A War to End All Wars: "Dying for a Cause"

Training Trenches at
Dartmouth College

Wainwright Merrill's, Class of 1919, war correspondence oozes with good-humor, idealism, and enthusiasm. He spent only one year studying English literature at Dartmouth (1915-1916), but even as a 17-year-old Dartmouth freshman, he believed in preparing the United States for war. He was an active member of the first controversial military drill battalion at Dartmouth that began training in February of 1916.^[1] The group practiced marching in formation on the green, learned about artillery, and simulated the war experience by digging trenches near the football field. In addition to his training at Dartmouth he attended camp at Plattsburg, New York, a well-known volunteer pre-enlistment military training program organized by private citizens.^[2] In the fall of 1916, Merrill transferred to Harvard, perhaps to be closer to his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite his premature departure, Merrill remembered Dartmouth fondly and believed that he could recognize a Dartmouth man anywhere, because the school “does put a sort of brand upon a man.”^[3]

Merrill’s love of English literature extended to all people and things English. He occasionally referred to the English as “his countrymen” and admitted, “I like England very, very much. I could easily love it as a home, and it is surely greatly worth fighting for.” After the British had endured two years of combat, Merrill decided that he could no longer continue drilling and waiting. He left his home at Cambridge in November of 1916 to volunteer as a gunner in the Canadian Field Artillery. Only eighteen, he was considered a minor by the Canadian military, and his father did not consent to his involvement, so Merrill assumed the false name Arthur A. Stanley.^[4] In a letter home to his father, Merrill explained that he “could not, in honour, stay out if America should take no action.”^[5] So, Merrill’s great love of all things English propelled him into war and he soon found himself on his way to England.

Students on Parade, Dartmouth College

From November 1916 to October 1917 at a training camp in England, Merrill was instructed specifically on operating the 8-inch Howitzers, massive guns fired from far behind the front lines. During his adjustment to military life in England, he decided that saying “Cheerio” was the best cure for war gloom.^[6] When on leave, he explored the English countryside and overstayed his leave of absence several times. Finally he was placed in “the clink,” a solitary cell, as punishment for absence without leave. Merrill was unperturbed though, and simply brought his large collection of reading material with him: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Canterbury Tales, Vergil’s Aeneid I-VI, Wilhelm Tell, The Golden Treasury, Pickwick, poems by Rudyard Kipling, French, German, and English Dictionaries, the Daily Telegraph, Horace, The Iliad, and Don Quixote. He also penned a short poem titled “Ye Ballad of ye Clink” while confined.

One of Merrill’s only frustrations was that he was just a private. Merrill does not explain why his college education and previous training experience did not earn him a commission as an officer, but it may have been a consequence of using an assumed name. On October 18, 1917, Merrill was posted to Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, and was then stationed near Ypres in Flanders, Belgium. There he operated guns at the front, firing at unseen targets and relying on aviator’s reports to determine if the shots met their mark. During combat, he kept his optimism joking, “the Front is not so black as it is painted—though it is quite as brown with khaki and no end of Flanders mud.”^[7]

Merrill’s cheerful determination ended on November 6, 1917, when a German artillery shell exploded in his barracks, killing him. Merrill was only nineteen and had been in Belgium less than a month. Ten days before his death when he was assigned to the front, Merrill wrote to his friend from Harvard, Edward Hubbard, and contemplated the possibility of his death:

It's mighty hard, Ed leaving everything back there, perhaps for good and all. So if it should be that, friend, I'll say good-bye—but God! how can one—a couple of simple words and it’s over, and you go up to the Line, and try to laugh, or smile at least, and swallow it down. But it's part of the game, of course, and it is a noble end which we seek out of the ruck and jetsam of death and broken men and lasting sorrow.^[8]

Merrill died when he had just begun to experience the realities of war. He never wrote regretfully about his decision to join the military, and as this passage shows, he considered dying in the war “a noble end.” Wainwright Merrill was one of the many young, good-humored, and idealistic men whose lives were ended prematurely by the war.

Written by Ellen Nye '14.

