Bess Truman Read online

  Other officers in the Battery were married - Captain Spencer Salisbury, for instance. He was the brother of Agnes Salisbury, a good friend of Bess. Lieutenant Kenneth Bostian, brother of Bess’ tennis partner, Bill Bostian, had just married Agnes’ younger sister, Mary. Harry mentioned that these wives had come to a Battery picnic the preceding Saturday, but he had not invited Bess because “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  He added that he was sending Bess a picture of him. “It is in uniform, I am sorry to say, but I can’t appear as a plain citizen any more until the war is over. If you don’t like it you can tear it up or send it to Mamma.”

  Those words suggest just how serious Harry feared the rift between them might become. Wistfully, he asked her if she could drive by Convention Hall sometime and watch him drill the Battery. “Some of the other officers have an audience sometimes.”

  Bess did not tear up Harry’s picture. At his request, she returned the favor by sending him her picture, a special one on which she and the photographer lavished a great deal of care. It is my favorite picture of Bess. I have always considered it a remarkable study in character. The photographer had the instincts of an artist. He caught Bess Wallace’s unique blend of strength and femininity, and he also captured the regret and doubt that were troubling her in that tumultuous year. There is no smile on her face. She looks straight at the camera, as she had forced herself to look at life - serious, determined but not uncaring. I also now see a vulnerability that I never saw before.

  The inscription on the back of the picture was a kind of prayer. It also marked the beginning of Bess Wallace’s decades of worrying about Harry Truman’s fondness for living dangerously. “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France - Bess.”

  The men of the 129th Field Artillery soon were on their way to Camp Doniphan, near Lawton, Oklahoma. Bess and Harry Truman were back to relying on the mails for communication. Just as he had throughout his travails as farmer, miner, and oil speculator, he kept her informed about the details of his army experience, from branding horses to washing socks by hand. She was able to all but live his success as the operator of the regimental canteen, which drew him into frequent conferences with his colonel. He and a friend named Eddie Jacobson teamed up to run the most profitable canteen in the camp and possibly in the U.S. Army.

  Although he was a soldier, he was still a tenderhearted man, who hated to hurt anyone and was deeply distressed when he was forced to do it, even for the best of reasons. “I caught one of my men stealing money out of the cash drawer [of the canteen] night before last and had him put in the guardhouse. It took me all afternoon yesterday to draw up the charges. I guess he’ll get about two years. I backed him into a corner and made him admit that he took the money. He had ten dollars in one pocket and three dollars in another, and two in another, and three in another. Did it all in about an hour. I was at school [artillery school] when the canteen steward came up and called me out and told me about it. They say the poor fellow is a good soldier but so much money in sight all at once was too much for him.”

  Bess’ picture did a lot to restore Harry’s confidence in her affection. He stopped closing his letters with “Most Sincerely” and began to use “Lovingly,” or “Yours always.” He told her “. . . I don’t like but one style of beauty and that’s yours. You should send me two letters the day you get this one for that last remark.”

  The page that Bess brought home telling her how to register for war service was no accident. She volunteered to sell war bonds and was soon assigned Blue Township, not far from Independence. She also joined the wives and fiancées of other members of the 129th regiment in a woman’s auxiliary, which held regular meetings to entertain themselves and compare notes on what the men needed. In the following year - 1918 - she served on an Independence committee that welcomed and entertained visiting soldiers from Fort Leavenworth.

  What really pleased Harry was the time and attention Bess gave Mamma Truman and her daughter Mary. Bess arranged for Mary to be elected secretary of the Woman’s Auxiliary and visited Mamma Truman at the farm. When she sent Mamma Truman a picture, she got a delightful little note, which she enjoyed enough to save. Mamma thanked her for the gift and then chatted about how she got along while Mary was away for several nights, no doubt on a trip connected with her growing involvement in the Eastern Star, the woman’s counterpart of the Masons. Mamma mentioned a cousin who had visited one night and then remarked: “I guess the Nolands are all dead. They have never spoken a word to Mary or me since Harry left.” She ended the letter with: “Come out.”

