was preserved and shared for the folks in America at the time and for future generations.

– Now, as a machine gunner, does he ever write about shooting at people?
– He does, yeah, he writes about shooting at people. With the machine guns, they’re these very large French Hotchkiss machine guns. The American machine guns in the inventory when they first went to war, many of them just weren’t appropriate for what the conditions were on the Western Front. They were very archaic. So they’re usin’ a lot French machine guns in his unit, and it’s more a long-range weapon, so he’s seeing ’em more as masses of soldiers or more as they’re firing at a position versus up close and engaging ’em that way.
– So it’s not really an ultimately very personal experience for him in combat, that’s actually more impersonal and almost arbitrary.
– In a way, yeah. He’s still there on the battlefields. He’s seeing the enemy, and the enemy’s sighting them in as well, and it’s, they’re very close to it, and he’s coming across enemy dead as they’re advancing across positions or as they’re on these battlefields. But yeah, it’s definitely not up close. I don’t know of any cases where he had to pull out his pistol to take care of an enemy soldier.
But there was gas.
– There was, yeah. Poisonous gas was something that was a huge challenge on the Western Front, and Francis Webster, in their trenches they had these shelters constructed that they could sleep in. There was like wooden bunk beds in ’em and tables and such, and they would have curtains that would go down across the openings that were treated. That way, gas couldn’t get into ’em.

– Sam: At 1:15 a.m., a large gas shell exploded at the entrance of our dugout. I was just getting up to go on guard, and Bertholf and I were at the door when a cloud of brown fog began to come in. We put on our masks and yelled to wake up the others. For several minutes, the Germans bombarded us, and I took the guards out to the pits with masks on and shells flying all around us. Barrage ceased at two a.m. Captain Fleur and Art McCullough killed by gas. 16 sent to hospital from company gassed. We had to eat our reserve hardtack and canned salmon today because the Boche gassed the chow in our kitchen.

– The Boche referring to the Germans. That was a French term, a derogatory term for the Germans in World War I.
– Absolutely, yeah. So this gas attack happens, this is their first real major taste of poisonous gas, and Webster is preparing to leave his dugout when it all takes place. About a day or two later, he’s going out on guard. He’s with another soldier, and another gas attack is launched. And it came out of these metal gas projector tubes, and as the shells came up, they were glowing from the heat, these metal canisters, and it almost looked like fireworks up in the sky. The other soldier who’s on guard with him freezes up, the shells are comin’ down around ’em, Francis puts on his mask, and this other soldier’s still scared, he’s completely frozen, doesn’t know what to do, and so Francis takes his gas mask, pulls it away, and yells out to him to put on his mask. And as he’s doin’ that, the takes a big whiff of phosgene gas, it hits his lungs, it’s a very deadly gas, and he’s a casualty at that point. So he’s evacuated from the trenches, they bring him back, and they’re treating his lungs, they’re goin’ through the whole process of shaving his head to make sure there’s no gas-infected hair, treating his eyes, you know just this whole very rigorous treatment process. And as he’s there recovering, he does an illustration, and there’s no paper available, he’s away from his bag of artist supplies, so he takes a piece of Red Cross stationery, flips it on the back and then does this illustration on it and then sends it back to a newspaper in Des Moines to be able to show that he’s recovering, and this is the recovery process of these soldiers. And he cracks a joke about is this heaven, or is this Des Moines or am I in heaven. You know, or something like that. But he’s trying to spin some humor on it even though he just had this, there’s so much loss happening ’cause of this gas that happened in the area of the trenches they were at. And he recovers within about the course of a month, and then he rejoins his regiment around the first of July.

