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Chapter Two

“I don’t know how I ever got through the next summer,” said Bill of the period following Bertha’s death. “It was spent in utter apathy, often running into anguish, in compulsive reflection, all centering around the minister’s daughter.’’

Yet the summer of 1913 was more active than his memory of it suggests. He made up his German class work. He met Lois Burnham (although their courtship would not begin until the following summer). And he went with his grandfather to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for the 50th anniversary of the Civil War battle.

The Gettysburg reunion was a spectacular undertaking, directed with meticulous care and efficiency by the state of Pennsylvania with the cooperation of the War Department. Bill and Fayette probably stayed in the Great Camp, a tented city that the War Department had erected on farmlands leased near the battlefield to house the thousands of aged Union and Confederate veterans who poured in for the event. Bill toured the battlefield with Fayette, who showed him where Vermonters had out flanked Pickett’s charge and helped determine the outcome of the battle. The hot days at Gettysburg were packed with speeches and exhibitions, climaxed by President Woodrow Wilson’s address on Friday, July 4.

Meeting Lois was the high point of that summer. The oldest daughter of a respected New York physician, she and her family took their summer vacations a few miles from Bill’s home, at Emerald Lake in North Dorset. She was not only attractive, intelligent, and charming, she was, to Bill, a member of a different social class: “She represented areas in which I had always felt a great inferiority. Her people were of a fine family in Brooklyn. They were what we Vermonters called city folks. She had social graces of which I knew nothing. People still ate with their knives around me; the back door step was still a lavatory. So her encouragement of me and her interest in me did a tremendous amount to buck me up.”

As Lois remembered their first meeting, her brother Rogers had been talking enthusiastically about his friend Bill. She found Bill to be tall and lanky, but hardly much more — after all, he was a mere boy of 18, and she was a young lady, four years older than he.

Bill and Lois shared friendly times that summer, usually in a group that included her brother and his sister. In the fall, she returned to Brooklyn with her family. The following spring, in 1914, the Burnhams returned to the lake. That summer, the relationship between Bill and Lois changed. They had what she remembered as “a glorious vacation picnicking, hiking, and taking all-day drives. Long before the end of the season,’’ Lois said, she thought Bill “the most interesting, the most knowledgeable, and the finest man I knew.” She had forgotten all about the difference in their ages.

The timing of their romance was providential, because the summer of 1914 was a bad time for Bill. She listened sympathetically as he told her he was no good, couldn’t face returning to school, couldn’t bear to leave her.

He gave Lois credit for helping him out of his depression. “She lifted me out of this despond, and we fell very deeply in love, and I was cured temporarily, because now I loved and was loved and there was hope again.

“At the unconscious level, I have no doubt she was already becoming my mother, and I haven’t any question that that was a very heavy component in her interest in me.” Whatever the individual needs that sparked their early courtship, Bill and Lois were drawn together. Said Bill, “I think Lois came along and picked me up as tenderly as a mother does a child.’’

Lois was the oldest of six children. She said her childhood had been so happy that she had hated to grow up. “Mother and Dad truly loved one another and openly showed their affection to each other and to us children,” she wrote. “They taught us never to be afraid to tell of our love, never to go to sleep angry with anyone, always to make peace in our hearts before closing our eyes at night, and never to be ashamed to say, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong.’”

At the time Lois met Bill, she had already completed school at Brooklyn’s Packer Collegiate Institute, and two terms of drawing at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. Still living at home, she was working in the employment department of the Y.W.C.A.

Meanwhile, Bill’s post-high-school education had followed an uneven path. In the 1913-14 school year, he had gone to live with his mother and sister Dorothy in Arlington, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. “I was entered in the Arlington High School and barely got through some courses there,’’ Bill said. “The idea of this was to prepare me for the examinations for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because of my scientific interests, it was supposed that I should be an engineer. I took the examinations and could hardly pass a one of them.’’