  Along with selling Liberty bonds, Bess coped with wartime shortages of such commodities as sugar, flour, and coal. She also had to cope with her mother’s anxiety when her brother Frank Wallace was called in the draft. She shared this worry with Harry, who wrote: “Hope Frank will be blind the day of the exam.” He knew Frank was as necessary to Madge Wallace’s well-being as Bess. Every day when he came home from work, Frank visited 219 North Delaware and spent a half hour with his mother.

  Frank failed the eye test and stayed home for the time being. But another of Bess’ brothers, George, was also on the draft rolls and was certain to pass when called. If the war lasted long enough, Frank’s eyes would not keep him out either. In the salty Missouri slang of my Aunt May, George’s widow, with whom I have spent many hours discussing the early years of Bess’ life, Madge Wallace “went up in smoke” at the thought of her sons going to France. Bess had to put aside her own more complicated anxiety about Harry Truman and spend hours calming and reassuring her mother.

  Bess continued to correspond with Mary Paxton, and as usual, the letters were lively. Toward the end of 1917, Mary remarked: “I can sympathize with you about Harry because I sent the nicest man in the world to France about two days ago.” A few months later, another letter brought startling news: “I am a pretty happy person. I am accepted for canteen work overseas. . . . If they have a service flag in the church tell them to put a star in it for me and tell Mr. Plunkett [the Episcopal minister) to please say some prayers for me when I am on the ocean. I am trying to make it as easy as I can for one man who loves me too much and trying to make it as hard as I can for one man who does not love me enough.”

  Mary obviously had mastered the art of multiple romances. She was determined not to risk all her feelings with one man again. Although Bess had chosen a different route to happiness, she never uttered a word of reproach or criticism to Mary. Perhaps she knew that Mary was too headstrong to take advice, even from her.

  Harry Truman, too, was moving inexorably toward France. There were several false starts. At one point, the Battery had everything packed and the canteen closed down, and their departure was canceled. Everyone was discouraged, and Harry moaned that they might yet get “benzined” [dismissed from the army] and sent home. He did not really believe it and was soon trying to keep up Bess’ spirits by describing the war as a moral crusade as well as a rare opportunity to participate in the history of their times. “We heard a lecture by an English colonel from the Western Front last night, and it sure put the pep into us. He made us all want to brace up and go to it with renewed energy. He made us feel like we were fighting for you and mother earth, and I am of the same belief. I wouldn’t be left out of the greatest history making epoch the world has ever seen for all there is to live for because there’d be nothing to live for under German control. When we come home a victorious army we can hold our heads up in the greatest old country on earth and make up for lost time by really living. Don’t you think that would be better than to miss out entirely? I am crazy to get it over with though because I wouldn’t cause you a heartache for all there is in the world.”

  Another time, Harry and a small group of other officers and men were supposed to rush to the East Coast to catch a ship to France for a special assignment. The orders were canceled at the last minute, and they learned a few weeks later the ship had been torpedoed off the coast of Ireland. Harry
tried to make light of it. “Don’t you worry about what’s going to happen to me because there’s not a bullet molded for me nor has Neptune any use for me. Had I been on the boat that went down, I’d have been in Dublin by this time with some Irish woman at a dance (if she looked like you) or taking a look for the man who invented corks and corkscrews. Ireland’s a great country so they say. . . .”

  She also participated through Harry’s letters in his struggle to win promotion to captain. He told her about his appearance before an examining board headed by a terrible-tempered general named Berry and his narrow escape from the medical officer, who thought his eyes were so bad he wanted to send him to division headquarters. Lieutenant Truman talked him out of it. In another letter, he gave her an inside glimpse of army life, along with some good news about his promotion: “I got an underground intimation that I passed my captain’s examination all right. I don’t believe it though until I see the evidence from Washington. I am telling you only because I thought maybe it would be nice to share good news with you if it is only a rumor, and I know you won’t kid me about it if it’s false. To tell you the honest truth I’d rather be a first lieutenant than anything else in the army except a buck private in the rear rank. He’s the guy that has no responsibility and he’s the guy that does the real work. I heard a good one the other day which said that a lieutenant knows nothing and does everything, a captain knows everything and does nothing, a major knows nothing and does nothing. Very true except that a captain has to know everything from sealing wax to sewing machines and has to run them. He also is responsible for about $750,000 worth of materiel and 193 men, their lives, their morals, their clothes, and their horses, which isn’t much for $200 a month and pay your own expenses. I shall probably get the swell head just as all captains do if I get it, and it will be lots better for me if I don’t. . . .”

