One hundred years ago this month the urgent clamor of city fire bells brought war, which had been raging for almost two years in Europe, to Concord’s doorstep.
“About 9:45 out rang the militia call 3-1-2, summoning the boys to the (Green Street) armory,” recorded Probate Court Judge and former Concord Mayor Charles R. Corning on June 19, 1916. “Khaki clad soldiers were hurrying through the streets amid a growing excitement. I had never heard the ominous signal before.”
Three months earlier, political unrest in Mexico had spilled over the border when revolutionary Gen. Francisco “Pancho” Villa led a raid on Columbus, N.M., killing a number of Americans.
Responding to public outrage, President Woodrow Wilson sent a column of U.S. cavalry commanded by Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing into Mexico in pursuit of Villa. But the U.S.-Mexican border, now stripped of regular U.S. Army troops, was left vulnerable. Other incursions and killings followed. Rumors persisted that they were encouraged by Germany, then at war with England, France and Russia.
President Wilson mobilized the National Guard on June 19 to secure the border. Within days, Concord began to fill with troops as the 12 companies of the 1st N.H. Infantry Regiment, National Guard, and its attached machine gun company assembled at Camp Spaulding (named for then-governor Roland H. Spaulding).
The camp on “the Plains,” the traditional military campground on the heights east of the Merrimack River, is now the site of Concord Municipal Airport and the N.H. National Guard reservation. Companies C and E and the medical unit, all based in Concord, were the first to enter camp.
Soon Camp Spaulding, housing almost 1,000 soldiers and attracting frequent official and unofficial visitors, took on the atmosphere of a carnival.
Judge Corning, a student of military history, was not impressed with the citizen soldiers.
“The evidence of frazzled and drooling want of all kinds of preparation abounds on every side,” he wrote after a visit to the camp. “Discipline might as well be sought at a country fair; slouchy, inattentive, and weak.”
U.S. Army surgeons dispatched to Concord to examine the men declared more than 20 percent of the regiment unfit for military duty – in some companies half the men were rejected. Departure for Laredo, Texas, where they were to be posted, was delayed for weeks as recruiters scoured the state for suitable volunteers.
With time to kill, off-duty soldiers gravitated to Main Street and it became commonplace to see them in their khaki uniforms among the civilians.
Military police also became a downtown fixture.
“Coming home, I was astonished to see armed sentries slouching up Main Street,” Judge Corning noted on June 29, “some leaning against posts, some calmly smoking, others jollying girls; not one manifesting the least knowledge of duty or soldierly action.”
By mid-July the 1st New Hampshire’s companies were up to strength and orders came on July 14 to board trains for Texas the next day. The Concord Daily Patriot reported that as soon as the orders arrived details were sent into the city to “roust up” the guardsmen and get them back to camp. “Armed guards were to be seen chasing scurrying soldiers in all parts of the city and at the picture houses and other places of entertainment announcements were made that all soldiers were to report at the camp immediately,” the newspaper reported.
At 2 p.m. the next afternoon the 1st New Hampshire marched down from the Plains in company formation, with its commander, Col. Michael J. Healy, on horseback at its head. Preceded by the Nevers Band playing patriotic airs and by honor guards of Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans, the khaki-clad soldiers crossed the Merrimack and swung onto Main Street where they were reviewed by Gov. Spaulding and other dignitaries on the balcony of the Eagle Hotel and cheered by as many as 20,000 onlookers before departing on three special trains. Though none realized it, this was the last time a military unit bearing the state’s name would serve outside of New Hampshire.
Within a few days, the 1st N.H. Infantry joined a 10,000-man National Guard contingent encamped on arid alkali flats about a mile outside of Laredo.
“A man eats dust, drinks dust and sleeps on dust here,” one soldier complained. “The air is full of it all the time, the food is covered with it and every article one handles is coated with it.”
Indeed, a few days after arrival a violent sand storm blew through Laredo disrupting the soldiers’ efforts to set up tents.
The Granite State soldiers began to adapt to temperatures that regularly reached 110 Fahrenheit and exotic fauna, such as rattlesnakes, coyotes, scorpions, tarantulas, chiggers, centipedes and inch-long, blood-sucking bedbugs. For a time it became popular to keep fierce-looking but harmless horned toads (actually prickly lizards) as pets.
Lt. Robert F. Keane Jr., of Company E, captured one while on the march and sent this curiosity home to Concord. Remarkably, the horned toad arrived alive. His father, Robert Sr., perhaps with some relief, presented the creature “to Miss Sargent at the high school, to be used in practical instruction in natural history,” reported the Concord Monitor.
During their off-duty hours, the men played baseball, grew moustaches and occasionally filched melons from local farmers. Or they passed the time writing letters home at the Army Y.M.C.A,a just outside the camp gate, run by W.S. Duncan of Concord’s Railroad Y.M.C.A.
But the Concord boys also honed their skills at soldiering. Brigaded with the 2nd Maine and 3rd Missouri National Guard Regiments, they toughened themselves with six-mile marches, and practiced close order drill under the keen eyes of commissioned and non-commissioned officers of the regular 9th Infantry from nearby Fort McIntosh.
August found the men engaging in three day-long war games along the banks of the Rio Grande that included digging entrenchments under enemy fire, lying prone using short-handled shovels.
In early September the regiment marched nine miles to the low hills east of the camp for a week of sleeping in shelter tents and honing their marksmanship on the 200-yard and 300-yard rifle ranges.
“Those in charge are pleased when a hit is registered,” reported Ben Pearson of the Manchester Union, “but in the main they give their entire attention to proper position and sighting. The men shoot lying, kneeling and standing and are instructed in each position.”
Hikes were extended to 10 miles in the heat of the day, building the men’s endurance. The citizen soldiers stood amalgamated guards and engaged in joint maneuvers and drills with the professional soldiers, as well.
“The result is already plainly seen to be a wide step in the right direction in the training of the individual soldier,” wrote Pearson, of the Manchester Union. “. . . It is safe to say that in another month, additional improvement along this line will be so noticeable that it will be difficult to separate the National Guardsmen from the enlisted men in the regular service.”
By early 1917, with the Mexican crisis cooling, American attention turned to the Great War raging in Europe. On Feb. 5, Gen. Pershing’s punitive expedition re-entered the United States and at 12:40 a.m. on Feb. 9, Concord’s National Guardsmen stepped off their train in Concord. Pelted by a heavy, wet snow they trudged up the hill for a few hours’ sleep in the Green Street Armory. After sunrise, the men paraded through the city to the cheers of their fellow citizens.
But the men who marched down Main Street in February were changed from those who had left the city six months before.
Judge Corning, once critical of the citizen soldiers remarked on the change.
“The sight . . . showed what regular food and hours hardened by military discipline had accomplished so that spectators saw a very different type of soldier from what they saw last July,” he noted.
Within a few weeks of the soldiers’ return, the United States would declare war on Germany and its allies. In five months the guardsmen would gather on the Plains and board trains once more, this time for Camp Devens, Mass., where the 1st New Hampshire Infantry would lose its state identity and become part of the 103rd Infantry in the hard-fighting 26th “Yankee” Division.
Turned into soldiers in Texas, the New Hampshire men would next make their mark against the Germans on such battlefields as Chateau Thierry, St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne.
(Byron O. Champlin is researching Concord’s involvement in the First World War. He can be contacted at chamby@comcast.net.)