Back Over There

by RICHARD RUBIN

  As badly as things went that spring, the French did manage to take, and hold, some bits and pieces of that dreaded ridge. And they would continue to do so throughout the rest of the year. By winter, things had quieted down there enough that their high command thought it might be a good place to train some newly arrived American troops. Besides, they needed a lot of fresh bodies to fill in for the men the French had lost there. Perhaps that’s why they selected for the assignment the only complete American division in France at that point, National Guard troops from New England whose commanding officer had wanted to get into the fight so badly that five months earlier, tired of waiting for his own high command to give him the go-ahead, he had his entire division shipped over to France without orders.

  * * *

  His name was Clarence Ransom Edwards; a native of Cleveland, he’d gone to West Point, graduated last in his class, and fought in the Philippines before serving stints out west and along the Mexican border. Before all that, though, back in 1898, Edwards’s hopes of fighting in the Spanish-American War had been dashed when Spain sued for peace before he and his unit could arrange a ride to Cuba. Perhaps that explains why, nineteen years later, he decided to just go ahead and ship his division across the Atlantic Ocean as soon as he deemed them ready. That he somehow managed to get all twenty-five thousand of them—plus all their arms, equipment and horses—sent all the way to France without any of his superiors finding out has to be one of the most remarkable logistical achievements of the war. To this day, it’s not clear exactly how he did it.

  The fact that the YD was the first complete American infantry division in France gave them, in addition to a tremendous sense of pride, a certain status with the French. In greeting some of the New England troops as they disembarked from a transport, France’s General Louis de Maud’huy, who commanded the sector, “said he already regarded them as thoroughbreds, eager to gallop where his own poilus were content to trot and to conserve their energies.” Clearly, the French had a lot of respect for these doughboys. Except they didn’t refer to soldiers of the AEF as “doughboys,” a term they had difficulty pronouncing correctly; they called them “Sammies.” You’ll still hear them called that in France.

  General de Maud’huy’s colorful remark was duly recorded by Frank Sibley, a reporter for The Boston Globe who’d embedded himself with the YD. In his 1919 memoir, With the Yankee Division in France, Sibley recounted that in those early months, the French did more than just train the Sammies. “The Americans needed equipment, too, and the French furnished it,” he recalled. “They did everything for us; when some of our rolling kitchens failed to turn up, they fed our men, and they waited on us in every way. Their officers were courteous as only French officers can be, patient with our mistakes—and if they were amused by some of our ways, they concealed it from us.”

  It’s likely the French, just a year after the slaughter of Verdun and a few months after the catastrophe at the Chemin des Dames, were more confused than amused by some of the Americans’ behavior, perhaps most of all by their seeming eagerness to get into battle. As Sibley wrote: “The Yankees rolled out of their trains, got their wagons on the road, and swung out through Soissons, singing. The boys were all excited; at last they were at the front, and the visible signs were all about them.” Their ebullient behavior stood in stark contrast to their grim surroundings:

  In the villages they passed every house was a ruin. Every wood was a dump for ammunition or barbed wire or endless miles of narrow-gauge railroad track, the lengths neatly corded up like so much lumber. Every road was one long procession of army transport of every sort, with the French staff cars whizzing in and out of the columns. On the roadsides were machine gun pill-boxes; trenches led off here and there, and piled stone barricades completed the assurance that not so very long ago there had been close-up fighting on this very ground.

  The French led the YD to a section of the Chemin des Dames that they had taken from the Germans only a few months earlier. We’ll never know just how much this doughboy or that knew about what had happened in that area the previous spring, but at the beginning—according to Sibley, at least—no one showed any trepidation about being there. Quite the opposite, actually. “There was something very impressive in the way the Yankees went into sector,” he recalled. “They were so excited, so interested, so happy over it,—and so utterly unconcerned about the danger. If a plane buzzed overhead, every man gazed as long as it could be seen. At each distant explosion of gun or shell, the whole column remarked ‘Powie! There’s one!’ And they searched the horizon for the smoke puff.” As Sibley described it, they were nothing less than exhilarated. “The men carried the full packs, which weighed anywhere from seventy to ninety pounds,” he wrote. “They had a ten-mile march to make, practically all of it after dark . . . They took it singing. The roads were muddy with a cream-colored paste, thick over broken stone—hard marching.” I’ve already described what the mud is like Over There; it inspires some strong reactions, but breaking into song isn’t one of them.