– Well, it’s remarkable that he could look at himself in his own condition, pretty sorry condition given the gas attack, and make a cartoon out of it. And I suppose part of that may have been for the sake, do you suppose, of encouraging his parents not to worry too much about him?
– I’m sure there’s some, partly his parents and also the parents and loved ones of the soldiers he was serving with as well. – Sam: Open warfare. We advanced across wheat fields under heavy fire and rain of bullets. We fired our gun in a hollow and then from a hilltop in advance of our own infantry. We could see the line of advancing Germans. Sutherland, Papa George, and I were on the gun. We drove back two attacks, one after dark. Heavy bombardment of high explosives, trench mortars and gas shells. We were under heavy fire all day. Sergeant Collins was killed about noon and buried in a blanket this afternoon. Baird’s leg was shot off as he was sitting beside me. Sergeant Anthony was gassed. I was make acting sergeant.

– A little hard to tell whether he was proud of that promotion or just sort of in awe of how fortunes could turn so quickly in war.
– I think, yeah, I think that he’s just documenting how much everything moves so fastly in this battle. So what happens is he rejoins his regiment in July. He’s there in the Champagne region initially, and a large German offensive happens, and it’s pushed back by the Allies, it’s stopped. And from then, the Allies then go on the offensive, and it goes into open warfare. So they’re leavin’ these trenches, and they’re going out and they’re fightin’ in wheat fields and wood lots and cow pastures and these little stone villages, and they’re tryin’ to push the Germans back out of the ground they’ve already captured. So during this time, there along the Arc River near Chteau-Thierry, about 70% of the regiment is lost from gas, from wounds, from death. So it’s this very traumatic experience that happens. Webster is up there on the top of a hill. There’s a German assault happening, and they pull back. They’re havin’ problems having their machine gun fire be effective with these Germans that are advancing towards ’em. So as there’s mustard gas comin’ around, and there’s heat, you know, it’s very warm temperatures in July in France, their gas mask lenses are fogging up, so they pull back down that top part of their mask, knowing that they’re gonna get gas in their eyes, just to make sure they can sight those machine guns and be able to stop this counterattack. And they’re successful with it, but the next morning he wakes up, and he’s temporarily blind, so he gets ordered off the hill, him and some of his comrades, and they have to be brought back through this valley of farm fields and pastures as there’s shells coming down, there’s German planes flying overhead, and they’re able to get back to the aid station again. And so he goes back to the hospital then, and he’s there for quite a while. He has poisonous gas in his eyes, his vision returns, and mustard gas is a very nasty kind of gas. It causes burns, and there’s a lot of serious things that can come out of that. So he recovers, he gets back up to full strength. He rejoins his regiment then, and it’s just as they completed another battle, it’s the St. Mihiel drive, and just as they’re continuing to advance, he catches up with them, he’s seeing the massive amounts of German prisoners marching to the rear, and he seeing the evidence of war. And he gets there, and they’re deployed into what’s called the St. Benoit sector, and they’re, rather than being these big, deep trenches with deep dugouts, they’re in basically what we call foxhole today. They’re shallow pits, and to protect against shrapnel and then this constant rain that was happening at the time, it rained for 47 days. At some point in each of those 47 days, it was raining. So they logs and they take earth, and they cut brush to pile over the top of it so that enemy airplanes and artillery can’t locate where they’re at, and they’re fighting in these foxholes, very similar to how they would fight like in World War II.

They’re fightin’ in these foxholes, and near them is where the Meuse-Argonne Offensive’s happening, which is one of the bloodiest campaigns in American history and where half the casualties suffered by the Americans in World War I are lost at. And so that’s happening just next to him. – So how long has he been in combat by now? – So he’s been in combat quite a bit. There’s times that he’s in the trenches where there’s just occasional shells comin’ in, or a plane spots him and fires a burst of machine gun fire at him. So there’s these small-type experiences with warfare, there’s these major experiences as well. So they’re in contact with the enemy quite a bit. They end up being raided as one of the, their division, the 42nd Rainbow Division is rated as one of the top U.S. divisions. And they take kind of pride from German prisoners and they capture ’em, and they’re kinda scared, they’re the 42nd Rainbow Division. Yeah, yeah.

