USA > South Carolina > Spartanburg County > A history of Spartanburg county > Part 23
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Finally, August 29, 1917, came-the eve of departure. Flags and banners were everywhere. New York surpassed itself to "make the going away of the Guards the biggest thing in the way of a parade that the city has ever seen," said the New York Herald-Tribune. A farewell banquet at the Biltmore Hotel to General O'Ryan and his staff was attended by five hundred guests. At sixteen armories or parks scattered over a wide area, groups of leading women of the city presided as hostesses, at dinners for the soldiers. On August 30, the Twenty-Seventh made the promised march the length of Fifth Avenue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Twenty-Seventh Division at Camp Wadsworth
Settling The men of the Twenty-Seventh Division went South Into Camp as fast as trains were available. Leaving Fifth Avenue and Van Cortlandt Park, they arrived at a small country station in the woods. The famed Twenty-Second Engineers with its elaborate equipment was the first regiment to arrive. Then followed the equally famous Seventh, popularly designated in New York as the "Silk Stocking Regiment." It was one hundred and six years old. This regiment reached Spartanburg with 1,825 members, proud of having lost 178 of its men to the Plattsburg Officers' Training School. Silk stockings notwithstanding, these men set cheerfully to work chopping down trees, laying off streets, and pitching their own tents.
Day after day men poured in by the thousand. The camp pre- sented to observers a scene of infinite variety-lines of men march- ing from the Fairforest station to their assigned rectangles, and upon arrival pitching their tents ; squads installing lights and spigots ; cavalrymen, artillerymen, quartermaster's motor trucks, spectators, all scurrying here and there. Within two weeks the New York Engineers were beautifying their camp so that it soon appeared more like a park than a camp. They moved trees from the woods, planted grass plots, gathered white stones with which they marked their company numbers, and even transplanted small evergreen trees to make hedges.
Camp Life At once the soldiers began to gather pets. Within two weeks the 10,000 men in camp had dozens of pets of every sort- especially dogs of every known breed. The Forty-Second had a bear, which later was well-known in Spartanburg. Company mascots included roosters, pigs, goats, burros, mules, opossums, raccoons, and cats. One enterprising man bought a captured opossum-an animal new to him. He was so fascinated with the creature's pouch that he put into it his gold watch. The startled animal, in frantic alarm, clawed the soldier's face, causing him to turn loose the chain by which he was holding his new pet. Whereupon Brer 'Possum plunged wildly across the camp and escaped into the nearby
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woods, probably the first opossum in Spartanburg County to carry a timepiece.
Within a few weeks the cavalrymen found that they were to be transformed into a machine gun unit. Sadly the First Cavalry made its last parade, and the men turned their horses over to the remount station. The following morning before three o'clock, about three hundred of these horses broke their corral and headed for their old picket line, two miles away, across the camp reservation. The thundering of hoofs awoke the cavalrymen and from their tent doors they saw their mounts approaching over the parade ground in columns-of-fours formation, as if on parade. The horses rounded the headquarters and proceeded down the company street to their old picket line, where, after milling about for a few moments, they took their accustomed places. This procedure had aroused the whole regiment, and soon the men were dressed and about the job of welcoming, feeding and watering their beloved steeds, many of them bred in the cavalry service and as perfectly trained as their masters.
As cold weather set in, the problem of fuel presented itself as serious. In the haste necessary to clear the camp, great piles of wood, brush, and stumps had been burned. Wistful thoughts now recalled these fiery sacrifices to temporary expediency, for the quar- termaster was buying wood from farmers all over the county, with the proviso that details of soldiers would cut and haul it. One farmer took a squad to his wood lot and designated certain trees which were not to be touched. "Si, si, Signor," he was told. Not a man in the detail spoke English well enough to grasp the farmer's instructions; and as a result the trees reserved for their value as lumber were the first to fall under the axes. City men nearly froze trying to make fires in the little camp stoves with poorly selected wood, often green, sobby, or wet.
