OLD CHARLIE

When the First World War began, my mother was not yet two years old. When it ended, she was six. My mother shared with me the story of a WWI veteran,  a man she called Old Charlie.

Charlie was sent to the trenches which stretched north and east from France. He was a hometown boy from Wheeling in West Virginia, but his heritage was German. His family, like many in this industrial town, were immigrants. My mother grew up in neighborhoods where, in addition to the many Irish (like her cousins), there were Germans and Poles. During the war, as in many US towns, the Germans and the Poles of Wheeling were often ostracized, or worse. But it was an American uniform Charlie wore to battle, and as an American he fought there.

Like many, Charlie returned damaged. We call it PTSD now, but then it was “shell shock.” Charlie had been a quiet lad, a gentle soul, before the war. Afterward, he became the neighborhood’s drunkard. Unlike many alcoholics who lash out at their demons, Charlie would often slip quietly into a stupor murmuring a melody. It was always the same tune, one well-known.

None of the neighborhood children were afraid of him, though many shunned him. Adults who had known him before the war, generally pitied him. He may have been homeless, but my mother might not have known as she was just a child. She told of mornings when she passed Old Charlie slumped in one doorway or another and reeking of alcohol. She remembered clearly the song she heard him singing as she passed. It was familiar to her, though the words he sang were German.

You see, the one memory that persisted for Charlie was of a single night in that war. It has been written about before, made much of and also diminished in the telling. But Charlie was there, and he never forgot that moment when across the battlefield came a song. Above the trenches from where Charlie shivered, he heard a song he had heard each year in his home sung in the language of his parents.

The words Old Charlie sang in his drunkenness with tears running down his face and heard clearly by my mother as she passed him slumped in any handy doorway were “Heilege nacht, stille Nacht….” The song my mother knew as “Silent Night.”

#WorldWar1Memories #PTSD