Back Over There

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “That house? It’s easy,” Jean-Paul said. “Just a few kilometers from here.” As he described how to find it, I fell into despair: None of the roads I’d have to take had names, much less signage. It didn’t sound like they were paved, either.

  “Don’t worry,” Jean-Paul said. “Here, I’ll show you.” He pulled out a paper napkin and drew me a crude map, then handed it to me with a smile. I didn’t feel any more confident, but I set off, anyway.

  As it happened, it was a pretty good little map, and I didn’t have any trouble spotting the farm—which had been called Musarde since well before Rommel stopped by—from the road. Approaching the house, though, first by car—it sat at the end of a half-mile dirt driveway—and then on foot, it didn’t look familiar to me; I later figured out that an entire section of it had collapsed since I’d seen it last.

  As I was poking around the rubble, a silver Nissan 4x4 pulled up and a man got out. Burly, rosy-cheeked, and rumpled, he looked to be in his sixties and vaguely resembled the late actor Dolph Sweet, or maybe an older, Frencher version of my friend Rick, who is not an actor and who, come to think of it, looks nothing like Dolph Sweet. “Bonjour,” he said, and not tentatively, though he was clearly sizing me up and wondering what I was doing there. He wore a gray button-down workshirt and had bright blue eyes behind his metallic spectacles. Not too tall, but broad; he looked like he could toss some hay bales if he had to.

  “Bonjour,” I said, then added my standard disclaimer. His expression softened a bit, and I pointed to the house. “Rommel was here in 1914?” I asked.

  “Vous êtes Anglais?” he asked.

  “Non,” I said. “Je suis Américain.”

  A big smile hijacked his face, and he nodded heartily. “You are far from home!” he said in French. “What did you want to know?”

  “Rommel,” I repeated. “He was here in 1914, yes?”

  “No, no,” he said. “I don’t know. But that house over there”—he pointed to another farmhouse maybe a quarter-mile off, smaller than this one and square—“MacArthur was there in ’18.” He pronounced the name Mack-are-TOUR. “Voudrez voir?”

  Did I want to see it? “Mais, oui.”

  He opened the passenger door, and I climbed in. The 4x4 looked like a typical SUV on the outside—something you would see cruising the streets of Stamford, Connecticut—but inside it was stripped down and covered in dirt and straw. A working vehicle. We drove for a hundred yards or so, and then he stopped to unlatch a gate. When he stopped again on the other side to close it, several cows ambled over to check out the stranger. One stuck her nose through the window and rested it against my shirt. France!

  This property, which comprised several old farms, was all his. His father, he explained, had bought it after the second war. During the first, the Germans had taken it early—Rommel came through the first or second day of September 1914—and already knew, having studied those secret maps, what they were going to do with it. The hills on the property, especially the Côté de Chatillon, and the open fields, made it a fine place to build the Kriemhilde Stellung, the central strand of the Hindenburg Line, the Germans’ ultimate line of defense in France. Designed to be impenetrable, it was. For four years. The Germans didn’t just build it; they overbuilt it. They covered the area so well that it’s hard to see how a butterfly could have escaped their notice. Or their fire.

  “There,” my new host said, gesturing at a meadow sloping up just to his left. He pointed his finger at a spot: “Mitrailleuse.” Machine gun. He moved it forward a few degrees: Mitrailleuse. Did it twice more. Mitrailleuse. Mitrailleuse. Pronounced mit-ray-USE, it’s an oddly pretty word for what it is. The German word, Maschinengewehr, sounds much more appropriate. Mah-SHEEN-en-gev-air. A machine that will fill you with air. Mitrailleuse sounds like a dance.

  The scene was equally dissonant: The rise was gentle, the field lazy, a shade close to the border of green and tan. Something out of a Wyeth painting. I could no more picture four machine-gun nests here than I could a Starbucks. But that was only true for a few moments; and then, I could see them clearly. They were precisely where they should have been to command the maximum amount of ground. The Germans—there’s no denying it—knew exactly what they were doing.

