In Memoriam:
Emmett Hamblen Shaw, 1896-1979
It was not until
long after Emmett’s death, when we were clearing out my father’s library that we found Emmett’s letters
and essays and appreciated better his talent for storytelling. Excerpts from my favorite of
his essays, Drinking Companions I Have Known,
tell of his WWI experience.
In 1917 I went to France to
drive an ambulance. After several months of pretty fair drinking in Paris and
at Bur-le-Duc and most of the little villages around the Verdun sector, I met
Harry Nelson. He was a husky mechanic from West Virginia. He had never been to
college but he knew more about the fine art of good drinking than most college
men I know.
Champagne was fairly cheap
and plentiful in the little hamlets of Northern France in 1917. That was before
the hordes of American soldiers arrived. Every little estaminet and farm house
had a well-stocked cellar. Moët and Chandon sold for 4
½ Francs a quart, less than a dollar. Harry and I drank champagne in abris and
on bridges and in grave yards and on manure piles all the way from Ancemont to
Cabaret Rouge.
Except for an occasional
attack on a limited front, Verdun was a fairly quiet sector that summer. At
least so it was between Bellevue and Les Éparges where we had our posts. By
tacit agreement both the Germans and French seemed to be using the sector as a
place in which to rest their tired divisions. There was plenty of activity in
the air, however, where the Boche had almost complete control.
They used to bomb our
cantonment and machine gun the roads on moonlight nights. One hot night a group
of us were sitting in the front room of a little stone farm house drinking
champagne and enjoying a quiet game of poker. We had blankets over the door and
windows to hide the lights from enemy bombers. Another group of boys were
sitting outside on the door step. Suddenly a huge bomb from a great height
dropped and exploded right in our front yard. Everyone at the poker table
jumped up and made for the door to get out of the house. At the same time all
the boys who had been sitting outside on the door step tried to get in. The two
groups met in the doorway fighting frantically for a moment or two before we
discovered that no one was hurt. When the excitement was over and we resumed
our game, no one had any chips or champagne except Harry Nelson. He had shoved
all his chips in his pocket and grabbed two bottles of champagne just after the
bomb hit!
That fall most of our gang
went to Paris. Our six months enlistment with the French Army was up and we
decided to look around. Some of the boys went into aviation and some joined the
tank corps. Several others enrolled in the French artillery school at Fontainebleau.
Harry and I were in no particular hurry as the battle of Paris was very
fascinating about that time. We made our headquarters at Henri’s Bar and the
Hotel Edward Sept. For several weeks we lived on raw eggs and cognac and saw
the sights.
It was over a bottle of
champagne at Henri’s one afternoon that Harry confessed that the main reason
why he had come to France was because he had read in some newspaper that there
were two million more women than men in France. Are armies recruited and wars
waged on such trivialities?
Almost every night we had a
glorious adventure of some kind. Harry had a particular technique with
Parisiennes. He always invited them to tea at the Edward Sept first. After a
cup or two of hot tea he would order hot rum. It never failed. After tea and
rum, the party was on and the sky was the limit.
Later on, the M.P.’s began
to invade Paris and proceeded to make life miserable for us bon vivants. One
day Harry suddenly announced that he had enlisted in the Balloon Corps. A day
or so later I signed up with the American Red Cross Ambulance Corps and
departed for Italy.
To
be continued…
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