The Americans were not impressed with it, at least not at first. “I had to laugh when I looked at the French 75-millimeter guns,” wrote Corporal Osborne De Varila of the 6th Field Artillery Regiment’s Battery C. “They seemed so small and inferior when compared with our American field pieces. ‘If we have to use these toys,’ I thought, ‘the Huns won’t do a thing to us when we get into action.’” After a few days of training, though, he changed his mind about “the little fire-eaters. I found that we could do faster and more accurate work with them than with the more warlike looking American pieces. It is certain that the Germans know to their cost what the little ‘75’s’ are capable of doing.”
The 6th FA had been assigned the honor of firing the first American shot; the American journalist Floyd Gibbons had essentially embedded himself with them for six weeks, he later told The New York Times, just so he could be there when it happened. “I attached myself to the A Battery,” he explained, “on the assumption that the A Battery would be the first in action, with B Battery and C Battery following in that order.” But when Battery C learned that Battery A “was out to steal the bacon,” as De Varila put it, “we howled with rage and apprehension . . . Our battery commander was terribly aroused, for he had his heart set on that first shot.”
“There was so much rivalry among the three batteries” for the distinction, Gibbons recalled, “that while the men of the A Battery were digging gun pits for themselves, the men of C Battery, working like Trojans and pulling through mud that was waist deep, took advantage of some old gun pits left by the French and got into position first.” And so it was that Battery C ended up firing the first American shot of the Great War, at 6:05 a.m. on October 23, 1917. They fired at Xanrey, a village about five miles to the east. After that, according to accounts, other men in the battery were invited to do the same—twenty-four shells in all. That day’s entry in the war diary of the French 18th Division’s artillery section notes: “The first gun shots fired by Americans were aimed at a party of enemy workers laboring in the Bavarian Salient, who then dispersed.” There is no record of any casualties.
Gibbons gave his interview to The New York Times specifically to establish the identity of the man who fired that first shot. He felt compelled to do so because Corporal De Varila, who had been gassed in early 1918 and sent home to help sell Liberty Bonds, published a memoir, The First Shot for Liberty, in which he claimed credit for firing it. Gibbons, though, without impugning De Varila—at least explicitly—claimed the honor really belonged to a Sergeant Arch. “That was Arch’s battery,” he told the Times, “and Arch—Alexander Arch, a swarthy gunner from South Bend, Indiana—inserted the shell, pulled the lanyard and extracted the shell.” Sergeant Arch was a 24-year-old immigrant from Hungary, a country allied with the people he had just fired upon. Shortly thereafter, he gave the shell to Gibbons, who was supposed to display it in Paris for a short while and then return it to him; instead, it got sent to the White House, where President Woodrow Wilson displayed it on his mantelpiece. Arch didn’t get it back until 1931. Shells 2 through 8 were also saved and dispersed. The French 75-millimeter gun that fired the shot ended up at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where it remains to this day.
Given all the souvenir hunting surrounding that first shot, you’d think someone would have thought to mark the spot whence it was fired. But apparently, no one did. When I’d asked about it on previous visits—and, admittedly, I’d just queried the first few people I’d come upon in Bathelémont—I was met with shrugs, and given to understand that its location was lost to history. This led me to believe it would be impossible to find, which in turn made me want to find it that much more. It was, after all, the site of the first shot, no matter who’d pulled the lanyard. I e-mailed Eric and asked him if he thought we might have any chance of finding it; he replied, a few days later, with a scan of an old topographical map covered with ancient, inscrutable notations. East of Bathelémont, a spot was circled in green: a hill labeled “A81.” He’d found it mentioned in some contemporary French military reports. I was stunned. And thrilled.
