Rough-hewn, trench-bound
As a rough-hewn trench-bound World War I soldier, my grandfather George Anderson "Black Jack" Vowel's career was marked by bravery and foolishness. At times, it was hard to tell which would get the upper hand.
The son of Calloway and Ellen Vowel was horse ranching in Hanna, Alberta with only the most modest success when World War I broke out. When the call came to go "Over There," he signed up in August of 1914. He was 23, ready for adventure. He would get it and then some.
His formal picture in uniform shows an athletic soldier with a strong jawline, a thick shock of dark hair and piercing blue eyes. "I am five feet nine and a half, weigh one hundred and sixty and look like a loose button on an overcoat," he wrote.
Letters to Miss Bebe
He made an acquaintance via letter with a young Irish woman living in London, Louisa Watson, "Miss Bebe," he addressed her, careful to season his notes with humor in the face of grim war. "It listens better if you grin when you read it," he said.
By April, 1915, he was in the thick of the Second Battle of Ypres. The front was "just the place for the person that likes thrills," he wrote. "The noise made by high explosive makes the hair stand and then along comes the flying steel and fragments slithering through the air making the most horrible sounds imaginable which makes a cold child run up and down the spine and puts a sinking sensation in the pit of the stomach and the brain starts urging the feet to beat it and the feet refuse to act and the knees get wobbly … his nerve breaks and he goes bugs. I have seen several cases of it and it isn't a pleasant sight to see."
Within months of arrival, his battalion was decimated. "I am thankful to say that I came through alright. Words cannot describe the scenes we went through at Ypres and I have often wondered since how so many of us ever got through alive. The battalion was fighting for six days. We went four days without anything to eat and some of the boys never had any sleep during the six days and nights … We will win out in time but at what a cost."
The journal accounts are a succinct blur. "Raid on German trenches failed. Germans waiting for us. Six killed, a dozen wounded. Quarantined for German Measles. Route march; After, played football ...
"Sandy Clarke was killed today. Shot through head by sniper. The Germans sent over ten thousand shells in an hour and a half. So damn homesick I can hardly do any work. Just waiting for next leave.
"22 kilometers march; we made it in less than 4 hours. One of the hardest marches I ever done. Rain makes impossible for observation. The country is a quagmire. Visited the old battle ground of Souche and the labyrinthe where the French lost so many men. There are thousands of carcasses lying up there yet. We are sleeping in an old trench with a piece of tin over us.
"Big airplane duel today. 25 planes in site. 12 German planes over our lines today. Our guns drove them back; tis a nice sunny day.
"Our boys went over at 5 this morning and advanced 4,000 yards. Lots of prisoners and guns. Our artillery just smothered everything. Watched attacks from north of Mont St. Eloi hill. It was the grandest sights that a person could ever see.
"Took the mumps … Doing very nicely, got a very fat face."
"The bullets were ripping the dirt up all around me for a bit, but none of them was marked Black Jack," he wrote from Flanders Fields, New Years Day, 1916. Desperate to keep letters from Bebe coming in, he scribbled under fire.
"They have started strafing again so if my spelling is bad don't blame me. I am doubled up in one corner of the dugout trying to make myself as small as possible and not making very much success of it. The beggars don't care where they throw the darned shells anyway – they are liable to hurt someone yet. I am supposed to be an artist at swearing but I choke up whenever I start in on the devils."
Four miles for a bath
March 18: Walked four miles for a bath today. The baths we get is about the only thing in this country we look forward to. The rats are worse than the Germans and the lice is worse than both of them togethers. .. they give us all kinds of dope to use, most of it just fattens. They give us one kind of dope and we used so much of it that it took all the skin off. It drove the lice off all right but the cure was worse than the reason.
"If a fellow gets a letter now and then it helps to keep his nose to the grind stone over the rough places. Please excuse the dirt – everything I touch seems to get dirty and just after a bath too."
Holidays in trenches were marked with little fanfare, memories of better times and much irony. "I guess we will be in the ditches on Christmas Day. Some prospect to look forward to. Xmas Day dawned foggy, wet and muddy just like many of the winter days in Flanders. With the occasional bark of a gun breaking in on our festivities to remind us that everything was not as it should be, we had a pretty lively day of it. Last year I spent Christmas on the plains. Two years ago I was working in a coal mine. Three years ago I was working on a ranch. Four years ago two boys and myself rode sixty miles to dance. We got snowed in and stayed a week."