  Then came a telegram that must have made Bess wonder about her resolution to share all aspects of the life of the man she loved:

  WE ARE MOVING TODAY. YOUR PACKAGE CAME ALL RIGHT AND WAS VERY FINE. WILL WRITE YOU FROM TRAIN. HARRY S. TRUMAN

  At 5:00 a.m. on March 21, 1918, the telephone rang at 219 North Delaware Street. It was Lieutenant Harry Truman calling from a railroad phone in Kansas City, where the troop train had stopped to change engines. The switchman who let him use the phone said: “If she doesn’t break the engagement at five o’clock in the morning, she really loves you.” The engagement stayed unbroken.

  When Harry reached New York, he got a telegram from Bess. She asked him for a picture. She even told him where to go - White’s, one of the best photographers in the city. Harry sensed what she was thinking or, to put it more exactly, fearing. “Don’t you worry about me not taking care of myself. . . . I’m going to use my brains, if I have any, for Uncle Sam’s best advantage and I’m going to aim to keep them in good working order, which can’t be done by stopping bullets.”

  Harry tried to cheer her up with a lively letter from the Hotel McAlpin, where he was staying in New York: “Would you believe it? I am here at this joint along with four other Missouri guys. We are having the time of our innocent young lives lookin’ out the window up Broadway. . . . Got up this morning [at Camp Merritt, New Jersey] had breakfast of ham and eggs at a cafeteria in the camp, and then got permission to come to the city. Got a taxi, five of us did, and drove thirteen miles to 130th Street, rode the ferry across, and then began hunting for the subway downtown. They told us it was only a block from the ferry. We walked around and hunted and finally decided to take the elevated, which was nearby about four stories up. Well the elevated turned out to be the subway! The devilish thing runs out of the ground about 120th Street and runs over a low place on stilts. We couldn’t recognize it as the subway. We have all had shines, shaves, baths, and are now in here to go to church somewhere this afternoon. We haven’t decided whether it will be A1 Jolson or George Cohan.”

  In France, letter by letter, Bess followed Harry through the exhausting ordeal of another, tougher artillery school, where he got to be so good at “trig and logs,” as he called it (that’s trigonometry and logarithms), that he was made an instructor. Then came even better news. On June 14, 1918, he wrote: “I am back with the regiment and a sure enough captain.” It had taken six weeks for his promotion to catch up with him so he had “about a bushel and a half of francs back pay coming next payday.”

  Even better news followed exactly a month later. “I have attained my one ambition, to be a Battery commander. If I can only make good at it, I can hold my head up anyway for the rest of my days.”

  Subsequent letters revealed that this promotion was a mixed blessing. Battery D was composed mostly of Irish-Catholics from Kansas City. Contrary to earlier versions of their background, they were not all lower-class mugs by any means. Many of them were college men, but they all shared a fondness for breaking any and every army regulation on the books. They had already ruined three captains before Harry Truman got them. Nevertheless, in a week, he was reporting more good news to Bess: “They gave me a Battery that was always in trouble . . . but we carried off all the credits this week. I hope to make a reputation for myself if the cards fall right and I don’t get wounded or something. It is the Irish Battery I have and the adjutant has decided to put an O in front of my name to make me right. They seem to want to soldier for me and if I can get them to do it, I shall consider that I have made the greatest success there is to make. If I fail, it’ll be a great failure too. That’s always the case though. The men are as fine a bunch as were ever gotten together but they have been lax in discipline. Can you imagine me being a hard-boiled captain of a tough Irish Battery? I started things in a rough-cookie fashion. The very first man that was up before me for a lack of discipline got everything I was capable of giving. I took the Battery out to fire the next day and they were so anxious to please me and fire good that one of my gunners got the ague and simply blew up. I had to take him out. When I talked to him about it he almost wept and I felt so sorry for him I didn’t even call him down. Tell George [Wallace] that little Higginbotham is one of my shootin’ men. He pulls the hammer on No. 1 gun and he sure rides it. The other day it nearly bucked him off.”