Three generations of the Wilson and Griffith families sat for this family portrait.

He had enrolled at Norwich University, which had entrance requirements far easier than M.I.T.’s. Called “The Hill,” Norwich, in Northfield, Vermont, is a military college with discipline as strict as at West Point. In the midsummer of 1914, Europe was on the verge of war, and there was a possibility — albeit slight — that the United States might be drawn into it.

In August, just prior to the start of his first year at Norwich, Bill went to visit his father. It was the first time he had seen Gilman since the divorce eight years previous.

Bill made the long journey to British Columbia on a transcontinental train that he boarded in Montreal. His letters home, written to his Grandmother Wilson, describe the journey west in striking detail:

“I woke up with a ringing in my ears and feeling a peculiar exhilaration. This was my first view of the Rockies. The mountains rise straight up and are clothed about the bases with scrub evergreens excepting when great slides have torn paths down the sides. The mountains are formed of many colored shales lying in strata sometimes tilted, sometimes horizontal. Everything is jagged and angular, showing marks of sudden and violent changes, a great contrast to the smooth, gentle curves of our mountains.

“Great number of streams rush down the sides fed from the perpetual snows above the timber line. Every high valley above the snow line has its glacier. The ice is a beautiful deep blue covered here and there with great white patches of newly fallen snow. The sky is cloudless and almost matches the ice in color. We pass through miles of such scenery as this. On one side of the road the peaks rise up like a wall. So straight and abrupt that it seems that their snows would slide off onto the train. To preclude any possibility of this, miles and miles of snowsheds have been built. On the other side, one looks down into the river gorge sometimes deep enough to be called a canyon. There is always the deep, narrow, swift-flowing river with numerous falls and splendid rapids. Forever tearing at its banks it undermines great rocks and cedars which falling in are swept away like toothpicks on the dark flood.’’

Already showing the powers of observation that would later serve him so well on Wall Street, Bill remarked on the oil field discoveries and natural gas developments in Alberta. He noted that in Medicine Hat, Alberta, the streetlights operated on natural gas that was never turned off, since the gas flowed as strongly as the day it was found 22 years before.

Bill’s letters were written on his father’s office stationery from Marblehead, British Columbia, a small community high in the Canadian Rockies. The letterhead listed G. B. Wilson as manager of the Marblehead Quarries of Canadian Marble Works, Ltd., quarry owners and manufacturers of Kootenay marbles. Its main offices were in Nelson, British Columbia.

For all Bill’s detailed descriptions of his surroundings, there was nothing in his letters about his reunion with his father. Father and son apparently got along well, although Gilman seems to have made little effort to keep in touch with his children.

A month later, Bill was an entering freshman at Norwich, which at that time had a total enrollment of 145. Bill was miserable during his first semester there: “Again, I felt I was nobody. I couldn’t even begin to compete in athletics, in music, or even for popularity with the people around me. I so keenly remember when the rush for the fraternities was on, and I didn’t get a bid to a single one. I tried out for baseball and football and wasn’t good enough for either first team. I remember how there was a fellow who played the violin so much better than I that I could not even get into the dance orchestra. I remember how I produced an old cello that I had and somehow scraped up a part in the glee club with that. But I was very second-rate. Some of my studies, I handled very well; others, I began to fail in.”

However, a letter to his mother written shortly after he arrived paints a very different picture: “There are four fraternities here, have been to all several times to dinner and have had ‘bids’ to join three which is quite an honor for a rook. However, I figure that if one is going to join a frat, it might be good to take a year to size up the bunches who belong.” Some months later, he brought up the fraternity matter again: “Can’t seem to get away from being popular. Have had second invitations to all the frats. But think it policy to stall. Just the minute you join a frat, you join more or less of a clique. In spite of all that’s done to prevent it, the frats can pull strings in the military business and by keeping out of them I think one will stand more on his own merits. As it is now, I am popular with men of the strongest frats here. If I join one, I lose my influence with all the rest. So me for the Commons.”¹

During that first semester, Bill received 94 in chemistry, 86 in French, 75 in drawing, 68 in English, 61 in trigonometry, and 53 in algebra. He had an outstanding rating of 98 in military duty and 100 in deportment. His final average of 86 gave him a standing of fifth in his class. If he was not leading the pack, he was certainly holding his own.

