War and beans: Freshly 'fired' from WWI, an ex-corporal laughs about his four months at Camp Pike

'Heinie' Loesch became a beloved sportswriter, but in 1918 he was just another soldier late for the big dance

Heinie Loesch in 1916, photographed at Kavanaugh Field. (Democrat-Gazette file photo)
Heinie Loesch in 1916, photographed at Kavanaugh Field. (Democrat-Gazette file photo)

Cpl. Henry William Loesch was 27 years old in December 1918 when Uncle Sam thanked him for his service in the Great War and sent him home.

Home from North Little Rock, that is. Loesch did his bit with the U.S. Army's 87th Division, 162nd Depot Brigade at Camp Pike.

According to his World War I registration card, he was a newspaperman with no wife and no earlier war service, living at 311½ Chester St. in Little Rock, a Caucasian of medium build and medium height, with "orkCh" hair and not bald; and the color of his eyes was "max."

Another thing that can be gleaned from his draft card: Pulaski County's Precinct 6 registrar had unhelpful handwriting.

Young as he was, Loesch had already spent more than a decade in newspapers, having joined the Lawrence World-Journal staff in Lawrence, Kan., as a teenager. He had spent three years at the Arkansas Gazette, as telegraph editor and then city editor (that is, the reporter who covered City Hall), and he wrote about sports.

He was known as "Heinie," and as a funny writer.

In December 1918, with heroic doughboys telling ghastly stories of trench combat in Europe, the Gazette published a 3,456-word letter from Loesch describing his war — all four months of it. If he was still city editor, he addressed it to himself. It's full of wry humor, Army jargon and inside jokes portraying the rough attitudes of camp characters — but evinces a sense of propriety.

His Army discharge, he wrote, was "the first time that I was ever fired from a job in my life."

What follows are excerpts from his

letter, reorganized chronologically and annotated with italics for clarity.

NEWS HOUND TELLS HIS TALE

FROM: Ex-Corp. Henry W. Loesch, A.S. No. 384082

TO: The City Editor, Arkansas Gazette

SUBJECT: Four Months at Camp Pike

It was my lot to miss the serious side of the war — the European side — I haven't the opportunity of describing the manner in which the Hindenburg Line was brought to a geometrical status of having neither breadth or thickness; I can't tell you how, single-handed and armed only with tin whistle and bowl of "slumgullion," I captured a division of Prussian Guards; I can't give you that, because you know there never were more than two or three Prussians at Camp Pike at one time, and because you know so darned well that Camp Pike was as far as I got toward the fighting front. ...

Getting [in] was a long, tedious job — all of the doctors in Camp Pike took a look at me and most of the statistical nuts and the genealogists stopped me en route. They took my footprints and my finger prints, but I am afraid that the footmarks were quickly lost in the heavy traffic that passed through our examining station. ...

The candidate for a suit of misfit khaki and a course of beans and pudding is boosted onto a table and a sack of wet sand or something heavier than wet sand is dropped on his shoulder. Orders come to raise the left foot and then a villain who has beat the candidate into the army and picked himself a bomb proof job in the medical corps bangs the candidate on the right heel with a mallet in an effort to shove his toes through a small dashboard that blocks passage to the front, and failing, sings out something like "9½ Double A," and you are ordered to get the hell out of the way so the parade can proceed. ...

On my first trip through this place I can recall now of having encountered only one human being — a gentle young "Louie," who was assigned the task of passing upon the mental status of the herd. The idea of a newspaperman seeking a clean bill from a nut doctor appealed to his sense of humor and he let me by. ...

[RELATED: Old News rediscovers the famous Heinie Loesch]

The first battle I got into was at Hill 162, where I was counted among the casualties. [This may refer to 10 days incoming troops spent in quarantine at the 162nd Depot barracks, but Loesch appears to have been held longer, and made to scrub hospital ward floors.] After three weeks in the hospital I was returned to my company, but in the meantime the hill had been lost and our organization was holding an important sector on the North Avenue line. ...

Our back yard certainly was a fertile piece of ground — it produced a crop of second lieutenants every three or four months. ...