This Series: During World War I, 3,407 Dartmouth men were uprooted from campus, graduate school, or their early careers to serve in a modern war unlike any previous American military engagement.^[9] Four of them, Harold Pinkham ’15, George Dock ’16, Edward Kirkland ’16, and Wainwright Merrill ’19, left records of their war experience in the Rauner Special Collections Library. All four matched the demographics of the College at the time and were united by their experiences at progressive prewar Dartmouth, but despite their somewhat similar backgrounds, their personalities were quite different. Their stories speak to the diverse beliefs, experiences, and sources of comfort of Dartmouth men involved in World War I.

Wainwright Merrill ’19 

Cambridge, Massachusetts 

Private, Canadian Field Artillery 

Ask for Rauner Alumni M5525c.

¹“Military Advocates to Organize Monday Night: Elementary Drill will be begun under direction of Army Officer.” The Dartmouth: January 13, 1916, “Over 500 Men Attend Preparedness Meeting.” The Dartmouth: January 22, 1916, and “Battalion Drill Begins.” The Dartmouth: February 5, 1916
²Wainwright Merrill and Charles Miner Stearns. A College Man in Khaki, Letters of an American in the British Artillery. New York: George H. Doran Co, 1918, vii.
³Merilll, Letter to Charles Miner Stearns, his English professor at Dartmouth, November 5, 1917.
⁴Merrill, vii.
⁵Merilll, Letter to his father, June 29, 1917.
⁶Merrill, Letter to Mrs. Clark, August 18, 1917.
⁷Merrill, Letter to his father, November 2, 1917.
⁸Merrill, To Edward Hubbard, October 28, 1917.
⁹Charles Wood, The Hill Winds Know Their Name: A Guide to Dartmouth’s War Memorials. Hanover N.H.: Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs, 2001, 6. 

"Not expected they will be useful for either study or reference"

In 1871, General Sylvanus Thayer gave a large gift of books from his personal library to Dartmouth to support the work of the Thayer School for Civil Engineering. The list is an impressive one, with major works in architecture, mathematics, and engineering.  But what caught our attention was a note he had added to the catalog of the gift regarding the volumes on military history. "Note: These works are given, as part of the library, more for safe-keeping and careful preservation than for use. It is not expected they will be useful either for study or reference."

Thayer expands on his reasons for giving the books in his cover letter accompanying the gift. After reiterating that they books have no connection to the research or curriculum of Dartmouth, he goes on to say, "There may come a crisis in our national affairs where the value of such a military library cannot be too highly estimated."

It is hard to imagine accepting a gift under these circumstances today, though we have respected Thayer's request that we maintain the collection. As far as we know, the books were never needed for a national crisis.

To see the catalog and Thayer's cover letter, ask for the Thayer School Record, DA-4, Box 2231.

A War to End All Wars: "Not the Gay Life You Would Have Imagined"

Both at Dartmouth and during his military career, George Dock 1916 chased adventure. During his four years at Dartmouth, Dock was a member of Psi Kappa Psi Fraternity, the rifle team, the ski team, and the outing club.^[1] Before America even entered the war arena and before Dock’s own graduation, he joined the Dartmouth Section of the American Ambulance Corp in 1916. Urged by humanitarian concerns, Dartmouth College alumni and students raised the funds for the purchase of ambulances to be manned by Dartmouth students and alumni at the American Hospital in Paris. Dock did not anguish over the morality of the war but instead signed up out of an adventurous interest in “going over to see war.”^[2]

At first, Dock eagerly anticipated his work in the ambulance corp. On the ship to France, Dock wrote his family entertaining tales of his perplexed discussion of the unfathomable French menus and unfamiliar dishes. One evening the American men attempted to identify the mysterious meat on their plates. Dock guessed roast horse, but another American claimed it was “wild and gamey like camel.”^[3] While onboard, Dock tried to croon in elementary French to the handsome girls on board, but was disappointed that there was “no romance in sight, as they are all married or nuns.”^[4] Dock ended his first letter home enthusiastically: “I hope I can write next time about life in the trenches.”^[5]

However, Dock had barely begun his work as an ambulance driver when he became frustrated about his noncombat role. Dock’s unit was dispatched to Bar le Duc in the Verdun in June 1916. He served as an ambulance driver at Verdun and Argonne from June 1916 until May 1917. To him, the weather was more disheartening than the battle and was itself the cause of most of the hospitalizations: “Only 15% of our men are wounded, the 85% being sick from colds, frozen feet, mumps, rheumatism and similar maladies.” ^[6] The longer Dock spent driving ambulances, the more frustrated he became. In October 1916 he complained,

