Looking for My Father - 100 Years Too Late

For the second time in my life, I visited London, and for the second time in my life, I arrived there with the veil of a bad cold obscuring my view of the City. My arrival this time had been at the end of a long formal tour I'd taken of the Hebrides Islands and then of the English Midlands. So I was fairly ragged from having been shuttling between planes, trains, and automobiles, for several weeks by the time I straggled into London.

I had booked a small room in the neighborhood I'd visited before – off of Cromwell Road in the Kensington District. The room was little more than a hostel-like rectangle in an old, run-down building. But its proprietors were friendly and the location was perfect for my purposes. I was too sickly by then to pursue any of the ambitious touring plans I'd made. Forget about high tea at the Mandeville Hotel. Forget about re-visiting the ravens at the Tower of London, or seeing another court case in the Old Bailey. Forget about trying to reserve a ticket to tour Parliament.

Instead I decided I'd limit myself to places I could walk to and could view casually, withdrawing from if I got a big sniveling, coughing fit. That meant concentrating on the museums that were near me. There were plenty of those, although I was a little disappointed that that was what my precious little time in London would devolve into – because after all, I had plenty of world-class museums in my hometown of Chicago, places I too often neglected because they were always there, available to me.

But museums it was. The first one I queued up for was the Science Museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington. I immediately found something more interesting, more distinctively British than I'd anticipated. The Museum was featuring a special exhibit commemorating the Battle of Passchendaele in World War I. (The Battle is more often known as the Battle of Ypres in the U.S.)

England suffered even more from World War I than America did. A higher percentage of Britain's generation of young men were killed or maimed in battle. It was the defining event for the writers, especially the poets, of that era. It turned the mood of society from the exuberance of the technological progress being made by the Industrial Revolution – to one of melancholy over the loss and cruelty of the world.

A large part of the Museum exhibit was devoted to the prostheses that were developed for injured soldiers. The artificial arms and legs look rickety by modern standards. The different masks designed to cover face injuries gave a Phantom of the Opera aspect to the exhibit. But the glass eyes looked astonishingly realistic. They had a case of them, all staring up at me with different, disturbing angles.

However it was the photographs that I was drawn to – the soldiers getting ready to depart, the soldiers lined up for training, the soldiers in gas masks, the soldiers in the thick smoke and twisted barbed wire of the battlefield, the soldiers lying shattered on the field and on crude stretchers.

I haunt these photos of World War I wherever I come upon them, always trying to find my father among the troops, always trying to garner some scrap of knowledge about who my father was. My father fought in that War. His only ostensible injury was a mangled thumb, which he said had been “shot off,” but which, like Al Capone's scar, my mother and I suspected had actually come from some much less heroic participation.

I knew that my father had gotten horribly sick overseas, almost dying from something that was vaguely diagnosed as “pneumonia.” It's only been in the last decade or so that I have come to realize he probably had the flu – the infamous influenza that caused the nearly worldwide epidemic of 1918, killing millions. It's been said that early victims were soldiers fighting in Europe, who then, on their return, brought the plague to American shores and to their other native countries. We have a picture of my father looking impossibly pale and frail and young in his uniform, unrecognizable as the stocky, whiskey-coarsened man I knew.

The only other information I had about my father's wartime experience was that he served in the Signal Corp and was assigned to the Dog Training Unit there. I have two further pictures of him from that period, showing him sitting rather bemused, surrounded by a mix of German Shepherds and Rottweilers. We always joked that it looked more as if the dogs were about to attack him rather than any enemy.

This London exhibit did provide me with some additional insight into what my father's dog training activities might have involved. I'd always assumed that dogs would only have been used to attack enemies or to carry messages. But I found that they might have been given a much larger role to play. It was explained that dogs were trained to go out in the field and rip certain insignia off of the uniforms of fallen soldiers and bring those swatches back base camps. They'd tear off one identifying swatch if the soldier was still alive – a different serial number swatch if he was dead. That way, rescue and medical care could be attempted for those who might still profit from it. It was sort of macabrely humorous to think how a man's access to help might depend on a dog's diagnosis of his condition. But in any case, the names of all those left out in the field, living and dead, could be known.

I spent most of my time in that exhibit though searching through the sepia faces of the soldiers. Of course most of the photos were of British troops, but photos of troops from America, Canada, Australia and other countries, were also inevitably included. Once again, I wished I had a magnifying glass to see the bygone faces better. Would I know my father if I saw him, one among that sea of stricken visages? Why would it matter?

No, I didn't see any trace of him, but I will look again, at other World War I photos as they come my way. That's because I know almost nothing about my father's life before I was born. He would never give any biographical detail. Whenever I'd ask him anything – about his history, his opinions, his philosophy – he'd make some coarse joke and walk away. He was about as far from being “verbal” as a person could get. And that, more than anything else, is what I held against him. While most young people chafe at how strict their parents are, or how controlling, or how misunderstanding – my brief with my father was that he was no raconteur. To me, one of the prime reasons for family is the opportunity it offers for an intimate exchange of each others' lives. I lived to wrap the events of my day up in a package and come home and present the package as a gift of myself. I waited to hear my parents do the same. But in my father's case, it was never going to happen.

So I've been left to hunt for him through street scenes of Chicago of the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's – hoping to catch a glimpse of where he might have been, what he might have been doing in those distant days. And before that, I scour pictures of the soldiers of World War I. I thought how fading and futile and somehow ironic it was to be standing there - in the dimness of a London museum, one hundred years after the fact – searching for clues to my father.