– Norman: Their reputation precedes them.
– You bet.
– And so as a participant in combat for, you would think even a week or two weeks, how does he view the new recruits coming in as the war grinds on?
– So what happens is, they need millions of men on the Western Front, and they’re scrambling the entire time to get these men up there. The regiment lost 70% causalities in July, so there a lot of replacements coming in. There’s men that can barely speak English, they’re recent immigrants. There’s men who received between one week to a month of training. So enough where they can salute and they can do the manual of arms with their rifles, and that’s about it. They don’t know how to load their rifles, some of ’em don’t know how to throw a grenade, they don’t know how to do any extended formations like skirmish lines, and these guys are comin’ up, and the task falls to Francis and other non-commissioned officers, corporals, and sergeants and officers as well to try to give these guys some very abbreviated training and get them up to speed. They just don’t have the skill set, though, as the guys who’ve been serving there and who had much stronger training while at the state fairgrounds and while citizen soldiers for the years prior to that, Americans entry into the war. So you have a very mixed skill set of his regiment at this point.

– Would that be true, you suppose, also of the Germans? Did he have any sense that the Germans were also wearing down?
– So at the St. Mihiel drive, the Germans, St. Mihiel is a salient that kind of jutted out into the Allied lines, and as the Americans struck that, as they started assaulting it, the Germans were preparing to fall back, and so massive amounts of prisoners are captured, massive amounts of equipment, so they can, and a lot of the men they’re finding as prisoners, they’re very young men or they’re very old men, and the Germans are losing a lot casualties as well. And they can sense it’s startin’ to wear down. I don’t think anyone thought it was gonna end by Christmas of 2018, or 1918.
– Almost 2018.
– Yeah, yeah, but I think a lot of folks thought it was gonna continue into 20, or into 1919, and so the Meuse-Argonne is one, the last battle, the last offensive of America’s participation in the war.
– The World War I poetry of some of the other participants on the American side and the English side and particularly the ones we are familiar with, there’s a kind of a spectrum of at least the most familiar poems in terms, there’s some fatalism, there’s a little bit of sense of carrying on the fight after I’m gone. What kind of sense do you get from Francis Webster at this point as we get into 1918?
– So he’s, after his, the materials that were with him were sent back to his family. One of his siblings, they write a brief poem, and basically what the focus is is that Webster put his trust in God and to tell his family not to be upset that he was killed because it was God’s will. And so I think as the war progresses, Francis is putting his trust in God as he’s serving on the Western Front. You know, if he’s meant to be killed, he’s meant to be killed. If he’s meant to get through it, he’ll get through it. And I think that’s probably one of the ways you just process what you’re seeing when you’re seeing these massive amounts of casualties and when you’re seeing guys who’re right next to you gettin’ their leg blown off or being struck and them versus you. I think you just start takin’ on that kind of mentality.

– And what sort of, we didn’t really get into this too much, Darrek, but the family background that would give him that kind of attitude?
– So yeah, his father was a Baptist pastor, and so in his youth, his dad would move around quite a bit with the family. They’d be in one community for a year or two and then kinda bounce around. So he came up with this very, he was raised in a very Christian upbringing. And I think also this moving around also helped him with a sense of humor that you see in a lot of his artwork, too. I think when he moved, he had to scramble to be able to make new friends, and so I think he was pretty good on his feet at being funny, and I think a lot of that shows in his artwork as well. But yeah, very much he was the son of a Baptist pastor.

– Do have a sense that his attitude toward Germans developed during the course of the war?
– It’s, he wasn’t a guy who took a lot of souvenirs from dead Germans. Some of his comrades certainly did, belt buckles and helmets and buttons and all that. Francis writes at one point, and this is in July of 1918, that there’s, he coulda taken a number of souvenirs, but he chooses not to, and at one point, he’s walkin’ across a battlefield, there’s an illustration, and it’s of some German soldiers with a few women, they’re sitting like on a cart or a wagon, and he picks that up off the battlefield. That’s really his only souvenir he picks up as he’s in this particular battle. And on the back he writes, “Found this on the ground after some Boche dropped it,” you know? He’s fighting, there’s certainly an enemy, and you see also during the St. Mihiel drive, too, they’re interacting with these prisoners. And these are young men, so they’re takin’ a lot of equipment that they need, you know, shoes are startin’ to wear out, shirts are startin’ to wear out or get very full of lice, and so they’re findin’ things that they can wear that’s German just to kinda make up for the lack of material that’s coming up to them in the front lines. And there’s one illustration he does where they find a box of candy and chocolate, cigars, all kinds of stuff, and they’re goin’ through it as the Germans are kinda standing back behind as they’re sifting through it, yeah.