No one can stay in this ambulance work four months without wanting to do something less passive and without wishing to get a crack at them with something better than a hand grenade. This work-in-behalf-of-humanity bunk sounds very altruistic and pretty, but towing the pieds geles [men with frozen feet] back and forth from the lines is not a great step toward cleaning up on the hostiles, and the only reason any Americans applaud this stuff is that they are humiliated at what little the States have done, and try to magnify that little. Then they re-elect Wilson.^[7]

Though Dock was heartily disappointed by his time in the American Field Service, he served the front trench in Verdun and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for rescuing an injured man while under fire. Rather than celebrating his accomplishments as an ambulance driver, Dock contemplated what occupation in the war would suit him better. He planned to change divisions, if and when the United States entered the war.

In April 1917 when the United States declared war on Germany, Dock decided on aviation, “the most thrilling and adventurous thing American lads are doing in The Great War.”^[8] Dock first considered joining the American Escadrille, but he was aware that his own country had been unprepared for war. He decided early on to “go in with the French [rather than] into a green American outfit officered by self-important bumpkins from Plattsburg.”^[9]

While training as a pilot, Dock discovered what would become a lifetime interest in bird watching: “One gets so obsessed by this aviation that he falls into the habit of watching flying birds to see how they make a good landing in rough terrain.”^[10] He also tried his hand at poetry. When he sent one of his poems to his brother, he prefaced it: “I expect you, my press-agent, publisher, and incarnate Muse, to give these vigorous lines what they deserve; in brief a merciful death in the apartment incinerator. It is, I need not say, quite original.”^[11]

When Dock was first stationed at the Chemin de Dames he was exhilarated by aviation work.¹² Dock and his unit patrolled the front and completed dangerous reconnaissance missions behind German lines. After landing from his first patrol where he faced German fire without damage, Dock wrote to his parents exuberantly, “This is the life! Good machines. Exciting work. Excellent men.”^[13] His optimism was dampened however, when he first experienced personal tragedies. In late April, he mournfully admitted to his brother, “This is not the gay life you may have imagined from my previous mouthings.”^[14] The day before one of his dear friends in the French Escadrille died in a skirmish with German airplanes. Dock comforted himself in the outdoors and was happy to adopt a fox cub as his pet, who “is very savage, but comical withal. . . only 2-months old, but untimely crafty. We feed him milk, but he prefers shoe leather and wool blankets as a war ration.”^[15]

After the Armistice was signed in November, Dock celebrated with the French and British “who went thru 51 months of it instead of 6 to 12 months.”^[16] During the debates surrounding the Treaty of Versailles, Dock was irritated by Wilson’s “high horse” speeches about the ideals of republican government, and by the end of the war he considered Wilson “a spineless shrimp”^[17] and “the worst of misfortunes and the armistice profoundly deplorable.”^[18] Dock remained committed to beating the “Boches” (Germans) until the end and could not see “the idea of even subconsciously sympathizing with them.”^[19] His adventure ended in hospitalization for Spanish Influenza in Paris, but Dock returned to the United States healthy in February 1919. Dock was not immune to the horrors of war, but throughout his military career he sought out larger roles in the conflict despite the danger.

Written by Ellen Nye '14

This Series: During World War I, 3,407 Dartmouth men were uprooted from campus, graduate school, or their early careers to serve in a modern war unlike any previous American military engagement.^[20] Four of them, Harold Pinkham ’15, George Dock ’16, Edward Kirkland ’16, and Wainwright Merrill ’19, left records of their war experience in the Rauner Special Collections Library. All four matched the demographics of the College at the time and were united by their experiences at progressive prewar Dartmouth, but despite their somewhat similar backgrounds, their personalities were quite different. Their stories speak to the diverse beliefs, experiences, and sources of comfort of Dartmouth men involved in World War I.

George Dock ‘16

St. Louis, Missouri

American Field Service (May 1916-May 1917)

Sgt. Pilot, Lafayette Flying Corps. Escadrille Spad 12. Groupe de Combat 11 (May 1917- January 1919)

Ask for MS-1057 to see the George Dock Papers. A guide to the collection is available.

