Because Corporal Helmer was not killed that day at Rouge Bouquet, he lived to tell his story but was otherwise forgotten by history, which I’m guessing he would have regarded as a pretty good trade-off for him. Major Donovan was awarded the Croix de Guerre for leading the rescue effort that pulled Helmer and one other survivor out of the collapsed dugout. That left twenty dead from one shell; fifteen of the bodies were never recovered. All were memorialized in a poem written by another soldier from the 165th, Sergeant Joyce Kilmer, which he called “Rouge Bouquet,” and which he read at a memorial service a few days later. It begins:
In a wood they call the Rouge Bouquet
There is a new-made grave to-day,
Built by never a spade nor pick
Yet covered with earth ten metres thick.
There lie many fighting men,
Dead in their youthful prime,
Never to laugh nor love again
Nor taste the Summertime.
For Death came flying through the air
And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,
Touched his prey and left them there,
Clay to clay.
He hid their bodies stealthily
In the soil of the land they fought to free
And fled away.
There are decent roads running through the Forêt de Parroy, but to get to Rouge Bouquet, you have to walk a half mile, more or less, up a dirt-and-gravel logging trail. Actually, before you do that, you need to have someone like Eric Mansuy look at old maps and then new maps and then old maps again to figure out exactly which dirt-and-gravel logging trail will get you close. There’s no Chemin des Américains here. No signs at all, actually.
I’m not sure how Eric divined where, exactly, we should leave the trail and head into the woods, but within thirty seconds of doing so, I looked down and spotted a century-old 1-liter French Bidon canteen, just sitting atop the fallen leaves. It was a good portent: The French 128th Division had been training the 42nd at Rouge Bouquet. “This must be the French and American lines,” Eric said. The forest floor sloped down toward a plateau; dirt trenches ran along the incline, zigzagging here, intersecting there. “This was definitely one of the lines,” Eric said. “Probably the second line, I’m guessing.” The second-line trench, a defensive fallback position, was usually dug a few dozen yards (though sometimes more) behind the first-line trench, which faced out onto No Man’s Land and, beyond it, the enemy’s first-line trench. As I tried to orient myself, I spotted, sprinkled here and there among the trenches, little bowls, maybe ten feet across. Too deep and too wide to be foxholes. “Shells?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
It was an overcast day, and the forest, though not terribly dense, was far from sparse; some of the trees looked like they had been around since before the war. The air was infused with a dark green sheen, the kind of light that requires one to look at things twice. As I stared at one of these depressions, gouged out of the side of a small rise and coated with dead leaves, it grew larger and larger. Eric came over to look. He stared, too, for a minute, then said: “Yes, that could be it.”
“What?”
“The dugout.” Eric knew the poem, too. And he knew about the memorial: how, after the war, someone had installed upon the ruins of the bunker a plaque that had long since disappeared, perhaps during the Second World War, when there was also some fighting in this vicinity. We moved along for a bit and found another set of dirt trenches—the first line. There was nothing else we came across that could have been a dugout at one point.
Past the first line, we came to an area where the forest floor leveled out and opened up. It was a plateau, though I wouldn’t call it flat: It was full of shell holes. Two here; three there. One, and another, and two more. There were small ones—eight to ten feet across, three to four feet deep—and larger ones, maybe twice that size, maybe more. All were filled, to some extent, with water. Trees grew near their edges; some had gotten too close and tipped over into the depressions. In one spot, near a young tree, we spotted a rotting metal box, maybe two feet cubed; grass sprouted up inside it. Its design said German. The same was true for a couple of round metal catchbasins we found nearby. No doubt they had been placed there earlier in the war, during quieter times, when No Man’s Land might have been subject to the law of Live and Let Live. Now, though, they sat amidst a field of shell holes, stretching on for hundreds of yards. At some point, both sides must have bombarded the hell out of this place. No more sneaking out to do your wash here.
Eventually the ground started sloping upward again; giant, bright orange slugs, each the size and shape of a slice of grapefruit, littered this section of the forest floor. After a few paces we saw a new line of trenches, also dirt but significantly deeper, and more jagged, than the last two. And there were more of them. And they made better use of the topography. In all likelihood, they occupied a better section of the forest, too. The Germans, as usual, knew what they were doing. If you’d been here in March 1918, you would have been much better off sheltering in—and attacking from—these trenches than the ones we’d just come from.
Eric and I just looked at each other; no need to say anything. We forded the trenches and scaled the hill until, a few dozen yards up, we came to another line of trenches, even deeper and more jagged than the first. Even now, a hundred years later, we had trouble figuring out how to get beyond them. It took a while and some searching to find a spot where, with difficulty, we could do it by jumping across to some large rocks that were carpeted with moss.
As I landed, it occurred to me that these rocks were awfully flat, with corners suspiciously close to ninety degrees. I scraped at a spot with my walking stick and saw, underneath, not granite but concrete. Looking up, I spotted another set of moss-covered, cube-shaped rocks nearby. And then another. And then one that looked a lot like a platform.