From a letter to his mother, written in February: “Am glad to know that you were pleased with at least a part of my marks. The week preceding midyears, I was laid up with a touch of the grippe and thus missed the general review which is held at the time. So my exams were not what they should have been. Algebra was the first exam and I got out of bed to take it. For the rest of them I had a whole day preparation. My exams fortunately coming one every other day, I took a makeup exam Saturday and passed with 65%. Could I have done that in the first place I should have ranked third or fourth in the class. At any rate, I do not compare unfavorably with the others. I am confident of ranking in second place next semester as I expect to get over 90% in four subjects.”

But it did not turn out that way. On a morning early in his second semester, he fell on his way to class and injured his elbow. He insisted on going to Boston to be treated by his mother, who by now was a practicing osteopath.

He had no desire to return to school. “How terribly reluctant I was to face that discipline, and that idea of being no good and second-rate. As I got on the train going from Boston back to Northfield, I began to have terrible sensations in the solar plexus. I felt like the world was coming to an end.” Short of breath, having heart palpitations, “I was in stark panic that I had heart trouble and was going to die. Back at school, as soon as I would attempt a few simple exercises, this terrible palpitation would set in, and I would collapse.”

Following these attacks, Bill would be taken to the college infirmary, but no physical cause could be found for his troubles. “This happened again and again, until, at the end of a couple of weeks, I was sent to my grandfather in East Dorset, which was just exactly where I wanted to go.” He was overcome by inertia, unable to do anything. “I used to go into fits of palpitations and cry to see the doctor,” he said. The doctor gave him a bromide and tried to persuade him that there was nothing wrong with his heart.

Bill stayed with his elderly grandparents that spring and summer, and gradually recovered enough to consider returning to Norwich for the fall semester. An April letter to his mother shows how preoccupied he was with his health problems:

“Up to the time Dr. Grinell made his second visit, I had been miserable. Some days eating nothing and the most a few slices of soft toast. Terribly sour stomach, consequent heart burn and palpitation. This last of course scares me to death. Makes me mad to think I am scared but I am just the same.

“Dr. Grinell came about six p.m. I was feeling awfully. He applied a stethoscope and said at once that I had the best valve action he had seen for some time. Desired me to listen. I did so. Sounded just the same as it did last time. I registered immediate relief. He said that the large intestine was rather inactive, causing sour stomach, and gas. Gave me a mild physic to take after eating. Did not seem to think my stomach was out of order. Grandpa and grandma think so. Hence they pursued him until he said, ‘I don’t think diet has anything to do with this case.’ He saw that he said the wrong thing so he afterward qualified the statement, by saying, ‘Of course, he mustn’t eat too much,’ a very definite statement, you see.”

Bill’s “heart” problems were clearly temporary; he soon recovered and had no difficulty either in passing the Army’s physical examination in 1917 or in performing his military duties.

Another letter, also written that spring, indicates that Bill was feeling better, and had his mind on other things. He wanted an automobile:

“I looked over the catalogue you sent with some interest and threw it aside. Grandpa picked it up and began to look it over. Pretty soon he began to talk about the machine some. Grandma remarked that it must be hard to learn to run a machine in view of this fact that Jim Beebe wouldn’t learn to run his. Grandpa at once ‘waxed enthusiastic’ and said he guessed there wasn’t much to it. Said he bet he could learn in short order.

“Heard no more about autos for a couple days. One morn he came in from the garden and said, ‘Better send and get one of those, hadn’t we? Seems as if we might get the agency perhaps. Guess I could sell those things. Never saw anything I couldn’t sell yet.’