¹Dartmouth Scrapbook, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
²Letter from George Dock Jr. to his aunts, June 13, 1916 , George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
³Letter from George Dock Jr. to his aunt and uncle, May 20, 1916, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
⁴Letter from George Dock Jr. to his brother, Will, May 21, 1916, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
⁵Letter from George Dock Jr. to his aunt and uncle, May 20, 1916, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
⁶Letter from George Dock Jr. to his aunt, November 2, 1916, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
⁷Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, October 10, 1916, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
⁸Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, November 19, 1916, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
⁹Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, March 1, 1917, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹⁰Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, June 30, 1917, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹¹Letter from George Dock Jr. to his brother, July 3, 1918, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹²Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, March 15, 1918, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹³Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, March 24, 1918, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹⁴Letter from George Dock Jr. to his brother, April 22, 1918, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹⁵Letter from George Dock Jr. to his brother, May 24, 1918, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹⁶Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, November 12, 1918, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹⁷Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, August 14, 1916, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹⁸Letters from George Dock Jr. to his parents, November 3, 1918 and February 22, 1919, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
¹⁹Letter from George Dock Jr. to his parents, October 14, 1917, George Dock Papers, Rauner Special Collections Library.
²⁰Charles Wood, The Hill Winds Know Their Name: A Guide to Dartmouth’s War Memorials. Hanover N.H.: Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs, 2001, 6.

Dalí, Psychoanalysis & Dante’s Divine Comedy

During the 1950s, Salvador Dalí began working on a series of watercolor illustrations to accompany Dante's Divine Comedy. These illustrations, which follow the trajectory of Dante's journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, were commissioned by the Italian government to mark the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth in 1965. But when word got out that a Spaniard instead of an Italian had been recruited to create the artistic tribute to one of Italy's greatest literary legacies, a general public outcry broke out, pressuring the government to revoke the commission. Undeterred, Dalí pushed forward on his own to complete the series, and found enthusiastic support from the French publisher Joseph Forét. The project was eventually taken up and completed by the French publishing firm Les Heures Claires, which released Dalí’s work in 1965 as a suite of limited edition prints to accompany an exquisitely letter-pressed, six-volume set of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The prints consist of one hundred color woodcuts, which carefully recreate Dalí’s watercolors, capturing their subtle washes of color and delicate linear drawing. It took the woodcut artists over five years to hand-carve 3,500 wooden blocks. Throughout the printing process, anywhere from twenty to as many as thirty-seven separate blocks were needed to reproduce each individual watercolor.

Dalí’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy are far from a literal engagement with the medieval Italian text. Implementing a psychoanalytic lens, Dalí extracts the metaphoric potential of Dante’s poetry. Dalí’s aesthetic idiom to represent dreams versus reality derives from explorations of the unconscious and subconscious.

Most of the Inferno and Purgatorio prints contain motifs referencing the elementary nature of human drives. Dali’s surrealist practice translates man's sins and frailties into unconscious drives. Crutches, bones perforating skin, soft or crystallized bodies, scatological and cannibalistic metamorphoses abound in his interpretation of the medieval text. For instance, Dalí’s interpretation of the twenty-eighth canto in Inferno, "The Hypocrites," plays with the crutch motif, with the naked Caiaphas nailed to the ground. In this print, the crutches indicate social weakness, flaccidity and vulnerability, but most importantly, the evil speeches of hypocrisy. One of the deceitful tongues, which a hypocrite is known to have several of, has been overused and hangs limply over a crutch. Caiaphas grasps desperately at another tongue as he simultaneously clutches his innards spilling from his body. The remaining two tongues are nailed to the floor.

Another illustration that draws heavily from psychoanalysis and surrealism is the print accompanying the first canto in Purgatorio. In this print, "The Fallen Angel" examines the drawers of his body. This iconography recalls the famous 1936 Venus de Milo with Drawers. Dalí used this sculpture, as well as the fallen angel illustration, to symbolize the ways in which Freud's analytical tools could be used to scrutinize the human soul.

To take a look at Dalí's surrealist illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy, come to Rauner and ask for Presses S153dadi.

The Natural History of the Hankey Bird

Soon after the publication of And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street in 1937, Ted Geisel '25 (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) produced a new creation for a very different audience: the Hankey Bird.  This grotesque, drunken bird was designed to hang on the neck of a bottle of Hankey Bannister Scotch whiskey inviting you to have a drink.