There we had many a clash with the I.C.O.T.S. [Infantry Central Officers Training School] forces. Frequently by sheer weight of numbers they swept us off our athletic field and forced us to put away our football, but our second line defenses [the enlisted men who worked in the brigade office], which were fortified with Remington No. 10's [typewriters], always proved impregnable to their attacks.

The hardest blow they ever landed was when they executed a daring night assault on our officers' quarters and carried away the major, who was our second in command, and by far the most popular officer that ever sat at the big desk.

THE QUARANTINE CAMPAIGN

Then came the battle of influenza and the quarantine campaign. [With 1,000 soldiers a day falling ill, Camp Pike was placed under quarantine Oct. 3.]

For a while gloom ruled the barracks and the office and we suffered some severe casualties, but we rallied quickly and soon the spirit of reckless indifference that makes the life of the army almost fascinating prevailed again.

The comedians took over the situation and only those who were listed with the missing in the upper squad room [because they were sick] found the situation unpleasant. ... It was during the quarantine that the flow of comedy was the steadiest — the comedians were all confined to camp and the audiences were larger. ...

We were divided into two classes, those who had the flu and those who did not. Those who did have it were the victims of the wits of those who did not.

I shall never forget the big laugh one of the patients gave us one morning when he violated the rule that was intended to confine him to the temporary hospital that had been established on the second floor of the barracks by coming below, and with a look of resignation on his face and in a husky voice inquired quite seriously as to how many men had died the night before.

Poor Devil! He missed the list himself only because the quota had been filled before the board that makes the final draft had reached him, and still the humor in the situation was foremost, and we kidded him until he beat it back upstairs determined to live in spite of us — which he did.

A couple of days afterward he joined in the big laugh.

SUPPLY SERGEANTS

[Black soldiers were another target of camp "comedians," that is, jerks. During a premature rumor that the kaiser had surrendered, a member of Loesch's company took a short cut through black soldiers' barracks area, which was not permitted, and a black sentry stopped him. He insulted the sentry, telling him the war was over and he didn't have to be a sentry anymore. The next day, the story went, some black soldiers tried to turn in their arms and surplus supplies to their sergeant. This was seen as very funny. Loesch remarks that it took a strong constitution to put up with camp comedy even in small doses.]

Getting around to supply sergeants — we had one that could demonstrate a few tricks in conservation that would make Mr. Hoover look like a Class AA spendthrift. [Herbert Hoover set stern food restrictions for the nation.] He boasts that he saves Uncle Sam more money than any man in the service and he's probably right about that — he never puts out a thing, not even a pair of shoelaces. And still we managed to keep warm and within the law. He's a wizard in his line and ought to make a record after the war in the motor industry — he could make a tin lizzie run without gas just as he made us fight without clothes.

Of course if you ever saw a bunch of the raw material as it comes from the supply room you would understand the attitude of indifference as to whether a soldier gets clothes or not. It must be written somewhere in the Articles of War or in the [Infantry Drill Regulations] that fits are prohibited. There must be a conspiracy between the army buyers and the army tailors.

Army duds come in two sizes — large and small — so that unless you are either elongated or abridged, you can't get a fit. The only articles that come from the supply room that don't require alteration before wearing are the hat cords, and I have told you before that we were in the throes of a shoe string famine most of the time.

REVERSING THE ALPHABET

Getting out is the ambition and home is the destination of every man in camp and each day bears a new crop of rumors regarding the methods to be employed in demobilization. Recently it was decided by the company council that discharges would be passed out in alphabetical order starting with the "A's." The mess sergeant almost cashed in that night. His name opens with a "Z."

But his soldier mind quickly handled that difficulty and the next morning he came up smiling.

"Got it all figured out so that I will be the first one to leave," he announced in triumph. "Going to fix it up with the captain so that before he begins passing out the discharges he will give the company 'about face.'"