“Naturally I was interested. We got the terms for agents through Will Griffith (who has been offered the agency) and Grandpa had me go to Manchester and talk up the machine. I went, and banking on your consent have practically disposed of one to the Bamfords. As to the financial risk, there is none, I think. This is also Grandpa’s opinion for the selling of one machine excludes the risk element and Grandpa has a sneaking notion that he wants one anyway. We figure that there is about $85 profit on a machine.

“Now to come to my present condition. Am glad to say that sinking spells and dizziness have totally disappeared. I have palpitation on a strenuous exertion. Am yet nervous. Am convinced that will disappear as soon as I convince myself that nothing ails my heart. I have no stomach symptoms, am able to eat every thing. Am physically myself as regards weight and strength. Obviously a diversion of the mind will now effect a cure.

“I know of no subject upon which I can discourse with greater intelligence or enthusiasm than automobiles.

“Consider the body risks. There are chances to be taken. Accidents occur daily. I should say the risks encountered in autos are considerably less than those Grandpa has taken taming kicking horses or that tunnel workers have of a scale dropping on their head or that you took as a child in running around on the edge of a flume or on narrow beams in the top of the barn or that I have taken every day at school with bucking horses. Consider the number of accidents also the number of autos. H. Ford runs off 1,800 of them a day. If this amounts [to a] nervous strain to which I should be subjected in driving perhaps you are the better judge. Certainly not more than steering a horse over a three-foot hurdle. Certainly no more demand upon concentrative faculties than as much violin practice. Certainly a more healthful occupation. I have heard you say that no more exhilarating and yet mild form of exercise existed than motoring.

“Now as to the danger which would be peculiar to me. Perhaps at this moment I am not fit to operate a machine because I am too nervous. But I’m not going to be this way all summer. At the present rate of improvement, shall be restored in another month.

“Normally, you know I am about as excitable as a mud turtle. It cuts me to think you have not enough confidence in my judgment to allow me to do what Jamie Beebe, Clifford Copping, Francis Money, David Cochran, Lyman Burnham are allowed to do without the parents entertaining grave fears as to their safety.

“Rogers [Burnham] has driven since he was 14. I should hate to think my judgment at present is not the equal of his at that time.

“Again, autos have come to stay. They will soon be as common as horses.

“You consider yourself competent to drive a machine with safety. You even would like to have ridden the motorcycle. You certainly could do both. But I should be fearful of your trying the motorcycle as you are that I attempt the auto. Love from Will.’’ In a later letter to his mother, there is no reference to illness or doctors. He had been hired to play the fiddle for ten dances, for which he was to receive five dollars per dance. His confidence in his own playing had clearly risen, as he told his mother:

“I do think that I can put myself through school with it. Have played enough for money now so that the thing has lost its glamor and it really seems like work. Have improved a lot since you were here.”

During the summer of 1915, Bill had a job peddling burners for kerosene lamps in nearby villages. That summer, Lois had opened a small tea arbor at the north end of Emerald Lake. Bill found a number of reasons to turn up at the tea arbor during the day. “He didn’t sell many burners and I didn’t sell much tea; but we had wonderful visits,” Lois said. “Often I would give him a treat of wild strawberries or fried picked-on-the-hill mushrooms on toast.”

By late summer, their courtship had become serious. But Bill had competition: Several years earlier, Lois had met a young Canadian named Norman Schneider at a young people’s church convention. Norman’s family owned a meat packing firm in Kitchener, Ontario. Lois and Norman had dated; he was a good person, nice-looking and intelligent. She had enjoyed being with him. Now, he came to the lake for a week’s visit, and just before he left to return to Canada, he asked Lois to marry him.

Lois, who had longed to be with Bill every minute she was with Norman, had her answer. “Just as Norman stepped on the train for Montreal, Bill jumped off,” she wrote. “We walked back to the lake together. But somehow our fingers often seemed to brush against each other.’’

