SEARCHING FOR JOHN DEWITT

Chase reconstructs his grandfather’s time as a trench runner from the WWI veteran’s letters home in this nonfiction work.

On the front lines of World War I, there was no job as important—and as thankless—as that of the trench runner. Young soldiers were chosen for their athleticism and quick thinking to deliver messages on foot, a mission so dangerous that the life expectancy of a trench runner was normally mere days. “They understood their deaths would not be a matter of bad luck but the expected outcome of soldiers delivering messages through the muck and mazes of deeply dug trenches and the open spaces between the lines—a maelstrom of falling shells, thick crossfire, and anxious and accurate German snipers,” writes Chase. Though Chase knew that his grandfather, John DeWitt, had served on the Western Front, he never knew that the man—always reluctant to speak about the war—served as one of these trench runners. He discovered this fact only a century after the war’s end when the long-deceased DeWitt’s wartime letters were found in a shoe box in a relative’s garage. The author remembered his grandfather, who died right around the time Chase was starting college, as a kind, soft-spoken man, a small-town Iowa lawyer who liked football and golf and was self-deprecating about his wartime experiences when he spoke of them at all. Now a grandfather himself, Chase felt a new urge to use these letters to reconstruct John DeWitt’s wartime experiences, a task that required him to read between the lines of DeWitt’s sanitized accounts and compare them to the well-documented exploits of DeWitt’s unit, the celebrated Rainbow Division. The story takes him from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the killing fields of the Marne and Saint Mihiel.

DeWitt’s letters are remarkable for their cheer and understatement, keeping the worst of the war from his family back home. “We all have slight flesh wounds,” he writes from a Paris hospital. “I got a wee bit of shrapnel in my left thigh. Elmer got a bit in the right buttock and Chris got a machine gun bullet in the flesh of the right leg. It was certainly a battle for fair. I suppose you know by this time we lost a lot of the boys but the greater part were only wounded.” In the rare moments when he allows himself to say more, the power remains in DeWitt’s restrained language: “I sure know what the hottest kind of fighting is in the worst way in history and, believe me, it is sure hell with a lot of extras thrown in.” Chase supplements his grandfather’s words with accounts from other soldiers, nurses, and newspapers of the time, painting a larger portrait of the trench runners’ experiences. The book will likely appeal most to WWI buffs, but the heart of the story is the manner in which the individual sacrifices of soldiers, in all wars, often go unknown or misunderstood by their families. A full century after the fact, one family at least can begin to appreciate those sacrifices.

An admirable work of historical resuscitation to show the life of a trench runner.

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2024