Two months later, when we arrived in Bathelémont, we were greeted by several men who had been—and this happened a lot; I’ll explain more later—informed in advance of my arrival. One of them, an amiable white-haired fellow, introduced himself as the mayor, Serge Husson. (By law, every settlement in France, no matter how small, must elect a mayor; I have been to villages where every adult has held the post at one time or another.) He and the others escorted us to a spot on the edge of town, next to a lovely house with a big yard, in the middle of which sat the ruins of a concrete bunker which the owners had ingeniously turned into a terraced garden. “There,” they said, pointing, away from the house and over some trees, at a small green hill to the left of a narrow lane: A81. Eric and I thanked them and headed off toward it. After a couple of minutes, he surreptitiously pulled a copy of the old map—the same one he’d e-mailed me—from his pocket, pointed to a spot on it, and said, his voice hushed: “That’s not A81. It has to be that hill there, on the other side of the road.”
Instead of turning left, we walked straight down the road, past an intersection, and started up the grade, which was much steeper than it had appeared from the village. Longer, too. It was a very warm June morning, and muggy, having just stopped raining, and I lagged a bit behind Eric. Two-thirds of the way up the hill, he suddenly stopped, pulled out his map, and studied it for a minute or two. Holding it open in his hands, he turned to the right, stared out ahead for a bit, then wheeled around and gazed out in the opposite direction. “Wow,” he said, softly.
“What?” I asked.
He looked down at the map again for a moment, then pointed at the hill he was now facing, the one the men in the village had pointed out. “They were right,” he said. “They were right! That is it!” It: a stubby hill, mostly covered in young wheat except for a couple of bald, rocky patches on the way up. A81.
We walked back down to the intersection, then turned right and headed toward the hill. As we got closer, it became apparent that, as I had been told before, there was nothing atop it to commemorate what had happened there at 6:05 a.m. on October 23, 1917, something so significant that two men had claimed credit for it and dozens more had snatched up any vestige of it they could find. There wasn’t even a trail leading to the spot. The closest we could get, without wading through chest-high wheat, was a narrow dirt road winding toward its base. As we passed by, I spotted a small green sign: “Chemin des Américains”—the Americans’ Path.
Oh, yes, someone in town told me later. That’s been there forever. We thought it was just because the Americans had been here. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that it might have anything to do with the First Shot for Liberty.
* * *
Those workers at Xanrey might have been unprepared, but it’s doubtful that the Americans caught the Germans entirely by surprise that morning. The Germans typically had excellent intelligence; it is likely they knew the Americans had moved in almost as soon as they got there. They didn’t wait long to retaliate. The Americans took their first casualties that same day, the History notes, and were treated at a nearby field hospital. Two days later, Lieutenant DeVere Harden of Rockford, Illinois, who was serving with the Signal Corps but happened to be attached to the 1st Division’s 26th Regiment at that point, became the first American officer to be wounded in action, hit in the leg by a piece of shrapnel. The History says it happened October 25; journalist Heywood Broun, who was in the sector at that time, went looking for Lieutenant Harden at a field hospital. “His wound was not a very bad one,” Broun later recalled in his memoir The A.E.F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces, “and the doctors allowed us to crowd about his bed and ask questions.” Broun reported:
A French officer ran over to him and said: “You are a very lucky man.”
“How is that?” asked Harden.
“Why, you’re the first American to be wounded, and I’m going to recommend to the general that he put up a tablet right here with your name on it and the date and ‘first American to shed his blood for France.’”
The thought of the tablet didn’t cheer the lieutenant up half so much as when we prevailed on the doctors to let him take some cigarettes from us and begin smoking again.
