* * *
They were here, those Americans, because this was supposed to be a “quiet” sector, a place they could get used to the trenches and develop defensive tactics and strategies without facing too much danger: a division, the most basic large U.S. Army unit, around twenty-five thousand troops at full strength. The 1st Division, to be specific.
The 1st was considered a fairly storied unit, especially within its own ranks. It was composed, at least at the war’s outset, of Regular Army men, career soldiers who had served primarily in peacetime. Many had gone down to Mexico with General John Joseph Pershing to capture the guerilla leader Pancho Villa in 1916, and though they had failed in this objective, they still recalled the expedition fondly. The following year, when the United States entered the war, its entire army numbered just 200,000 men, a third of whom were actually National Guard troops. (By comparison, there were more than three times as many soldiers in the U.S. Army before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941; presently there are around 1.3 million active duty troops in the U.S. Armed Forces, and an additional 800,000 or so in reserve.) The 1st did its best to foster the rumor that its men were the cream of the Regular Army. Other divisions, especially the 2nd and the 3rd, didn’t much care for that claim, but the 1st was the first American division to send troops off to France—setting sail on June 14, 1917, just two months after America entered the war—so they were free to foment that reputation without challenge Over There, at least for a while. By the time the last of them got there, a few days before Christmas, there were several other divisions in France, including at least one complete one, the 26th, comprising some twenty-five thousand National Guard troops from New England. General Pershing, though—now the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces—was said to have a strong preference for Regular Army troops in general, and for the 1st in particular. Later in the war, the division would be nicknamed the Big Red One—not as an assertion of primacy, but because its divisional insignia was in fact a big, red one.
The 1st Division was almost certainly the most heavily chronicled military unit in American history to that point; swarms of reporters followed it everywhere. It was a time when newspapers put out several editions every day, and major American cities had several papers in competition with each other: There was an insatiable appetite for copy, and the 1st was good for plenty. It had a lot of notable names in its ranks, for one thing, including two of former president Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, Theodore Jr. and Archie. The rest of its men, every one of them volunteers, came from all over the country. And as the first doughboys to arrive in France, almost everything they did was endowed with significance and coated in symbolism. Elements of the division paraded through the streets of Paris on July 4, 1917, to announce their arrival, and made their way to the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette, where someone reputedly announced: “Lafayette, we are here!” That alone sold an awful lot of papers.
The United States of America had entered the Great War that April as a co-belligerent, not an ally. That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but legally, it gave General Pershing the prerogative to decide where, when, how and—most important—under whom his troops would go into battle. From the very beginning, Pershing was anything but shy about exercising that prerogative. This enraged and alienated the British, who had expected doughboys to serve in British units under British commanders. The French, though, were just happy to have the Americans there under any circumstances, and they assumed primary responsibility for training the new arrivals. It was no small task; Pershing insisted they be thoroughly prepared for combat before they entered the line. According to the History of the First Division During the World War, 1917–1919, published in 1922, they had a long way to go when they first arrived:
Although the troops were basically trained in the fundamentals of the soldier and were full of enthusiasm and vigor . . . tactics had changed entirely during the war and were continually undergoing further changes, due to the employment of new weapons and new formations and to the stabilized conditions of the Armies in long lines of trenches with no flanks. It was, therefore, necessary that the Division should be instructed in the style of fighting that the Allied Nations had found to be the most effective after three years of experience. So desperate and cruel was the struggle that ignorant troops would have been sacrificed without accomplishing any useful results. The plan of training prescribed by General Headquarters, American Expeditionary Forces, allowed a division one month for acclimatization and instruction in small units from battalions down. The battalions were then required to serve one month with French battalions in the trenches in contact with the enemy, and thus learn by experience the application of the methods that had been taught them without being entirely responsible for the defense of the sector. Upon being taken out of the trenches, a third month was devoted to the training of the combined Division in the tactics of open warfare. The Division was then ready to take over and defend a sector in the line.
By all accounts, the training went very well; the Americans were apt pupils, the French dedicated teachers. They got along with each other famously.
Phase one was mostly done at Gondrecourt, about forty miles west of Nancy and far behind the lines. Phase two was done here, right on them. The History describes this area as “a rolling and attractive country traversed by the Rhine-Marne Canal . . . suitable for the maneuver of large armies,” and it remains so today, although it is difficult to picture armies of anything converging upon such quiet, open terrain. Even the cows and horses around here seem to prefer being unencumbered by company.
The sleepiness of the place didn’t diminish the doughboys’ excitement at being there. They were thrilled to be posted at the front, at last, and more than eager to get into the action, determined to make some noise in an erstwhile “quiet” sector. I suspect a lot of them didn’t care to give much thought, at that point, to how little experience they really had; nor to how much the enemy, just a few hundred yards away, did. But that would all change very soon. The Big Red One was about to find out just how unquiet a quiet sector could get.
* * *
I should say get unquiet again, because back during the war’s first great clash, the Battle of the Frontiers, things had been anything but quiet here. Like the Americans would be in October 1917, the French and Germans of August 1914 were terribly excited to be fighting at last. It did not serve them well, especially the French. Again and again, they attacked; again and again, they found the Germans ready for them. Maybe it was poor communication, or poor coordination. Maybe they just couldn’t believe it. Whatever the case, the fighting quickly spread out all along the border, from eastern Belgium down to Alsace, the French attacking, the Germans counterattacking. Both sides lost a lot of men. The French lost a lot more.
You can assemble a picture of the Battle of the Frontiers like a mosaic, with bits you see here, pieces you hear there. In the village of Lagarde, a small French military cemetery, built on a gentle slope, holds 550 dead; there are two mass graves and about 200 markers, almost every one of which bears the date August 11, 1914. They were men from the south—Nîmes, Avignon—who’d hurried up north to join the battle. If you stand in the cemetery and face out, beyond the gate, you can see, past a wide meadow, the woods they charged out of that morning. There were German machine guns here, on this ridge, waiting to meet them when they did.
That kind of thing happened a lot around here during the first six weeks of the war. Hearing that the Germans were heading for Raon-l’Étape—the pretty town in the foothills that has that urn of soil from Douaumont buried at the base of its war memorial—poilus rushed there by train, only to be mowed down, as they emerged from boxcars at the station, by Germans who had gotten there first. Not far away, the large cemetery at Saint-Benoît-la-Chipotte is filled with French soldiers who were all killed between August 24 and September 11, 1914. Most were chasseurs—literally, hunters—elite troops distinguished by
their dark blue uniforms, which didn’t do them much good. A memorial outside the gate, to the 86th Brigade, shows a single chasseur, standing still, rifle at his side, gazing ahead with a steely determination, something he probably didn’t have much opportunity to do in August and September of 1914.
“This was the worst period of the war,” Eric Mansuy mused as we looked at that monument, which he believes was built even before the armistice. “It was very, very hot; soldiers were marching fifty kilometers a day, and constantly fighting.” Casualties were shockingly high, but the French did not think of letting up. It had not yet occurred to them, it seems, that there might not be a ceiling to the carnage.
Eric is in his late forties, thin and spare, with short brown hair, glasses and a goatee; he looks a great deal like the American public radio personality Brian Lehrer. This section of the Western Front—far eastern Lorraine going into Alsace, encompassing the Vosges Mountains, its foothills, and rolling farmland leading into both—is, unquestionably, his fiefdom; a friend of mine, a French woman who now lives in the United States and had briefly worked on a project with Eric years earlier, recommended I get in touch with him before I visited the area. It was one of the best referrals I’ve ever gotten: In a country filled with people who are knowledgeable about the First World War, he is exceptionally so. He is also tirelessly enthusiastic, endlessly patient—he will happily answer your questions until you are exhausted—and can research like an archivist and read maps like a cartographer. And he’s fluent in English. He first learned it as a high school student in the 1980s, when he spent two summers in upstate New York; since 1994 he has taught the language in a high school here in eastern Lorraine. In doing so, he often discusses with his students certain episodes in American history, especially the civil rights movement; when we met he told me he’d been delighted to discover, Googling me before my visit, that I had written about the subject more than once. He greeted me that first morning warmly, as a colleague whose work he admired. By the end of the day, I felt as if we had known each other for years. He has since translated for me more documents than I can count, and helped me research a great many historical matters. Sometimes we engage in lengthy e-mail exchanges when he gets up in the morning and I have yet to go to bed.
Eric cannot remember a time, he says, when he wasn’t interested in military history. His background may have something to do with that: His father served in Algeria in the 1950s; his grandfather was a career officer who fought in the Second World War. In his teens, Eric developed an interest in the Vietnam War—the French one, which effectively ended at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In his twenties, he moved on to la Grande Guerre. Three of his great-grandfathers fought in it. One, Émile Auguste Mansuy, was killed near Verdun on October 5, 1914, at the age of 40. Another, Albert Gerber, who’d been born in annexed Alsace, actually fought for Germany. While this surprised me, Eric said it wasn’t at all uncommon. “Alsatians didn’t consider themselves French or German,” he explained. “They considered themselves Alsatian.” Many, he added, still do.
Albert Gerber lived to the age of 93; he died, still living in Alsace, in 1978. A hand-tinted photo of him as a young man in his German uniform shows a proud soldier, gaze set, lips pursed, shoulders squared. His mustache is turned up at the ends like the Kaiser’s; there’s actually a small inset of the Kaiser himself, for comparison. As a child, Eric knew Albert Gerber, but was never able to have a conversation with him—about the war, or anything else—because the old man spoke only Alsatian.
The third great-grandfather, Henri Georges Curien, who was from the Vosges, did his compulsory military service from 1898 to 1901, and was recalled in 1914, when he was 36. He survived the war, and kept a journal throughout. From 1914 until the summer of 1918, when he was sent to fight on the Marne River, Georges Curien was posted in the Vosges. He was clearly a thoughtful, observant man; his early musings are among the most philosophical I have ever come across in a war diary. Take this entry, from December 20, 1914:
We leave the main road for a transversal way across the woods. This is a real battlefield we then cross, for we aren’t far from La Chipotte pass, which is now nicknamed “The Death Zone.” There are but debris of guns and rucksacks, kepis and helmets. Crosses mark the spots of French graves, mere branches the German graves. We can see trees which have been pierced by shells. We wonder how all this must have been like. Did we have to live in such a civilized century to kill each other this way?
