Hello: am liking this life fine—now write for it helps us soldiers in our new work.
A.L.D.
October 18, 1917
From Camp Zachary Taylor, Louisville
A.L. Dixon to Miss Cora Smith
Batchtown, Ill
Cal. co
The War to End All Wars had raged for three years when the United States entered the conflict on April 6, 1917. Immediately, the war effort went into overdrive. Registration of fighting-age men began June 5 with the draft, eventually making soldiers of 2.8 million men.
A.L. Dixon’s turn came on Oct. 4.
By the summer of 1918, 10,000 Americans shipped out each day to fight in France.
Dixon, also known as Dix, never got the anticipated call. He served his country in Camp Taylor, Kentucky, supporting the waves of new soldiers training for the trenches.
The war that debuted aerial bombing and poison gas was, in other ways, an old-fashioned war, dependent on the hauling force of millions of horses and mules.
At Camp Taylor, 29-year-old Dix was, as he put it, “boss” of 22 of those mules, plus “30 men & 25 wagons.”
His was an easy war, except for the enemy of loneliness.
December 13, 1917
Dear Friend:
When you want to know how good home made candy tastes, why just join the army for the candy was sure good, a sergt here stoled some of it and when I bawled him for it he said that I should be satisfied to know a girl that could make good candy.
Calhoun County, Dix’s Illinois home, was a little country place marooned between big rivers, with the Illinois to the east running down to the Mississippi just before the Missouri caught up. Of the best count of 323 Calhoun men drafted, many—Dix among them—were sent to Camp Taylor, built to receive Illinois boys like them, plus Kentuckians and Indianans, according to Ken Maguire, founder and curator of the Camp Zachary Taylor Historical Society.
For Kentucky, Camp Taylor was an economic engine suddenly revving in farmlands just outside of Louisville. It brought thousands of wartime dollars to a city of 235,000. A total of 150,000 trained there, many on their way to fight the Hun in France. Others stayed to keep the camp running, with the working help of more than 10,000 horses and mules.
In the rising war city, Dix found himself in his element.
I am making good here nowdays and I am acting Sergt’ seems with good luck I will have my stripe some day but don’t tell this for one is never sure of a thing here and I may get fooled, he wrote three months into his war on Dec. 13, 1917.
I have had charge of the QMC wagon train for over three weeks … and you should see my head swell when I line these men up and yell ‘tention’ squadron right boys march, am such a bear on that & they can hear me all over the camp.
Dix’s only complaint was the weather.
When anyone trys to tell you that Ky is a warm state you tell em that its all wrong for we have about one foot of snow here and some cold.
For all his jaunty tone, the young man knew he was caught in a life-stakes game.
Me thinks we will soon see France and I hope so, just to get this over with. I have taken out $5000 insurance and Mother may find herself rich some day soon …
For Dix, as for so many soldiers, letters from home were lifelines in a sea of homesickness and uncertainty.
Between October 1917 and April 1919, Dix’s pen pal was Miss Cora Smith.
Dix and Cora
“Friend Cora” was 37 when their World War I correspondence began; Dix was 28. They’d met a decade earlier when she was teaching and boarding in his hometown, Hardin, the Calhoun County seat.
Perhaps she was his teacher. Perhaps she had seen his schoolwork at a shared kitchen table.
I know you have a hard time making out my writing and you know how hard I worked in school, gee—but we never thot them days that all of this war would spring up and get some of us shot.
Dix is playing the schoolboy to Miss Cora’s marm. His handwriting is clear, sometimes even lovely, and his grammar not half bad—though he has little use for punctuation and refuses the second o in too. His thoughts pour from his pen as he describes his experiences in regular letters that hop from teasing to reflecting on life and death. Dix’s 12 surviving letters from Camp Taylor amount to 6,000 words. Most of his letters fully fill four pages, often back and front.
Many were written on YMCA stationery, advising wartime thrift at the bottom of every page:
TO THE WRITER: – save by writing on both sides of this paper
TO THE FOLKS AT HOME: – save food, buy liberty bonds and war savings stamps
The never-married schoolteacher Miss Cora kept Dix’s letters, along with hundreds of other letters, postcards and greeting cards she received over 70 years. She was my grandmother’s first cousin. The letters are part of her legacy to me.
