Christmas, 1917

My name is Charles Fogarty Jr. and I am 77 years old . I live happily alone in a log house in the town of Sandisfield in western Massachsetts and I am pretty sure this is going to be my last Christmas. Under the circumstances, I have taken a look at my long life, played back a string of Christmases and I've decided to make this one a sentimental holiday that would sound and look like the Christmas Eve sixty years ago when I played the bugle in an American Legion Drum and Bugle Corps Memorial Jamboree on a wintry confield in middle Illinois. I remember most everything about that night....our '46 Mercury automobile with a Christmas tree tied on top, the blue uniforms of the band, the grand out-of-tune music, my father's blue overseas cap with the little curved prism of the Rainbow Division of World War I, the frost on his mustache, my mother's arms around my sister with her pigtail down the middle, the foot-high broken stalks of corn and most of all the Mayor, resplendent in a blue and yellow conductor suit flailing away with a gold baton in the midst of an awful noise. We were all so enthusiastic about wars and flags and courage.

But now I know that memory is a souffle, whipped and sweet above the truth.

You see, recently, I found some very old special papers in my father's files. Some were typed and others were written in pencil...the batch of them had burnt edges as if he had tried to get rid of them beforfe he died.....but.....humbled by his Parkinsons, he couldn't destroy them. I found them in a ratty folder, jammed flat above other files that were neatly organized. In the bottom of the file was small flat box with an official paper wrapped around it. The paper was an order for Charles Fogarty appear at a courts martial and inside the box was the Medale Militaire, a
French medal for valor.

Written on the outside of the folder in his shaky hand was "CHF in World War I".

Of all the wars we have fought, indeed of all the wars anyone anywhere has fought, th "Great War", the one that sucked up the world between 1914 and 1918 was the dumbest, most idiotic human folly of them all. Wars, over time, become myths....even the "good " war sixty years ago,
although it had to be fought, has picked up a certain empty celebrity. But the so-called "great"
war, World War I....was nothing more than a bloody human carnivore that ate up generations of young men to no purpose at all.

My father, Charles Hubert Fogarty Sr. was born in New York City in February of 1900 and almost missed the whole war. He was a patriot at birth and when he was 15 tried to join the Candadian army.....but he got sent back.

He succeeeded in becoming a soldier on his 17th birthday, when America had declared war on Germany. The army would talke him as an infantryman because he was too nearsighted but he talked them into letting him become a medic. And it was as a medic that he served in England and France.

On the night of December 24, 1917. Corporal Fogarty, the medic, lay in a little hole he had dug in the back of a trench near the French town of Passchendaele....it was, for awhile, unimaginably silent. There had been three Christmas Eves already in this endless war....men sat in their trenches, sometimes less than a hundred yards from their enemies and thought about their childhood Christmases with plum pudding and sticky fruit cakes, laughter and...most of all.... carols, achingly familiar carols. They silently mouthed the simple, traditional lyrics.

Now my father had had one hell of a time leading up to that Christmas Eve. After an Atlantic crossing that required his standing up most of the way because of the crowded troop ship, he walked into the teeth of the influenza pandemic that swept through Europe in 1917 like the 14th Century plague. It wasn't what we call "the flu" at all, it was the "flu" gone mad...a viral upper
respiratory infection that became a mortal form of encephalitis, killing almost everyone who got it. My father caught it right aawy but survived, depveloping an immunity that made it possible for him to minister to the flu patients that arrived in England to die. A lot of soldiers ended up in
Charlie Fogarty's wheelbarrow as he lugged their bodies to an incredible "morgue" on a fancy
estate near Dover...a warehouse that became an abbatoir...were doctors cut up the corpses in a desperate effort to find the cause of the disease.

In August of 1917 Charlie Fogarty was shipped across the channel, assigned as a medic to a British battalion to fight the Germans at the Third Battle of Ypres...a brutal four month bloodbath known to history as the Battle of Passchendaele.

The war had come down to a hopeless standoff. The genocides of the Somme and Verdun were behind them, but the soldiers huddled in a line of trenches that stretched from Belgium to Switzerland, knew that it all was going to happen again. A whistle would sound and they would climb the side of the trench and walk across the grim playground of the dead once again.

Within hours of his arrival outside Passchendaele, that whistle blew and Charlie was staggering forward through the harvest of bodies that had been scythed by German machine guns. Charlie, the medic,was trying to separate the wounded from the dead, wrapping the ripped flesh with his packet of four inch bandages and passing on to the next soldier lying in the summer mud.

In the end, nothing had been accomplished, the lines remained exactly the same and Charlie went back to the same trench and sat in his little hole where he had left his pouch of tobacco.

He sat there for four months.

In the fall and winter of 1917, the rules, the proprieties of warfare were being challenged. Millions of men had reached the limits of human endurance...and actual mutinies and anti-war strikes had broken out... especially among the French regiments. "Shell shock" entered the language and the insanity of it all...the endless inhumanity was everywhere.

On that Christmas Eve, 1917, Charlie was especially sad as he sat with his English comrades in his hole in his trench because he was 17 years old and Christmas for him was supposed to be a time of gifts and surprises. The temperature had dropped below freezing all along the front and it was gently snowing on the shell holes and unrecovered bodies in no-mans land.

Quite suddenly....as if it were some sort of divine intervention....Charlie heard a beautiful tenor voice singing "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht". Around the music it was completely quiet....the men were swept into a great pause....Charlie realized that the singing was coming from 100 yards away, from the German trenches.

As the song ended, lights began to appear on the horizon, Charlie and his comrades reached for their rifles until someone whispered loudly,

"My God in heaven! Look at that, they're lifting Christmas trees!"

Small balsam trees adorned with candles were being placed on the upper edges of the enemy trench...and a voice called out in German-tinted English,

"Where are your Christmas trees?"

The men began to move out of their holes, Charlie Fogarty climbed up the side of his trench, this time without his rifle. A dozen soldiers joined him walking across the battlefield towards the Christmas candles. Someone started singing "Adeste Fideles" and pretty soon everyone was lustily singing in the common Latin tongue.

They came from all sides and gathered inthe center of the cratered field. At first they were awkward, barely able to speak...but soon the voices were sprinkled with laughter and handshakes turned into embraces. Corporal Fogarty spotted a German medic wearing a red cross and they stood together for a few minutes without a word.

But is was the lifting of the Christmas trees that Charlie remembered most vividly. And it was the bobbing trees just above the trench line that alerted the officers.....who were appalled by the spectacle of fraternizing soldiers. Sharp orders to stand down were barked from both sides and the men retreated to their respectived ditches.

It was a great scandal. Forty men, including Charlie Fogarty, were called to courts martial to answer for their behavior. But the touching story appeared in the London Illustrated News and the charges were dropped.

Thirty years later, in 1947, I was playing my bugle at the American Legion Memorial Christmas Jamboree.

At the end of the concert...my father....my wonderful, sane father, Corporal Charlie Fogarty, walked over to our car, unstrapped the Christmas tree on the top and mysteriously lifted it high in the air.

December 7, 2007