Caissons Go
Rolling Along
A Memoir of America
in Post-World War One Germany
Maj. Gen. Johnson Hagood
Edited by Larry A. Grant
Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 2011
Hardback. v-228 pp.
ISBN 978-1-57003-915-7. $39.95
Reviewed by
Michael Marino
The College of New
Jersey
Caissons Go Rolling
Along
provides readers with a memoir of an American artillery officer’s experiences
and observations in the period immediately after the First World War. The
writer’s perspective is a unique one in that little has been written about the
American army in the years between the Civil War and the First World War. The
author, General Johnson Hagood, entered the US Army in 1896, and his
perspective provides insight into the values, beliefs and attitudes of the
American army at this time.
Although General Hagood’s memoir
discusses his life before and during World War One, the bulk of the text is
devoted to his observations while serving as commander of an artillery brigade
(as part of the US Second Division) tasked with marching from France into
Germany to serve as a component of the Allied occupation forces. In this
capacity, General Hagood had a chance to observe conditions in France and Germany
and to ruminate about the peace negotiations that were then occurring at Versailles. Many of the
General’s observations run towards the mundane. For example, considerable time
is spent discussing the quality of his lodgings and the sorts of meals he was
served. General Hagood also emerges very much as a man of his time—a career
officer with a deferential attitude towards his superiors and an overweening
concern for rules and regulations. Illustrative of this fact is how his memoir
reprints a number of circulars and missives he issued while serving in occupied
Germany.
These announcements provide valuable perspective into the nature of the
American occupation, but they also show that their author was someone much
concerned with attention to detail.
General Hagood does prove himself to be
an acute observer of political events at the time and many of his observations can
be described as prescient. For example, in the years after the Versailles
Conference, much was made about Germany’s
suffering and how the punitive aspects of the Versailles
treaty had irreparably harmed Germany.
However, General Hagood notes in several places how France
had suffered much worse than Germany
and that even German children seemed healthier than the French children he had
met. At one point he states, “During the time I was in Germany, I saw no
underfed babies, no undernourished, cold, or hungry children… there was nothing
to compare to the conditions of northern France or the devastated regions of
Belgium.” General Hagood also seemed to have little use for Woodrow Wilson and
the idealistic notions with which he described America’s war aims, noting that
“you would never hear an American soldier say that he was fighting to make the
world safe for democracy.” Later he criticizes Wilson
for his meddling at the Paris Conference and for failing to make the treaty as
punitive and harsh as it needed to be to prevent Germany’s eventual resurgence.
This last point is perhaps the most
significant observation General Hagood provides in his memoir. He continually
alludes to the latent power of Germany
and the fact that the Germans had not seemed to suffer much during the war. He
also found many of the Germans he met to be grasping, devious and calculating, stating
that “my own impressions of the Germans were never favorable, and the longer I
stay here the more I dislike them.” Hagood also routinely cites the atrocities
committed by Germany over
the course of the war and notes how these atrocities serve as evidence of the
criminal nature with which Germany
prosecuted the war. As such, the impression that General Hagood had of Germany was that it was a dangerous nation that
constituted a serious threat to the stability of Europe.
At one point he notes in his memoir that “heaven knows what will happen to us
twenty years from now if Germany
is still a nation.” General Hagood can thus count himself among the small
minority of people (French general Foch is another that comes to mind) who
recognized the inherent strength of Germany and that the flawed Versailles
Treaty did little to curtail Germany’s underlying power. Observations such as
these show how Hagood’s memoir reveals its author to be more than a blinkered,
narrow-minded military man; rather he emerges as someone with a keen and astute
perspective into the world situation at the time.
Caissons
Go Rolling Along is a useful primary
source that provides readers with several important perspectives into the time
it was written. For one, General Hagood’s discussion about the military culture
of the pre-World War One American Army gives readers insight into a period of
history not much studied or written about. Indeed, the general seemed to have
lived a fascinating life, moving from postings as an instructor at West Point,
to service as a staff officer, to duty in the Philippines. General Hagood’s
memoir also provides readers with a sense of what life was like in Europe in
the months immediately after the end of World War One, and his observations
about his time in Germany offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of
this period. The only issue that could be raised with the book is that it is
hard to define exactly what it is. It is not quite a diary, but not exactly a
memoir. The most accurate description might be that it is a journal, and the
General was clearly recording his observations with the thought that others
might one day read them. Whether this fact unduly influenced what General
Hagood wrote and said in his journal is left for individual readers to decide. Despite
this, readers would certainly find the observations contained in Caissons Go Rolling Along to be valuable
and thought provoking.
