"Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade, Vol I: From Before the War to the Eve of Belleau Wood" to be released mid-December

 Muleskinner with the Marine Brigade is slated for release in mid-December.  Here is the Introduction:

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       The decision to write a history of my grandfather’s service with the Marine Brigade in World War I occurred shortly after my grandfather’s death in late 1974, half a century ago.  After Alpheus Appenheimer was buried, his effects were divided among his seven children and these included relics from his service in the war some sixty years earlier: a diary, letters, photographs, documents, medals, bits of equipment and battlefield souvenirs.  Taken altogether, they were compelling and evocative, but as I studied the diary (which was meager, consisting mainly of place-names and dates), and the letters (short on description and relatively few in number, as many were lost in a house-fire), it became clear that they constituted no more than the bare tip of a very large iceberg.

       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