Reporters roved through the camp invading the privacy
Dramatic Incidents of millionaires, celebrities, and men of affairs in search of "human interest" stories. They found a multi-millionaire using as his office a fly tent with a dirt floor, and for its sole furniture two camp chairs. That was Colonel Cornelius Vanderbilt. They were equally fascinated by the situation of young Cornelius Vander- bilt, who was a buck private in his father's regiment, in a company of which his former chauffeur was captain. The Vanderbilt family
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supplied the reporters with many stories. Mrs. Vanderbilt and her daughter Grace paid a visit to Colonel Vanderbilt and Cornelius, Jr., and lived in a private car on the railroad siding in a cotton field. In that car Grace celebrated her eighteenth birthday. A "Squaw Camp" of portable houses was established by some of the New York officers that they might have their families near them during their brief respite from possible death. In such quarters lived sev- eral families of railroad presidents, newspaper owners, New York business and professional men of substance.
One New York woman provided a folk saga which, with such variations as may occur to the mind of the individual· narrator, has been repeatedly told by the "old inhabitants" about the camp. The tale runs that this woman, determined to be as near her son as possible while he was in training at Camp Wadsworth, visited the camp, selected a house in the vicinity, knocked at the door, and an- nounced that she wished to rent the house. The owner, startled by so novel an idea, said the family had always lived there, and their people before them, and the house was not for rent. The lady in- sisted ; money was no object. Some narrators report that she of- fered $500 a month for the house, others say $600, and one imagi- native soul insists she paid $1,000. Whatever the price, she got the house, with the stipulation that such improvements as she deemed necessary must be made at her own expense. The owners moved into a tenant house close by, where, unfortunately for their peace of mind and pride, they had to see their cherished home "magicked" before their very eyes into a residence adapted to the tastes of a sophisticated New Yorker. The hearts of the owners burned within them with resentment that what had been good enough for three generations of a good Spartanburg County family would not serve a rich Yankee for a few months. This tenant appeared in the fall, did her bit to make her son and his friends happy, and in May, when he was sent overseas, presented to the owners all the improve- ments she had placed in their house and returned to New York.
The local Spartanburg papers kept reporters at Camp Wads- worth, as did most of the New York leading dailies. Every day produced its crop of stories. The New York World had thirty-eight employees in service at Camp Wadsworth, each of whom received from the paper each month a check covering the difference between his army pay check and his salary on the paper.
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The soldiers began to publish their own papers; Company A, Seventh Regiment, published Att-A-Boy every Saturday. Company B followed with The Bee Hive. Trench and Camp appeared Oc- tober 8. published at Columbia as the official paper of Camps Jack- son and Wadsworth. Later the Twenty-Seventh Division had its own official weekly paper called The Gas Attack, heralded as a re- habilitation of the Rio Grande Rattler, which these same men had published on the Mexican border. The first issue, with twenty pages and a colored cover, appeared in November.
The Twenty-Second Engineers had a highly trained orchestra, for which Colonel Vanderbilt bought a piano. On October 2, 1917, this orchestra gave its first entertainment, a concert in "the red schoolhouse on the National Highway between the Camp and the city." The camp had its first wedding October 18, with a colonel to give the bride in marriage and the colonel's lady to act as dame of honor. The groom was a sergeant, and the bride traveled down from Asbury Park, New Jersey, to marry him. The chaplain used the ring ceremony, and the newly married couple passed from the chaplain's hut under the crossed rifles of the groom's company. The groom had a leave of absence, and the pair went to Asheville for their honeymoon. A year later an equal excitement was felt over the first christening in camp. Weddings had become common- place.
Reorganization Such was life at Camp Wadsworth during the and Drill early months. Meanwhile the great machine which was the Twenty-Seventh Division was being constructed. Orders came from the War Department for a reorganization, to facilitate cooperation with French and British units. Hearts burned when old companies and regiments were broken up or done away with. A regiment would parade for the last time ; officers and men would have a dinner, gifts and compliments would be exchanged, and the members would report to new assignments or adopt new numbers as their insignia. Visiting French officers appeared to direct bayonet drill ; English officers supervised practice in trench and tank war- fare. These visitors bluntly warned the Americans, "You are going to kill or get killed. You must know your rifle and your bayonet."