Broun also met another first in the hospital that day—the first German to be taken prisoner by the Americans:
He was a pretty sick boy when we saw him. He gave his age when examined as nineteen, but he looked younger and not very dangerous, for he was just coming out of the ether. The American doctors were giving him the best of care. He had a room to himself and his own nurse. The doughboys had captured him close to the American wire. There had been great rivalry as to which company would get the first prisoner, but he came almost unsought. The patrol was back to its own wire when the soldiers heard the noise of somebody moving about to the left. He was making no effort to walk quietly. As he came over a little hillock his outline could be seen for a second and one of the Americans called out to him to halt. He turned and started to run, but a doughboy fired and hit him in the leg and another soldier’s bullet came through his back. The patrol carried the prisoner to the trench . . . Somebody gave him a cigarette and he grew more chipper in spite of his wounds. He began to talk, saying “Ich bin ein esel” [I am an ass] . . . The prisoner explained that he had been assigned to deliver letters to the soldiers. Some of the letters were for men in a distant trench which slanted toward the French line, and so to save time he had taken a short cut through No Man’s Land. It was a dark night but he thought he knew the way. He kept bearing to the left. Now, he said, he knew he should have turned to the right. He said it would be a lesson to him. The next morning we heard that the German had died and would be buried with full military honors.
Broun doesn’t report the man’s name; he was Leonhard Hoffmann, 3rd Machine Gun Company, 7th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, part of the 1st Bavarian Landwehr Division, the unit posted directly across from the Big Red One. It is doubtful that many of the innumerable German soldiers shot by doughboys thereafter received quite that level of tender attention. For both the Americans and the Germans, the war was about to change irreversibly.
At 9:00 p.m. on the night of November 2, the 2nd Battalions of all four regiments in the 1st Division—the 16th, 18th, 26th and 28th—relieved the 1st Battalions in their first- and second-line trenches. A battalion was half a regiment; thousands of men would have been in motion simultaneously, either coming or going, in the dark—a tremendous logistical challenge. “The execution of a relief is in itself a difficult and a dangerous operation,” the History explains, “and every precaution was taken to prevent the enemy from knowing of the plan. On this occasion the relief was completed and the newly arrived garrisons set about learning their way in the maze of deep trenches and familiarizing themselves with the instructions for the defense given by their predecessors.” The division had only been at the front for a little more than a week; no doubt there was still a good bit of adventure to it all. “With the exception of a rifle shot here and there, the stillness of the black night was unbroken and the men were tense with the novelty and the sense of danger,” the History reports. Midnight passed; it was now November 3. The part of the line closest to Bathelémont, along a hilltop ridge, was occupied by the men of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment. Like the rest of their division, they were Regular Army, and hailed from all across the United States; many had been in the service for years. The relief maneuvers completed, the men settled in for the night, some curling up to sleep.
And then, at 3:26 a.m., things suddenly started blowing up all around them.
The Germans launched Operation Jakobsbrunnen—Jacob’s Fountain—by bombarding the 16th Regiment with high-explosive shells for a few minutes; then they isolated one specific platoon from Company F with what was known as a box barrage, surrounding them on three sides with shell fire to prevent them from retreating and reinforcements from reaching them. Into the fourth side rushed Stosstruppen—shock troops, from Leonhard Hoffmann’s 7th Bavarian Infantry Regiment—blowing open the protective barbed wire in front of the trenches with bangalore torpedoes and tossing hand grenades into the American trench line. They followed close behind. “With pistols, trench knives and bayonets they attacked the men along the trench,” the History notes. “The affair lasted only a few minutes, when the raiders disappeared and the fire ceased.” Twenty-four minutes, to be precise; but it was enough, for their purposes: The raiders carried off eleven American prisoners, three of them wounded, one a sergeant. Later that day, in the village of Coincourt, a few miles behind the German lines, the healthy eight were lined up on the street and photographed, surrounded by German soldiers over whom they towered. The image was circulated throughout Germany; the photo was made into a popular postcard, with the caption Die ersten gefangenen Amerikaner. The first American prisoners.
Taking American prisoners was clearly the Germans’ primary objective that night; but in the process, they also killed three doughboys. Corporal James Bethel Gresham, 24 years old, of Evansville, Indiana, had been shot in the forehead. Private Thomas Francis Enright, 30, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had been stabbed in the gut and the throat. And Private Merle David Hay, 21, of Glidden, Iowa, had been shot and had his throat cut. The war where doughboys gleefully competed to fire the first shot and take the first prisoner, where the enemy was a hapless postman who got lost on his route and whom you felt bad about killing—that war was over.
