![]() Less than twenty-four hours later, Ed had only thirty men left. And if Ed Lukert in Ward 13, Bed 13, did not hold his pen perfectly upright while opening or closing it or filling it with an eyedropper, then his nurse with number 13 on her tunic would certainly have scowled at her patient and his bedclothes covered with ink.Īs Dearheart read her husband’s letter, she learned that Ed and the more than one hundred men under his command had dug trenches in open ground for a whole afternoon under a German artillery barrage. Well, “safety” was sometimes too optimistic a description for this type of pen, for the seal was not infallibly leak proof. During the Great War, Ed Lukert would have had to shell out $2.50 for the lowest priced Waterman or Parker safety, and if he paid twenty-five cents extra for the Parker, he could get a “Parker Patent Clip held in place like a washer” to secure the pen to his shirt pocket. In 1907, the Waterman company introduced its version of the safety, which was widely imitated. But the safety’s nib, stored in the ink-filled barrel, was primed and ready to write when extended. Fountain pens of the era did not always write when first uncapped and you might have to shake out an ink blob to get it started. The nib of a safety pen retracted into the barrel, and the design created a leak proof seal when the pen was capped and when the nib was fully screwed out for writing. Over time, the threads of a conventional eyedropper could wear or crack and then the joint leaked. The safety pen was an “eyedropper,” that is, you unscrewed the part holding the nib or writing point and used an eyedropper to fill the barrel with ink. When Ed Lukert wrote his “Dearheart,” he may very well have used the soldier’s favored instrument, the “safety pen,” which had been invented in the 1890s. The pen user would put the cap on the knob at the end of the barrel and turn the cap to the right, which extended the nib from the barrel (where the ink was stored) and made a seal so the ink would not leak out. This is a page from the instruction sheet that came with a Waterman safety pen in the 1920s. One could say that during the Great War the fountain pen was not an insignificant weapon. In 1918, for example, the 4,000 soldiers of Britain’s Army Postal Service were delivering twelve and a half million letters a week to their comrades on the Western Front. Governments wanted their service men and women to receive and write letters because mail, then as now, was a major morale booster for the armed forces. A doughboy’s life was often furious action - constructing and repairing fortifications, charging across no man’s land into a wall of bullets, and fighting hand-to-hand in trenches - followed by long stretches of tedium, during which a favorite occupation was writing the folks back home. Soldiers in the field found pencils convenient to carry, but pencil lead was less bright than ink and smudged easily, and a good fountain pen was highly prized, especially for diary and letter writing. ![]() Clerical staff and officers not right on the front lines would have access to a typewriter. Pencil, fountain pen, and typewriter - these were the writing implements during World War I. He set down the date “October 13, 1918,” and then “Dearheart,” and began a letter to his wife. He would later write: “Bullets are not bad, clean and small, but chunks of iron from high explosives are dreadful.” While recovering in a hospital in Ward 13, Bed 13, and attended by a nurse with number 13 on her uniform, Ed Lukert uncapped his fountain pen. On Friday the thirteenth, September 1918, the second day of the American Expeditionary Force offensive at Saint-Mihiel in northeastern France, a German shell exploded, sending a jagged metal fragment tearing deep into the thigh of First Lieutenant Edward Lukert. ![]() This article is a slightly edited version of one that first appeared as a two-part series in the Northfield News, Northfield, Vermont, and is published here through the courtesy of that newspaper. Some Intersections of Pen History and Real Life
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