  Now he pointed above the ghost machine guns, to the top of the ridge, which was flat and shaggy. “Up there,” he said, “there was a German narrow-gauge railroad.” It ran all through the property; there was even a station, he told me, pointing straight ahead at a spot in the distance I couldn’t discern. We went by it a bit later—a huge, jagged wedge of concrete embedded in the earth, pitted and pocked but still with a sharp corner, and a passel of iron rods snaking out, as if to get a look: a section of the old platform. Well preserved, not for historical reasons but because it was well built to begin with, and because there’s just no way to get rid of it. It would be a menace to try to plow around, if this weren’t a pasture. The cows, though, don’t seem to mind.

  We stopped briefly for him to unlatch another gate, then approached the second farmhouse, which was shaped like a big gray Lego brick—and, as I could now tell, had no roof. A little closer, and I could some trees growing inside it. “La Tuilerie,” he announced, then turned away from the old house and pointed up at some forested hills off to the right. “MacArthur came from over there,” he said with a slight smile that was equal parts pride and delight. “Early in the morning. The Division 42. October 18.” That’s 18 the year, not the date; as often as anything else—as often as la Grande Guerre and la Première Guerre, which are the other main options—the French refer to the First World War as “14–18.” They don’t feel the need to specify the century.

  He turned back to the house. “MacArthur was here,” he said, his voice tinged with awe, as if he were just beholding the place and hearing its history for the first time. Of course, he’d grown up with this house, La Tuilerie; had known, for most of his life, that on October 14, 1918, three weeks into the climactic Meuse-Argonne Offensive, some particularly ferocious combat had taken place here. The Americans were down here, the Germans up on that hill with the machine guns and beyond, with even greater firepower, on the Côté de Chatillon. Clearly the better position; even without a topographical map—even without looking around—you would know that simply because the Germans held it.

  The Côté de Chatillon, in fact, was high ground of such strategic importance that American commanders felt they couldn’t effectively press what was, in essence, the heart of the offensive without it. They also knew that if they understood this, the Germans did, too; and, that being the case, that the Germans would have done their best to make it impossible for the Americans—or the French, or anyone else—to take it away from them. And so they gave the assignment to a brash, vainglorious 38-year-old West Pointer from the 42nd Division who’d been promoted to brigadier general just that summer. MacArthur’s orders, the legend goes, were to take the Côté de Chatillon or show five thousand casualties for the effort. He is said to have responded that he would, or his name would top that list. He did; it didn’t.

  My host stood still and gazed at the old farmhouse for a few moments, then suddenly turned to the left and gestured at a tree line a few hundred yards away. “Those woods are full of German trenches,” he told me. “Voudrez voir?”

  “Bien sûr!” Of course.

  We got back in the 4x4 and rolled up the pasture toward the trees. He pulled to a stop close enough for me to see how thick they were; I was glad to be wearing long pants, despite it being a hot day. From the first step inside, we had to bushwhack. There were no signs that anyone else had walked through here in a very long time; nothing resembling a trail. But he didn’t need one. He knew exactly where to go.

  If you’ve only seen trenches in old pictures, or in movies (and don’t even get me started on the ones in Downton Abbey), then you might not spot a bona fide World War I trench if you came upon
one in the woods. But you’d only have to have them pointed out to you once. There is, simply, no mistaking them for anything else. Natural ravines are not so narrow and shallow; gullies are not so jagged. Neither are so pervasive. And neither run in pairs or sets, roughly parallel to each other, with other ravines or gullies intersecting them fairly regularly and at more or less perpendicular angles. Trenches do not occur in nature.

