Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade is slated for release in mid-December. Here is the Introduction:
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I had grown up listening to my grandfather’s stories of the war. Even as a young boy the First World War had
been a source of fascination for me and I read a great many books about it, but
my reading was indiscriminate and casual.
I sought tales of adventure and heroics and was more drawn to the art,
literature and mythology of the war, than to the military history as such. As a result I was slow to develop the
technical understanding of the war that might have enabled me to ask my
grandfather intelligent questions about his experiences. By the time I eventually acquired such
knowledge and understanding, he had been gone for many years.
But even though that golden opportunity of talking with my grandfather
in depth about his experiences was lost to me, I refused to let it go. I began to assemble everything I could dig up
about his service—interviewing everyone who had known him to collect any war
stories they might have heard, gathering copies of all his letters—both those
he had written and those written to him, and from that small beginning I worked
gradually outward. I acquired every book
and article I could find on the Marine Brigade and the Second
Division—especially first-hand accounts of soldiers who had served in those
units—as well as a great many books about the war generally. I also sought out whatever I could find about
his family members during the war. I left nothing out. If it was related in any
way to my grandfather’s life in those years, I added it to my growing archive.
Especially noteworthy in this regard were the experiences of my
grandmother, America Swango—first the fiancé and then the wife of Alpheus. She left a considerable body of letters,
mostly written to Al, but also written to and from other family members. The
letters are filled with details of her life on several farms and in several
small towns along the upper Spoon River in central Illinois during the war, as
well as descriptions of her people in the hill country of eastern Kentucky,
where she spent a number of weeks in the fall of 1917, visiting among them and
covering many miles on foot or on horseback to reach their remote, isolated
farmsteads. Her letters constitute a
rich resource of impressions and information both for those family members
interested in America’s personal life, and for those interested generally in
the life of rural and small-town America during the war.
As a result, this book is as much a social and cultural, as a military
history. There is, for instance, far
more about the French villagers among whom the Marines were billeted than you
will find in other books about the Marine Brigade. There is more about the rear areas, and
movements from one area to the next, with all the complex preparations such
movements entailed, than can easily be found elsewhere. And there is of course a good deal of
information on the care of mules and wagons, and the duties of teamsters, as
well as anecdotes about teamsters and mules.
This book, in other words, is about those aspects of the Marine
Brigade’s history which—because they do not bear directly on the fighting—have
been largely passed over. But a soldier’s experience of war involves a great
deal besides combat, and such “peripheral” experiences are consequential in
their own right. They matter. They are
an integral part of the full story.
It will never be possible to recover the greater part of my
grandfather’s experience of the war—for the most part that experience went with
him to the grave. But there are,
nevertheless, many aspects of his experience—and of the wider context of that
experience—which can be recovered, and this book is the result of a
fifty-year quest to seek them out and organize them into an open-ended but
still coherent narrative.
But before we begin that narrative, something should be said here of the
colonial forebears of Alpheus and America, for those deep familial roots,
binding them into the land of this continent, had a profound influence on the formation
of their character—on the sort of individuals they became—and instilled in them an understanding of military
service as one of the natural obligations of a free people.
Both Alpheus and America had ancestral lines that extended back to the
1630s in early America, Their ancestors served in numerous local militias and fought
in King Phillip’s War, the French & Indian War, Lord Dunmore’s War, the
Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
Additionally, I have identified over twenty family members (there were
doubtless far more) who were killed, taken captive or even adopted by native
tribes: Narragansetts, Wyandots, Lenape, Shawnee and Cherokee. A large number
of Alpheus’s and America’s forebears (dozens of whom can be identified) settled
frontiers in western Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee—nearly all of them
homesteaders and several who worked as wilderness scouts or guides.
Of particular relevance to this book is the fact that one of Al
Appenheimer’s direct forebears, Anthony Remington, during the Revolutionary
War, served aboard the continental frigate Providence under Capt Abraham Whipple as a Continental
Marine.
[More about America’s forebears and their role in the settlement of
frontier Kentucky can be found on p. 103].
BJ
Omanson
Morgantown, West Virginia
Armistice
Day, 2024
