Reflecting on a Grandfather I Never Knew
By Neil Sherouse
On November 11, 1918, a century ago, the “war to end all wars” drew to a close. With deaths and other horrors heretofore unseen in human history, the November 11, 1918 Armistice brought with it a universal hope that the world would never again embark on so ill-conceived a conflict.
Among the over-four-million Americans who served in that war was Captain George W. Sherouse, a 1905 graduate of Emory University’s medical school. Doctor Sherouse was my paternal grandfather. Through the tireless research of my brother, Craig, we know something of his service record. In summary, World War I saw him serving with the US Army’s Third Infantry Division as a medical officer. In July, 1918, he and his division were in France in the trenches of the Second Battle of the Marne. There he tended the wounded and dying in some of the bloodiest fighting American troops experienced. Later, he was transferred to the division’s medical headquarters, and became a regimental surgeon. After the war ended, he went with the Army of Occupation to Luxembourg. He returned to the States in August of 1919. Thereafter, he settled with his little family in Campville, Florida, the town where he had grown up, and became a beloved small-town physician.
From my earliest years, I heard stories of the care and devotion my grandfather extended to his patients – how he went to their homes in the dark of night by buggy to attend them or deliver their babies, how his diagnostic skills became legendary, and how he had once treated the author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. In short, my grandfather became for me an ancestor of mythical proportions. What I did not hear about, until much later in life, were the demons that had inhabited him in the blood-soaked trenches of France, and traveled home with him after the Great War.
My grandfather died at the age of 63, several years before I was born. It was an early death most certainly hastened by those demons of war that never fully left him. These days, we understand the oft-debilitating impact of trauma on the human psyche. But a century ago, victims – and soldiers in particular – were expected to put the horrors of combat behind them, like shucking their threadbare uniforms — and move forward in life, with no outward display of the lasting effects of what they had experienced. My mother, who often seemed to me to be more fond of Doctor George than my father, remembered how much he wanted to have grandchildren. Perhaps we would have been for him an assurance that his service had secured for his progeny a life and a world better than that in which he had come of age. Regrettably, his death preceded the birth of any of his four grandsons.
Despite the fact that I never met my grandfather – never sat in his lap and rocked on the rickety porch of his home, never observed him caring for his patients, and never smelled on his breath the liquor that dulled the memories of war – he still played a significant role in my life. From a very young age – soon after I decided I no longer wished to become a cowboy – I determined that I would be a physician and advance his legacy of selfless patient care. For me, this was much more than a passing thought. It became a driving force throughout my school years and into my first year of college. My obsession with preparations for medical school led me to take every high school course offered in the sciences – biology, zoology, human physiology, chemistry and, my nemesis, physics. When I called my parents well into my freshman year of pre-med at the University of Florida to gently break to them the news that I had decided to change my major to, of all things, music, I felt in every fiber of my being that I had somehow failed Doctor George.
To my knowledge, my grandfather left no written record, no letters or journals. If he did, they have been lost to our family. All that appears to have survived is his medical bag containing a few implements and his state medical license from the final year of his life. My impression has always been that he was a man who kept his thoughts, and his demons to himself. Nonetheless, it always seemed to me that my father was very reserved in the things he shared about growing up in the doctor’s household. I always had the sense that there were secrets kept, and that my father felt my uninformed admiration for the grandfather I had never known was somehow misplaced or undeserved. Still, well into my adulthood, I would from time-to-time cross paths with someone whom he had treated or whose relative was saved through his care. In all cases, they spoke with near-reverence of Doctor George.
Now that I have lived some years beyond my grandfather’s lifespan, I realize that most of us are, to some extent, flawed. Most of us carry around some demon or other of some size or influence that in some way alters the paths our lives take. So I revere the good Doctor George for the selfless service he rendered to the sick, wounded and dying and the determination he mustered to serve despite his brokenness, and the fact that his sacrifice and the sacrifices of millions of others who have fought in the great wars of our nation have preserved for us a union that, though certainly imperfect, continues to strive in fits and spurts, to cast off its own demons in order to be better than it has been in the past.
— Neil Sherouse is a musician, writer, and churchman living in Lakeland, Florida.
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