  Bess matched Harry letter for letter. One day he got four - and a box of candy from Paris on which was written: “Sent by order of Miss Bess Wallace, Independence, Kansas City, Mo.” Along with worrying her man through France, she had to cope with a family crisis at 219 North Delaware Street. Her grandfather was dying. Her mother all but collapsed at the thought of losing the one man who had sustained her. George P. Gates had been ill since early in 1918, suffering largely from the complications of old age. (He was eighty-two.) On June 26, 1918, he died. For Bess, too, it was a wrenching loss. A strong, genial, loving presence vanished from her life.

  The loss also triggered considerable anxiety. Her grandfather left his wife Elizabeth an annuity, so she was financially secure. But the rest of his modest estate was divided among his five children. Madge Wallace received $23,247.39 - not enough to support her and Bess and her youngest son, Fred, whom Madge had resolved to send to the University of Missouri, for more than a few years. If Harry Truman was killed in action, Bess’ future would be bleak.

  We know, now, that he was not killed. But the coming months and years of Bess Wallace’s future were as opaque and threatening to her in 1918 as they were to the women who sent men to all the other wars of our century. She threw herself into her war bond sales work and put a star in the flag of the Episcopal Church for Harry, even though he was a Baptist who seldom went to church. In her letters, she shared some of her deepest feelings with him. She revealed how awful she had felt when he came to a Fourth of July party in his uniform in the summer of 1917. It is interesting that it took her an entire year to tell him. As he neared combat, she seemed to want to let him know that her pain at the thought of losing him had been acute from the start.

  Letters from another friend with a strange (but in my opinion lovely) name reveal th
at Bess was afraid that she might have a nervous breakdown in 1918. Arry Ellen Mayer had grown fond of Bess and vice versa when her family moved to North Delaware Street from Kansas City. When they relocated again, this time to Toronto, Canada, the two young women began a lengthy correspondence. Bess saved dozens of Arry’s letters, almost as many as those of Mary Paxton. Where Mary was intense and dramatic, Arry was cheerful and high-spirited. She obviously gave Bess an emotional lift, but she also was close enough to let her write frankly.

  “Don’t for heaven’s sake get nerves,” Arry wrote in response to Bess saying she might have a breakdown. “They are the meanest things on earth, and the only cure is a complete rest. And I know how you’d hate that. So do get rid of them quick, please.” Arry cheered her by reporting that Canadian friends wrote from France that the Germans could not hold out much longer. “Take care of yourself,” Arry wrote, “for you know . . . you want to be ready for a glorious time when Harry comes home. It’s so splendid of him to be going . . .”

  This sentiment was not one Bess was hearing at 219 North Delaware. Other letters reveal Bess was interested in Arry’s romantic experiences. When she hinted that she was falling in love with a Canadian major, Bess wondered how she could possibly marry a foreigner. “It’s a shame to have made you so excited about my thoughts of embracing matrimony,” Arry wrote. “I will confess I am mightily tempted, but I haven’t the courage. You’re quite right, I simply couldn’t marry anyone but an American.”

  Bess sent Arry a copy of the photograph she had sent to Captain Truman and received an ecstatic reply. “It’s the one picture I’ve always wanted and most given up hopes of ever having,” Arry wrote. “My but I am glad the ‘General’ had to have it. That’s surely one of the good things out of this war.”

  Then came the letter from France that Bess had dreaded. Captain Truman was in combat. “I . . . have accomplished my greatest wish. Have fired 500 rounds at the Germans . . . been shelled, didn’t run away thank the Lord, and never lost a man.” With that uncanny instinct for fulfilling her deepest wish, to know, to share everything with him, Harry added: “Probably shouldn’t have told you but you’ll not worry any more if you know I’m in it than if you think I am.”