The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [98]
For a year, Hubble's army division stayed in the United States, largely relegated to teaching new recruits. At one point his astronomy background came in handy. His commanding officer requested that he instruct his fellow trainees how to use the stars to guide their nighttime marches. While others joined the artillery and were commissioned as lieutenants, Hubble chose the infantry, where he could enter at a higher rank, as a captain. By September he was put in charge of the 2nd Battalion, 343rd Infantry Regiment of the 86th Division at an Illinois base. “Stirring times,” Hubble wrote a friend from his new camp. “I can't picture myself missing the gathering, as it were, of the clans.”
Commended for his contributions, Hubble was promoted to major, just eight months after he joined. He finally made it to Europe in September 1918, his men reassigned to various divisions to serve as replacements. Hubble was sent to a combat training camp in France, but what exactly happened afterward is debatable (his full military record was destroyed in a fire). Hubble always claimed he saw some action in the trenches and later told his wife that he had been rendered unconscious at one point by a shell exploding nearby and awoke in a field hospital, whereupon he quickly dressed and departed. Nowhere in his discharge papers, though, is there a record of his participation in any battles, engagements, or skirmishes. Beside each listed category, only the word none appears. Furthermore, no “wound chevrons” were authorized for him to put on his uniform. Perhaps his exploits were never precisely documented in the fog of war or possibly Hubble was fastening more adornments to his reinvented self, tall tales that Grace proceeded to faithfully record, with unquestioning belief, in a memoir after his death. What seems most honest and unadorned is what Hubble wrote to Frost right after the war ended: “I barely got under fire.”
With his skill in languages and his expertise in the law, Hubble purportedly took on postwar assignments at the U.S. Army of Occupation headquarters in Germany, the Combat Officers Depot in France, and the American Peace Commission in Paris. Along the way, he learned of a U.S. Army program for officers to study in British universities while awaiting shipment back home. He quickly arranged to be assigned and arrived at Cambridge University in March 1919, along with two hundred other American officers and enlisted men. Like James Keeler, Hubble was a skilled networker and made sure to hobnob with the noted astronomers who were there in Cambridge. Soon he was being proposed for membership in the Royal Astronomical Society. Upon arriving at a posh dinner hosted by the best and the brightest of British astronomy at this time, visitors from Mount Wilson were surprised to see their prospective staff member, junior at that, seated in a place of honor between a noted British physicist and Great Britain's astronomer royal.
By May 1919, worried that his promised job at Mount Wilson might have evaporated given the added delay of his postwar activities, Hubble dashed off a brief note to Hale for reassurance. He reminded Hale, “My interest has for the most part been with nebulae especially photographic study of the fainter ones.” Hale soon replied. “I had been hoping to hear from you,” he wrote, “and am pleased to find that you still wish to come to the Observatory.” Hubble's salary offer rose to $1,500, and Hale promised him rapid advancement, should his work prove worthy. But he urged Hubble to come as soon as possible, “as we expect to get the 100-inch telescope into commission very soon, and there should be abundant opportunity for work by the time you arrive.”
Hubble arrived in New York on August 10. After a one-day stop in Chicago to meet with his mother and sister, who had specially traveled down from their new home in Wisconsin