The first World War trenches in America were constructed at Camp Wadsworth, and were first used on the night of November 19, 1917, when "2,000 men marched into the labyrinth of trenches
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under cover of darkness, there to remain for twelve hours." Calis- thenics, drills, marches, cross-country runs, memory tests, lectures, first-aid instructions kept the men busy all day. By the end of Sep- tember more than 20,000 men were actually in camp, and every day was bringing in more. The quartermaster reported that the monthly bill was more than two million dollars, $600,000 for food alone.
The Artillery Range In August 1917, Major Michel, representing the Southeastern Department of the United States Army as an artillery expert, inspected a proposed artillery range and pronounced it "a most satisfactory location, the character of the land being just such as we like to have for artillery work." The tract selected extended over a mountainous area about seven miles long and from two to three miles wide along the outlying ridges of Hogback and Glassy mountains. It lay entirely in Greenville County, distant twenty-six miles from Spartanburg and two and a half miles from Landrum, the nearest railroad station. The topography was adapted to all sorts of artillery practice-range firing, barrage fire, or the moving of guns from point to point.
Paul V. Moore and Baylis Earle arranged all the details prelimi- nary to occupation; and, September 24, fifty men of the Twenty- Second Engineers moved in, with ten big army trucks carrying sup- plies and tents. The next day the two thousand men who were the first to be trained began arriving. Along with them went newspaper reporters, who interviewed veterans of Manassas, the Wilderness, Chancellorsville, and Appomattox. They wrote of New York men who for the first time drank spring water from gourds ; of the moun- taineers' comment that soldiers wore blue uniforms and brass buttons and that these men in camp wearing butternut jeans were just work- men; of the mountain cabin in which a New Yorker found, over the mantel, in close juxtaposition, an old-fashioned pistol and a gaudy framed motto, "Prepare to Meet Thy God." The camp at once be- came an objective for sightseers from many miles around, and the roar of cannon and the whistling of shells became familiar sounds.
Spartanburg The Red Cross, the Young Men's and Young Women's Hospitality Christian Associations, the City Federation of Women's Clubs, the Country Club, the fraternal lodges, the churches, the col- leges, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce-all the city's agencies worked wholeheartedly to extend hospitality to the men at Camp Wadsworth. Wofford dormitories housed the Reserve Of-
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ficers until the camp could provide them with quarters. The city raised a fund of $27,500 for War Camp Activities.
A letter written by a New York woman for the New York Times and reprinted in the Herald of November 11, 1917, depicted vividly some phases of the enterprise, as seen through a woman's eyes. She wrote of the crowded conditions ; the dazed, bewildered housekeepers, overrun with would-be paying guests and distracted by demoralized servants; of block-long lines of soldiers waiting their turn to get to the soda fountains; of drug stores taking in $1,200 a night and having to restock daily from New York and Atlanta ; of the excellence and insufficiency of the food ; of the hospitality of local housekeepers whose best hand-embroidered bed linen was not withheld from their country's defenders or their womenfolk; of the churches with doors and grounds and kitchens wide open to the guests; of the bridge games, country club parties, and Saturday night dances for the sol- diers. "When the military band strikes up 'Over There,' and all the soldiers sing as they dance, the sight is one never to be forgotten," the letter ran; and its concluding passage read :
If it were not for the heavy cloud of war, time in Spartanburg would pass very pleasantly. It may be, however, that life becomes more precious when at stake. The men and women feel that they would make the most of this crowded hour of glorious life, so they seize each minute when they can be together. When the soldiers are at work in their all-day drills or trench digging, the women can sometimes motor out and watch them do their bit with en- thusiasm. As one Spartan lady remarked: "We know now as eye-witnesses that New York has given her best."
The imagination of the people of Spartanburg had not prepared them for the numbers or the requirements of the soldiers' relatives. Houses and rooms were not sufficient to supply the demand. The school enrollment showed a twenty per cent increase. It appeared that citizens and soldiers alike sought refuge from reflection by filling every moment not assigned to duty with organized recreation. Par- ties, dances, barbecues, watermelon cuttings, banquets, concerts, old fiddlers' conventions, community singings, spirituals sung by Negroes, plays, and musical shows in which soldiers and townspeople co- operated, concerts by the military bands, parades, teas-always some- thing was doing somewhere.
The Spartanburg County Fair Association and the Community Fair Association responded to the stimulus of prospective visitors
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from another State. Chesnee, Landrum, Wellford, Reidville, and Poplar Springs all held community fairs and also entered their ex- hibits at the county fair which was held October 30-31 and Novem- ber 1-3, 1917. Pauline held a Dahlia Show of such excellence that a permanent Dahlia Club grew out of it. Saxon, being so close to Camp Wadsworth, enjoyed an especially good patronage for its com- munity fair.
Camp Hospitality But Camp Wadsworth presented much more interesting exhibits to Spartans than anything they could offer in return. The Converse College girls, escorted in a body through the underground trenches and dug-outs, pronounced the experience "thrilling." Band concerts, parades, drills, and teas drew hundreds of civilians to camp as spectators every day the weather permitted. Musical and drama-loving Spartans reveled in the contributions made to their pleasure by the soldiers' amateur theatricals and by the mili- tary bands and individual musicians. Soon after the camp was or- ganized, General O'Ryan issued a special order permitting camp bands and orchestras to participate in civic programs when invited. Singers gave their services to the local church choirs; and many of them were men of exceptional talent and professional status in New York.
The Over There Club, a social organization composed of enlisted men who were former students of Yale, Harvard, and Columbia uni- versities, presented a musical comedy entitled Swat the Spies, which fascinated Spartans. The play was written by Lawton Campbell, formerly of the Princeton Triangle Club. His assistant, L. P. Hol- lander, who wrote the lyrics and arranged the musical numbers, had been interested in dramatics at Exeter and had belonged to the Har- vard Dramatic Club. The scene of the play was laid in the Cleveland Hotel dining room, and the intricate plot centered around some papers which a German spy obtained from a general at Camp Wads- worth, who was under heavy financial obligations to the German. Private Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., played the leading role.
All sorts of plans were proposed for the celebra-
Christmas at Camp Wadsworth tion of Christmas. Spartanburg had been im- pressed by the lavish flow of money, and the many stories of wealthy New Yorkers and their extravagant demands. That there was an- other side to the picture was brought home to the readers of the Herald, December 16, 1917, by a letter to the editor signed "One of the Northern Visitors." This letter pointed out that there were many
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very poor men at Camp Wadsworth who could not spend even the quarter it cost to get to town, and who were forced to make long marches in the snow, gloveless, because of their poverty. Character- izing the proposal to spend $2,000 on a Christmas pageant for the men at Camp Wadsworth as merely "a personal display for a few people," she demanded tartly :
Is this the spirit of Christmas? Is this what we want Christ- mas to mean to 40,000 men, not children? What do they care about floats and expensive decorations, while their hearts are back home thinking of little Susie's stocking ? . The men in the camp need warm things. There are many men there too poor to receive gifts from home, men the families of whom will pass a sad Christmas, not just because of loneliness, but because money is scarce. Santa Claus will not come down many a chimney for a little child back home, while here at Camp Wadsworth a wonder- fully planned pageant will take place.
The weather prevented a pageant; the roads were slushy with half-melted snow, and it was bitter cold. Lighted Christmas trees and carols and concerts cheered town and camp. Northerners were shocked by the typically Southern celebration of Christmas with fire- works-and Spartans were shocked to learn that such a mode of cele- bration was not universal. The 105th Regiment Infantry had a "Regimental Gala Night" in the Harris Theatre, December 24, ar- rangements for which were made by men of influential theater con- nections and experience, who gave New Yorkers and Spartans an evening of New York vaudeville.
Hardships and Camp morale was high. The discipline was se- Disappointments vere, but the men found it interesting. Many among them had seen service overseas and could therefore help others visualize what was ahead of them. Numbers of the experi- enced French and British officers serving as instructors were maimed, and the sight of their heroic bearing challenged similar courage in the men.