  They arrived after dark, and were warned, for their own safety, to stay put. They did. But the next morning, having survived that first night, Sibley reported, “the boys swarmed up on to the plateau to have a look around.” Curiosity, it seems, proved more powerful than caution, and there was a lot to see. “The fields on the hilltops were crisscrossed with old trenches and littered with all sorts of German relics,” Sibley wrote, and here I took particular notice:

  Hasty orders were immediately sent out against touching any of these relics, especially shells that seemed to be unexploded. The German trick of baiting explosive traps with attractive souvenirs was explained, and the extreme whimsicality of duds—as unexploded shells are called. The soldiers were very obedient, but very ingenious. I found one of them coiling up a length of old field telephone wire—about a hundred feet of it. He made a noose in one end, dropped it round a helmet which he wanted, unrolled his line, and pulled from the other end. When the helmet came along with no disastrous results he went back and picked it up, utterly charmed because it had a bullet hole in it and stains inside that might have been Boche blood.

  Soon, though, the Yankee Division had to abandon their quest for souvenirs and get down to work. At 3:45 p.m. on February 5, 1918, Battery A of the 101st Field Artillery, stationed near the village of Vailly on the Chemin des Dames, fired the YD’s first shot of the war. (Apparently, knowing that the AEF’s first shot had already been fired several months earlier, they didn’t feel the need to wake up early for theirs.) Four nights later, Robert Bayard of Winthrop, Massachusetts, on post in a shell hole, heard a sound in No Man’s Land and, despite orders to the contrary, went out to investigate. “He probably was eager to get the first Boche,” Sibley speculated. Instead, he got lost and wandered back to a different point in his line, failed to respond to calls to identify himself, and was shot in the leg by an American machine gun; other doughboys pulled him back into their trench and applied a tourniquet, but he bled to death, anyway. And thus, Sibley tells us, “the first front-line casualty came from an American, not a German bullet. It was due to American enterprise, American lack of caution, lack of discipline and over-confidence.” But that was why the division was here: not to launch an offensive, but to learn what it was like to hold a position near the enemy’s. Bayard’s death, it turned out, was an important part of that education.

  He was buried two days later, in a small cemetery outside Vailly where the French had already buried many poilus. “At the far end,” Sibley observed, “two whole rows of graves had been dug and left open; these were for the use of the Americans.” It was, he recalled, a bright but cold morning. Planes flew overhead—not in salute to the fallen, but in search of the enemy. The affair was a great deal less ceremonious than the service for Gresham, Hay and Enright had been. “An armed escort was sent by the boy’s company, but there were no blank cartridges with which to fire a parting salute,” Sibley wrote
. “There was not even a coffin; the soldier was buried in his blanket. A bottle containing his name and the date of his death was buried with him, and a duplicate was placed on top of his grave.” That was it. Five days later, Private Ralph Spaulding of the 103rd Regiment became the first soldier of the YD to be killed by the enemy; a native of Madison, Maine, he was struck down by shrapnel from a German shell.

  Not coincidentally, it was around this time, when the men of the YD were first starting to confront the dangers in their “quiet” sector, that they began looking for shelter, and quickly discovered the chalk mines that the Germans had occupied, and used so well, until just months earlier. Sibley referred to them in his memoir as “the wonderful French quarries.” “They were not,” he explained, “great open pits, like our quarries at home. They were more like elaborate mines, with broad tunnels. In almost any one of them a battalion could be comfortably housed; in one or two of the largest there was room for a regiment or more. They bore names like Montparnasse, the Pantheon, Montmirail, or Carriere du Sourd. They were all lighted by electricity; some had their own water supply; all were fitted up with floored and ceiled rooms.”

