LITTLE WOUNDS

The grandfather I never knew

The two-story row houses on Matthews Street in the Germantown section of Philadelphia were adorned in American flags and bunting to welcome Corporal Joe Little home from the Great War. The residents in the narrow street recognized the smile of the guy moving cautiously up the steps to 5645. The black patch on his forehead was new. So was the triangular-shaped scar below it and the two red carvings, one running into his hair and the other near his left eye.

     

     Surface scars never tell the full story of the ones that haunt beneath.

       Joseph Aloysius Little was the grandfather I never knew.

       My brother, Joseph Aloysius McQuade, is named after my mom’s dad, appropriate since both Joes come from tough stock. Joe is probably the toughest of the four McQuade brothers. Joe Little might have been even tougher than my dad, Andy, the Marine, honored for bravery in World War II who became a drill instructor during the Korean Conflict.

       Joe Little proved tougher than most humans, living to talk about the bullet that dropped onto a bloody field in France after ripping through his head. He also had a soft side, grinning as he described the horror.

       A report in a community newspaper described the first Joseph Aloysius as a guy with “a sparkle in his eye, roses in his cheeks and a perpetual smile on his lips.” 

       That eerily sounds as if someone was painting a picture of my brother Franny. The characteristic strands run like molasses through my family history, leaving foggy traces of memories, some buried for decades.

       Here’s the headline that appeared in a local newspaper in November 1918:

       HIS BRAIN PIERCED BY BOCHE BULLET BUT THAT DIDN’T STOP CORPORAL JOE LITTLE AS JUBILANT MATTHEWS ST. BEARS WITNESS

Corporal Joe Little crawled across a field of dead and dying soldiers after the bullet entered his forehead and tore into brain tissue before exiting near his left ear. He added a purple heart to the warm one that beat beneath the proud chest he stuck out as an Irishman and Philly guy.

       My mom’s dad was a machinist and semipro baseball player who was being scouted by the Philadelphia Athletics as a catcher before serving as an infantryman in World War I.  He joined the National Guard at 22 and was discharged Aug. 5, 1917. He enlisted in the regular army the same day.  Seven months later he sewed the corporal stripe on his uniform.

       He fought with the 109th Machine Gun Battalion, attached to Company 4 overseas, involved in battles in northeast France at Champagne-Marne, Aisle-Marne and Oise-Marne before being wounded in Meuse-Argonne. He was discharged on Nov. 15, 1918.

       The Docs gave him a couple months. He lived two decades, dying in 1939 at the age of 47. My mother, Alice, was 12.

        Not everyone survives to talk about a bullet to the head. Not everyone was Joe. 

       “I had been over the top five times when I was transferred to a machine gun squad and went over the top for the sixth time with this bunch on Oct. 6,” Joe said in the newspaper article. “I was hit in the head but did not lose consciousness. I did not have my first aid kit, so crawled about 50 yards to where field doctors were fixing other wounded men. 

       “I smoked a cigarette while waiting and then feeling tired, went to sleep. When I woke up several days later I was in a comfortable bed with a nurse beside me. The first question the doctor asked me was if I were Irish. ‘I sure am that and don’t you forget it and I have the Irish luck.’ ”

       Thinking he was lucky says a lot about Joe. He was wounded a month before the war ended. Some luck. Discharged with a skin graft hiding the bullet hole four days after Armistice Day when the allies and Germany met at Compiegne, France for the end of hostilities on the Western Front. 

       When Joe said he went over the top, he probably meant out of the muck of a trench onto a field pockmarked with shelling from the Germans. There is no glamor in war despite what movies might lead you to believe. At the infantry level in the Great War you battled strangers difficult to hate fully because you didn’t even know them. You are all young because decision-makers on both sides sacrifice those in best physical shape. You went from skinned knees to bloody guts in a short span of a precarious life. 

There are certain truisms in war. The old theorize and strategize from afar. The young fight the wars face to face.

       I got more of a sense about my grandfather through his recollection of that scary day when he was wounded than in anything my mom ever told me. That was my fault. I rarely asked her about him. I can’t now because she’s gone. I was too busy being a kid then to ask my mom about a ghost. She didn’t volunteer much. All of sudden, I yearn to learn about him 80 years after his death. My mom’s big sister Emily filled in some blanks before she died.

Joe’s words are at once haunting and vivid, clearly relieved as he remembered the carnage. Soldiers expect to be eliminated during combat more than they expect to perform an impromptu Lazarus impersonation. 

At first, his family was told he died, according to my cousin Paul Newns. The name inside the helmet on the field of fury did not match the dead soldier next to it. Confusion is always ingrained in the bloody mess of war. Joe Little had already crawled through the gut-wrenching obstacle course to the makeshift recovery room.

The family wore black until they heard the shocking news that slapped color back in their lives. Surprisingly, Joe Little was back in the states in General Hospital in Cape May, N.J. a month before his kin was informed. 

 “It’s good to be back in God’s country and God’s own city,” said Joe as he sat in his home on a 48-hour furlough from the hospital. “I went to France with the nerviest bunch of guys that ever came down the pike. I saw them drop, some days a few, but more often in large numbers. Our company was filled up time and again with casuals but it never stayed even near its full complement any length of time.

“Finally it came my turn and it’s good to be alive and have all the horrors behind me now.”