So sensational were the rumors in circulation as to the suffering in camp that Chief of Staff Colonel H. H. Bandholtz made, December 22, 1917, an official statement to the press concerning camp health conditions. A New York paper had published a story that six men had frozen to death in the trenches at Camp Wadsworth. Colonel Bandholtz stated that not even one death had occurred from trench
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service, and that only eleven deaths had occurred among the 31,000 men at Camp Wadsworth during the entire four months of its opera- tion.
Winter had set in early and was cold, rainy, and snowy. Snow fell December 12, much earlier than usual in this section. The sol- diers really suffered extreme discomfort-and so did Spartans. There was a coal shortage. The hastily built roads did not stand up well under the stress of bad weather and constant heavy hauling over them. Townspeople and soldiers were equally embittered by the difficulties of transportation between camp and city. The electric interurban company was confronted with a problem impossible of immediate solution in the sudden demand for increased facilities in three camp towns-Greenville, Charlotte, and Spartanburg. Private taxi fares were exorbitant.
The soldiers, if they did manage to get into Spartanburg, were often doomed to disappointment in their search for pleasure. There were not enough picture shows, lodge rooms, soldiers' clubs, restau- rants, ice cream parlors, in the town to accommodate them all. Worse still, few of the available amusements satisfied the cravings of sophis- ticated men used to the gaieties of New York.
Jarring notes crept in, but not enough of them to destroy the har- mony. Although everybody had a great deal more money than be- fore, it soon began to appear that everything cost a great deal more too, and there were complaints of extortion. Men and women used to New York often found Spartanburg annoyingly "small town" --- and some Spartans confronted with this attitude manifested peevish resentment. Not everybody fell in gracefully with the sugar allow- ancing, the meatless days, and the wheatless days requested by Food Administrator Hoover. One lively old lady voiced her disgust at the parade made of it all. She said that during the sixties people were really driven to desperate makeshifts-parched potatoes and oats for coffee, sorghum or honey for all sweetening, burned corn- cobs for soda, wheat flour only on Sundays. Then good manners required that makeshifts be ignored and forbade any unpleasant com- ment on the food. But now she found every meal made hideous by calculations of calories and citations from the Hoover Card as to what one must eat or refrain from eating.
Difficult situations grew out of conflict between the rigid require- ments of military etiquette and civilian ignorance of its details ; and
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sometimes democratic scorn of its irritating inhibitions. The soldiers chafed when crowds failed to remove their hats on proper occasions, and some of them attributed such failure to "Unreconstructed Reb cussedness" instead of to ignorance of military conventions. The Bank of Spartanburg distributed a helpful pamphlet showing the sig- nificance of military etiquette and insignia-bars, stripes, chevrons, hat cords; the crossed sabres of the cavalry ; the crossed rifles of the infantry ; the crossed guns of the artillery ; the wings and serpent of the medical corps; and so on. Eventually even little boys and girls in Spartanburg could glance at a soldier's uniform and determine his exact status, and few people failed on the proper occasions to remove hats or stand at attention.
In November General O'Ryan's continued absence from camp occasioned surmises and comments. When he reappeared December 6 and disclosed that he and Colonel Bandholtz had been in Europe inspecting the European war front and conferring with General Per- shing, excitement rose high; for the men anticipated orders to move any day. During November the camp had visits from Governor Whitman and Senator Wadsworth of New York and Governor Man- ning of South Carolina-visits which entailed many parades, dinners, banquets, reviews, and speeches; and heightened the men's eagerness to go "Over There."
Not until April was this desire satisfied; and in the interval drill and discipline were increasingly rigorous. So closely guarded were all plans that before Spartans realized it, the Twenty-Seventh Di- vision was gone. A committee of citizens followed General O'Ryan to New York and presented to him and the division, on behalf of the city of Spartanburg, a silver bowl.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Year 1918
New Conditions at The departure of the Twenty-Seventh did not Camp Wadsworth leave Camp Wadsworth depleted, because as fast as soldiers went away others came in to replace them. An Of- ficers' Training School was established. Changes and additions were being made at the camp all the time. The Spartanburg City Council, June 30, executed an extension of the lease to June 30, 1919.
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