A story of November 11

Just as most of those upfront are in war, Jacob Van Veldhuizen seemed largely oblivious to the designs the brass were creating to end the carnage. What he knew was what he was told to do, what was pounding him in the moment. Given the trenches all around, just keeping a grip on his sanity required about everything his mind and soul and heart could muster. 

He was a grunt in the Great War, although it would take a half a century for that word to be coined. He was a young man of limited means and little or no education jerked out of the nation's heartland, a farm boy, but not a kid really--26 years old--a grunt without whom there would have been no battle at Meuse River in that decisive fall of 1918, a huge battle that began just months after American troops entered the war and weeks before the "war to end all wars" finally ended.

He would have called Newkirk home, rural Sioux County. He was the son of a farming family--mother, father, three sisters and a brother. Religiously, his eulogy says, "he practiced his belief with a sincere walk." There was no reason to believe he was anything but a good man, a religious man, a church goer. 

Jacob Van Veldhuizen wrote out a summary of his time at war, a little seven-page journal whose tense and brutal prose suggests he was a man far more at home with a hay fork than with pen or pencil. Listen. There is no punctuation. His tour of duty is one long sentence.

Then we left the rest camp and rode about 2 days on the train and then walked a little ways and arrived in Fruitcord and stayed there a little while and then Fruitcord and arrived Melville and stayed there about 2 weeks and there is were we got our gas masks and the drilled there and then left Melville and rode on trucks and arrived a Rariegate and there we stayed about a month and there is where we got our 6 weeks training going back and forth to the trenches we left Perilgot the 7th of August and went to Apillie Hill and there we went over the top [on] the 9th of Aug that was my first time and stayed there about 16 days then we went on the train and went to Louisey and drilled there 2 weeks and then we left Lousey and rode all night on French truck and came in a rest camp and stayed there about 2 days and then went to dugouts at germanville and stayed there 11 days and the 26th of Sept we went over the top on the other side of dead mans hill and that was some noise to hear about 2400guns shot as fast as they could . . .

Misspellings are abundant. Don't mind them. There's still plenty of story, plenty more he leaves unsaid. 

There's more in the phrase "over the top" than meets the eye. Think of him sitting in the mud of a sturdily built trench maybe a few hundred yards from the place where the Krauts were doing the very same, machine guns loaded, rifles up. "Over the top" meant hearing the whistle from the company commander and pulling yourself up and out of what little safety the trench could afford in order to advance on the enemy pouring machine gun fire into your face the moment your helmet comes up over the edge, all of that scramble of fire amid the canon roar from what he says were a thousand guns. You can feel the brittle nature of things in the prose, can't you? For thousands of doughboys blessed to survive, the frame of mind came to be called "shell shock."

and then we stayed there in the front line a little over a week and then we went to some dugout a little ways back and sta there about 3 days and then we went to foreste woods and stayed there 2 days then we crossed the meuse river and went in the argone woods and there we had an awfull fight on the 18th of Oct we went over the top for the 3th time and stayed there about a week then we went back to dead mans hill and stayed there about 4 days then we went back to a rest camp of the man (?) of Eschetol, and then I took sick and went to the Hospital with Broncituss the 27th of Oct and went to base hospital 22 stayed there about a week then I went to a covalesent camp

What history tells us is that the Meuse–Argonne offensive was the last and biggest Allied offensive of World War I. It began on September 26, 1918 and ran all the way up to the Armistice on November 11. The most massive battle in US military history required the bloody, selfless contributions of 1.2 million American soldiers, an Iowa farm boy, Jacob Van Veldhuizen, among them. Whether he knew it or not at the time, Jacob was one of that battle's 350,000 casualties. Historians have come to believe the tally of Americans was made worse by their inexperience.

All of that is there in the heartbeat of his memories, isn't it? You can feel the injury. What did he know anyway?--very, very little. He'd only just arrived, never been any farther away from home than the Sioux City stockyards. When the war ended, many more succumbed to an influenza outbreak of something called "Spanish flu."

Jacob Van Veldhuizen made it back to home to Newkirk, back to the place he grew up, the house where he'd lived as a child, the farm he wanted to work. He returned from three trips going "over the hill," from crossing the Meuse River in the biggest battle American soldiers ever waged. He got back.

we landed the 23 of May in New York in camp mills and then the Red Cross gave us pies and cake and coffee the camp is a nice place you can buy anything what you want and on the 28 of May we were split up those that go to the different camps and the last dinner we had them we had pie and ice cream after we were split up we went to tents and the 29 we went on the train for Camp Dodge came through Holland Ohio the Red Cross gave us sandwich and milk did not have milk for a long time and so it tasted good at Elkhart, Ina the Red Cross gave us ice cream arrived in Camp Dodge the 31st of May and got discharged the 1st of June.

But that's not how the story ends. How and why he scribbled out this seven page summary is something no one knows, more than a century later. You wish, sometime, that he'd been a better speller, that he'd taken the time to describe what it felt like to be there, to be a part of the massive battle that finally settled things and sent those who survived back home on the ships on which they came. You wish he could or would tell you more.

But he didn't. What he left was a scribbled manuscript far more pointed about when he'd been where he was than it is about how and why. What we have is what his mother herself might have kept in her diary--"snow last night cold wind winter on its way."

Jacob Van Veldhuizen was discharged from the American armed forces on June 1, 1919 and went home to Newkirk, where he died on a Thursday evening in the home of his parents on the farm whose land he worked. It was Thursday, September 25, 117 days after his discharge. The war took him too. It's good to remember, as we did yesterday, that we do well not to forget Jacob and many thousands of others.

Jacob Van Veldhuizen is buried in the Newkirk Cemetery.