That same evening, they told each other of their love and became engaged. (When asked many years later whether she had any regrets, Lois replied: “Never, never, never, never. It never occurred to me. I never dreamt about anybody but Bill Wilson.”)

At first, Bill and Lois kept their betrothal a secret from everybody except Mark Whalon, in whom Bill did confide. Mark was a “sort of uncle or father” to Bill. They had worked together on summer jobs and helped string the first telephone lines into East Dorset. They also hunted and fished together, and they shared an interest in Vermont history. Later, they would drink together, although Mark’s drinking never progressed into alcoholism.

During the fall of 1915, Bill made an effort to compensate for past failures at school. His course of study was electrical engineering, which he chose because of his interest in science. Some of his old drive had finally returned, and he began to become popular on campus. Several of his classmates found themselves involved in a hazing incident. Because no one would name names, the whole class was suspended for a full term. The hazing scandal and the suspension happened to coincide in time with the Mexican border troubles. (The following year, U.S. troops under General Pershing were sent into Mexico in a vain attempt to capture Pancho Villa.) Because the Norwich cadets were part of the Vermont National Guard, they were mobilized — although they never were sent to the border. The mobilization was fortuitous for Bill, because it meant that he was reinstated at Norwich.

He continued to be driven by a need to stand out, to do something unique. He found such an opportunity, he believed, in a calculus course.

“I was failing miserably in calculus,” Bill recalled. He had had difficulty memorizing formulas in algebra, and he was encountering similar problems in calculus. “I realized that I was going to be an absolutely flat failure in calculus. In fact, the professor promised me that I would get zero.”

Then Bill discovered that his professor had certain shortcomings in his own understanding of the subject. “He was a catalog of formulas; he could apply the formulas; he was glib; but deep down, he didn’t know how the thing worked,” Bill said. “And I made up my mind I would learn.’’

Bill, stretched out at a picnic with Mark Whalon (center foreground), in a pose many remember as characteristic.

At the library, he studied the history of mathematics and the evolution of calculus. Finally, he grasped the concept sufficiently to discuss it. He had developed considerable talents in argument.

“I got the professor over a barrel, and I made a fool out of him before his class,” Bill said. “He did give me zero, but I had won one battle. In other words, I was the only one on the school grounds — the Number One man again — the only one who deeply understood the underlying principles of calculus.’’

The incident did nothing to help him academically, but it did make him the center of attention. It was a rerun of the boomerang project. His drive for prestige was reasserting itself, making him a sort of hero to his classmates — but a brash upstart in the eyes of his calculus professor.

Bill was an unusually gifted young man, although he was often hypercritical of himself. He possessed a native talent for leadership, which was finally recognized in the military program at Norwich.

“I had been made a corporal or a sergeant in the corps,” Bill said, “and then it was discovered that I had talent for instructing people. Curiously enough, though awkward myself, I had talent for drilling people. I had a voice and I had a manner that would compel a willing obedience, and so much so that the attention of the commandant was drawn to it.” This talent for leadership would serve him well on active duty in the Army. And, he assumed, it would serve him equally well when, upon leaving military service, he would find himself “at the head of vast enterprises,” which he “would manage with utmost assurance.”

Bill had mixed feelings about military service. It was honor, glory, and duty, but it was also danger and death. Growing up in East Dorset, Bill had spent countless hours target-shooting with old Bill Landon, Civil War veteran and “great character” who lived next door. Grandfather Griffith never talked about the Civil War, but old Bill Landon “would spin me yarns by the hour. He had been sergeant on Sheridan’s staff, and he used to tell me how, on a charge, a minié ball had struck his musket butt, and it passed through and stuck in his skull just over the eye; how he plucked it out and continued his charge. And old Bill had a drooping eye, a scar, and poor sight to prove all this.’’

Landon, reliving the glories of the Civil War, also spoke with great scorn of those who had managed to avoid active service. “One of the worst forms of opprobrium that could be cast on anybody when I was a kid was to be called a slacker,’’

As a young officer, Bill anticipated honor and glory, feared danger — and had his first drink.

Bill remembered. “Those who failed to go to the Civil War, evaded service, or got some sort of an easy job got a stigma that they carried all their lives.’’ Old Landon had told Bill about a wealthy and respected East Dorset citizen who carried this stigma. “All during the Civil War, he was ill and used to toddle down to the village with a long shawl over his shoulders, very much stooped, with a bottle of smelling salts, and all during that period, no one would speak to him,’’ said Landon.

But in the cemetery south of East Dorset is a marker for Waldo Barrows, Bill’s great-uncle, killed in the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness. And the Gettysburg battlefield, which Bill had visited with his grandfather, also had a cemetery. “Neurotic that I was, I was ambivalent,” he said. “The great upwellings of patriotism would overtake me one day — and the next day, I would just be funked and scared to death. And I think that the thing that scared me most was that I might never live my life out with Lois, with whom I was in love.’’

The tradition of military service, however, was deeply embedded in Bill. When America entered World War I in 1917, he was called up by the military and never graduated from Norwich.

When he was called, he chose to serve in the Coast Artillery. The decision later caused him guilt, because that was considered one of the safer branches of military service.

From Norwich, Bill was sent to the new officers training camp at Plattsburgh, New York. Here, he discovered that the Norwich cadets’ military training had given them a head start on the others in the camp, and he moved rapidly through the training. His flair for leadership brought him further recognition, and after additional training at Fort Monroe, Virginia, he was commissioned a second lieutenant. It was a heady experience for a 21-year-old who only a few years earlier had been in deepest depression. Then, he was sent to Fort Rodman, just outside New Bedford, Massachusetts. “Here was all the tradition of the old Army, seasoned regular officers and noncoms, along with the drafted men and volunteers,” he remembered. “How I enjoyed that atmosphere, encouraged as I was by actually being put in command of soldiers. But still there crept into me at times that nagging undertone of fear about going abroad.’’

Lois, accompanied by Bill’s grandmother and his sister Dorothy, had visited him at Plattsburgh. She and Bill had now been engaged for almost two years; it was clear that they would marry. Lois’s parents approved of Bill so completely that she was actually permitted to visit him unchaperoned. “Their understanding and their trust in Bill and me were very unusual during that conventional era,” Lois wrote. She was 25 years old; her comment clearly illustrates how young women of her day continued to answer to their parents, even when they were no longer living at home. At this time, Lois had a teaching position in Short Hills, New Jersey, and was living with the aunt who operated the school where she taught.

It was at Fort Rodman, New Bedford, that Bill’s life took a new course. He learned about liquor.

Until that time, he had never had a drink. The Griffiths did not drink, and there was a family memory of what alcohol had done to some of the Wilsons. Bill, who thought it may have been one of the reasons for his parents’ divorce, was afraid of liquor. He was critical —specifically of Norwich students who sneaked off to Montpelier to drink beer and consort with “loose women.”

New Bedford was different. Bill would later remember the charged atmosphere of the town in that wartime period: “moments sublime with intervals hilarious.” He also remembered the social circles that opened to young officers like him. “The society people in town began to invite the young officers to their homes,” he recalled. “One of the great fortunes and one of the leading families of New Bedford was the Grinnell family. They were very rich and very much socialites. I remember so well Emmy and Catherine Grinnell. Emmy’s husband had gone off to the wars; Katy had lost hers; and the two of them used to entertain a group of us kids at their house. This was the first time in my life that I had ever been out in society. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen a butler. And a great rush of fear, ineptitude, and self-consciousness swept over me. In conversation, I could hardly say two words. The dinner table was just a terrible trial.’’

At the Grinnells’, Bill was offered a Bronx cocktail (usually concocted of gin, dry and sweet vermouth, and orange juice). Despite all the warnings, despite all his training, despite all his fears about drinking, he found himself accepting it.