  The trenches I’ve seen—the dirt trenches, that is; I’ve also seen concrete trenches, but those are relatively uncommon, and almost all German, and I’ll deal with them later—vary in depth from around three to eight feet, and are typically two or three yards wide. It’s tough to say how long they are, because it can be difficult, even impossible, to determine where they begin and end. Some seem to go on, and on, and on. They often have steep, rough side walls from which rocks and thick tree roots protrude; but the ones in my host’s woods were fairly smooth and solid, with modestly sloping walls, and I did what I often did when I came upon trenches like these: scurried down and ran around, trying to imagine what it would have been like in them a century ago, when they were deeper, and wider, and full of men, and under fire.

  My host didn’t want any part of that, but he waited patiently for me to emerge, then told me that further out in the forest were two German blockhouses. (The French word for blockhouse is blockhouse, pronounced blow-KOOZE.) Voudrez voir? You know I did.

  We started bushwhacking again, and in a few minutes found ourselves perched on the rim of a large depression in the forest floor, maybe ten feet deep and thirty across and full of stuff, branches and vines and thickets and fallen tree trunks. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the point where I could see them, sitting under all that flora: two massive concrete bunkers. They looked like enormous stone hippopotami emerging from the brush, mouths agape.

  “How do we get down there?” I asked, assuming he’d done so many times.

  But he just shrugged. “That’s up to you.”

  The slope was steep; I tried a few branches, but none seemed strong enough to support me, nor long enough to cover most of the distance to the forest floor. Finally I spotted a vine and, not pausing to think too much, grabbed it and swung down to one of the blockhouses. The farmer clapped. “Tarzan!” he called out.

  “The same,” I said, and took a bow.

  “I’m not Jane,” he replied, and did not budge.

  I pulled a small flashlight out of my pocket and ducked inside the first blockhouse, through a narrow rectangular doorway—I didn’t spot any evidence of a door—and into a winding entrance corridor that was clearly designed to protect those inside from a blast. Before the first turn, facing the doorway and embedded into the concrete wall, was a square iron plate with a hole in its center just large enough to accommodate the muzzle of a machine gun. Nearby, set in the ground, was a square cement well, a foot or so across and a few deep: a grenade sump. Should a live one get tossed inside, you were supposed to kick it into the sump, which would direct the blast straight up, rather than all around. Easier said than done, I imagine, but you have to hand it to the Germans—they thought of everything.

  I snaked around the corners into the main chamber. Large and small chunks of concrete littered the floor; tiny white stalactites hung from the corrugated metal ceiling. A single drop of water clung to the tip of each. A large section of the ceiling had fallen and lay in rubble on the ground, letting in vegetation and an eerie green-gray light. The other blockhouse was much the same, though I noticed it also had a hole in its roof for a periscope. They were clearly well designed, and extremely well built; despite the rubble, it was easy to envision them full of men a hundred years ago. And more recently, too: My host told me that the French Resistance used them during the second war. It wasn’t until the 1950s that they were blown up—by farmers, in an attempt to clear the land. Futile.

  I grabbed another vine and hauled myself out of the pit; I hadn’t yet reached the top before my host started telling me about something else and asking “Voudrez voir?” We left the woods, and then the farm, and he drove me around assorted fields and through various villages for the next several hours, pointing out places where something significant or dramatic had happened in the fall of 1918, telling me how this place or that had fared during the war. At one point, he pulled off a road in a thick part of the forest and onto a rough, rock-strewn trail I would have hesitated to walk, much less drive. He must have seen as much in my expression, because he grinned and slapped the dashboard twice. “Voiture Asiatique!” he crowed. “Très bon!”

  Asian car or not, it was rough going; we stalled a few times, and his shock absorbers and alignment took a real beating. But he seemed to know where he was going. We drove uphill for a while and then stopped at what looked to be the crest of a ridge. As I climbed out of the car I almost fell into a trench. A line of them, deeper than the ones in his woods, slithered along on either side of the road, just a few feet from the narrow ridge. The slope to our left was short and easy; at the point where the ground leveled off for a bit was a series of depressions, too wide to be shell holes. “Gun pits,” he said. “Howitzers.” The guns would have faced us, firing shells up over the ridge and down the other side.

