A Play in Four Acts
An homage to my cousin, a World War I hero
For the past 35 years, I’ve carried a play around in my head. I’ve read books, imagined scenes, written smidgens of dialogue. I’ve even started drafting the play several times – and then abruptly stopped.
There are three major reasons for this. First, as a professor whom I respected told me in 1986, “the language has to be perfect.” That assessment always made me wonder if I was ready to take on a project with Shakespearean overtones. Second, my cousin was probably the best-known war hero of the first world war, and writing about him meant writing about a legacy that loomed very large in our family’s history, and I couldn’t afford to botch it. And finally, any play about him would have to end tragically. There’s no silver lining to uncover, and no redemption for the main character.
But tragedy or not, it’s one incredible story.
As far as I can tell, Charles White Whittlesey was my fourth cousin, three times removed. He was born in Florence, Wisconsin, a small lumber town near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. At the age of 11, his family moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He attended nearby Williams College, where his classmates voted him the fifth brightest man in his class. He also wrote short stories and edited the campus’s most prestigious literary magazines. After college, he went straight to Harvard Law School and then became a Wall Street lawyer, taking an office a few blocks away from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.
Charles White Whittlesey was a socialist. He was also anti-war. But he got caught up in the war fever that spread throughout the country after a German U-boat sank the Lusitania in 1915, killing more than 1,000 civilians, 128 of them Americans. Whittlesey enlisted in the National Army, quickly rose through the ranks, and wound up commanding the First Battalion of New York’s Metropolitan Division during the final allied offensive in 1918.
In October, his unit broke through the heavily fortified German lines, but the units on his flanks were beaten back, leaving Whittlesey and roughly 500 men surrounded by Germans. They had no food, few medical supplies, no tents or coats, and they soon ran short of ammunition and water. The Germans attacked them daily with machine guns, mortars, grenades, and, toward the end, flame throwers. They were even shelled by their own artillery. The casualties were horrendous. On the fifth day, the German commander sent Whittlesey a note, asking him to surrender. Legend has it that Whittlesey told him to “Go to hell.”
Later that night, American forces finally broke through and rescued what remained of Whittlesey’s command, which reporters back in America were already calling “The Lost Battalion.”
Hollywood has made two movies about the Lost Battalion – a mediocre silent film in 1919 and a modern film in 2001, starring Rick Schroder. The latter is a typical Hollywood production, emphasizing American grit and valor, with Schroder playing the strong-jawed, silent hero so often found in the genre. It’s a fine acting performance, but I couldn’t see much resemblance to the gangly, book-loving man who actually led The Lost Battalion.
Anyway, that part of the story has been told hundreds of times. It’s not really what interests me. I have always been more curious about the man – the anti-war socialist who volunteered to fight in a foreign war, won the Medal of Honor, and then came home a reluctant hero – a role that he quickly came to despise.
The main action of the play is set in New York City, after Whittlesey’s return. But the latter part of the story doesn’t make sense without references to the battle, so a number of scenes take place in “the pocket,” the wooded valley in France where The Lost Battalion was trapped. The play concentrates on Whittlesey’s reluctant status as a war hero, his ambiguous relationship with a young woman, and his attempts to cope with the devastating effects of post traumatic stress syndrome. Sadly, he lost that battle. In November of 1921, he boarded a steamer bound for Havana, Cuba, and in the middle of the night jumped to his death.
Given that tragic end, I wonder what Charles White Whittlesey have wanted a play about him to say? That question won’t stop nagging me. I know that he considered his own fame misplaced, always deflecting any praise for himself and showering it on his men. I also believe that before his death he’d concluded that World War One was a colossal blunder, a pointless tragedy that was doomed to repeat itself – as it did sooner than he ever could have imagined.
So this play is not a rehashing of history, but more an attempt to get inside the head of Charles White Whittlesey – to feel and think as he did after the war, and to tell the part of his story that has never been told.
A few weeks ago, I finished the first draft. If all goes well, I will have the final done by the end of summer.