“Well, my self-consciousness was such that I simply had to take that drink,” he recalled. “So I took it, and another one, and then, lo, the miracle! That strange barrier that had existed between me and all men and women seemed to instantly go down. I felt that I belonged where I was, belonged to life; I belonged to the universe; I was a part of things at last. Oh, the magic of those first three or four drinks! I became the life of the party. I actually could please the guests; I could talk freely, volubly; I could talk well. I became suddenly very attracted to these people and fell into a whole series of dates. But I think, even that first evening, I got thoroughly drunk, and within the next time or two, I passed out completely. But as everybody drank hard, nothing too much was made of that.’’

By his own account, Bill was an excessive drinker from the start. He never went through any moderate stage or any period of social drinking. Bill’s inner warning system must have told him his drinking was unusual, because he “kept the lid on” when Lois came to visit him and was invited to meet his friends. But he did not stop altogether. Without liquor, Bill again felt inferior.

It was now early 1918; the United States was fully at war; and Bill could be shipped out at any time. He and Lois had set their wedding day for February 1. There was a rumor that Bill was to be sent overseas soon; so they decided to push the wedding date up to January 24 and change the invitations to announcements. They chose to go ahead with the big church wedding they had planned, and everyone pitched in to help. It was all done in such a rush that the best man, Lois’s brother Rogers, arrived from Camp Devens too late to change his heavy-duty boots, and had to stomp down the aisle.

Meeting Lois, here in her wedding dress, lifted Bill out of deep depression and into love and renewed hope.

In Brooklyn for the wedding, Bill was again conscious of those horribly familiar feelings of inferiority. He even imagined that some of Lois’s family and friends were asking, “Where did Lois get that one?” In contradiction, he also remembered that they went out of their way to make him feel comfortable. Lois, on her part, was clearly delighted with her new husband, and with the “great welcome” that waited for the couple at the furnished apartment Bill had rented for them in New Bedford. “Flowers and plants were everywhere, and people dropped in continuously to congratulate us,” she recalled. “Bill was very popular on the post.”

One aspect of his new social life had been unknown to Lois, but she discovered it while they were in New Bedford. Bill remembered that during this period, he must have passed out at about every third party. At a party one evening, Lois was shocked to hear Bill’s Army buddies tell how they had dragged him home and put him to bed. Still, she was not terribly perturbed about it, confident that she could persuade him to return to his former abstinence. “Living with me would be such an inspiration, I was sure, he would not need alcohol!”

In his recollections of that period, Bill referred frequently to his fear of going to war, and his shame about that fear. He even felt that he was letting his Vermont ancestors down: “None of those who came across the mountains with rifles and axes would have acted like that!’’

He was sent to Fort Adams near Newport, Rhode Island, to await orders. Finally, the dreaded day arrived. On an August night just a few hours before he was to ship out for England, he and Lois climbed one of the beautiful Newport cliffs that overlook the sea. Their mutual gloom and depression of a sudden lifted, and was replaced by a feeling of patriotism and duty. “She and I gazed out over the ocean, wondering. The sun was just setting, and we talked about the future with joy and optimism. There, I felt the first glimmerings of what I was to later understand as a spiritual experience . . . I shall never forget it.”

Aboard the British ship Lancashire in the North Atlantic, two significant things happened to Bill. The first was that he met a ship’s officer, who shared his brandy with Bill. The second was that in a brief encounter with danger, Bill discovered, to his great relief, that he was a man of courage after all. The prospect of this test, which he knew he must sooner or later face, had made him apprehensive, pessimistic, and occasionally sick with self-doubt.

The Lancashire was a troop transport; her decks were packed solid with bunks and, in the middle of the night, sleeping men. Officers were stationed at every hatch on every deck. Bill was on night watch belowdecks, “practically on the keel,’’ where the men would be the last to be rescued in an emergency. The Lancashire was not far from the British coast. Bill was trying to stay awake. Suddenly, there was a huge thud against the hull of the ship. The men were instantly awake and, in the same instant, headed in a panic for the ladder at the base of which Bill was stationed.