Black Jack was witness to one of the famed brief holiday truces of the Great War.
On January 1, 1916, he wrote: "I was on guard last night when the New Year made her appearance and say talk about fireworks, I think I saw about the grandest display that was ever let loose at once. Right on the stroke of twelve about five thousand rifles cracked and flares by the hundreds were shot into the air. I reckoned that was the signal, for the artillery opened up and the country was lit for miles. It lasted a couple of minutes and died down as quick as it started. One of our fellows stuck his head over the parapet and wished Fritz (the Germans) a happy New Year, Fritz's answer was quite typical of him he pulled the trigger of a couple of machine guns and then made some unprintable remarks about the English pigs. As we were not English, we let that pass. We asked him if he had made any resolutions for the New Year and then he asked us if we had. I yells back it isn't time for us yet .. when the weather permits we will make some resolutions toward Berlin."
Another year, yuletide celebrations had to wait two days for a trek to a farm in Marcelles. "Very hard trip on the horses. Snowing and blowing," he noted.
As a child, he had watched his father make shoes for neighboring children from old harness leather; he spent a year as a shoemaker on the front, resoling boots worn through from marching.
He trained at a makeshift school in an abandoned convent as a Lewis Gun trainer, teaching soldiers how to kill Germans with the portable machine gun.
Black Jack's Roots
Black Jack always said he was proud to be from Texas. His great-great uncle, James Callison, died in the famed Battle of Goliad in Texas; George was a cowboy who liked to think he was made from that same rugged stuff. "If I don't quit drifting I'll get clear off my range," he'd write. He loved to tell stories from back home on the ranges in Texas and Alberta , Canada. He talked at length about his horse, "not a beauty he is just a cayuse but he is the most intelligent broncho that I ever saw."
He was an avid naturalist. Sometimes he enclosed a plant sample with his letters – a clover leaf from the battlefield at Ypres, a maple specimen from the Ploegsturt wood in Belgium.
He used homespun witticisms with a rural flavor. "As we are getting used to the mud, we are feeling better, we all are as happy as a pig fed on tater peelings." On a stubborn fellow soldier: "He is just like Paddy's pig. You can coax but he doesn't drive worth a darn."
One gruesome rumor that made it back home via a fellow soldier who was discharged got him in hot water. "He was telling my brother that I had a big Bowie knife and was cutting crosses on all of the German I ran across. It tickled my brother but it didn't my mother," he wrote.
George was raised in a fair-thinking home; his father, Calloway, quit a fraternal lodge in Oklahoma because he didn't want to also be associated with the affiliated Ku Klux Klan and had a vocal antipathy to their cause. At a time when Black Americans were demonstrating their mettle on the Great War's sodden battlefields but prejudice still reigned back home, George wrote, idealistically, "You will find the majority of Western Americans ready to hold out his hand to a person that proves himself a man whether he is white, red or black."
His love of cards earned him his nickname. "We were paid sixty five francs yesterday so the game is rather lively. I didn't tell you about the time we were playing poker when the Germans were shelling us and a shell hit the dugout and wounded three of the fellows. It sure spoilt the game."
Returning to the front from leave was hard. "Coming over on the boat I got so darned homesick that I had a notion to jump over board but I am all right now," he wrote.
Valor, Hardship at the Front
Still, accustomed to the hardships of the ranching life, he took the dismal conditions with resignation. "I was coming out last night for a turn in billets when I fell into a shell hole. It was pretty near full of water, so I got soaked to the neck, and I hit against a couple of dead Boches (Germans) in it, too. Not nice.
"June 14, 1916: My chum was wounded broken leg I carried him out to dressing station, mile and a half."
In September, 1916, Black Jack was gassed near Albert. Later, he managed to run through a barrage of heavy fire from the Germans to get to the front. Once there, he was buried by a shell but survived.
