I’m often asked how I find the books I write about. And no matter what I say, I know the only truthful answer is, “Serendipity.” It’s hard to look for something you don’t know about. Instead, you stumble across it. This is one reason I love a well-stocked used bookstore, particularly one that’s only loosely organized. I’m fortunate in living just down the road from one of the West’s hidden treasures, the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton. I’ve probably scoured its shelves at least twenty times over the years, but interesting things still pop up out of nowhere on every visit.
Most recently, I came across Soul Wounds, subtitled A Novel of the World War. That subtitle alone told me that it was published before world wars had to be numbered. But what intrigued me was the fact that it was published here in Missoula, Montana. This is not a hotbed of publishing and never was. The Missoulian Publishing Company devoted its energies to putting out the town’s newspaper and only rarely published books and then mostly local interest items. There was no information about the author and if there’d ever been a dustjacket, it was long gone. So this was an unknown quantity — but then, so was the very first neglected book I ever discovered, which was also a novel about World War One: W. V. Tilsley’s Other Ranks.
Like Other Ranks, Soul Wounds opens in media res. Hagen, an infantryman, is slogging through the mud and the dark as his company works its way up to take position in the front line of trenches just prior to an assault. It’s still winter, so this is one of the first American units to go into combat after America’s entry into the war. Aside from a few weeks’ stay in hospital to recover from a leg wound, Hagen will remain in or near the front lines almost continuously until the Armistice and take part in at least five major assaults.
The youngster in his company — still a teen and kept out of the brothels by the other men in his unit, Hagen will, by the end of the war, be considered one of the “old men,” one of the few from the original company to survive. He will endure shelling, gas attacks, relentless gunfire, and suicidal assaults across No Man’s Land, and even manage to overtake and capture a German machine gun nest.
Like many volunteers, Hagen comes to war with naive notions. Raised in a town on Flathead Lake in Montana, his one exposure to the military prior to joining up was when his mother sewed him a little soldier suit out of a cousin’s former uniform. Herrick, a poet who was living in Paris when the war broke out, tries to straighten him out: “You check your body, your mind, your soul, at the entrance, and you leave the check as a fee for admission. Once you get in you cannot get out.”
Herrick may have been a poet before the war, but there is no poetry in Soul Wounds. Schak writes in staccato, almost telegraphic prose:
A flash, a roar, beside him. His ears almost burst. The mud reeled as something pushed him over into it. There was a sting in his left knee, his forehead felt numb and heavy. He was faint. Another roar and flash, another, another, not so near him. A shot spat into the mud in front of him. His leg was burning. Shots struck, sput, sput, the parapet before him, flicked the mud near him. They’ll keep it up, he thought, and one of them’ll get me.
Only once does Hagen knowingly kill a man. In the final weeks of the war — not final to Hagen and his fellow Doughboys, for whom the Armistice comes as a surprise — he shoots a German who has come close enough to speak to him. By then, Hagen is numb with combat fatigue:
He did not think of it for a long time. Whether he was too utterly tired to fel anything, or whether the ceaseless horror and misery had calloused him, or whether he had become so dulled by the terrific pounding on his nerves and mind and body that he had lost some of the attributes of a human being, he never knew. He never found such questions entering his sickened mind. He was to completely overwhelmed by the front to wonder what was happening inside him.
When the war does end, however, the duty does not. Hagen’s unit is among the first Allied forces sent in to occupy the Rhineland. They spend months in a Germany town near Koblenz and Hagen is billeted with a German family. He sees the photo of a German soldier on the mantelpiece — an uncle killed in the war, he learns — and begins to see the human side of his former enemy while he awaits orders to return home.
Aside from the this final chapter about the initial occupation period after the war, there are many parallels between Other Ranks and Soul Wounds. Both focus on a single young infantryman, both stay tightly bound to the experience of being in the front lines, being in combat, with few and brief episodes of rest in the rear. Both are written in spare, artless prose. And both books are highly autobiographical with few nods to fiction aside from the change of names.
Al [Bernard Alfred] Schak was born in Minnesota in 1899 to Danish immigrant parents, one of five children. His family moved to Bigfork, Montana, when he was still young. He enlisted in the Montana National Guard in 1916, even though he was underage and slight of build, and was assigned to the 163rd Infantry Regiment. His older brother Walter also enlisted after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, and the two brothers sailed for France on the S. S. Leviathan in December 1917.
Al served in the 163rd and later in the 26th Regiment under Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He fought in six major engagements: Montidier, Cantigne, the Marne, St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, and the Meuse. He was wounded several times as well as missing in action, resulting in his mother twice being notified of his death in combat.
Sometime in the early fall of 1918, Al Schak felt the impulse to write a poem. As he later related, he borrowed a pencil, used the envelope of a letter from home, and wrote the following, which was published in the Literary Digest in October 1918:
NEAR NO MAN’S LAND
There wa’n’t no bugler there a-blowin’ taps;
The regimental chaplain, tho, was ‘round;
An’ I’m a tellin’ you as how I’m feelin’ blue,
‘Cause they put my rookie Buddy in the ground.I showed ‘im how to do “right shoulder arms”
An’ told him all a doughboy oughta know;
We slept together, but to-day he sleeps
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud an’ snow.He said ‘is ma an’ sister back at home
Kissed ‘im a dozen times in fond good-bys,
An’ when ‘e talked about ’em I could see .”
That look o’ longin’ shinin’ in his eyes.I hate to think o’ how ‘is mother feels
— A mother’s loneliness is worse ‘n mine.
I’d write ‘is folks a letter, only that
This writin’ business ain’t much in my line.I don’t know what to do when I’m off post.
My Buddy’s gone; an’ seems like all I know
I’d like to put a flower on ‘is grave
Near “No Man’s Land,” beneath the mud and snow.
Like Hagen, after the Armistice, Schak crossed into Germany and served with the occupation forces until he was repatriated in 1919. He had a difficult time adapting to civilian life at first and received relief from the Montana Veterans’ committee several times. He and his mother moved to Missoula around 1921 and he enrolled at the-then Montana State University (now University of Montana) as a special (i.e., not assigned to specific graduating class) student.
He seems to have thrived as a college student. He was the sports editor for the campus paper, The Sentinel, and published several stories in the university’s literary magazine, The Frontier. He joined the Sigma Phi Episilon fraternity and served as its chapter secretary. He graduated in 1924 with a degree in journalism.
Al Schak’s brother Walter was assigned as a motorcycle dispatch rider after the 163rd arrived in France, and he was wounded when a shell landed nearby as he was carrying orders just prior to the attack on Cantigny. Al Schak describes the incident in Soul Wounds:
It was late in the afternoon. The head of Hagen’s company was approaching a crossroads. A cloud of dust spurted out of the woods and a motorcycle with a sidecar zipped past the crossroads. It had not gone fifty yards past when a shell sent the driver hurtling into the field alongside the highway. Odds and ends of the machine flew up in a cloud of smoke and dust. The sidecar was obliterated.
In the novel, Hagen later learns that the motorcycle rider was his brother (also named Walter). Hagen is able to visit Walter at his field hospital, but his wounds are too severe and he dies and is buried in France. In reality, Walter Schak was returned to the U.S. and cared for in an Army hospital in Utah, but he died of complications in 1920 and was buried with honors in the town cemetery in Kalispell, Montana.
Al Schak worked as a reporter for the Missoulian after graduating from college, but he struggled with alcoholism and health problems — problems that would likely be diagnosed as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder today. He worked for years on Soul Wounds (an apt euphemism for PTSD), which may have been published as a goodwill gesture by his old paper, for there appear to have been no reviews of it anywhere.
Twenty-seven years after the war, with France liberated and the French Army settling back into its pre-war routines, the paperwork for the award of the Croix de Guerre medal was located and Al Schak was finally decorated. The citation read in part,
Private Schak, still in his teens, came across a man from his unit shot in both hips and pulled him to cover. Unable to move him without help, he called to other members of the outfit. When they ignored him, he drew a .45 revolver and pointed it at the nearest men and told them to put the soldier on a litter and carry him back to comparative safety. Private Schak went with them, and when one of the litter bearers was killed, he grabbed one end of the litter and they took the wounded man to medical aid. He then rejoined his outfit and started forward through the bursting shells.
He had little time to enjoy his belated recognition, however. During the night of November 14, 1945, a lit pipe he had forgotten in a living room chair caused a fire that destroyed his house. Firemen found his body in the kitchen. Luckily, his mother, who lived with him, was visiting a daughter in California. Al Schak was buried with military honors in Missoula, though his gravestone states a unit he never served with. He was 46.