– The war, of course, progressed in a technological sense. Did he see any of the other innovations of war, I use the term very loosely here, in addition to the introduction of gas?
– Yeah, so airplanes were very archaic during the time period, and they were very common on the Western Front. So there’s one illustration he does where he depicts a soldier with his backpack and his canteens, all his gear, and he writes with a little arrow, “two tons.” And then he, the guy’s lookin’ up, and there’s like a little balloon, and it says, and he’s lookin’ up at a plane, and he says, “Gosh, I should have been in the aviation,” you know, securing all of this gear and being in the muck and mud and everything. But one of his last drawings is he’s in this bivouac, this encampment, they’re in pup tents, and they’re in shelters made out of corrugated steel, almost like a camp kind of area. They pull ’em off the front lines for a little bit to count, help them get ready for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive and work with these replacements. And so they’re in this camp, and that’s when there’s a Allied observation balloon, it’s full of helium, it’s way up there in the air, and a German aviator cuts through the lines or through the defenses of it and comes up close, and fires into it and ignites it. So the thing’s startin’ to burn up, and the guys who are in it, the Allies, they jump out with parachutes. These are very basic, archaic parachutes, they’re comin’ down, and then the German plane spins around, and he’s taken down then by an Allied airplane, so he comes down. But Webster did this illustration that’s showing this burning observation balloon and the guys parachuting out, and then him and his comrades down at the bottom just kinda cheering it all on, this show they got to watch from their bivouac. So that’s one of his last illustrations, and he sent that then back to a Des Moines newspaper where they published it then. That was one of his last published pieces of artwork, from the period of the war anyway.

– Now, we have letters, of course, from Francis Webster. Do we have letters from home to him that give us some sense of what they were thinking, what they were hoping?
– Yeah, there’s a few letters that came in from home that were preserved. His father at one point, he’s lookin’ at joining the YMCA and goin’ over there to be a volunteer. The YMCA, they were, they supplied a lot of comforts to soldiers. They would have areas towards the front lines where they would sell, you know, cigarettes, people smoked a lot back then.

– Norman: It was one of the least of the health hazards.
– Exactly, yeah, yeah. And you know, chocolates and stationery, things of that nature, and sometimes these YMCA positions, they could be causalities as well. In that first gas attack they experienced, a couple YMCA men start movin’ up towards the front, and they become fatalities. So Francis’s dad is writing him, talking about how he wants to be a part of it, and Francis is a little unsure about his dad coming over to the Western Front, and he’s like, you know, just the what’s taking place over there. I think he realizes his dad has no idea what he’s gonna experience.
– Just as probably Francis didn’t either when he went over. Do we have accounts from his fellow soldiers as to what he was like?
– Yeah, so a lot of his fellow soldiers, they describe him as a very likable guy. He became very famous throughout the regiment. Everyone knew him as the machine gun cartoonist. And so he’s sending artwork back to the home front, and you know, their loved ones are talking about it, they’re referencing him. As I was writing the book, I took a look at the collections of a few other soldiers who served with Webster, and some were in different platoons, they weren’t very close with him, but they’re making mention of him as well periodically in their writings. So most of his company knew him, and a lot of the men throughout the regiment knew him as well as this cartoonist.

