Bess Truman (11 page)

In France, letter by letter, Bess followed Harry through the exhausting ordeal of another, tougher artillery school, where he got to be so good at “trig and logs,” as he called it (that’s trigonometry and logarithms), that he was made an instructor. Then came even better news. On June 14, 1918, he wrote: “I am back with the regiment and a sure enough captain.” It had taken six weeks for his promotion to catch up with him so he had “about a bushel and a half of francs back pay coming next payday.”

Even better news followed exactly a month later. “I have attained my one ambition, to be a Battery commander. If I can only make good at it, I can hold my head up anyway for the rest of my days.”

Subsequent letters revealed that this promotion was a mixed blessing. Battery D was composed mostly of Irish-Catholics from Kansas City. Contrary to earlier versions of their background, they were not all lower-class mugs by any means. Many of them were college men, but they all shared a fondness for breaking any and every army regulation on the books. They had already ruined three captains before Harry Truman got them. Nevertheless, in a week, he was reporting more good news to Bess: “They gave me a Battery that was always in trouble . . . but we carried off all the credits this week. I hope to make a reputation for myself if the cards fall right and I don’t get wounded or something. It is the Irish Battery I have and the adjutant has decided to put an O in front of my name to make me right. They seem to want to soldier for me and if I can get them to do it, I shall consider that I have made the greatest success there is to make. If I fail, it’ll be a great failure too. That’s always the case though. The men are as fine a bunch as were ever gotten together but they have been lax in discipline. Can you imagine me being a hard-boiled captain of a tough Irish Battery? I started things in a rough-cookie fashion. The very first man that was up before me for a lack of discipline got everything I was capable of giving. I took the Battery out to fire the next day and they were so anxious to please me and fire good that one of my gunners got the ague and simply blew up. I had to take him out. When I talked to him about it he almost wept and I felt so sorry for him I didn’t even call him down. Tell George [Wallace] that little Higginbotham is one of my shootin’ men. He pulls the hammer on No. 1 gun and he sure rides it. The other day it nearly bucked him off.”

Bess matched Harry letter for letter. One day he got four - and a box of candy from Paris on which was written: “Sent by order of Miss Bess Wallace, Independence, Kansas City, Mo.” Along with worrying her man through France, she had to cope with a family crisis at 219 North Delaware Street. Her grandfather was dying. Her mother all but collapsed at the thought of losing the one man who had sustained her. George P. Gates had been ill since early in 1918, suffering largely from the complications of old age. (He was eighty-two.) On June 26, 1918, he died. For Bess, too, it was a wrenching loss. A strong, genial, loving presence vanished from her life.

The loss also triggered considerable anxiety. Her grandfather left his wife Elizabeth an annuity, so she was financially secure. But the rest of his modest estate was divided among his five children. Madge Wallace received $23,247.39 - not enough to support her and Bess and her youngest son, Fred, whom Madge had resolved to send to the University of Missouri, for more than a few years. If Harry Truman was killed in action, Bess’ future would be bleak.

We know, now, that he was not killed. But the coming months and years of Bess Wallace’s future were as opaque and threatening to her in 1918 as they were to the women who sent men to all the other wars of our century. She threw herself into her war bond sales work and put a star in the flag of the Episcopal Church for Harry, even though he was a Baptist who seldom went to church. In her letters, she shared some of her deepest feelings with him. She revealed how awful she had felt when he came to a Fourth of July party in his uniform in the summer of 1917. It is interesting that it took her an entire year to tell him. As he neared combat, she seemed to want to let him know that her pain at the thought of losing him had been acute from the start.

Letters from another friend with a strange (but in my opinion lovely) name reveal that Bess was afraid that she might have a nervous breakdown in 1918. Arry Ellen Mayer had grown fond of Bess and vice versa when her family moved to North Delaware Street from Kansas City. When they relocated again, this time to Toronto, Canada, the two young women began a lengthy correspondence. Bess saved dozens of Arry’s letters, almost as many as those of Mary Paxton. Where Mary was intense and dramatic, Arry was cheerful and high-spirited. She obviously gave Bess an emotional lift, but she also was close enough to let her write frankly.

“Don’t for heaven’s sake get nerves,” Arry wrote in response to Bess saying she might have a breakdown. “They are the meanest things on earth, and the only cure is a complete rest. And I know how you’d hate that. So do get rid of them quick, please.” Arry cheered her by reporting that Canadian friends wrote from France that the Germans could not hold out much longer. “Take care of yourself,” Arry wrote, “for you know . . . you want to be ready for a glorious time when Harry comes home. It’s so splendid of him to be going . . .”

This sentiment was not one Bess was hearing at 219 North Delaware. Other letters reveal Bess was interested in Arry’s romantic experiences. When she hinted that she was falling in love with a Canadian major, Bess wondered how she could possibly marry a foreigner. “It’s a shame to have made you so excited about my thoughts of embracing matrimony,” Arry wrote. “I will confess I am mightily tempted, but I haven’t the courage. You’re quite right, I simply couldn’t marry anyone but an American.”

Bess sent Arry a copy of the photograph she had sent to Captain Truman and received an ecstatic reply. “It’s the one picture I’ve always wanted and most given up hopes of ever having,” Arry wrote. “My but I am glad the ‘General’ had to have it. That’s surely one of the good things out of this war.”