If it seems odd to you, it did to Geisel as well. "There's no sense to it," he said in Sales Magazine (January 1, 1939):

"The bird on the bottle is a replica of an actual bird, developed after years of painstaking cross-breeding in the Seuss Laboratories for a lofty purpose, namely, to produce a carrier pigeon for the Scottish army... a bird so distinctive that it would not be mistaken for a grouse and shot down by near-sighted American millionaires. After fifteen generations of wearing kilts, the Hankey Bird has developed sideburns. But most unfortunately his mating call is characterized by a distinct burr. Our only purpose in leasing him to Hankey Bannister is to finance further scientific effort to de-burr that mating call... not, I assure you, to aid in the crass business of selling whiskey."

We really should have a bottle to go along with our bird. We wrote to Hankey Bannister asking if they had an old bottle (preferably still full) that they could give us, but they did not have any samples.

To see it yourself, ask for MS-1100, Box 3.

A Comic Tour of Japan

Legend has it that Japanese author Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831) spent so much money drinking that he could not afford to furnish his home. Instead, he simply hung pictures of furniture he would have bought. One New Year's, when he found himself without proper holiday attire, he offered a visitor a bath and took off with the man's nice clothes to pay some visits of his own. And on his deathbed, he had firecrackers secretly stowed in his funeral pyre, to go out with a bang, if you will.

Sadly, these tales are probably untrue, a result of Jippensha being conflated with his clownish characters. Yaji and Kita, the traveling duo in his novel Footing It along the Tōkaidō Road, are always trying to trick their way into free meals and free rides, and into the beds of attractive young witches. Usually their schemes backfire. For instance, in a meta-referential moment, Yaji boasts to a local that he is in fact the famous writer Jippensha Ikku, researching for an upcoming book called (you guessed it) Footing It along the Tōkaidō Road. The local is impressed and treats Yaji at his home, but when a letter arrives from the real Jippensha, Yaji is forced admit his deception and flee.

At the time, the book functioned both as an entertaining story and as an informational travelogue, sketching out the varying customs and scenery along the eastern coast. Rauner's edition features 60 full-page illustrations by print maker Tamenobu Fujikawa. The landscapes, which often dwarf the characters, provide moments of pause to accompany the fast-paced narrative. The prints' detailed use of patterns is impressive, especially considering that each color had to be carved from a separate block of wood and perfectly aligned. Such work was done not by the artist alone but by a team who specialized in each stage of the printmaking process. As the book goes on, you can see the level of detail on the faces change, reflecting differing interpretations of the artist’s original drafts.

If you can’t read Japanese, you're not alone. Illiterate Japanese in the nineteenth century would commonly buy books just for the printed illustrations, too. But unlike them, you can view this one online from our Digital Library Program, or ask for Rare Book PL797 D62 1800z.

A Head Full of Steam

If you've ever traveled across the Connecticut River between Orford, New Hampshire, and Fairlee, Vermont, then you did so on the Morey Memorial Bridge. The steel span, finished in 1938 and now listed in the National Register of Historic Places, was named for Samuel Morey, a resident of both Orford and Fairlee who was instrumental in the construction of the river locks between Connecticut's Windsor Locks and Olcott Falls in New Hampshire (now the site of the Wilder Dam).

However, Samuel Morey is perhaps better known today, at least around these parts, as the man who should rightfully be called the inventor of the steamboat as we now know it. Although Robert Fulton is generally regarded as the proper holder of that title, he instead should be credited with making the steamboat a commercially viable concept. Morey had built and successfully operated a steam-powered paddleboat in the early 1790s, more than a decade before Fulton's Clermont sailed up and down the Hudson between Albany and New York City in 1807. In fact, some historians speculate that if Morey had been a better businessman, his name would be synonymous with the steamboat, and not Fulton's. The financier for Fulton's "invention," Chancellor Robert Livingston, had originally approached Morey with an offer of $7,000 to use his invention. When Morey refused, Livingston turned to Fulton instead, and the rest is history.

The Samuel Morey papers at Dartmouth bear testimony to Morey's early inventive endeavors. They contain numerous United States patents for various inventions related to the use of wind and steam power and provide a veritable who's who of Founding Father signatures, from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson all the way up to Andrew Jackson. One of Morey's first patents, filed in 1793, involves a wind-powered cooking spit. One of his last is concerned with an improvement of the "decomposing and recomposing of water in combustion with spirits of Turpentine," filed in 1833.

To see Morey's patents and other papers, ask for Rauner MS-150.