  The other side: Past the trenches, there were smaller, shallower pits for machine guns, and then the slope seemed to just drop off straight down. Edging closer, I could see, through the trees, that the incline was maybe sixty degrees. My host stood and stared straight down, silent, though the angle, and the dense vegetation, made it difficult to spot the bottom. It looked to be several hundred yards away; for certain, the grade was so steep that you’d have to snake up on your belly, or walk up like a crab, hands and feet. Under rifle and machine-gun and mortar fire.

  Later, when he drove me back to the house where we’d met, he invited me inside, to a big, musty room full of spiders, and offered me a cold beer. The house, Musarde, was no longer inhabited, but my host still used this part of it as a hunting lodge/clubhouse. He phoned his son and had him bring over his “papers”—old maps of his land, photocopied pictures and pages from history texts, old postcards of the area, correspondence with historians; opined on politics, the economy, France’s low birth rate. It was only afterward, as we shook hands good-bye outside, that we thought to exchange names. His was Jean-Pierre Brouillon.

  At one point back in the house, while he’d chattered about Sarkozy’s and Hollande’s records, I’d looked over some of his maps and spotted that ridge we had visited earlier: Côté Dame Marie. Seeing it there, on paper, I suddenly understood the presence of all those trenches and machine-gun nests and artillery pits. The position enabled the Germans to command an entire section of the Argonne; to make it impenetrable. The Germans, of course, had figured that out well before September 1914. They had taken it right away, secured it quickly, layered it with wire and trenches, machine guns and howitzers. Then they used it—for the next forty-nine months—to rain awful fire down upon French troops over a vast area. Many French had died trying to take it back; many more had died simply because they had gotten too close to it.

  The maps say the ridge is three hundred feet high and more than a half mile long, but they don’t tell you what that slope, that sixty-degree hill studded with trees and roots and rocks, looks like—what that climb, that slither or scuttle under all kinds of fire, must have been like for the men of the American 32nd Division, National Guard troops from Wisconsin and Michigan, who finally took Côté Dame Marie from the Germans in October 1918. It’s the kind of thing you have to see to be able to imagine; and yet, seeing it makes it even harder to imagine. It doesn’t seem humanly possible. Jean-Pierre had lived nearby his whole life, had visited many times; still, standing there that day, looking down that hill, even he was struck dumb. All he could do was turn to me and summon an expression that said: Can you believe that?

  Finally he spoke. “The French,” he announced, “didn’t drive the
Germans out of here. The English didn’t do it.” He shook his head, pursed his lips. “Just the Americans,” he said. “Only the Americans could do it.”

  Jean-Pierre Brouillon remembers. Musarde, and La Tuilerie, and Côté Dame Marie remember. Long after Americans forgot, French people and French earth continued to safeguard the memory of the American Expeditionary Forces—of American doughboys—and what they did here in 1917 and 1918. They held them, kept them, preserved them, cherished them; waited, patiently, for Americans to come back and reclaim them. To look down.

  Look up: A century has passed. Let’s go.

  Chapter Two

  The Soul of the Battlefield

  Too frequently, someone or other will make the mistake of saying to me (or near me) that the United States of America, which eventually lost its patience with unrestricted submarine warfare and declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917—two years and eight months after the fighting began in Europe—entered the First World War late. My typical response is to ask them: Late for what, exactly? The mud? The slaughter? The stalemate? None of it, I point out, to any avail; and none of it in service of a cause or objective that had anything to do with the United States of America. Besides, all of it—the mud, the slaughter, the stalemate—was still there, waiting for America, in 1917. All the United States missed was two years and eight months of killing. And didn’t even miss that entirely: The 128 Americans who went down with the British ocean liner Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, would tell you that. So would all the others who went down, a few or a few dozen at a time, on various other Allied ships. So would many of the Americans who, impatient with President Wilson’s policy of neutrality, headed off to Canada, or over to Europe, to enlist in some foreign military.