“The German second line,” Eric declared triumphantly. We had mapped out the entire battlefield of Rouge Bouquet, just as Major Donovan, and Sergeant Kilmer, and Corporal Helmer would have seen it. There was no visible evidence that anyone else had been here since they had.
* * *
In between Parroy and Bathelémont there’s an even smaller village called Bauzemont. Bauzemont doesn’t have much, but it does happen to have a château, built in 1740, that managed to survive the First and Second World Wars, not to mention the Franco-Prussian War and, for good measure, the French Revolution. Like most châteaux, it’s handsome and stately and has seen better days. The woman who owns it doesn’t care to live in it; her tenant, a genial countryman named Damien, welcomed me into the house and, after pointing out this and that, led me up a narrow, precarious old stairway to a rectangular chamber above the kitchen that had once been used to store grain. In late February and early March of 1918, it had been used to store a few soldiers from the Rainbow Division.
It’s a small chamber, maybe twenty feet by eight; I doubt they did much more than sleep there. But they did, I happen to know, do a little bit more there, because the walls are still decorated with their pencil drawings. They drew soldiers like themselves, some decent likenesses, some caricatures, in campaign hats, soft caps, uniforms and fatigues. They drew big guns and shells and explosions. They drew a waitress carrying a tray of drinks, and one sketch that could be a howitzer on wheels but is more likely something obscene.
And they wrote their names: L. P. Reed. Goofer O’Hare. Joseph Tineo, Brooklyn, N.Y. Ralph O’Donnell, “The Panama Kid.”
None of them had seen action yet, but they knew they were about to. And though they were at that moment very close to Bathelémont, and almost certainly knew the names James Gresham and Thomas Enright and Merle Hay, they also knew that other doughboys had been killed there, too, within days of those first three, and that no one knew their names anymore. No French general had delivered an impassioned eulogy over thei
r graves; no one had commissioned a monument to them. Even having a renowned poet in your division, as these men had, was not enough to ward off the almost certain oblivion that would consume your name if you were unfortunate enough to die on the field of battle thousands of miles from home. Yes, Joyce Kilmer wrote a poem to the twenty men killed in that dugout at Rouge Bouquet on March 7, 1918; but if you want to know their names, you’re going to have to dig through archives as diligently as Major Donovan’s men dug through the dirt that day. In war, everyone knows, names are even more easily lost than lives.
So L. P. Reed, and Goofer O’Hare, and Joseph Tineo from Brooklyn, N.Y., and Ralph O’Donnell, the Panama Kid, wrote theirs on a wall in Bauzemont.
At the same time, a couple hundred miles to the west, another division of Americans, facing the same prospect, did even more than that.
Chapter Four
From the Bowels of the Earth
I.
As I lowered myself, cold metal rung by cold metal rung, some thirty feet onto the floor of a subterranean chalk mine, clenching an old plastic flashlight between my teeth, I did not give much thought to two long-dead French princesses. I very much doubt that the men of the American 26th Division, hunkering down in this same mine in February and March of 1918, did, either. But we were all, in a way, connected.
In the mid-eighteenth century, those two princesses, Marie Adélaïde and Victoire, daughters of France’s Louis XV, developed an attachment to Adélaïde’s Lady of Honor, Françoise de Châlus, who also happened to be one of the king’s mistresses. This was a position of even greater prestige than being the Lady of Honor to a princess, and eventually Françoise landed a well-fixed husband, the Comte de Narbonne-Lara, and moved away to his château in Picardy, about ninety miles north and east of Paris. Adélaïde and Victoire, who also bore the title “Lady of France,” didn’t see any reason why this should end their friendship, and neither did the comtesse, who extended to them an invitation to visit whenever and as often as they liked. The only problem was that the road they had to travel to get there, which ran along a fifty-mile ridge, was in pretty poor shape; the princesses must have said something about how hard those first few trips were because at some point the comte, being a gentleman, went to the trouble and expense of having the road resurfaced for them. Soon they started making more frequent visits, and the road they traveled became known as the Chemin des Dames—the Ladies’ Way. It exists to this day, though it now bears the somewhat less colorful appellation D18.
Many people in France know the story of Louis XV’s daughters and his former mistress. But when they think of the Chemin des Dames, what comes to mind first is probably not princesses and gilt carriages, but soldiers and machine guns. In 1917, just as the United States entered the war, the French were waging an offensive at the Chemin des Dames that went so badly it nearly knocked them out of it. It would permanently alter the French Army’s approach to that war; and for generations since, the term “Chemin des Dames” has been associated not with the former grandeur of France, but with the senseless slaughter that brought it, and the rest of the world, into the Modern Age.
