Beautiful and Horrible

A Guest Column

I’ve been having problem w my Substack memoir and I apologize for my delay in posting anything for weeks now. I’m hoping those problems are resolved — what appears to be their solution is as mysterious to me as their introduction — but here goes anyway.

What follows isn’t my work but the memoir of a man who I grew up with. I originally posted it about a week ago on Facebook. But I think it’s good enough to re-post it here, as I hope you’ll see:

Andrew A. Lawn

“I’ve known Bert Hoak since both of us attended grammar school in our hometown of South Buffalo. We lost contact over the years, but never a shared appreciation of each other. He was adventurous, unpredictable. During those years, he became a skilled writer. A couple of months ago, he showed me he’d done something I was never able to do: he discovered another adventurous man – my grandfather, Andrew Lawn.

He was called Pop by his many grandchildren. He was famous for his silence. I tried to have him tell his story, to no avail. When I wrote about what I knew of Pop, I called the story “The Silent Man.”

But Bert, who lived two blocks away from Pop, succeeded where I had failed. Pop shared his stories with Bert in his kitchen, also sharing more than one beer or glass of homemade wine. And Bert listened, but good. The result is the following story. I found it thrilling, not just to have Pop’s thoughts recorded, but to hear a war story – a World War i story – about an effort I’d never heard of before. A story told nimbly, clearly and directly, without sugar-coating. A warning: the story is grisly. It is, after all, a war story. And war stories are all about hurt and danger and death. So be prepared.

"Mr. Lawn was a farm boy.

In ninety plus years he was many things but never took greater pride in being anything more than a farm boy.

He was an old man when I met him, but I was only five and at that age anyone over sixteen was an adult, and over thirty was old. Mr. Lawn had just retired from the railroad after forty-five years. He was ancient. He was a fossil. He was at old as Santa Claus. He was maybe sixty.

He was always “Mr. Lawn” to me. No matter that he insisted I call him “Andy”, he was always “Mr. Lawn”. Some things are too hard to change and he had been Mr. Lawn far too long to be anything but that. That’s just the way I was raised.

Mr. Lawn took pains to call be “Bert” rather than my childhood nickname “Randy”. He occasionally slipped but generally called me “Bert”.

I’m grateful he lived long enough to share some of his life with me. We also shared more than our share of beer. And even more homemade wine. Had there been less beer and wine there may have been more stories; or I would have remembered more of them.

One story I remember well. It seemed to sum up so much of his life and to underscore the fact that Mr. Lawn, for all of the many things that he was, was always a farm boy in his heart and soul.

Mr. Lawn left the farm to work for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad at fifteen at 17, he became an apprentice boiler-maker He enlisted in the navy shortly thereafter when America. entered the Great War.

He crossed the Atlantic several times. He could recall the exact number of trips and departure and arrival dates of each convoy. But one voyage made a lasting impression on him. He entrusted the story to me and I’m compelled to pass it on lest it be lost and forgotten.

Shipping war machinery was a novelty at that time. Throughout the war it was largely man against man, or perhaps more appropriately, man and his beasts opposed to other men and their beasts. The beasts were beasts of burden hauling men and materiel to confront and kill each other.

On this particular voyage the ship was carrying horses. A hundred large draft horses drafted from farms across America.

“Big horses. Big beautiful plow horses. Carpenters spent weeks building stables on two decks,” he told me. “The stalls had heavy oak stanchions. The stanchions were eight inches square; bigger, heavier than you’d ever see in a barn, and of oak no less. Some expert along the chain of command determined that these stanchions would withstand the rolling of the ship and the rocking of the horses. In normal conditions the experts would have been right.

“It took all day and well into the night to load the horses. I spent much of my time off watch helping. The horses were skittish. It was all new to them, the sounds and smells of the ocean and the dock, rigging them up, hoisting them up onto the deck. Mostly I just calmed them down. It was wonderful to be around horses again.”

“I wasn’t the only farm boy on that ship and we took turns working in shifts just for the joy of it. We fed and watered them, talked to them. Couple of the boys even slept there in the stalls. The captain had no problem assigning men to stable duty. Even some of the city boys joined us just for the novelty. It was an education for them.”

“Somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic we hit a storm. The ship began to pitch and roll, and those big horses were rocking back and forth. Normally the stalls would have held, but the horses kept banging over and over into the sides of the stalls. The stanchions and paneling began to give way, cracked and splintered and horses began to get cut by the splinters.

“As the stalls tore apart, the horses, fueled by the smell of blood, began to panic. They bunched together as they broke loose, and as they gathered on the starboard side the ship began to list.

“The horror fed on itself. The more we listed, more stalls tore loose; horses were gashed, even impaled on the splintered wood. Horses tried to climb up, but the deck, slick with blood, gave no footing. The horses screamed in terror. The list increased.

“We took on waterhe furnaces were snuffed out. We lost power and the list increased.

“The convoy had long since left us behind. We were on our own. The captain had no choice. He ordered Marines below to shoot horses. A handful of sailor boys were sent along to help.

“The Marines had rifles, and we sailors held kerosene lanterns modified to let out just a beam of light. We jack-lighted the horses; moved the lantern around until that beam lit on the horses’ eyes.The eyes lit up, reflecting back at us, and the Marine aimed as best he could between the glowing eyes. Some went down with one shot.

“Oh Lord Randy! You can’t imagine how it was. Especially for a farm boy. It went on for an hours, maybe more. Who knows the time?

“With the blast of the rifles and the smell of blood the poor horses screamed in panic, adding more to the hellish din. It was a scene and a sound impossible to forget.

“When it was finally done the officer of the watch went through and shot those still alive in the head with a pistol.

“We were still pitching and rolling and we sailors were sent below to rig up dead horses and hoist them up. More boys were topside, dropping the horses over the side. For hours we worked by lantern light but by dawn the storm eased up and we got power back on.

“Even then it was a nightmare below. The smell horrible, the deck slick. We rigged up a horse the best we could and used block and tackle to drag them along and up the hatch.

“We continued with the block and tackle; the last of the horses pulled to an area beneath open hatches and hoisted to the deck. In the glare of bare bulbs, lanterns, and flashlights was an empty hold with scattered debris, blood stains, and pools of coagulated blood.

“Through the open hatch the sky showed a lighter shade of night.

“The remaining horses piled on the deck were heaved overboard.

“The work went on for hours as the black gang set to work re-firing the boilers and gradually we began to build up steam and the engine was brought to life; the props slowly began to churn and the ship crept forward.

“The crippled tail end of a convoy with a flotilla of bloated dead horses in our wake.

“The captain realized that a long line of dead horses might arose the curiosity of a passing German U-Boat, so a group of Marine Corps marksmen was assembled and as each bloated horse was shot it deflated and disappeared from sight.

“About then we saw a silver lining to the nightmare. We came to a part of the hold that was full of cigarettes. Hundreds and hundreds of cases! They were marked ‘American Red Cross’. Though they were supposed to be given away free we knew they were being sold to soldiers at the front.

“We talked it over and it took but a minute to determine that it was our patriotic duty, to liberate those cigarettes and we did just that.

“We got word to the next shift to send down the sea bags of the crewmen. We didn’t include officers since it was possible that one of them might take it into his head that it was his patriotic duty to stop us. Some officers had such fool notions in their heads.

“When the watch changed we boys went up with pockets of cigarettes. The boys down below filled all the sea bags and we waited ‘til the one officer who was a regular guy came on watch.

“He generously looked the other way while we hauled up sacks of cigarettes.

“It was also his idea to bust open a few crates and mix them in with the seawater and blood. He then noted on his report that crates of cigarettes broke loose in the storm and had been ruined.

“He was a true American and got a sea bag of cigarettes as a tribute to his patriotic zeal.

“Randy, you’ve no idea what it was like to land in Le Havre in the middle of the war with over a hundred cartons of cigarettes! We were rich! I’ve never in my life been so flush!

“A carton would buy a gold watch! We lived like kings. You could buy anything!

We needn’t look for the black market. We were the black market! They looked for us.

“I came home with gold watches. One for my father, one for my brother and one for myself. And lots more! And plenty of money, most in gold coin.

“Of course, it’s all gone now, the watches, the money, the gold. Long gone.

“But the horses Randy, they’re still there.

“They come back. Sometimes when sleeping, often when I’m awake.

“The horses are still there ‘cause you see Randy, I’m still just a farm boy