Soon, though, he realized that such musings are a luxury war rarely affords. Six months later, still in the Vosges and having been promoted to sergeant, he wrote:
At dusk, we arrive after encountering a large number of wounded and killed, among whom several officers . . . Bullets come whizzing by our ears . . . Houses catch fire close to us and light up our trenches. All we can do is lie down inside them for, if we were seen, the whole platoon would be dead and gone. We are sure we are going to die in a short while.
At that point, Georges Curien still had three years and five months of war to go. Eric never knew him; he died just thirty-nine months after the armistice, at the age of 44.
Like his great-grandfather, Eric is a fine storyteller. It was he who first told me of the ill-fated French assault on Lagarde, and the slaughter at the train depot in Raon-l’Étape, and what happened to the chasseurs at La Chipotte. And in Baccarat, a colorful town of several thousand known for its crystal, he led me to a modest bridge over the Meurthe River and said: “The Germans killed a hundred French soldiers here in ten seconds.”
It was August 25, 1914; the men of the 86th Infantry Regiment (not to be confused with the 86th Chasseur Brigade) went to cross the bridge, either unaware that the Germans were lying in wait on the heights across town, or merely unconcerned. “The French were playing by the old rules of warfare at that point,” Eric explained. “The old rules were that you didn’t use machine guns in the front line, offensively. You used them in your second line, defensively.” A few months later, a French expatriate I know in the United States, upon hearing this story, told me: “The French didn’t expect the Germans to use machine guns on them; they believed machine guns were only for use against the natives in Africa, etc.” According to code, he explained, civilized white men didn’t unleash such a savage weapon upon each other.
But the code was dead. When the poilus got out onto the bridge, the Germans opened up their Maschinengewehre. It took the men of the 86th a few seconds to figure out what was going on; a few more to turn and get off the bridge. “They were shot coming and going” is how Eric put it. One hundred killed in ten seconds.
Near the bridge is Baccarat’s Grande Guerre memorial. As I mentioned earlier, every city, town, village and hamlet I’ve ever visited in France has one; after the war, the French government offered funds to every community in the country to build such a monument. In all of France, I am told, only five places declined to do so. Many places later appended to their 14–18 memorials plaques that commemorate their 39–45 dead; some went on to add plaques for the subsequent wars in Algeria and Indochina, too. Baccarat did not, perhaps because its monument, relatively large though it is, didn’t have room for any more names. As I often did when coming upon such a memorial, I let my eyes wander over the names that were listed there, more than three hundred of them spread out over five large copper plates; in the last column on the fourth, one row from the bottom, they came to rest on this one:
L. RUBIN, ADJt.
Eric later found the records online: Adjutant Léon Ernest Rubin, 20e Bataillon de Chasseurs à pied, born February 22, 1883, in Buchy, a village in Normandy; later moved to Baccarat. Reported for obligatory military service in 1903. Reported again in 1914. Killed by the enemy October 9, 1914, Aix-Noulette, Pas-de-Calais. Not far from the Belgian border. “Maybe he’s a relative?” Eric asked me. No, I replied; impossible. But I have since come to claim Léon Ernest Rubin, anyway. Or maybe he claims me.
The Ge
rmans took Baccarat pretty quickly after that affair on the bridge. Much of what they didn’t destroy in the process they torched deliberately afterward—public buildings, shops, houses. It was all done by that same evening: August 25, 1914.
On September 13, they left. All of them. Summoned to the Marne, two hundred miles west, where the French were making a stand.
And that’s how this sector became “quiet.”
It stayed that way until the fall of 1917, when the AEF’s 1st Division was sent there for the purpose of getting experience in actual trench warfare.
They did.
* * *
The Division’s infantry arrived in the Sommerviller Sector, which included Bathelémont, on October 21, 1917. Artillery made it there the following day. Both were to be deployed alongside, and under the supervision of, the French 18th Infantry Division. It had been decided at some point—I’m not sure by whom, exactly—that the first American shot of the war should be an artillery shell, not a rifle bullet, which makes sense if you understand that artillery was responsible for more deaths in the First World War than anything else: more than bullets, bombs, gas, barbed wire, and disease, and almost certainly more than at least a few of them combined. (Remember, too, that the infantry weren’t there to go on the offensive, but strictly to gain experience at the front; it was possible, theoretically, that they might not fire any rifle shots at all.) The United States did not yet have the means to ship over big guns of its own, so the doughboys would fire the French 75-millimeter gun, which was quite possibly the finest weapon their army possessed. It was celebrated as such throughout the country; I’ve seen postcards featuring romantic hand-tinted photographs of the gun, along with flowery odes to its might.
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