  They could thank the Germans for those amenities—and for giving them a good idea of how to pass the time down there while warding off what must have been the ever-encroaching fear of oblivion.

  * * *

  In 1951, as the Cold War was heating up, the United States acquired an old abandoned air base outside the French city of Laon, about twelve miles north of Vailly, and stationed bombers there. For the next fifteen years, the U.S. Air Force had a large presence in Laon; certain neighborhoods were populated entirely by airmen. One of them, perhaps a son of a YD veteran, befriended a local French veteran of the recent war in Algeria named Claude Chauwin, and at some point told him about some underground mines in the area where there was a lot of American graffiti from the First World War. Claude was intrigued; the American took him to some of the mines and showed him. When the base closed, in 1967, Claude continued exploring them on his own, and brought along his teenaged son, Gilles. A half century later, Gilles continues to be fascinated by them.

  While most people in France, or so it seems to me, know a fair bit about la Grande Guerre, the war—even just the Western Front—was, as I’ve said before, so vast, and had so many facets, that the people who dig the deepest into its history often direct all of their considerable attentions to one narrow, knowable area. Gilles Chauwin is one of those people, and his area is the Chemin des Dames. He has visited the chalk mines where the men of the YD took shelter in 1918 on innumerable occasions; and yet, every time he goes down into them, he finds something new. Perhaps it’s not really knowable after all.

  No one’s ever been able to tell me for sure how many mines soldiers—French, German, and American—occupied at one time or another. Gilles knows of three with American graffiti. All are on private property. One of them, he tells me, has become unsafe. He’s happy to show people the other two, though typically they only get to visit one, outside the little village of Braye-en-Laonnois.

  I had been referred to Gilles by several people, including the superintendent of the nearest American cemetery, about an hour away. We’d e-mailed back and forth in French, and eventually decided upon a date and time to go exploring. He said he’d pick me up at Braye’s mairie, which turned out to be closed, despite it being a weekday. I sat on its front steps and waited; never saw or heard another human being, at least not until Gilles pulled up and got out of his car. He was wearing a fleece jacket with an American flag sewn on one sleeve and a patch from the DEA’s El Paso bureau sewn on the other. It was hard to tell how old he was—sixties?—but he looked rugged; perhaps it was the hand-rolled cigarettes he smoked. Maybe six feet tall, broad shoulders, close-cropped hair, little glasses, determined gaze. He greeted me by name and shook my hand enthusiastically, but didn’t say much, at least not at first, choosing instead to communicate in short, sharp gestures, the first of which was to beckon me to follow him to his car. Eventually, I figured out that he was self-conscious about his English, which wasn’t any better than my French.

  We drove a mile or so out of the village and parked just off the road, near the start of a dirt path. Gilles grabbed a large pack from his backseat, slung it over his shoulder, and, wordlessly beckoning me to follow, started walking. The path was narrow, surrounded by waist-high grass; it wound this way and that up a very slight rise, until we rounded a bend and I spotted what looked like the entrance to an old cemetery vault that was built into a hillside. As we got closer, I could see it was quite elaborate: Grass grew atop scores of petrified cement sacks, which sat atop a broad corrugated metal half-pipe—the kind the Germans brought to France by the thousands in 1914—which in turn sat atop a base of stone and mortar with a portal in the middle. In front of all of it was a locked gate, a thick wooden frame fitted with iron bars and, in the middle, a metal grille festooned with ornamental squares in geometric patterns. The whole thing looked out of place, as if Frank Lloyd Wright had built a fallout shelter in the middle of nowhere. But it was sturdy—and, as Gilles later explained, sadly, necessary: Before it was built, souvenir hunters who knew about the mine plundered it, using saws to cut out some of the irreplaceable artwork and take it home. If you ask him, Gilles can tell you what used to be in this now-effaced spot or that. But he’d rather not think about it.