He received the Military Medal for bravery as a lance-corporal in a single-handed machine gun attack on a German company at the Battle of the Somme in October 1916. Marked for advancement, he attended officer's training. His opportunity was short-lived as he was apparently demoted for going AWOL, perhaps for self-professed fisticuffs or times he simply lit out to explore what he called "mighty pretty country." "Went to Abeele without pass or belt was caught and name sent into HQs. Drill and physical exercise all the damn time," he wrote.
He begged Bebe to stop addressing letters to him as a corporal. "I've had the skids put under me and am just a private once again."
Black Jack Vowel felt keenly the loss of many buddies he'd joined up with. "Tonight is the anniversary of the first trip in to the Trenches for some of us … We had a reunion of the old fellows in the YMCA and there is not many of them left. I came away. I couldn't stand to hear the boys talking of the poor devils that were here with us a year ago but are absent now," he said.
"The guns are getting a little louder each day in their proclamation that might is right and everybody is expecting and preparing for the final contest and we all expect it will be fought out on this front and everything seems to point that way too. It will be the biggest fight in history. Well anyway, Fritz won't find Tommy asleep," he penned from the front. "Our fellows seem to be throwing everything but the wheels at him. The whole country in a blaze of fire as far as a person can see to left and right. It seems as though both sides were trying to see how much ammunition they could waste."
As the war's tide turned, George's battalion advanced; carnage was everywhere.
August 10, 1918, Beauchamp le Benix. "From the looks of the trees and houses our barrage must've acted about the same way that a cyclone does. Dead Germans are lying everywhere all over the country. I went up the line today to see if I could get a look at Cambria. All I could see was smoke. The Germans have set it on fire before being driven out."
That was likely where he liberated his final notebook, a thin volume signed Paul Dilschmann, Weissenfels, with notes in German, presumably made before its author was killed fighting to the last. "Germans fought like Wildcats … The 13th was pretty badly cut up this trip. Fritz is contesting every inch of ground," he penned in October on the remaining pages.
On Nov. 11, 1918, it was over. A journal entry reflects his shoemaking responsibility: "Returned Boots" with the date underlined.
The End of Black Jack's Story
Discharged from the Army May 5, 1919, Black Jack returned home, snapping his war diary shut with a final entry. "Arrived home today finished with the Army after 4 years nine months absence."
A family history says he was in unrequited love with Bebe, who reserved two pages in her book, Mrs. Private Peat, for Black Jack Vowel. Bebe married a disabled soldier, the famed Private Peat that an enlistment film was made about. Her book cited George's wit and bravery. "Jack Vowel's letters are in themselves an epitome of the war. He has a power of description, a sense of contrast and a sense of humor, rarely combined."
Back on the ranch in Alberta, George married Laura Knutson, a lovely Norwegian immigrant seven years his junior. Family histories are full of contradictions about George Anderson Black Jack Vowel. One account said he was buried with full military honors; not true. Though he told Ms. Watson Peat he "Was raised in Texas USA and have lived on the ranges from Texas to Northern Alberta," this was likely a romanticization. Family records indicate he was born in Hays, Kansas, and that the closest he came to living in Texas was the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma where, on Sept. 16, 1893, his horse ranching father galloped to claim 160 acres on a race horse he'd raised and trained himself.
George was reputed to hold his liquor well, a talent he supposedly picked up in France. My grandma would later say he was scarred by the war, and that he was not a success as father nor husband. "He was more of a dreamer and probably would have done well with a proper education," his daughter Peggy recalled. George and Laura separated in 1944.
He died in 1955 when his tractor overturned on him as he tried to maneuver out of mud. A World War II volunteer, his son Don learned about his father's wartime exploits from a fellow soldier who had joined up with Black Jack back in 1914. "There was never a better soldier ever lived – George Vowel had more guts than a slaughterhouse. That's the way he was, he wasn't afraid of anything," he said.
An article written about George Anderson Vowel's World War I by his granddaughter J. Louise Larson experience appears in the November 2006 issue of Alberta Views Magazine. His letters to Louisa Bebe Watson Peat were turned into a radio program broadcast on CBC Radio.
Read Louisa Watson Peat's account of George Anderson Vowel in her book, Mrs. Private Peat, at this link. There's a picture of him in uniform, and you can read the whole book.
