“The Courier” Delivers A Wartime Message

A man in a gas mask thrusts a bayonet in your face. There’s an explosion behind him, and a soldier caught up in it. Behind him, as if through a veil, are what seem like memories, of a row of women, of a train steaming by the Eiffel Tower, of a zeppelin shot down over a city by a machine gun. Action and memory blur together.

It’s a comic book. It’s a document. It’s a bit of both. And it’s at the New Haven Museum as part of its most recent exhibit, ​“The Courier: Tales from the Great War,” on view now through autumn 2018.

Commemorating the impending centennial of the end of World War I, ​“The Courier,” put together by exhibition team Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, Mary Christ, and Katie Piascyk, hinges on the unique idea of combining primary documents — a diary of the war, kept by Lt. Philip H. English, who served in France as a motorcycle courier in 1917 and 1918, along with photographs of the war he collected upon his return — with a graphic interpretation of those documents, created by comic book artist Nadir Balan.

It’s easy to see what drew the exhibition team to English’s diary. English was working at the Acme Wire Company in early 1917 when he learned he would be deployed to France. After a few months of training in New Haven, he arrived in France in September of that year and soon got his first taste of the war. He was in infantry instructor until an accident involving a live grenade put him in hospital for a couple months. Upon his recovery he relayed intelligence to and from the front, seeing the action and aftermath of battle. He served in various capacities until Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, was honorably discharged, and returned to New Haven. He revised and edited his account in 1919, and in doing so, created a compelling account of his wartime experience.

Here’s English describing his first air raid: ​“Hardly had we turned in when the city’s church bells rang an alarm, and resounding crashes deafened our ears. It was merely a battery of three-inch guns firing at another Zeppelin from the front of the Hotel. Until we learned this fact Sam and I had decided that every bomb was landing in our immediate vicinity. Long gleaming fingers swept the clouds as a dozen powerful searchlights sought the Zeppelin.”

English’s humor remained intact even for the accident that hospitalized him. ​“I jumped to my feet with ears ringing from the concussion, shook each arm and leg to see if they were still in working order, and laughed hysterically on finding that I could still walk,” he wrote. But as the war continued and he saw more of its horrors, this humor dissipated. On July 24, 1918, he came across a mass of American dead and worried that friend and fellow New Havener Captain Dan Strickland was among them. ​“Had Dan been killed? The idea was unbearable. His family would be frantic for news,” English wrote. ​“Leaving my motorcycle against a tree just south of the village I commenced a tragic hunt for my friend. A score of American dead lay where they had fallen in the fields nearby, many with their rifles still in hand, bayonets fixed and still pointing toward the nearby shattered hamlet, which appeared so serenely peaceful in the bright sunshine. For twenty minutes I went from body to body looking for my friend … Thank God Dan was not there!”

Perhaps English’s most wrenching moment came on Armistice Day itself. He learned early in the morning that the fighting was to stop at 11 a.m. — but that fighting would continue right up until that hour, and it was his job to relay the orders to attack.

“With joy turned to dismay I instantly telephoned the three generals concerned, that the infantry was to advance,” English wrote. ​“I was later informed that this message did not reach the infantry companies in time to cause heavy losses. Those few battalions which did advance under the barrage moved only a short distance and lost few men. Nevertheless some were killed in this last hour of the War.”

The photographs from English’s collection that accompany the exhibit bear out his experience. There are pictures of soldiers on the front in France, a picture of a ruined village. Other images bring the war home: a photograph of English on his motorcycle during training at Yale Field; another photograph of the field itself, populated by rows of tents (“Camp Yale from Yale Bowl. Best home the 102nd inf. ever had”); the Winchester Repeating Arms Plant guarded by a soldier armed with rifle and bayonet.

The diary and photographs alone would make for a fine exhibit, a detailed and rich personal perspective on a historical event. Balan’s kinetic illustrations, though, really help bridge the gap between 2017 and 1917 by translating World War I so effectively into the visual language of comic books, and in so doing, show what comics can be uniquely good at.

Balan’s move isn’t just to give us the narrative of English’s experiences in the war, but to create layers of narrative within each large panel. The effect is to give us context to each critical moment in the foreground, and one that doesn’t offer easy answers. In one, English searches through a pile of corpses, not all of them human. The panels on the side show a motorcycle springing into action, but then, English standing as a powerless witness to what appears to be a soldier stealing, or otherwise abusing, a cow. Next we see English at a desk poring over a map, seeming just as despondent. Returning to the main image, there’s a sense not only that the soldier atop the carcasses is feeling at a loss, but that this is just the latest in a string of situations in which he has felt utterly small, utterly helpless. It gives us a sense of the constant futility English might have felt, of being one man with a job to do in an enormous killing machine. Even if he believed in the cause — and English’s own diary gives us the keen sense that he did — after seeing the atrocious aftermath of combat again and again, he must have wondered if it was all worth it.

Likewise, the action-packed image of English on his motorcycle — almost in superhero mode, surrounded by carrier pigeons in flight — is made more complex by the panels behind him, depicted destruction and chaos, but also the drudgery of a march, and the flash of what looks like a party. This is a man in motion, a courier on a mission, but the memories of all he’s seen are piling up in his brain.

So the final panel, showing English’s return home to a delighted sister, is bittersweet. The characters in the foreground are all conquering hero. The images in the background give a sense of the inner tumult behind that beaming smile. He’s so glad to be home, but there’s so much he can’t forget. ​“In conclusion,” he wrote in his diary, ​“I am convinced that Sherman was right.”

The comics thus shed some light on how it was that the New Haven Museum came to possess English’s diary and photographs. They suggest something about the entire lifetime that followed English after the war, and the weight he carried through it. He married in 1921 and had two sons. He lived in East Rock, worked for the New Haven Clock Company, and was an active philanthropist. He served on the Board of Education, the Board of Park Commissioners, and the Board of Library Commissioners, and was a member of the New Haven Museum, then called the New Haven Colony Historical Society. He died in 1985. It was only a decade before, in 1976, that he finally handed over to the museum all that he’d been carrying around about his World War I experience — his diary, which he’d worked into a manuscript right after the war, and the photographs he’d collected. He held onto all of it for almost 60 years before he let it go.