Their relationship is … well, that’s a good question. Miss Cora clearly has top billing. But in his aspiring manhood, Dix is climbing up.
Some how I have been afraid of you ever since you called me a 2 face and laughed at me when I took that hard fall at the barn gate remember how you laughed at me? he writes in his first letter.
By January, he’s gaining confidence.
Friend Cora–
Darned if I am going to call you Miss any more for I am learning to save nowadays, I suppose you would make me stand on the floor for doing this but if you just have to be called Miss why say so for I am in the habit of doing just as I am told these days.
As their relationship finds new footing, Dix tucks tales of escapades and girls into his long letters.
I am going in town Sunday to meet a girl and I am most afraid to for I wont know how to act so pray for me ha ha
Often he signs himself Mike, scratched in rough printing as if his left-handed alter ego had taken the pen. But beneath the bravado, Dix is a lonely boy, and Friend Cora is his confidant.
Last Sunday, he wrote in a letter dated March 10, 1918, was my birthday (29 yrs), say but I’m getting old, there never will be a chance for me when I get out of this army but its best to get old for one learns lots and time flys here.
I know you are sick of all this junk. But I have to bother some one and it may as well be you
And please write again soon and tell me all the news; we’re going to have a swell camp hotel here for visitors and you had better come and see us poor fish.
Life at Camp Taylor
Camp Taylor was a fast-growing, testosterone-stoked town. The first draft recruited young men, 21 to 31. And there was gambling.
A big crap game is going on and those boys should be at church or somewhere, Dix wrote on March 10, 1918.
There was, as would be expected, rough talk and foul language, hard enough that it got under Dix’s skin.
No we don’t go to the guard house for all our meanness, they just bawl us out till the guard house would look like a palace to us, for some of these birds here can think of some mean things to say, and about things that make one want to cuss why I can’t tell you.
Many of Camp Taylor’s soldiers were country boys like Dix … but not all.
In this barracks we have lawyers—Drs—artist—school supts—and most any kind of trade but all are soldiers now, he wrote on Dec. 13, 1917.
In that same letter, he recognized their diversity and skill: We hear better singing here than at a show. Plays were regular fare and a lure he hoped would bring Friend Cora to visit.
Come down and I will take you to a show at our new theater its some play house and will seat 4000 of us boys and we have the best of shows here.
Theater brightened the days of young men snatched from their walks of life, possibly from life itself.
They have been giving us some good shows and I try to see them all, he wrote.
Movies also played at the camp and, in the case of D.W. Griffith’s propaganda movie, Hearts of the World, played on the soldiers’ emotions.
I saw it last night and it was great of course I had to be a boob and bawl but one cant help it, if you ever get the chance be sure and see this play for its real war—it takes three hours to play it but don’t seem that long.
Dix was so starstruck that in the summer of 1918 he took a part-time theater job.
I worked at our camp theater about a week, I helpt on the curtains, they were playing a Bit of Broadway, those were good girls but to blame careless about their dress they (or one) almost caused me to fall off a ladder so I quit the job, it paid 50c a night to but to much risk.
About girls, Dix was of two minds—at least when writing to Friend Cora. Actresses so frightened him that he had to flee. Kentucky girls were too fashionable for his budget.
If those French girls dress any worse than these Ky girls do, why I sure want to marry one of them for it wont cost me much to buy their duds.
Nurses were distracting and (was he sizing up their wifely potential?) not very good cooks.
Two nurses sat near me and that is why the show seemed better some of these nurses are real dolls, but they dont go with no one except a com’ officer, but the privates sneak out with them quite often, I don’t fool with them for I am sore at them I bumed a lunch from them while making them a tennis court and I am sure that nurse knows how horrible drugs for that sandwitch she gave me almost caused my death.
Kidding aside, girls’ home cooking was one of the wartime comforts for the boys.
We are about to have a party here at the Y … the girls said they would bring ice-cream & cake so they will find me here waiting for the eats, he wrote on July 17, 1918.
In a nation mobilized in support of the war effort, the YMCA was one of many charities helping the “boys,” as Dix styled the soldiers. At training centers like Camp Taylor, the Y was home away from home for the soldiers. As well as supplying letter paper, it became Party Central, drawing Kentucky girls to keep the soldiers company.
