We turned and headed up the grassy part of the path. Eric walked twenty paces or so, stopped, looked at the field, looked at his map, walked another twenty paces, and repeated the process a couple more times. Finally, he stopped, looked at the field, looked at his map, looked back at the field, and walked no more. “This is it,” he said, softly and without any sense of triumph. He pointed at a spot in the field a few yards to our left. “This is where they were killed.”
I turned and looked out over the tops of the young wheat stalks, searching for dips that might indicate the existence of trenches, but there were none. The one where Gresham, Hay and Enright were killed had been filled in long ago, no doubt to make the field easier to plant and plow. As hard as it was to find the spot, it was harder still for me to turn my back on it and look out over that lush meadow spread out below, the second-nicest vista I had beheld in France, and reconcile myself to the thought that this was where the first three doughboys died in that war. We stood there for a few minutes, then wordlessly turned and walked back down the path.
As we made it back to the road where we had parked, Eric suggested we walk through the fields to see if we could find any remnants of the German pillboxes—small concrete machine-gun nests—and bunkers marked on the map. We could, without even having to look very hard: One pillbox—or its remains, anyway—was a stone rise, about the size and shape of a pitcher’s mound, in the field to our right; another, some partially crumbled cement blocks, was further up, near our car. We walked across the road and into a cornfield (lots of shrapnel, not much else) and soon came to a large concrete outcropping, perhaps fifteen feet square, big blocks surrounded by corrugated metal bands, with iron rods poking out here and there. Just beyond, a few hundred yards in the distance, were the rooftops of Réchicourt-la-Petite, and a steeple. The bunker had been blown up after the war, but it could not be cleared; it never will be. The farmer cannot do anything with that patch of ground, and must go to great trouble to plant and reap around it. A century on, the Germans are still bedeviling the French.
* * *
When the sun rose and they were able to determine with certainty that the Germans had really gone, the Americans carried the bodies of Gresham, Hay and Enright to Bathelémont. The following afternoon, American and French soldiers, and at least one detachment of French sailors, gathered there for the funeral. The church had been badly damaged earlier in the war, but a makeshift altar was put up amidst the rubble of the village. Wood had somehow been found to fashion three coffins—a gesture of tremendous respect. Such a luxury had long been unavailable to French soldiers, who were, by that point in the war, typically buried in blankets.
General Joseph Bordeaux, commanding officer of the French 18th Division, spoke to the crowd:
On behalf of the 18th Division, on behalf of the French Army and on behalf of France, I say goodbye to Private Enright, to Corporal Gresham, and to Private Hay of the American Army. Of their own volition, they left a prosperous and a happy country to come here. They knew that the war in Europe was still going on. They knew that the forces fighting for honor, love of country and civilization were still opposed by forces prepared for a long time, serving the powers of brutal domination, oppression and barbarism. They knew that efforts were still needed. They generously offered their blood . . . The death of this humble corporal and these privates takes a character of particular grandeur. We will ask that their bodies remain here forever, and we will inscribe on their graves, Here Lie the First Soldiers of the Famous Republic of the United States, Who Fell in the Fields of France for Justice and Freedom. Passers-by will stop and the men of heart who will visit the battlefields of Lorraine will go out of their way to come here to bring to these tombs the tribute of their respect and gratitude. Corporal Gresham, Private Enright and Private Hay, on behalf of France, I thank you. God receive your souls. Adieu.
Shells and shots were fired; “Taps” was played. When it was all over, an American officer with the 1st Division staff asked a French officer for a translation of the general’s remarks. The French officer was a great-grandson of Victor Hugo; the American was future Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State George Marshall.
And then everyone got back to the war. Except they didn’t, not really. In the days to come, as the news spread, the sense of loss was refreshed again and again whenever someone heard it for the first time. The eleven American prisoners taken that night were told of their comrades’ deaths; when the sergeant, Edgar Halyburton, requested a coat to replace the one he’d lost when he was captured, the Germans gave him one they had taken as a souvenir. It was covered with blood; had a bullet hole. Sergeant Halyburton looked inside and saw the name Merle David Hay.
Back in the United States, Gresham’s, Hay’s, and Enright’s faces and names were soon recruited for fund-raising posters. (“Give till it hurts,” one demanded. “They gave till they died.”) The French, though, had other ideas. Within days of the funeral, Léon Mirman, the prefect of the département of Meurthe-et-Moselle, which included Bathelémont, hit upon the idea of building a monument to Gresham, Hay and Enright in the village. Right away. It would be dedicated, he decided, on November 3, 1918, the anniversary of their deaths. The war was still raging; Bathelémont was still right on the front lines. No matter. Mirman was a man of will, a Radical-Socialist; he had once fought a duel with another politician. He could handle a monument.
Mirman identified 160 cities, towns and villages in the département that had not, he believed, suffered so much in the war that they couldn’t donate to such a cause, and hit them up. Almost all of them contributed. He then commissioned the famous sculptor Louis Majorelle, who lived in Nancy, to design it. Majorelle decided upon a stele, 4.5 meters tall; one side bore a large Cross of Lorraine, with “France” and “États-Unis” carved in its crossbars. Another side bore the inscription:
Here Lie
In the soil of Lorraine
The first three
American soldiers
Killed by the enemy
On November 3, 1917
Corporal J.B. Gresham
(of Evansville)
Private Thomas F. Enright
(of Pittsburgh)
Private Merle D. Hay
(of Glidden)
As sons worthy of their great
And noble nation, they
Fought for right,
For liberty, for
Civilization, against
German imperialism
The scourge of humanity
They died on the Field of Honor
When we returned from hiking around in the mud, Mayor Husson and his party showed us around the area a bit, and then escorted Eric and me to Bathelémont’s mairie; on our way, we passed a small, modern building with a sign on the front identifying it as Le Poulailler, the Chicken Coop. It sat on a small rise. “During the war,” the mayor said, “this was used as a lookout post.” Only then did I notice that the rise it sat atop was actually a large, well-preserved concrete bunker, with two entrances leading underground. In the nearby village of Arracourt, we had spotted another, much larger one that looked as if it hadn’t deteriorated at all; someone had since built a house around it, and was using it as a deck. I very badly wanted to knock on their door, but someone in our party said the current owners were new and not around very much. Their demeanor made me wonder if the French just don’t knock on strangers’ doors very often, which in turn made me wonder why I was always treated so well—and, often, fed—whenever I did so Over There.
The mairie was, like Bathelémont, small and bright. The walls of one of the larger rooms were covered with photos of the village during the war, and of the monument. Mayor Husson showed me a 1:10 scale model of the latter, one of several M. Majorelle made and gave out to dignitaries ranging from President Wilson to the mayor of Nancy. (It’s not clear whose copy ended up in Bathelémon
t.) The actual monument was, indeed, unveiled as planned on November 3, 1918. The front was just as close as it had been a year earlier; during the ceremony, three German shells landed nearby. Remarks were brief.
General Bordeaux’s expressed wish was that the three Americans remain in French soil in perpetuity, but in 1921 they were exhumed and repatriated to the United States, buried in their hometowns. It is, perhaps, just as well. Less than twenty years later, another war, and another generation of Germans, came to Bathelémont. They did not care for the monument to the first three Americans; in particular, they did not care for the line about German imperialism being the scourge of humanity. “My grandfather was mayor then,” M. Husson told me. “The Germans demanded he remove those lines from the inscription. He refused.” Other accounts have the mayor’s grandfather, Joseph Crouvizier, attempting to mask the offending words with plaster. In any event, the Germans decided to just handle it themselves. On October 6, 1940, they blew it up with dynamite. In 1952, when George Marshall returned to Bathelémont, the remnants of it were still scattered around the village. The département hastily allocated funds for a new one, much more modest than the first, to stand on the same spot as the original, which it did for years until a property dispute resulted in its being moved to a new site just outside the village, next to the cemetery. The new inscription reads:
HERE LIE
THE FIRST Three SOLDIERS OF THE
UNITED STATES
TO FALL ON THE FIELDS OF
FRANCE
FOR JUSTICE AND LIBERTY
Which really shouldn’t offend anyone.
* * *
The next morning, after spending part of breakfast telling my hosts and fellow guests about water from the sky, I met Eric outside my chambre d’hôtes, or bed-and-breakfast. His wife, he said, hadn’t been at all upset about all the mud we had tracked into the car; she had even packed a lunch for us both. I’m not sure if the first part was really true—by the end of the previous day, the little Citroën was more clay than metal—but the sandwiches she’d fixed, turkey and cheese, were delicious.
We headed off toward the town of Parroy, a few miles east of Bathelémont. Elements of the 1st Division had been posted near Parroy, but on that day, we were more concerned with another American division, the next one to train in the “quiet” Sommerviller Sector. They had arrived in the vicinity of Parroy in February 1918, a couple of months after the 1st had departed: the 42nd, known as the Rainbow Division.
A few miles from Parroy we spotted, just off the side of the road, a large concrete bunker, mostly covered in vegetation but completely intact, its rounded corners distinguishing it from most of the others I’d come across. Eric had never seen it before, either; we climbed up on top and descended inside, walking through galleries into chambers at either end, where machine-gun mounts were still bolted into the walls, and large cement blocks could have doubled for gun rests and beds. “This was French,” Eric pronounced after a while, and neither of us had to note how unusual that fact alone made such a find. “I don’t believe it was ever used,” he added; scribbled on a wall inside was the date 1916, which would have been more than a year after the Germans pulled out of the area. Perhaps it was hoped, after that war ended, that this bunker might prove to be of use should another come; but when it did, the French were overrun too quickly for them to do anything with it. It had sat empty for nearly a century when we found it. A nice discovery, and unexpected: We were actually headed toward Parroy in search of a poet.
It can seem strange, with everything we know about the horrors of that war, to hold it and poetry in the same thought; but that conflict—the fighting and dying, shells and gas, trenches and mud—managed to inspire verse in the minds of men like Alan Seeger, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon, only the last of whom survived. Owen, who was killed in the last week of the war, and Sassoon, who spent a term in the hospital for shell shock, were both British officers who eventually became disillusioned about the war; Seeger, an American who ran off in August 1914 and joined the French Army, wrote about his desire to die gloriously in battle, which he did at Verdun in July 1916. But Eric and I were on the trail of another American who, like his countryman Seeger, seemed to hold a rather romantic view of the war. Alfred Joyce Kilmer is perhaps most famous today for a piece of verse that begins “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” but Eric and I set out that morning to find the place that inspired his second-most-famous poem: a section of the Forêt de Parroy—the Forest of Parroy—known as Rouge Bouquet.
When he enlisted in April 1917, the same month the United States entered the conflict, Joyce Kilmer, a New Jersey native and graduate of Columbia University, was a 30-year-old journalist who also dabbled in poetry. With his background and education, he could easily have been an officer, but he decided the unit was more important than the rank, and he chose to be a sergeant in New York’s famed 69th Regiment, which had served with distinction throughout the Civil War. Indeed, before he sailed off to France, Kilmer contracted with a publisher to write his war memoirs, to be titled Here and There with the Fighting 69th. Never mind that, by that time, for clerical reasons, the Army had renamed the regiment the 165th; they could deal with that later.
There were, at that point, only four complete American divisions in all of France: The 1st and 2nd were Regular Army, who were already in service before the war; the 26th were National Guard from New England. The 42nd were National Guard, too, but they were special in one respect: While every other National Guard Division comprised troops from a specific area—the 26th from New England, the 27th from New York, the 28th from Pennsylvania, and so on—the 42nd comprised troops from twenty-six states plus the District of Columbia. Such an arrangement was said to have been the idea of a major who headed the War Department’s Bureau of Information, a West Point graduate who liked the notion of a single division that would “stretch over the whole country like a rainbow.” Secretary of War Newton D. Baker liked it, too; and thus was the Rainbow Division created. The major who conceived it, Douglas MacArthur, would rise within its ranks to become a brigadier general before the war’s end, and one day trespass on what would eventually become Jean-Pierre Brouillon’s property. In February 1918, though, he was still a colonel, and his division, having only recently arrived in France, still untested. They were sent to the Sommerviller Sector to get some experience in the trenches.
Like the 1st Division, the 42nd had some notable names in its ranks: In addition to MacArthur and Kilmer, there was the latter’s commanding officer, Major William J. Donovan, who would win the Medal of Honor in that war, and run the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS, the forerunner to the CIA) during the next one; and Kilmer and Donovan’s chaplain, Father Francis Duffy, who would be awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, and have a section of Times Square renamed for him. In early March, 1918, Sergeant Kilmer, Major Donovan and Father Duffy found themselves, along with the rest of the 165th, in the Fôret de Parroy. The rest of the division was spread throughout the sector.
“Aside from learning the routine of life in the trenches and the methods of making reliefs,” Henry Joseph Reilly, a colonel in the 42nd, later wrote in his history, Americans All: The Rainbow at War: Official History of the 42nd Rainbow Division in the World War, “the principal activities of the Rainbow were made up of nightly patrols . . . throughout No Man’s Land, or the territory between the French and American front lines and the German front line.
“In addition,” he continued, “the Division had two classes of experiences: The first consisted of raids, on a large enough scale to be called minor attacks, on the German trenches; the second consisted of German retaliations in the shape of fairly large raids and of heavy artillery concentrations on different parts of the trenches held by the Rainbow.”
One of the reasons this sector had remained “quiet” for as long as it had was because the French and Germans ha
d settled into a fairly stable status quo, wherein each recognized the likelihood that nothing of significance was to be gained by attacking the other. The Americans, though, were not there to respect any unspoken truce; they had left their homes looking for action and sailed across an ocean to find it. What’s more, they hadn’t been worn down by three and a half years of fighting at that point. On the night of March 4–5, 1918, a patrol from the 167th Infantry Regiment—National Guard from Alabama—went out and grabbed two German prisoners from a trench. A few hours later, Reilly said, the Germans attempted a raid on the 168th Regiment—Iowa National Guard—and when that was repulsed, unleashed a barrage of Minenwerfer, or short-range, high-caliber mortars, upon some machine gunners who’d left their shelter to man a Stokes mortar. “A single shell, lighting squarely on the Stokes squad which had been doing such valiant work, wiped out the entire crew of seven and destroyed the gun,” Reilly wrote. “Of Sergeant Porsch and Private Nash no trace was ever found, but the mutilated bodies of Sergeant Wedding, Corporal Parish, and Privates Hoschler, Pederson, and Worden were later recovered.” The Iowans lost nineteen killed and twenty-two wounded.
The Americans retaliated; the Germans retaliated. Over the next couple of days, there were more trench raids, more bombardments. At 3:20 on the afternoon of March 7, as twenty-two men from the 165th Regiment’s Company E took shelter in a dugout at Rouge Bouquet, a Minenwerfer scored a direct hit, burying all of them. Major Donovan immediately ordered a rescue operation, but more shells continued to fall; only two men were recovered alive. One of them, Corporal Alf S. Helmer, later told Colonel Reilly, as recounted in Americans All, that he believed at least some of the buried stayed alive underground for another three days; others reported hearing voices emanating from beneath the dirt for at least as long. Helmer himself had been buried up to his mouth before they managed to pull him out. Earlier that morning, he later recalled, his company had replaced another, “with the high and enthusiastic feeling which only an American doughboy can know.” Following his rescue, while making his way back to HQ, he heard another German shell coming in. “I dropped flat on the duckboard,” he reported afterward, “thinking it was a hell of a note to be blown up by a shell when I had just escaped being smothered to death in the dark bowels of the earth.” He was spared once again and continued on his way, but “as I rounded the bend the fumes were still rising from the exploding shell. I tripped and fell on what had been Kelly!”
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