A few months after that horrific battle ended, the 26th Division—known as the Yankee Division, or YD, because it was composed entirely of National Guard troops from the six New England states—was sent to the Chemin des Dames to train. Though it was, by then, relatively quiet on that ridge, the men of the YD would have known what had taken place there only recently. They would have seen the graves of the dead, and the faces of the living. They would have heard the stories. They would have understood that the war songs they’d heard back home—“Over There,” and “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France,” and “We’re All Going Calling on the Kaiser,” and “Wee Wee Marie, Will You Do Zis for Me?”—had nothing to do with what was actually happening at the front. And they would have, I am sure, been afraid.
None of that made them particularly special among the troops of the American Expeditionary Forces. But the way they exorcised that fear did. And they couldn’t have done so anywhere at the front except for the Chemin des Dames, where the topography—and the geology—made it possible.
* * *
The Germans hadn’t thoroughly scouted and charted just Lorraine before the first shots were fired. They’d gone all the way to the English Channel, and back again; knew exactly what they wanted, had their targets prioritized. And the Chemin des Dames was high on their list. Obtaining it, they knew, would enable the Germans to sever essential French rail lines in Picardy and disrupt vital inland waterways like the Aisne River. They also knew that it was riddled with enormous centuries-old chalk mines that would offer ample shelter to their troops during enemy bombardments, making the ridge—which already offered them the considerable advantage of elevation—easy to defend, once they took it. In addition to being very fine spies and surveyors, the Germans were students of history; they knew that Napoleon had used the Chemin des Dames very effectively against the Prussians a century earlier. Why the French left it so lightly defended in 1914 remains a mystery.
The Germans grabbed a part of the ridge after their defeat at the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914, then used it to stop the advance of the Allied armies that had been pursuing them. The French fought fiercely to protect the rest, but the Germans, having gotten there first, had an advantage, and by November they had taken the whole thing. They used it as effectively as Napoleon had; vexed the French terribly. The French became obsessed with taking it back, and for the next two years staged lightning-strike attacks, known as coups de main, all along the ridge. They killed a lot of Germans. But the Germans killed a lot of more of them, and, more importantly, held their ground.
In December 1916, as the ten-month Battle of Verdun was winding down, concluding a year of unprecedented bloodletting, the French decided to make a change, replacing the extremely popular Généralissime Joseph “Papa” Joffre with General Robert Nivelle. Many questioned the appointment: Nivelle, who had actually been subordinate to General Philippe Pétain at Verdun, was known less for tactical brilliance than for originating the rallying cry “They shall not pass!” Whatever others may have been muttering about him, Nivelle was exceedingly confident and even more ambitious. And he had a plan.
Nivelle believed that Verdun had broken the Germans, and said he intended to knock them out of the war in 1917 by launching a great offensive, spearheaded at the Chemin des Dames, that would succeed magnificently. Better still, he assured everyone, it wouldn’t even cost all that many casualties; the Germans, facing such a French force, would surely break and run for their lives.
The muttering grew louder, spread wider: Nivelle’s assessment of the enemy was badly mistaken, his plan folly. The Germans, people warned, held much better ground, had constructed formidable defenses. Nivelle ignored them. Others proposed different schemes. Nivelle overruled them. His plan was the one. It became known as the Nivelle Offensive.
He soon came to regret that.
After a few false starts, the offensive was launched on April 16, 1917. Nivelle had predicted a breakthrough that first day. It didn’t happen. Instead, his troops took many times the number of casualties he had projected for the entire offensive. The Germans, remembering why they had gone to so much trouble to take this high ground in the first place, used it to devastating effect. In the week that followed, French troops did advance their lines in places, and managed to capture a good number of German soldiers and weaponry, but their casualty figures soared in the process. A year or two earlier this might not have seemed disastrous, but the French Army, it turned out, had also been broken by Verdun, at least to a much greater extent than its commanders had understood. By the end of April, the offensive had stalled. On May 3, Nivelle, attempting to revive it, ordered his 2nd Division to attack; they refused. Mutiny quickly spread among the troops. Thousands deserted. The offensive was suspended. Nivelle was removed from command and sent to North Af
rica. Pétain, appointed to replace him, had to deal with rebelling French troops before he could focus on the Germans. “It wasn’t that they were unwilling to fight, and even to die,” one French historian explained to me. “They were. But they did not want to be just sent to their deaths for no reason.”
To his credit, Pétain recognized this. He also recognized that he couldn’t very well execute every poilu involved in the mutiny; if he did, he wouldn’t have enough left to fight the war. Still, something had to be done to restore discipline. Pétain chose to court-martial a small percentage of the mutineers, and hope that their example—along with the promises of more leave from the front and a suspension of greater offensives until the American Expeditionary Forces joined the fight—would convince his soldiers to stay in their ranks and refrain from disrupting the war effort further.
It worked. But for the rest of the war—and well beyond—the words “Chemin des Dames” would be inextricable from the awful, painful memories of the slaughter of the Nivelle Offensive, and of the thousands of courts-martial and hundreds of death sentences that followed in its wake.
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