He pulled out his gun; he had orders to shoot any who tried to climb out without permission. But instead of using the gun, he used his voice. In a few minutes, he found that he was able to calm the men, to reassure them, and to prevent panic without his having any information about what had actually happened. In turn, he was as reassured as they were, because the incident gave proof of the courage that he had so sorely doubted.

There had been no real danger. An American depth charge, a so-called ashcan intended for an enemy ship, had exploded so close to the Lancashire that it had made a shattering noise against the ship’s hull.

The Lancashire reached England safely. It was shortly after landing there that Bill had another soul-shaking experience. As the experience aboard ship had, it revealed an inner resource that he had never recognized before.

An epidemic kept Bill and his regiment detained at a camp near Winchester. Depressed, lonely, and apprehensive about what lay ahead, Bill went to visit Winchester Cathedral. Inside the great cathedral, the atmosphere impressed itself so deeply upon him that he was taken by a sort of ecstasy, moved and stirred by a “tremendous sense of presence.” “I have been in many cathedrals since, and have never experienced anything like it,” he said. “For a brief moment, I had needed and wanted God. There had been a humble willingness to have Him with me — and He came.” In that moment, Bill knew that everything was all right, as it should be.

Benumbed and slightly dazed by his experience, he found his way outside to the churchyard. There, a familiar name carved on an old headstone caught his eye: Thomas T____, dead at age 26. One letter in the last name was different; still, here could be an ancestor of Bill’s good school friend Ebby T. Bill read with amusement the doggerel that was Thomas’s epitaph; this is his memory of how it went:

“Here lies a Hampshire Grenadier / Who caught his death / Drinking cold small beer. / A good soldier is ne’er forgot / Whether he dieth by musket / Or by pot.”²

Soon afterward, Bill was sent to France, where he at last saw the devastation of war. There, too, he discovered that French wine could produce the same effects as New Bedford liquor, or the brandy he had been introduced to aboard ship. In those closing months of 1918, the war was winding down rapidly, and Bill’s artillery unit was settled in a small mountain town, far from the front. The only time he and his fellow artillerymen ran into actual danger was during a practice firing session.

Their battalion had placed its guns in positions dug into a bank. They were then supposed to practice firing over a low hilltop and into the countryside beyond. The target was a piece of canvas that had been set up about nine miles away. Bill was sent to observe the results of the practice. He and his men took up positions in a slit trench about 300 yards from the target, using a periscope to observe the operation from a distance.

The number one gun fired, and the shell came down practically on the mark. Bill was elated and congratulated the group on their skill. But when the number four gun was fired, he suddenly found the earth opening up around him, and “tons of dirt blown all over us.” Crawling through the dirt, he discovered that the gun had been trained directly on him and his team. It was only a miracle that had saved them.

Bill was still in that mountain town on the day the Armistice was signed. He was kept in France until spring, and was just developing a taste for French wine when he was finally shipped home, to be separated from the service.

“Like all returning vets, I ran into a few difficulties,” he later recalled. “Unlike most of them, I was heading toward a destiny that lay in directions I could not conceivably have anticipated when I stepped off that ship onto the New Jersey shore and into the waiting embrace of my lovely wife.’’

1. One explanation for the big discrepancy in Bill’s memories of that time is, as he himself suggests, that he was struggling to win his mother’s approval during this 1914-15 period, and deliberately lied about the fraternity bids to explain why he did not belong to one.

2. The famous epitaph actually reads: “Here sleeps in peace a Hampshire Grena- dier, / Who caught his death by drunking cold small Beer. / Soldiers, be wise from his untimely fall, / And when yere hot, drink Strong or none at all. / An honest Soldier never is forgot, / Whether he die by Musket or by Pot.”