– And back home, were people then responding to him, to his cartoons? Was he sort of a celebrity back in Iowa, also?
– A little bit, yeah. You see some of the newspapers, and the Des Moines Capital, they report there was a big following of his artwork. When things came in from the Western Front, they would put it on the front page, and that way people could see it. And he would oftentimes just write a real brief description of what went with those illustrations, and it would be reproduced and printed then in the newspaper, and there was a lot of clippings that were saved. They worked with a few other collections of National Guard soldiers from that time period, and some of the clippings are there from one of their families and cut ’em out and gave ’em to ’em. So it was something that I think people on the home front, they were hungry to learn more about their soldiers. During the war, there was the Committee on Public Information which limited a lot of what could be shared from the Western Front to the home front, and this happened almost right away as America entered into the conflict, and it limited what could be shared in the newspapers, publications, just, there’s a lot, there’s been a number of books written on it as well. And so it’s, the information was very limited, and Ding Darling writes him at one point and says, “It’s great what you’re doin’ here, because we’re so hungry for learning more about what’s happening in the trenches over there.”

– And of course, a little bit of the irony is that Francis Webster didn’t have that much knowledge of what was actually the big picture.
– For sure, so he’s, you know, a lot of it is he’s serving with his division, he’s serving with his unit. But what’s really unique about it is that he’s one of the first soldiers to go over there. The 42nd Division was the first American divisions to arrive in France, not the first, but one of the first, and so they’re over there, and they’re experiencing much of the American experience over there in the war. So they’re training with the French, learning how to use this modern military equipment, and they’re in the trenches in the early part of the war, and then in the summer of 1918, they’re fighting in open warfare, and they’re part of the St. Mihiel drive. And then later, in the Meuse-Argonne when half the American casualties are lost, Francis is one of those.

– What did he think of the French?
– So with the French, he held ’em in pretty high regard. A lot of the soldiers in his regiment did. So they were serving with the French for a good chunk of the war. So he did a lotta illustrations of French peasants, of French girls sometimes, and just some of what he was seeing in these villages. And in his bag of equipment, there was also a French phrase book, and he does an illustration where he’s tryin’ to learn how to, so he can communicate with a French girl there. He’s illustrating soldiers coming back from the front lines and interacting with their families before heading back over to the Front. So he holds ’em in pretty high regard. There’s one time, and it’s in the book, him and some of his fellow soldiers, I think they see their first French soldier up close and personal, and the guy’s on leave, and he’s this grizzled veteran, and they wanna take a picture of him and talk to him, and I don’t think he really wanted much to do with it. So one of the guys offers him a bag of American tobacco, and then he posed quite a bit for some photos. And they were working very closely together. Real early on when they’re in the trenches, they are, it’s almost like a one-to-one ratio, French and American soldiers, and then it turns into a much lesser ratio, and then towards the end, there was mostly just all Americans that are serving in French armies. So a great example is the Battle of Champagne in early July of 1918. They’re there with the French Fourth Army, and so the 42nd Division is the only National Guard division that’s there other than a regiment of African-American soldiers who are kinda aligned with a French unit. They were taken from the American military and put into the French. And so they’re there on the lines, mostly French just with some Americans kinda scattered between, along the front lines. So it’s, there’s very much a lot of interaction between the French and the Americans, and much of it was very positive.

– Did he ever say anything about German way of conducting warfare? I mean, did he feel that sides were balanced in the terms of the way they conducted warfare? Did both sides use gas?
– Yeah, so both sides used gas, and the Germans were the first to start using it, and then the Allies caught up with it. So there’s a lot of gas shells that were fired by the Americans, just as there was those fired by the Germans, too. And right after they arrived into the trenches, they go and it’s kinda a quiet sector. They write about how there was German soldiers like hanging laundry on the barbed wire to let it dry. And the French and the Germans on either side, they kinda had this truce where, you know, you don’t fire at me, I’m not gonna fire at you, and there would just be a standard number of shells they were supposed to fire, and they just kinda throw ’em off in that direction. And it was, for their part of the Western Front, they’re tryin’ to keep kinda quiet.