Heinie Loesch (center) cavorts with Arkansas Gazette co-workers Jack Reid and Boyd Carroll sometime in 1917.  (Democrat-Gazette file photo)
Heinie Loesch (center) cavorts with Arkansas Gazette co-workers Jack Reid and Boyd Carroll sometime in 1917. (Democrat-Gazette file photo)

The chief clown of the lot was the company barber, an original bird with a sharp sense of fun and a total indifference to work, an all-around good fellow, who was cussed out almost daily by every member of the company and still was able to cuss 'em all in return. He was the source of the very best comedy we had, that is, he held up the traditions of the profession in a very efficient manner.

One of the men showed up one day in deep grief over the loss of his hat.

"Why worry about that," sympathized the barber. "Get yourself a peanut hull, it'll fit all right."

On another occasion when the fortunes of the game [cards] had been running against the lather king he sought revenge by riding the winner, who has a habit of holding a roll call of his nickels every 15 minutes of the pastime.

"Guess you got that quarter of mine in your sock and about the only way I'll ever get it back will be to saw off your leg," he challenged across the table.

The Military Police and the mess sergeant were his mortal enemies. [But] if you ever rode three deep in the back end of a Ford you will appreciate the difficulty of producing your pass at the gate. It is the M.P.'s duty to demand the town-bound soldier's papers, but the soldier always will contend that it is a nonessential procedure. The ideas that the average soldier entertains regarding M.P.'s are not very flattering to the M.P.'s. The company barber turned loose on them one night:

"Don't see why that bird wanted to look at our passes," he grumbled. "Look at his face and you can tell that he can't read."

Then he had an afterthought: "Guess it must have been time for his reading lesson when we drove along." ...

Did you ever see that load of soldiers our top sergeant used to bring to town in his little flivver? He could load 11 into a four-passenger Ford and have room for an argument. He recently obtained a discharge and has gone to work in a sardine factory.

The only time we really had it on the tonsorial party [the barber] was once when a pet cat took up her residence in the middle of his bunk while he was out on a 24-hour pass. The family consisted of Mrs. Cat and six little Tom and Jennie kittens. The Toms and Jennies weren't in the family when Mrs. moved in. ...

Army life certainly has a tendency to develop a spirit of independence provided the term of service isn't too long. Take the matter of employment after the war: if the soldier doesn't care to go back to his former occupation of jumping stumps or serving neckties and socks to match, his army training has put him in line for honors in other fields. Almost any soldier at Camp Pike would make good as a washer woman, bootblack, chamber maid or a seamstress.

NOT SO IGNOBLE AFTER ALL

Don't suppose I will ever run for office on my war record ... still there are two excuses for being satisfied with my part:

1. Never wore a wrist watch.

2. Never until the present time wrote anything about it for publication.

[A senior noncommissioned officer who worked in the brigade office with Loesch planned to tell people who asked what he did in the Great War that it was none of their blanketty-blank business.]

The old boy's attitude is generally shared by the men who did their fighting with their wits and a battery of No. 10s, but theirs was not such an ignoble part in the war after all. The pen, we have been told, is more deadly than the sword and a modern conclusion would place the typewriter ahead of the machine gun.

We took our share of the salts and the quinine and we always handled our quota of beans. Hash came and hash went, but beans we had forever. Green beans, red beans, black beans and white beans, we had all flavors. We were never short of them. Sometimes the supply of bean dishes went low, but that was no problem — the cook dumped all the brands into one dish.

Another request: Can't you arrange for a couple of blasts on a tin whistle when meal time approaches? I missed two meals the first day out waiting for the familiar alarm.

Moral: If you ever go to war be sure your ticket reads there and back. It's the getting out that makes the getting in worthwhile.

With the U.S. Army discharging thousands of soldiers in December 1918, syndicated cartoonist T.E. Powers (1870-1939) envisioned the battle of the sexes at home. The Arkansas Gazette ran this cartoon Dec. 28, 1918. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
With the U.S. Army discharging thousands of soldiers in December 1918, syndicated cartoonist T.E. Powers (1870-1939) envisioned the battle of the sexes at home. The Arkansas Gazette ran this cartoon Dec. 28, 1918. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

Style on 12/24/2018

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