butt, and it passed through and stuck in his skull just over the eye; how he plucked it out and continued his charge. And old Bill had a drooping eye, a scar, and poor sight to prove all this.’’
Landon, reliving the glories of the Civil War, also spoke with great scorn of those who had managed to avoid active service. “One of the worst forms of opprobrium that could be cast on anybody when I was a kid was to be called a slacker,’’
As a young officer, Bill anticipated honor and glory, feared danger — and had his first drink.
Bill remembered. “Those who failed to go to the Civil War, evaded service, or got some sort of an easy job got a stigma that they carried all their lives.’’ Old Landon had told Bill about a wealthy and respected East Dorset citizen who carried this stigma. “All during the Civil War, he was ill and used to toddle down to the village with a long shawl over his shoulders, very much stooped, with a bottle of smelling salts, and all during that period, no one would speak to him,’’ said Landon.
But in the cemetery south of East Dorset is a marker for Waldo Barrows, Bill’s great-uncle, killed in the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness. And the Gettysburg battlefield, which Bill had visited with his grandfather, also had a cemetery. “Neurotic that I was, I was ambivalent,” he said. “The great upwellings of patriotism would overtake me one day — and the next day, I would just be funked and scared to death. And I think that the thing that scared me most was that I might never live my life out with Lois, with whom I was in love.’’
The tradition of military service, however, was deeply embedded in Bill. When America entered World War I in 1917, he was called up by the military and never graduated from Norwich.
When he was called, he chose to serve in the Coast Artillery. The decision later caused him guilt, because that was considered one of the safer branches of military service.
From Norwich, Bill was sent to the new officers training camp at Plattsburgh, New York. Here, he discovered that the Norwich cadets’ military training had given them a head start on the others in the camp, and he moved rapidly through the training. His flair for leadership brought him further recognition, and after additional training at Fort Monroe, Virginia, he was commissioned a second lieutenant. It was a heady experience for a 21-year-old who only a few years earlier had been in deepest depression. Then, he was sent to Fort Rodman, just outside New Bedford, Massachusetts. “Here was all the tradition of the old Army, seasoned regular officers and noncoms, along with the drafted men and volunteers,” he remembered. “How I enjoyed that atmosphere, encouraged as I was by actually being put in command of soldiers. But still there crept into me at times that nagging undertone of fear about going abroad.’’
Lois, accompanied by Bill’s grandmother and his sister Dorothy, had visited him at Plattsburgh. She and Bill had now been engaged for almost two years; it was clear that they would marry. Lois’s parents approved of Bill so completely that she was actually permitted to visit him unchaperoned. “Their understanding and their trust in Bill and me were very unusual during that conventional era,” Lois wrote. She was 25 years old; her comment clearly illustrates how young women of her day continued to answer to their parents, even when they were no longer living at home. At this time, Lois had a teaching position in Short Hills, New Jersey, and was living with the aunt who operated the school where she taught.
It was at Fort Rodman, New Bedford, that Bill’s life took a new course. He learned about liquor.
Until that time, he had never had a drink. The Griffiths did not drink, and there was a family memory of what alcohol had done to some of the Wilsons. Bill, who thought it may have been one of the reasons for his parents’ divorce, was afraid of liquor. He was critical —specifically of Norwich students who sneaked off to Montpelier to drink beer and consort with “loose women.”
New Bedford was different. Bill would later remember the charged atmosphere of the town in that wartime period: “moments sublime with intervals hilarious.” He also remembered the social circles that opened to young officers like him. “The society people in town began to invite the young officers to their homes,” he recalled. “One of the great fortunes and one of the leading families of New Bedford was the Grinnell family. They were very rich and very much socialites. I remember so well Emmy and Catherine Grinnell. Emmy’s husband had gone off to the wars; Katy had lost hers; and the two of them used to entertain a group of us kids at their house. This was the first time in my life that I had ever been out in society. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen a butler. And a great rush of fear, ineptitude, and self-consciousness swept over me. In conversation, I could hardly say two words. The dinner table was just a terrible trial.’’
At the Grinnells’, Bill was offered a Bronx cocktail (usually concocted of gin, dry and sweet vermouth, and orange juice). Despite all the warnings, despite all his training, despite all his fears about drinking, he found himself accepting it.
“Well, my self-consciousness was such that I simply had to take that drink,” he recalled. “So I took it, and another one, and then, lo, the miracle! That strange barrier that had existed between me and all men and women seemed to instantly go down. I felt that I belonged where I was, belonged to life; I belonged to the universe; I was a part of things at last. Oh, the magic of those first three or four drinks! I became the life of the party. I actually could please the guests; I could talk freely, volubly; I could talk well. I became suddenly very attracted to these people and fell into a whole series of dates. But I think, even that first evening, I got thoroughly drunk, and within the next time or two, I passed out completely. But as everybody drank hard, nothing too much was made of that.’’
By his own account, Bill was an excessive drinker from the start. He never went through any moderate stage or any period of social drinking. Bill’s inner warning system must have told him his drinking was unusual, because he “kept the lid on” when Lois came to visit him and was invited to meet his friends. But he did not stop altogether. Without liquor, Bill again felt inferior.
It was now early 1918; the United States was fully at war; and Bill could be shipped out at any time. He and Lois had set their wedding day for February 1. There was a rumor that Bill was to be sent overseas soon; so they decided to push the wedding date up to January 24 and change the invitations to announcements. They chose to go ahead with the big church wedding they had planned, and everyone pitched in to help. It was all done in such a rush that the best man, Lois’s brother Rogers, arrived from Camp Devens too late to change his heavy-duty boots, and had to stomp down the aisle.
Meeting Lois, here in her wedding dress, lifted Bill out of deep depression and into love and renewed hope.
In Brooklyn for the wedding, Bill was again conscious of those horribly familiar feelings of inferiority. He even imagined that some of Lois’s family and friends were asking, “Where did Lois get that one?” In contradiction, he also remembered that they went out of their way to make him feel comfortable. Lois, on her part, was clearly delighted with her new husband, and with the “great welcome” that waited for the couple at the furnished apartment Bill had rented for them in New Bedford. “Flowers and plants were everywhere, and people dropped in continuously to congratulate us,” she recalled. “Bill was very popular on the post.”
One aspect of his new social life had been unknown to Lois, but she discovered it while they were in New Bedford. Bill remembered that during this period, he must have passed out at about every third party. At a party one evening, Lois was shocked to hear Bill’s Army buddies tell how they had dragged him home and put him to bed. Still, she was not terribly perturbed about it, confident that she could persuade him to return to his former abstinence.