– Civilized.
– Exactly, yeah, yeah. And so the Iowans get in there, and they start seeing these Germans walking and exposed and hangin’ laundry up, and they start engaging ’em right away.
– Oh, really.
– They start firing towards ’em, because–
– Didn’t quite know the informal rules?
– And I think they were there to try to finish, to help finish the war, and so I don’t think they wanted to have that kind of relationship with the Germans. So there was, they started shooting, and the sector become aggressive very quickly. And that’s around that same time period when this massive raid happens. So the Germans were planning a massive raid, and at the same time, this was all coming together. They brought in specialized Bavarian Stormtroopers from another part of the line, brought ’em in, and my understanding is there was even like little training areas that kinda replicated where they would be advancing across. That way, they were very well-prepared for when they went across no man’s land into the Iowans’ positions. A similar thing had happened with an Iowan a few months prior, in November of 1917 where the first casualties of the war were lost, that he was an Iowan, and I think a lot of men from Webster’s unit, they knew what would happen if they were taken in an assault like that, they’d be paraded before the German media. So they fought very aggressively back with ’em.

– And so in that last battle in which Francis Webster was involved, what was the big picture of that?
– So he Meuse-Argonne is this, was this massive offensive. It’s a very wooded and hilly-type terrain. It looks like a lotta areas in Wisconsin, really. And it’s sorta broken-type ground, a lotta elevated positions, and it was massive amounts of barbed wire, very thick stretches of barbed wire on top of all these ridges and hill tops. There’s artillery, there’s machine gun emplacements, and when the assault first happens, when the offensive first begins, they start sending divisions in, and some of those divisions are completely wiped out, not completely, but largely shattered as they’re moving in, and some heavy casualties are suffered, and it’s just large amounts of troops that are being deployed into this. When Webster’s unit, when they come into it, the 1st Division had already been fighting, and so there was American dead from the 1st Division scattered across the battlefield. It’s a very apocalyptic-type feel.

And even before they go into the Meuse-Argonne, as they’re goin’ into it, because there had been fighting over this area for some time, there was windrows of bleached, sun-bleached skeletons laying out there from where lines of French troops had got caught up in barbed wire or been hit by machine gun fire or artillery, and they were still out there. And some of the soldiers were takin’ pictures. They’d never seen like it before. Webster didn’t do much with takin’ pictures or illustrations of it, but a number of his comrades did. And so the Meuse-Argonne is this very large offensive, and they kept pounding away at the Germans, and the 42nd Division’s then brought into it. They’re serving pretty closely to the 32nd Division at this time, too, the Wisconsin National Guard, and they started coming into an area which is called Hill 288 and then Cte de Chtillon, which is just behind it. These were very large positions. They’re on the landscape, they provide commanding views of the surrounding area, and it’s part of this massive German line through that area, and they begin engaging that. And so they are successful in attacking it, and they capture this ground with quite heavy losses, and the war continues to proceed, they’re relieved off the lines, and then they’re involved into the very end in the drive to Sedan as they’re gettin’ closer and closer into areas that hadn’t been really fought over yet in World War I. So it wasn’t these moonscape-type areas as they started getting beyond the Meuse-Argonne, and then that’s when the Armistice then takes place.

– So as we follow Francis Webster into October of 1918, by now does anybody have a sense that this war is going to end within a month?
– I don’t think anyone thought the war was gonna end in a month, but it was, you could definitely see that it was startin’ to grind down quite a bit, and so there’s still a number of prisoners that are being captured, and there’s new divisions comin’ in from America, and replacements are coming in in pretty large amounts. The American military is looking at probably peace in 1919, you know, realistically, but it comes to a close very quickly in October and early November.
– And we find Francis Webster, what, walking through the woods, not right in the immediate front lines of combat on October 14th of 1918?
– So yeah, October 14th, the day that he’s killed, they’re preparing for a large massive assault, and it’s on Hill 288, 1st Battalion of the 168th Infantry is the ones who are leading it, and Francis Webster and his comrades, they’re firing into, and it’s kind of broken ground kinda leading up to this hill. There’s a lotta farm fields, there’s some patches of timber, and then this rise, and it’s well-wooded and very well-fortified. So they’re getting closer to it, and they’ve dug some small foxholes, and they’re preparing for, and they’re supporting the assault that’s happening and firing machine gun rounds into the German positions. A lot of it’s indirect fire where it’s goin’ up and over and then into the German lines.

