L. Curds Tiernan

L. Curds Tiernan was a Catholic chaplain whose importance in the account of Harry S. Truman’s wartime service lies in the range of his presence: he was a trusted companion in camp, a fellow walker on a rain-soaked march, and a minister burying the dead under fire. The scenes do not supply a full biography, but they show a friendship formed amid military strain and repeatedly set beside the realities of war.

Identity and Companionship

Truman counted Tiernan among roughly half a dozen men he considered real pals. Their circle also included Eddie Jacobson and several fellow officers, but Tiernan occupied a distinctive place in it: the narrative identifies him as a young Catholic chaplain, a religious figure who was also part of Truman’s everyday social world. The friendship is conveyed less through formal description than through small acts and remembered exchanges.

One such moment came when Truman suffered what he discreetly called indigestion. The complaint ended quickly after Tiernan came to his rescue with a bottle of whiskey. The account presents the episode with dry humor, but its detail matters: Tiernan’s care is practical and informal, offered within the intimacy of the men’s circle rather than as a formal ceremony. In a life marked by military examinations, training, and the prospect of departure for France, this kind of companionship formed part of the texture of daily existence.

The surrounding account also contrasts Truman’s earlier anxieties about his future with his letters from this period. He still missed Bess Wallace intensely, but the old self-doubt about what he might make of himself had receded. Tiernan belongs to this altered emotional landscape as one of the people Truman could count on among his closest friends—not a replacement for his attachment to Bess, but a companion in the demanding life he was then leading.

The March and Its Dangers

During the march toward the front, Tiernan and Truman shared the same exposed routine as the battery moved by night and rested by day. The march lasted a week. Rain turned the roads to mud, horses weakened and fell, and restrictions on movement meant that traffic had to proceed under cover of darkness. The strain reached officers and enlisted men alike; the account describes a column negotiating exhaustion, poor weather, and the difficulty of keeping men and equipment moving.

Tiernan appears in one of the march’s more revealing details. Colonel Karl D. Klemm wore a yellow rain slicker, and Tiernan had on a coat of the same color. The men later speculated that, in the darkness and confusion, the matching coats mattered: someone might have mistaken Klemm for the chaplain, and no one would have risked making that mistake. The detail is not evidence that Tiernan faced a particular attack. Instead, it registers the march’s disorientation, when the color of a coat could become a potentially consequential distinction.

The account also places Tiernan alongside Truman at the head of the battery as they walked together. They talked about history and other subjects during the night journey. Truman remembered telling Tiernan that if all priests were like him, there would be no Protestants. The recollection presents their friendship as easy enough to accommodate a joke about religious difference; it does not describe a theological dispute or explain Tiernan’s beliefs beyond identifying him as Catholic. Against the march’s mud, darkness, and fatigue, their conversation supplies a quieter measure of how the two men accompanied one another.

Chaplaincy Under Fire

By September 30, the offensive had brought heavy casualties. The account describes hundreds of litter cases at the dressing station at Cheppy and fourteen ambulances carrying wounded men to the rear from that station in a single day. Thousands were being fed, many of them wounded or gassed. In this setting, Tiernan was busy burying the dead under fire all afternoon.

That brief description gives his chaplaincy its starkest form. The narrative does not specify the names of those he buried, his words to them, or the precise circumstances of each burial; it establishes the work itself and the conditions under which he performed it. His presence in the account therefore moves from the private assistance of camp life to service among the dead in an active combat zone. The contrast is not explained away: the same companion who shared conversation and the ordinary discomforts of the march was occupied, amid mass casualties, with burial.

Narrative Role and Limits

Tiernan’s appearances are episodic, and the book gives no account here of his later life or a sustained record of his duties. Yet the incidents together make him more than a passing name in Truman’s circle. He is identified as a trusted friend, appears in Truman’s recollections of the march, and is shown carrying out the chaplain’s grave responsibility as the fighting exacts its cost.

The sequence also places different kinds of wartime evidence beside one another. Truman’s memories preserve the companionship and conversation; the march account makes visible the conditions in which they occurred; the report of the burial work fixes Tiernan’s role amid the wounded and dead. The result is a compact portrait grounded in actions rather than a generalized account of character. Tiernan’s significance rests on this combination: friendship in the intimate sphere and service in the face of battle’s consequences.