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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 10, 2018)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, November 10, 2018 East Oregonian Page 5A ARMISTICE DAY ‘Time to bury the dead’ By BRIGIT FARLEY For the East Oregonian T he 1918 Armistice, negotiated between the Allies and Imperial Germany at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 100 years ago, ended hostilities in the Great War. There was great joy and relief everywhere, also some confusion. One Australian soldier asked his friend, “What’s an armistice, mate?” “Time to bury the dead, mate,” came the reply. The end of the war became an occasion to take stock, mainly of what had been lost — besides four empires, some nine million men and women on the battlefields and behind the lines. Indeed, a time to bury the dead. Umatilla County sent 1,026 men, both volunteers and draftees, to the battlefields. As was true of the country generally, casualties here were light — fewer than 20 dead of wounds or illness. But every loss reveals a story, and three in particular remain vivid and affecting 100 years on. Dell Blancett was a Pendleton Round-Up celebrity in 1917. He had competed well every year since his 1911 debut and won the 1912 bulldogging title. When war came to the U.S. in April, he and fellow Round-Up champ Lee Caldwell mustered up a group of Photo by Kathy Aney cowboys and adventurers known Gravestone of Robert Ingalls, who died during the battle of the to history as Oregon National Argonne forest in France in 1918. Guard Cavalry Troop D. They would help the U.S. rope and tie of September-November 1918 the Kaiser. But after failing the the January 1919 birth of their was fated to be the last major required U.S. Army physical, he son, whom she named Robert operation of the war, also the faced being denied the chance to Pershing Ingalls after American bloodiest battle in U.S. history. fight for the Allies. So he traveled Expeditionary Force commander Pendletonian Robert Ingalls north to enlist with Canadian John J. Pershing. “Heaven sent and comrades of the Army’s forces, winning a place in Lord you to me, as a pledge of love 154th Infantry Brigade, 77th Strathcona’s Horse, a storied from one who is sleeping far Division, took the field in late cavalry regiment. Ironically, away, with his glorious duty Blancett became the only Troop D September. Under the command done,” read a poem written after of Col. Charles Whittlesey, member to make use of his riding the boy’s birth. “Sleeping now Ingalls’ battalion advanced too prowess, as the Army converted in Flanders Fields, free from all quickly during an attack on the Troop D to field artillery prior his pain, but through those bright Germans in the Argonne forest to overseas duty. Blancett rode blue eyes of yours, he smiles at and became separated from the with the “Strats” into the teeth of me again.” Tragically, Elizabeth units on its flanks. This group the last major German offensive, Ingalls was to suffer a second later became known as the “Lost Operation Michael, and was devastating loss. Details remain Battalion.” Overwhelmed and mortally wounded on March 30, sketchy 97 years on, but a quiet outnumbered by the enemy, 1918. Veterans Affairs Canada hillside in Olney Cemetery tells notes that Private Blancett showed Whittlesey’s men fought for days the tale. “very fine pluck and cheerfulness” without food, water or shelter. Robert Ingalls’ body came Ingalls, a local farmer who had throughout. Like two-thirds of all home to Pendleton in late married just a month before the Great War casualties, Blancett’s December 1921 and was laid U.S. entered the war, was badly body was never found. His name to rest after a funeral in the wounded during the ordeal. He is inscribed on the wall of the Presbyterian church. A few feet missing at the imposing Canadian died shortly after the battalion’s away, mourners could see the war memorial near Vimy Ridge in rescue on Oct. 8. fresh grave of 2-year-old Robert Back in Pendleton, Ingalls’ France. Pershing Ingalls, who had died The Meuse-Argonne offensive widow, Elizabeth, took solace in just three months earlier. Elizabeth Photo by Kathy Aney Gravestone of Robert P. Ingalls, young son of Robert Ingalls. EO file photo Sheldon Ulrich Ingalls now faced life without her husband and son, a fate she shared with millions of women worldwide. In the spring of 1917, Sheldon Ulrich was looking forward to graduation from Pendleton High School. He was one of the class’s bright lights, achieving high grades, captaining the football team and serving as student correspondent for the East Oregonian. But when the U.S. joined the war in April, Ulrich and classmate Clell Brown promptly volunteered for the Marines and left for training the day after graduation. Both trained at Quantico, Virginia, and fought with the 6th Marine Regiment, which helped stop the last-gasp German push toward Paris at Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry in summer 1918. Ulrich alluded to the Belleau Wood campaign in a June 23 letter published in the East Oregonian. He declared laconically that he was “glad to have pulled through,” and hinted at some weariness. “Fritz can sign the peace treaty any time now.” Mostly, though, he was anxious for news of family, fishing and PHS classmates. “I would like to get more papers, especially the Lantern,” he told his father. Ulrich survived numerous assaults on his mortality that summer. By early November 1918, he and his comrades — minus Brown, who was recovering from wounds behind the lines — were in the thick of Meuse-Argonne, near Sedan. They could not have known that even as they fought on, the German government had entered into negotiations with the Allies for an armistice. Early in the morning of Nov. 11, the parties finally agreed on terms that provided for a cessation of hostilities at 11 a.m. Mass rejoicing ensued up and down the lines, but Sheldon Ulrich was not among the revelers. His tombstone in Olney cemetery reads, aptly, “killed in the last battle of the World War, Sedan sector, at midnight November 10, 1918.” There is a special Armistice exhibit in the Belgian town of Ypres, the unofficial capital of the European Great War, entitled, “Coming World, Remember Me.” A century on, I hope 2018 Pendletonians will pause to remember their Great War dead. They died trying mightily to make the world safe for democracy. ■ Brigit Farley is a Pendleton resident and professor of history at Washington State University. Imagining the Great War, a century later By JIM VAN NOSTRAND T here are competing schools of thought as to the inspira- tion for J.R.R. Tolkien’s visions of Mordor in his epic fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Some say it was the steelworks and blast furnaces of the industri- alized West Midlands northwest of Birmingham, England. But many others — including myself — believe Tolkien’s memories of his British Army service in the horrific World War I battle of the Somme were the real catalyst. The British suffered 57,000 casu- alties on the first day of the battle alone. The campaign would claim almost 1.5 million Allied soldiers, including the lives of two of his closest friends and another shortly afterward. Several passages in the novels evoke echoes of the blasted moon- scapes of northern France — the muddy trenches, the widespread pestilence, the barbed wire, the deadly clouds of poisonous gas, the enemy siege works, and death and destruction on an unimag- inable scale. For example, as Frodo and Sam cross the Dead Marshes in “The Two Towers,” they see the faces of the dead below the water. “Grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their sil- ver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead.” Sunday marks the 100th anni- versary of the Armistice ending the war. Memories of one of the most cataclysmic events in world history have mostly faded from the public consciousness, as the generation who fought in it has passed. It is left to their children and grandchildren to preserve the accounts of their sacrifices. Associated Press A U.S. Army 37mm gun crew mans its position during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France in September 1918. The battle cost 26,000 American lives, but helped bring about the end of World War I. “Hurrah!! Hurrah!!,” local Army veteran William Carl Urell’s diary from Nov. 11, 1918, reads. “The war is over at last. Hurrah!!!!!” ——— As a young lieutenant serving in the Army’s 1st Infantry Divi- sion, I had the opportunity in the 1980s to tour several of the battle- fields in France on which Amer- ican soldiers fought — Canti- gny, Soissons, St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. At first, it’s hard to imagine the scenes recounted in diaries and offi- cial unit histories, and depicted in grainy black-and-white photos from that era. The Argonne countryside is a verdant and idyllic place today, full of lush farms, lakes, thick for- ests and picturesque villages. Then, driving through the region, the reminders appear. The vast cemeteries full of crosses. The mass graves marked by tow- ering monuments. The overgrown outlines of vast trenchworks and machine-gun emplacements. The 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive, which ended the war, involved 1.2 million American troops and was a particularly bru- tal affair, even by the standards of the day. Fresh, inexperienced, eager soldiers were thrown head- long into frontal assaults against machine guns manned by sea- soned German troops in densely wooded terrain. Much of the combat devolved into close-range fighting with pistols, bayonets and knives. I thought to myself at the time how fortunate my grandfather was to have served on a Navy ship during the war, not on the front lines in that hellish fray. The most haunting memory of the trip is of the “Trench of the Bayonets” near Verdun. In 1916, a company of the French 137th Reg- iment defending Fort Douaumont was annihilated almost to the last man when a German artillery bar- rage collapsed the walls of their earthworks. They were found with a neat line of bayonets sticking out of the ground, still attached to their rifles, a body buried next to each one. The site has been preserved nearly intact. ——— Tolkien, a young Oxford aca- demic, was 24 when he arrived at the Somme that same year. He began writing the first drafts of his mythology about Middle-earth, as he recalled, “by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire,” accord- ing to Joseph Loconte, an asso- ciate professor of history at the King’s College in New York. “When Frodo returns to the Shire, his quest at an end, he resembles not so much the con- quering hero as a shellshocked veteran,” Loconte wrote in the New York Times in 2016. “Here is a war story, wrapped in fantasy, that delivers painful truths about the human predicament. “Tolkien used the language of myth not to escape the world, but to reveal a mythic and heroic quality in the world as we find it,” he added. “Perhaps this was the greatest tribute he could pay to the fallen of the Somme.” ■ Jim Van Nostrand is editor of The Daily Astorian.