– And how was the news of Francis’s death conveyed to his family?
– So with Francis, his death was, they shared a telegram. And so this, it was sent, it didn’t arrive right away. You know, there’s so many casualties happening in the Meuse-Argonne that they, it doesn’t arrive ’til after the Armistice. So his family no doubt celebrated the Armistice at home in Iowa–
– Terrible timing.
– Absolutely, and a couple days later, then the telegram arrives saying, you know, “We regret to inform you.” And it’s a telegram, the type of telegram that quite a few Iowans received. The fight in the Meuse-Argonne, 2/3 of the casualties, 2/3 of the 1st Battalion that went up that hill were casualties, and there was quite a bit of loss in the regiment.

– His platoon was in front of Hill 288 on the morning of October 14th. They had been in action but a little while when the Germans got their range and laid down a barrage. They withdrew to their protections. Francis was acting section sergeant. Frank M. Bondor was a platoon sergeant. He and Francis had the night before made themselves what the boys call a fox pit, a kind of grave-like hole which was covered with logs, dirt, and brush. But a new man, a replacement man, who had neglected to repair a protection for himself, climbed into their pit. Bondor asked Francis if he should order him out, but Francis said, “No, let him have it.” Then the two laid down in a shallow open hole, and two minutes later, Francis was shot through with a bit of high-explosive shell casing. He died as they were carrying him from the field. This last incident should not be told publicly, but it shows the spirit of the boys. Sergeant Bondor did not tell me of it until the boys who were him had told me. Then he gave fuller details. I do not know who crawled into their pit. I have never asked. I do not think he was a Des Moines boy, though he might be. The speculations or the avoidance of speculation on the part of the father, the bereaved father of Francis Webster.

– Absolutely. There was a part of the letter that Francis’s father was sending to the clergy who was going to be doing his funeral. After Webster was killed, his comrades found him. They wrapped him up in a German blanket, and they brought him to an aid station. And that’s where he was placed at. He remained there for a few days, and he was found because of his notoriety in the regiment. What happened when he was hit with that shrapnel was that he was laying out there in the woods, some guys were walkin’ by him and recognized him and then reported back, and then they took care of him. But he was temporarily buried there on the battlefield, just with a wooden stake, a wooden marker, and then in 1921, when there was more room to be able to bring deceased soldiers back to the U.S., his family elected to bring him over to America, and he’s buried now in a Des Moines cemetery. So in 1921, his remains were then brought back. He arrived at his parents’ home, and there was a visitation in their parlor in Algona, Iowa. And then one of the soldiers who was with him, Frank Bondor, escorted his remains then down to Des Moines, and then he was buried in what’s called the Gold Star Plot of a large cemetery in Des Moines, and he’s not too far away from his company commander, Captain Fleur, and a number of other men who served in the 168th Infantry during World War I.

– What was he carrying when he was killed?
– So at the time that he was killed, he had a bag with him that was full of artwork, and so he had been sending a lot of his illustrations to these newspapers in Des Moines that he was working with, but he also had a number of illustrations that were with him and watercolors that I believe that he was saving for a book of his own after the war. And this is a book that probably wouldve came out in 1919 if he wouldve been able to make it home, and instead, it came out in 2016. However, when he was killed, one of his comrades then grabbed this bag of artwork, and he took ownership of it and took responsibility to make sure it got back to his family, and that’s where it was curated at for almost 90 years. And so his family had a bag of his artwork, it still had bloodstains on the outside of it. And then the newspaper that had published much of his artwork, they had curated it as well, and then those were given to his family. So that was all in these boxes when I first, when I first began the research on Francis.

– Well, Darrek Orwig, thank you for looking into the life of Francis Webster and sharing it with us.
– Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate being here.
– I’m Norman Gilliland, and I hope you’ll join me next time around for University Place Presents.