Then came the letter from France that Bess had dreaded. Captain Truman was in combat. “I . . . have accomplished my greatest wish. Have fired 500 rounds at the Germans . . . been shelled, didn’t run away thank the Lord, and never lost a man.” With that uncanny instinct for fulfilling her deepest wish, to know, to share everything with him, Harry added: “Probably shouldn’t have told you but you’ll not worry any more if you know I’m in it than if you think I am.”

At the same time, the letter revealed his caution about telling her every detail, especially those that would worry her. Not until the war was over did Captain Truman report just how dangerous that first encounter with the enemy had been. “The first sergeant failed to get the horses up in time and The Hun gave me a good shelling. The sergeant ran away and I had one high old time getting out of that place. I finally did with two guns and went back to my former position. . . . The boys called that engagement the Battle of Who Run because some of them ran when the first sergeant did and some of them didn’t. I made some corporals and first class privates out of those who stayed with me and busted the sergeant.”

From this first brush with the Germans in the Vosges Mountains, the Battery soon moved into one of the major battles of the war, St. Mihiel. Bess got a stream of vivid letters from Harry describing his experiences. He told her about bringing the Battery forward under fire, with shells falling on all sides of them, and never losing a man. “I am as sure as I am sitting here that the Lord was and is with me,” he wrote.

Peace rumors began sweeping Europe as the German armies fell back under the American assault. Captain Truman read them and promptly turned his mind from shellfire to something more pleasant. “Would you meet me in New York and go to the Little Church Around the Corner if I get sent home?”

But the peace rumors faded, and the fighting resumed. This time, the 129th fired the opening rounds in one of the most stupendous battles in history, the American drive into the Argonne. “I have just finished putting 1,800 shells over on the Germans in the last five hours,” Captain Truman told Bess on November 1. He also reported he had gotten a commendation for having the best-conditioned guns in the U.S. Army. He gave the credit to his chief mechanic and put a copy of the letter in the files. But he said he was going to save the original. “It will be nice to have someday if some low-browed north-end politician tries to remark that I wasn’t in the war when I’m running for eastern judge or something.”

This statement must have been startling news for Bess. Eastern judge was an administrative job in Jackson County. There were three judges - actually commissioners - who supervised the county government, in particular the roads. For a few months after his father died, Harry had served as road overseer in Grandview. He had proposed an ambitious road-building program and been fired for his trouble. The judgeship was one of the most fiercely contested jobs in Missouri, because so much patronage power was connected with it. Bess hardly could have been thrilled to discover that Harry Truman was thinking about plunging into the cutthroat political world that had destroyed her father.

Within minutes of floating that future, Captain Truman was telling her that he would be just as happy “to follow a mule down a corn row the balance of my days - that is, always providing such an arrangement is also a pleasure to you.”

The next day, in another letter, he was telling her he was proud to learn that she had been made manager of her district for the latest Liberty Loan bond drive. “Should we decide to promote some of my numerous oil leases when I return, I shall know whom to elect secretary and money getter.” He somewhat ruefully confessed that he had yet to buy a bond because each payday he lent most of his centimes and francs “to worthless birds in this regiment.” He had no real hope of collecting these loans. “Maybe I can make them collect votes for me when I go to run for Congress on my war record - when I get tired of chasing that mule up that corn row.”

Captain Truman obviously did not have a clear plan for his postwar life, except for marrying Bess Wallace as soon as possible. It is interesting that there is not a hint in any of these letters that Bess tried to take advantage of this uncertainty and tell him what she thought he should do. Instead, she concentrated on praying and worrying him through that rain of shellfire through which he rode so confidently in France.

Suddenly, incredibly, it was over. At 219 North Delaware, everyone was awakened about 4:00 a.m. on November 11 by the sound of clanging church bells. As dawn broke, people took to the streets for the wildest celebration in the history of Independence. Bells rang, fire engines sounded their sirens, factories blew whistles, and cars blared horns continually for the next twelve hours. Bess and her friends joined the exultant crowds in Jackson Square. It was all marvelously joyous and good-natured. Not a single person was injured, and the only reported property damage occurred when some celebrator fired off a gun and the bullet went through a window.

In France, on November 11, Captain Truman gave Bess a blow by blow (or boom by boom) account of how the war ended for him and Battery D.

Even before this long letter ended, he was thinking of Bess and marriage. He included a nice compliment for her war work.

Bess was proud of the part she played in this fund-raising achievement. In those attic files at 219 North Delaware Street, I found carefully preserved her commission as a “Liberty Soldier” on the “ladies committee” that sold $1,780,000 in bonds in Blue Township.

That Thanksgiving, Maud Gates Wells invited the Wallaces and Grandmother Gates to Platte City. The invitation was gratefully accepted. No one wanted to spend the day at 219 North Delaware without Grandfather Gates to carve the turkey. Everyone had a lovely time in the Wells’ spacious mansion. There was a good deal of joking about whether Captain Truman might go AWOL and swim the Atlantic to get home and marry Bess. The well-fed guests returned home by streetcar, which required a change in Kansas City. As they waited for the Independence car, May Wallace noted that Bess and her brother George (now May’s husband) were both shivering. There was a chilly wind blowing, but it was not that cold. The next morning, they were still shivering. Both had the flu.

In 1918, that was not good news. That year’s flu was not the ordinary bug that gave its victims twenty-four or thirty-six hours of chills and went its way. It was a killer that had already wiped out whole families and villages in Europe and other parts of the world. George was lucky. He recovered fairly soon. So did Mary Truman who caught it in Grandview. But Bess sank into a nightmare world of fever and delirium that lasted for weeks. More than once, the family was sure she was dying.