The Meuse-Argonne campaign was the greatest American battle in World War I, waged over rough, hilly terrain for 47 days. The United States had 26,277 casualties. The Germans lost 28,000. French lives were also lost. Little was among the 95,786 Americans wounded during the biggest operation and victory of the American Expeditionary Forces.

“Time and again I saw men killed beside me and had machine gun bullets whistling between my legs and between my arm and body, but I was never scratched before,” said Joe to the reporter 100 years ago. 

From not a scratch to permanent scars, etched in his head and his psyche.

“He came home with a black patch on his forehead and wore it for a few years,” wrote my aunt Emily. “The German surgeon who operated on him did a wonderful job. He was fine physically and mentally but in those days he was considered a disabled veteran and his only therapy was a woman teacher who came to see him occasionally. They didn’t have the wonderful rehab and physical therapy that we have today.

“I always felt that his life was wasted through no fault of his own. He did a lot of reading and umpired at sandlot ball games. He died when I was 17. Some said it was from a accumulation of poison gas from the war but the death certificate read coronary.”

His heart gave out but it lives on. 

It is a part of my heart now. Shortly before receiving an email from my cousin, Father Jack Newns, with details of my grandfather’s final resting place I found it on my own by googling Matthews Street and scrolling the neighborhood to find a cemetery 5 minutes away at the intersection of Haines Street and Limekiln Pike. The road veers left quickly just inside the entrance of the Philadelphia National Cemetery. A short distance past the Mexican American war monument, my grandfather is three rows off the path in Section L, site 598.  The cemetery is row after row of brownish-white cement stones, curved on the top, with simple crosses in a circle on each. 

Stark and powerful.

Joe’ s tombstone reads in all caps: JOSEPH LITTLE, PENNSYLVANIA, CPL MG CO 109 INF, 28 DIVISION, WORLD WAR I, AUGUST 16, 1893, FEBRUARY 24, 1939. Joe’s stone faces other stones. On the back facing the neighborhood it reads: L598, HIS WIFE, ADELAIDE, MAY 22, 1899, DECEMBER 7, 1968.

 Eerily, she died on the anniversary of an infamous day of war. Oddly, she gets a less-than inspired mention. HIS WIFE wouldn’t work these days. She is buried on solemn ground, alongside her heroic husband.  His neighbors are other Great War veterans as well as 66 Buffalo Soldiers. The cemetery also contains an American Revolutionary War monument honoring reinterred Continental soldiers from the Battle of Germantown. The Mexican-American section honors 38 reinterred veterans. A Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument remembers 184 prisoners of war who died in Philadelphia area hospitals or camps during the Civil War.

There’s one actor and one fellow catcher buried there. Hall of Famer Louis Santop was a left-handed slugger who made his Negro Leagues debut with the Philadelphia Giants in 1909. Joseph Sweeney was an American actor, whose most famous role was elderly Juror No. 9 in the 1957 film, “Twelve Angry Men.”

Life surrounds death with row home after row home outside and headstone after headstone within the cemetery walls. There was snow on the ground when I visited. The view of headstone formation on a palette of white was stunning. Anyone would pause to think and let the moment settle.

Nearby Joe lived most of his life.

His parents Nicholas and Mary were born in Ireland and lived in Sligo. Joe’s older sisters Mary Ann, Alice and Maggie and older brother Nicholas were all born in Ireland. Joe was born in the states, along with younger siblings Jack, Agnes and Emily. 

Except for his time spent catching in semipro leagues in younger days and umpiring softball and reading in his later years details are sketchy on Joe’s life apart from his time in the service. He received a check twice a month as a disabled veteran in his later years. He knew where the local pubs were located and at times regaled the patrons with his Irish voice, according to what my mom told my brother Mark.  

Yet, it was clearly not always an idyllic existence of song and camaraderie. The Littles lived with Joe’s sister Mary Ann and her husband George Griffith. In 1928, Mary Ann told the Littles they had to move out of the crowded house. Emily asked if she could stay and Joe and Adelaide said yes. They took Alice with them to their new place two minutes away on the 5000 block of Ardleigh Street.

Before long Alice didn't live there anymore. She showed up unannounced on the Griffiths’ doorstep. The family history compiled by my aunt Emily says the Littles didn’t look for young Alice for two days.

 Bleak. 

It wasn’t all gloomy. My cousin Jack said his mom Emily spoke of her father with great affection. He clearly had a sense of humor, sinking what was left of his teeth into foreign food on plates of desperation.

“When we were in the thick of the fight we often went for a couple days without eating, but then we could eat until we were sick,” said Joe. “However, I lost two teeth trying to eat English hardtack when we were brigaded with them. There was no trouble between the English and the men of the 109th. We also got along like brothers with the French.”

Joseph Aloysius gave my mom a small American flag he kept with him doing the war. She gave it to her third child, the other Joseph Aloysius. He still has it. It has a bullet hole in it.

That image haunts me.

         I dug a discarded flag from a trash can when I was still working and kept it at my desk in Joe Little’s memory for years. It was stuck in the corner of my workspace and moved with me when I played musical cubicles, a game more and more companies love these days. No one ever asked about the flag. Probably just thought I was patriotic.

I would forget about him from time to time until suddenly my eye would focus on the flag behind computers sticking out of a crevice from the cubicle wall. Made me smile about the grandfather I never knew. I feel I know him better now and think about him often, especially on Veterans Day and July 4.

 Sometimes I think about my grandfather for no obvious reason at all.