Like A81, the site where the first three American doughboys died has no marker. Eric, though, managed to determine the location of the trench line using contemporary reports and old maps; it lay along a ridge at the crest of a hill that comprised the rear half of a deep field. Under ordinary circumstances, we could have driven pretty close to the spot on a tractor road that ran along the field’s left edge, but, as I mentioned, it had rained that morning, so instead we parked nearly a mile away, alongside a paved road near a village with the quaint name of Réchicourt-la-Petite. Any closer, Eric worried, and the mud might pin down his little Citroën. We walked the last stretch.
But wait: a word about that mud. You hear a lot about the mud of World War I—mud in the trenches, mud in the dugouts, mud in No Man’s Land. It conveys a sense of the wretchedness of everyday conditions in that war, I suppose; but that word, “mud,” is really insufficient to the task. The mud of northern France is to the mud of a typical American post-rainstorm landscape as Krazy Glue is to Scotch tape. When American mud dries, it becomes dirt; when French mud dries, it becomes clay, kind of like that stuff your dentist uses to take impressions of your teeth, only brown. If you get it on your left shoe and try to scrape it off with your right, it will attach itself to your right shoe without surrendering an inch of your left. The only way to shed it is to sit down on your car seat with your feet outside the vehicle and peel it off the soles of your shoes in one solid piece, which you will then want to throw as far away from you as possible. It has never, to this day, come off the pants I was wearing that morning. That mud, in fact, made such an impression on me that despite everything else I saw and did that day, when my hosts at the inn where I was staying asked me the next morning how my day had gone, I said, “Fine, except for the . . .” And I was stuck; not knowing the French word for mud, I tried a workaround. “Except for the . . . ground,” I said, “because of the . . .” But for some reason just then I couldn’t summon the word for rain, pluie. “Because of the . . . uh . . . water from the sky,” I blurted. They and all the other guests at the breakfast table smiled and nodded vigorously. “Water from the sky!” a couple of them said. “Très poétique!”
The mud of northern France was like a third army, albeit one that harassed the other two equally. When you think about all those soldiers marching through it—or, more accurately, trying to march thro
ugh it—and hunkering down in it, being covered in it and trying desperately to keep it from swallowing them entirely, you come to understand that even those rare days when they weren’t being shelled or shot at were extremely trying, and that while war has always been hell, this was a particularly gooey version.
We hiked up that tractor road slowly, eyes on the mud and treading whenever possible upon sticks or rocks. Soon, on our left, we passed an enormous pile of manure, around ten feet high and forty feet wide. “Very Lorraine,” Eric told me. “Farmers here are proud of their manure piles; it’s a sign of their wealth. The bigger the pile, the richer the farmer. When General Pershing first saw them he was horrified. He ordered the farmers to get rid of them, but it was no use.”
The field spread out to our right; the tractor road followed its contours, slowly increasing grade the further we walked. After fifteen minutes or so we came to the crest of the ridge, and suddenly the whole scene was laid out before me like a board game. The path took a sharp turn to the right, and was covered entirely with tall grass and hay. To the left of it was young wheat, waist high, on a flat plain; to the right was the gently sloping field, a smooth green meadow punctuated here and there by small clumps of trees. Eric pulled out a map and studied it for a moment. “The Germans came up from there,” he said, pointing back toward where we had parked. “They might have gone around that way”—he pointed at a tree line in the distance—“but they could have just come straight up through these fields. It was dark; they knew what they were doing. The Americans would have had had listening posts in those groups of trees—that one, that one, all of them, probably—but the Germans would have known that.” He pointed to the map. “They knew this whole area very well. Better than the Americans. They might have known it better than the French.” It would have been easy, he explained, for them to give those posts a wide berth, even in the dark.
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