INHERITANCE: “HAUNTED BY HISTORY”

SEPTEMBER 4, 2023 – The American Field Service Ambulance Corps, which morphed into the modern day “AFS” (think: “AFS exchange students” and other global intercultural affairs), was established in April 1915 to support the Allied war effort on the Western Front. Before the U.S. entered the conflict in April 1917, it became de rigueur among Ivy League men to join the American Field Service and head straight for the front in France to serve as medics and ambulance drivers.

Grandpa, who was all about business the day he matriculated at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, graduated in 1915. He headed straight for Columbia University Law School, a hop-skip-and-a-jump from Rutherford, but he fully intended after obtaining his law degree to return to his father’s thriving business across the Hudson. When President Wilson’s official policy of neutrality changed in April 1917, Grandpa joined up (reluctantly, I suspect) and ventured as far as Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he wound up as an instructor in the operation of a machine gun. I would have doubted such an improbable concept if Cliff hadn’t uncovered photographic evidence from the ashes of the Great Fire[1].

Mother, meanwhile, had told me years back that (her) Uncle Henry, also a student at the Wharton School of UPenn—Class of ’19—had “gone off to the war in France in 1915” much against his father’s wishes and to Grandpa’s chagrin. According to Mother, Grandpa had actively discouraged his brother from putting his education on hold and “going off on some foreign adventure” when the family had a business to run (while Grandpa furthered his studies for application to the enterprise).

But Henry was a man of action, not books, and off he went to seek adventure. If it was the first time Henry defied his brother’s business agenda, it wouldn’t be last. Nearly a half century later they’d wind up suing each other over the business.

No one on our side of the family ever said anything about Henry’s role in the Great War. I stumbled across it quite by accident, ironically in the chaos of UB’s office. The story was preserved in a fragile discolored clipping from a local newspaper. Great Uncle Henry had been awarded the Croix de Guerre—France’s Medal of Honor—for his bravery in the Battle of Verdun. The savage conflagration that opened in February 1916 lasted for 303 days and claimed over 800,000 French and German casualties. Volunteers with the American Field Service Ambulance Corps, including Henry as an ambulance driver, were on hand to provide medical support for the French.

According to the article, through a hellish fusillade Henry navigated his ambulance loaded with wounded French soldiers. As bullets flew and shells exploded all around, he came upon yet another badly wounded soldier, who was lying directly in the path of the vehicle. Henry stopped immediately, according to an eye-witness, and in contempt of all danger to himself jumped from his seat, ran to the victim, lifted him from the mud and carried him to the back of the ambulance before leaping up behind the wheel again and driving to safety. The rescued Frenchman, according to the report, survived[2].

Why, I wondered, hadn’t Mother, at least, told me about Henry’s bravery? Surely she would’ve heard about it. And was Grandpa so much about bihdness that he’d dismissed or even resented Henry’s medal? And what about UB? I’d found the article in his “office,” after all. Clearly he’d known about Henry’s rendezvous with glory. Yet I knew that for one reason or another UB had grown to despise his uncle Henry and Henry’s only . . . surviving . . . son, Bud.

But there was more to the story, more to the tragedy of human nature.

Over the years, Mother would talk about her abiding affection and admiration for Bud’s older brother, Robert Holman. She and UB were closer in age to “Bob” than to Bud, and early in life this fact had shaped their relationships. I don’t remember UB ever mentioning Bob—negatively or positively; as though Bob had been a non-entity. Mother, however, spoke of Bob fondly as her friend and mentor. It was by his active example that Mother learned to love the waters of Hamburg Cove in Lyme, Connecticut, where the two families—the Griswold Holmans (Gaga, Grandpa, Mother and UB) and the Henry Holmans (Henry, his first wife Kay, Bob and Bud) spent their summers at side-by-side properties overlooking Upper Hamburg Cove; properties owned by the grand patriarch and matriarch of the clan, George B. Holman and Ethelyn Huntley Holman).

A photo of the four cousins in their youth speaks much about them[3]. They’re standing on the grounds overlooking the Cove. Standing tallest is Bob, who was a year older than UB and two years older than Mother. Mother stands between Bob and Bud, the youngest, who smiles impishly. Mother has her arm casually and affectionately tossed around her younger cousin while she matches Bob’s warm and natural smile.  UB stands disconnected emotionally from the others and assumes what’s close to a pout.

As the reader knows from earlier pages of my inheritance, Hamburg Cove is to me one of the most idyllic settings on planet earth. This sentiment is shared by my sisters and members of the generation behind us. During our visits “East,” even Grandpa, despite being all about bihdness, rarely missed a weekend at Hamburg, where invariably he’d take time away from all his business papers to admire the view and take Gaga and us visitors for a drive around the “artist’s easel” that was the surrounding countryside—replete with seascapes.

Grandpa was no stranger to the water, and on occasion he’d entertain us by floating on his back and sticking his toes out of the water. “Lk-it, lk-it!” he’d cry out to Jenny and me as Mother demonstrated a perfect crawl behind him and Gaga, lounging on shore, smiled out from under her sun-hat.

Mother, a painter, shared our appreciation for the scenery, but during her long absences from Connecticut she never pined for the family’s corner of paradise. I thought this odd until Jenny observed that the place held precious childhood memories that had become a dark well of sadness. The cause was the untimely death of her best friend and cousin; her helmsman—who’d taught her how to sail and row and kayak and pilot a motorboat in and out of Hamburg Cove and up and down the Connecticut River to and from the sea[4]: Robert Holman—whose middle name was “Bruce,” as was Grandpa’s, Great Grandpa’s, UB’s . . . and as is mine

Jenny was also the one who noted that Mother was “fundamentally opposed to war”[5] because war is what had taken Bob’s life. In the year-long course of cleaning out my parents’ house in Anoka and later in the exponentially bigger job of sifting through all the refuse in New Jersey, I uncovered newspaper articles and letters from the War Department about “Second Lt. Robert B. Holman.” He’d been killed in action aboard a B-17 bomber just seven weeks after having arrived in England[6]. He was the golden scion of the family: a Dartmouth scholar, captain of the swim team, and much loved and admired by family and friends. As a college junior, he’d joined the Army Air Corps and in 1944 his bright, promising future went down in flames.

I cried when I read the details and imagined how hard the news must’ve hit everyone in the family, especially Bob’s father, his mother, his brother . . . and his worshipful cousin, Mother. I then contemplated the much larger tragedy of that war, of every war, crushing lives barbarically and shattering just as savagely the hearts of survivors. I was forced to wonder what effect Bob’s death had on my inheritance and how different the family legacy would have been had he returned from the war fit and willing to serve the family’s interests; to nourish and cultivate what UB had squandered.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson

[1]

[2]  After the U.S. entered the war, Great Uncle Henry joined the army. I don’t know where or in what capacity he served. He remained in the reserves after the Armistice and to the rank of captain by the time the U.S. entered World War II. Among the precious papers that survived the Great Fire was a handwritten letter from Henry to Grandpa during the war. Henry had been assigned to duties in Tennessee, where he was responsible for some aspect of logistics—appropriately so, given that the family was in the moving and storage business. It was a friendly letter well composed, and with familial pride Henry described how by chance he’d surprised perfect strangers with his moving expertise. While hiking along the sidewalk in town one day, he’d encountered a couple of men struggling to move a piano into an apartment building and up the stairs. A small crowd gathered to watch the movers fail at their occupation. According to Henry, the poor movers didn’t have a clue, so he stepped in and gave them proper direction. In no time the piano reached its intended resting spot. With the task completed, Henry moved on without further ado. As he walked away he overheard the astonished folks expressing wonderment over how “that guy in uniform” had performed a miracle.

[3]

[4] It was Bob who’d led the rescue of Albert Einstein from a sandbar in the Connecticut River just south of Hamburg Cove and north of Long Island Sound. (See 6/9/23 post)

[5] Mother enjoyed a special relationship with Jenny, the youngest of us four. If Nina, the eldest, was “solo” for her first two years and when Mother was 25 to 27, Jenny was essentially an only child for the first four of her teenage years, when Nina, Elsa and I were away at school and Mother was 33 to 37—by then more relaxed and experienced in the realm of child-rearing. Jenny’s personality and perspicacity and Mother’s more favorable disposition toward Jenny allowed for a rapport that the rest of us never developed with Mother. With that enhanced rapport came deeper insight on Jenny’s part.  Given Dad’s outspoken hawkish foreign policy views, Mother never openly expressed the pacifist views she shared with Jenny.

[6] The newspaper account said he was killed “in England.” Mother said his plane was “shot down over the Channel.” A letter from the War Department to Henry after the war identified where his son’s remains were interred: Cambridge. One inference from this limited information is that Bob’s plane had been attacked over the Channel but crashed in southern England. Recovery from the Channel waters would have been unlikely.