From every source, sweets were well received.
Thank you for the cake, he wrote Friend Cora. It was all in good shape when it landed here, and I never tasted angel-food cake that was a good as that.
Not always so well received were the socks hand-knit for the soldiers.
It’s good of your Mother to knit all those socks for us boys, would like to see them that you made but wont say that I would want to wear them for we have some of them here that wont’ fit any one or any thing.
Gifts of all sorts brought comfort from home to men whose fate was out of their hands. The first Christmas of the War, Dix wrote, found the most of us broke here but we all got gifts of some kind from the Red Cross—my old Arkansas sweetheart sent me a dandy air-filled pillow made of rubber and silk and it sure came in nice—for the pillow I was making use of was made out of two suits of heavy under wear rolled up in the side of my shirt arm—and it was a good way to use this under wear for its wool and I would rather fall against a barb-wire fence than to put it on.
Three Time Lucky
Camp Taylor’s distance from German firepower did not protect it from all the ills of war. By spring of 1918, the city had swelled to its capacity of 47,500, mixing men from distant places. Disease liked those conditions. First came spinal meningitis.
I have lots of time to write you now as the whole works is under a quarantine, Dix wrote on April 18. Now don’t be afraid of this letter for there are no danger or germs.
Next came influenza, which would travel around the world, even above the Arctic Circle, and prove more deadly than the war.
The flu was sure bad here and some few of our boys “kicked off” I had it two days & felt punk, was so darn sick could hardly stick in the saddle, he wrote on Nov. 4.
Flu took about 1,000 lives at Camp Taylor, historian Ken Maguire estimates.
Dix’s luck held.
The flu failed to land me this time so you and others will still have to keep on sending letters to Camp Taylor and trust the Huns to get me when I go across, he wrote.
About that seeming inevitability, Dix couldn’t manage a joke.
There are lots of the over sea boys here in camp all wounded and all quartered at the base hospital, they most make me bawl every time I see them for some are in bad shape and one can see just what war means, he wrote on the eve of 1919.
Going Home
Dix’s Nov. 4, 1918 letter to Friend Cora speculated, uncensored, that the war would soon be over.
Don’t the war news look fine now days this can’t last much longer for the Germans are in their last stand, he wrote.
The rumors were true; the Armistice was signed on Nov. 11, the day we now celebrate Veterans Day.
Reflecting on his imminent freedom, Dix opened his heart to Friend Cora:
I guess that is why I never cared to stay here or leave for there was no one cared what happened to me and I thot the same about my self, he wrote.
Among no one who cared, he meant one in particular.
In a melancholy mood, he wrote: One of the boys is playing The Long Trail, and it always makes me think of the dark nights I walk that path thru the woods to the Metz home, them days I was young & tender me thinks Amy would see a great change in the old boy now.
On a six-day furlough near the war’s end, Dix had the bestest time with his brothers, but no luck with the girl on his mind. I tried to talk her in the notion of returning to Louisville with me & be Mrs. Dixon, but, he wrote Friend Cora, she thot it best to stay with Dad where she was sure of her three squares a day.
By April 4, 1919—just 18 months [since] my last night as a civie—Dix expected to be mustered out in two weeks.
He evaluated his army time as well spent. I am not sore on the army life, and I am leaving it a better man that I was when I came here, he wrote.
The qualities that made Dix a better man did not include wealth.
There aint a chance in the world for Amy & I to marry, he confessed to Cora. I might ask her, but when I leave this army I am flat broke and I haven’t the nerve to use her money.
About what came next, he had no idea. I dont know what I am going to do think I will hobo all summer.
Thus Dix’s letters from Camp Taylor end.
What Next?
Where in the world might Dix have gone, I wondered as I read his letters a century after he penned them. In all my cousin Cora’s hundreds of crisp and fading letters, no more showed his flowing hand. Then, 100 years after the correspondence began, I chanced on a Christmas card postmarked Kansas City, 1937. On the back of its parchment paper, I read these words:
Dear Miss Cora,
Albert wishes me to tell you he’s using the Bible you gave him in 1907. Many years have been lost but on Oct. 19 he was gloriously saved and you never could imagine how changed he is.
Paragraphs of family news followed, with the message signed “Albert & Amy.”