  Gilles unlocked the gate, stepped inside a little chamber, and lay down on his belly on the platform. Moving closer, I saw that he had extended one of his arms through a circular metal grate on the floor of the platform. He turned his head to the side—hand-rolled cigarette still clasped in his lips—and groped around for a couple of minutes, until his eyes widened momentarily and I heard a click. He pulled his arm out, got to his feet, brushed himself off, bent over again, and opened the grate. Reaching into his pack, he pulled out a headlamp for himself and handed me a large flashlight—the old kind, made of molded plastic and rubber, that has a built-in handle and runs off a single battery the size of a brick. Then he sat back down on the floor, dropped his legs into the hole, and slowly eased his hands and feet onto the sides and rungs of a black metal ladder that rose only as high as the lip of the platform. In several motions he managed to turn himself around so he was facing the rungs, then lowered himself one at a time. When he reached the next platform, about fifteen feet down, he beckoned for me to follow. I lowered myself to the floor, dropped my legs into the hole, and took a minute to figure out exactly how I was going to do this; then I stuck the flashlight in my teeth and got to it, never once thinking about Adélaïde and Victoire.

  Attached to that second platform was another fifteen-foot ladder for us to climb down, slowly. The bottom was soft, dirt; a cloud of something rose up as I hopped off the last rung onto the ground. Two cones of light—Gilles’s small and bright, mine diffuse and somewhat dimmer—revealed a deep cavern. Its walls, solid, hard, were white here, gray there, gray and white elsewhere. Its ceilings were low; after I’d taken a half-dozen steps, I could no longer stand up straight. When I climbed back out, five hours later, my hair was white with chalk. There was no natural source of light. I wasn’t sure where the oxygen was coming from. For six weeks in the winter of 1918, hundreds of men from Massachusetts and Connecticut lived here.

  And that was nothing: For three years before that, hundreds of German soldiers—maybe more—rotated through the Froidmont carrière, or Cold Mountain quarry. Resting on the dirt near the bottom of the second ladder were some of the things they’d left behind: brown wine bottles, green beer bottles, empty food tins, bayonets, bullet clips, helmets, a telephone receiver, all of which looked like they’d spent a century underground. The ceiling was studded here and there with porcelain electrical insulators and bits of wire. The Germans electrified these quarries, as they did just about any place they spent much time. They dug ventilation shafts; ran telephone line in. As we moved around, I spotted remnants of bunks
and stoves. Who, you may think, would want to spend that kind of time in a sunless chalk quarry three stories beneath the earth? And then you remember what was happening up on the surface in 1914, and 1915 and 1916 and especially 1917, and it doesn’t seem so bad down here at all. Especially if you could find creative ways to pass the time. They did.

  You don’t have to walk very far into the mine to see their work. The Germans were meticulous, had beautiful handwriting in that old, Gothic style. As you read their names—Franz Göttgens, Josef Tübsdorf, Fritz Hase, Valentin Zajac, Hans Haude—you can picture them being taught to render such graceful script one letter at a time by a stern schoolmaster like the one in All Quiet on the Western Front. They painstakingly chiseled away at the walls to create flat surfaces, rectangles and squares as perfect as one can make without proper tools, then wrote on them in pen or pencil. They drew German flags; carved Prussian crosses, the elaborate wartime ones with a crown up top, the date 1914 down below, and a large W in the middle, for Kaiser Wilhelm. Next to one of these, someone wrote, in big block letters and blue ink that has since faded to purple: ave caesar. morituri te salutant. Hail Caesar. We who are about to die salute you.

  They took care to record their names and ranks: Gefreiter Loth. Jäger Jammasch. Landsturmmann Schmitz. Unteroffizier Runkel. Musketier Cohn. Cohn wrote his name and the dates 1915–1917 under a niche he carved out to hold candles, the chalk in and around it blackened by a lot of smoke. He was down here a good long while. So were a unit of Krankenträger—stretcher-bearers—who, busy as they must have been, still found the time to carve an impressive memorial plaque for their fallen, dated 1914–1915, with an appendix for 1916. Throughout the Western Front, Krankenträger had some of the highest casualty rates of any units.

  Sometimes they eulogized a fallen Kamerad with a bit of romantic verse; memorializing one Fritz Jaencke, someone inked: