May all the world speak badly of you,
just keep your conscience clean,
so God will always stay with you.
You’ll find popular expressions of the day on the walls, too, like Gott mit uns, God is with us, and Gott strafe England, May God punish England. The latter was a line from a patriotic song, “Hassgesang gegen England,” or “Hate Song Against England”; gott mit uns was stamped on millions of belt buckles issued to German soldiers. They were the most cherished souvenir a doughboy could bring home.
As intriguing and artistic as much of their graffiti is, though, the Germans also stenciled a lot of signs and arrows on the chalk, directing you to this unit or that. A practical measure; those mines are labyrinthine, passages departing from passages departing from passages, every which way. But for the markings on the wall, you might never find your way back out. When it came time to leave that day, Gilles and I got lost for a good twenty minutes, and he’d already been down there hundreds of times. But I was too tired and exhilarated to feel scared; and if there was fear in his expression, it was too subtle for my flashlight to detect.
* * *
Those New England doughboys may, as Frank Sibley wrote, have been excited to arrive at the Chemin des Dames, but by the time they found their way down into the mines, a week or so later, they had seen enough of the enemy at work that none of them, I suspect, were in any rush to get back up top. As Captain Daniel W. Strickland of the YD’s 102nd Infantry described the local landscape in his 1930 history, Connecticut Fights:
If one were to take several thousand cups of various sizes and set them rim to rim as closely as they could be packed, some conception might be had of the nature of the terrain. Great craters, many large enough for the cellar of a house, were partly filled with slimy water covered with a green scum. An occasional battered tree raised its forlorn scarecrow stump. The rusty entanglements hung about twisted and broken stakes, while off toward the front the ominous grey hills loomed, hiding the enemy . . . The place resounded with working parties, ration parties and patrols, cursing their way over this hellish plateau. Road repairs, wire repairs, the whine of gas shells, and sometimes the roar of an “ash can” or a “trolley car,” as the men came to call the big shells, made the area anything but quiet.
And yet, as Strickland wrote, “as one surveyed this scene of destruction, where not a living thing could be seen when a barrage was passing over, he would little suspect that within a few minutes ten thousand men could burst forth from the bowels of the earth.”
Perhaps the sights of the “hellish plateau” colored Strickland’s impressions of what lay below. He refers to the mines as “wonderful, cozy dugouts,” says they were “like children’s ideas of robbers’ caves, with all the comfort a soldier could want.” The caverns, as he calls them, “were long, wide, winding tunnels, and broad well lighted chambers hewn out of the soft stone, where the light and shadow effect of thousands of soldiers coming and going back and forth with glimmering candles and electric torches reminded one of the tales from Arabian Nights. Here and there the cigarettes glowed from shadowy corners or bunks, like fire flies on a summer night.”
I thought about that as I followed Gilles deeper into the mine, the embers of his cigarette almost too small and dim to look like what they were, much less fireflies. Strickland’s description haunted me as we slowly made our way forward, down this deeply dark passage or that; I felt as if I were exploring a long-abandoned boarded-up mansion and imagining the galas that its ballroom had once hosted. I tried to picture the electric bulbs hanging overhead, the telephone line strung through hooks along the ceiling. I summoned bunks in this alcove; a galley stove over there. And everywhere, men, in small groups, pairs, alone. Young Americans, thousands of miles from homes they’d never left before, sheltering deep underground, having seen that hellish plateau, heard the ash cans and trolley cars come screaming in. A hundred years ago. Nothing left of them now.
Except.
It was as if a baton were being handed off: At one point we passed a finely drawn hand, forefinger pointing to the left, the word Zug (train) rendered in handsome Teutonic lettering; and then, a few paces beyond, I looked up at the ceiling and saw, written in black inside a circle, four indelicately crafted letters.
Hell.
Welcome to the American section.
I don’t know why the Americans chose to shelter in this particular area of the mine, but it certainly seemed like hell to me, at least at first: Aside from that word, and a skull and the number 18 on the ceiling a few paces on, and a charred block of wood with a couple of porcelain electrical insulators attached, and an empty bottle, it was desolate. Actually, even with those things it was pretty desolate in there. But then, after a few minutes, I cast my light on a section of wall, and things suddenly changed from ghost town to high school.
Unlike most of what I had walked past to get there—some of which still bore two-hundred-year-old pick marks—it was flat, and smooth; someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it that way. Whether it was the Americans, or the Germans, or French miners long before either, the Yankee Division took full advantage of it. There were monograms, Greek letters (Sigma Delta; Mu Phi Kappa), and names: Marsh. Donovan. Robinson. R. B. Kincaid. A bas-relief plaque identified this wall as the province of Company A, 101st Machine Gun Battalion. The most striking element was a skull, colored deep red with bright blue eyes, the words Boche Kultur carved into its forehead. German Civilization. Always used ironically.
It continued on an even larger section around the corner: DWC. JMF. ORL. Galpin. T. Coady. E. K. O’Neil. B. W. Townsend. Ned Perry. Fred J. Brophy. Someone carved a large rendering of the Knights of Columbus shield; someone else, a Masonic compass.
We walked further. There were names everywhere: George Ross. Alfred Swanson. L. V. Frank. P. W. Schofield. Emmet Guaros. Charles Sabo. Ray Connor. Julius Zawadsky. M. Erickson. W. Winniki. Arnold G. Cox. T. J. Fay. F. A. Woop. Albert C. Poulin. Nicholas Little. G. E. Johnson. Otto Contardi. Winfield Dowd. E. T. Greene. H. W. Judd. R. L. Dudley. John Sweeney. Joseph R. Gemski. Louis Booth. Oscar W. Johnson. Ed Stearns. Bob Jones. Many included some association: Company F, 101st U.S. Infantry. Company K, 102nd Infantry U.S.A. The Plumber’s Association. Company C, 102nd Machine Gun Battalion. The International Order of Odd Fellows. 102nd Sanitary Detachment. The YMCA. Company C, 101st Field Battalion, Signal Corps. The Knights of Columbus. The Crack Bomb’n’ Team of the Second Section, Company I. The Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Bucket of Blood. Compass #9, Wallingford, Conn.
From time to time Gilles would lean in so close that the tip of his cigarette would just about brush against the wall. He haltingly sounded out American names—Eh-vahns, Doe-noe-vahn, Cuur-teess—and beckoned me to correct his pronunciation. Some he said without hesitation; he seemed to regard them as old friends. He was familiar with Sibley’s account, would have known that after a short while at the Chemin des Dames, the men’s initial excitement about being at the front faded. After a few weeks there, Sibley wrote, “the physical condition of the men was bad. They had been run down by the long exposure, the weather [it was still winter, after all], and the unremitting labor. Equipment was short; underclothes, shoes, uniforms, and blankets were lacking in proper quantities.” Down here, at least the weather and exposure weren’t bad, and they probably got to rest more than they worked, which might explain their creative energy. They drew in pen: German soldiers. Poilus. Doughboys. Uncle Sam. Someone inked a pretty fine likeness of Buffalo Bill; perhaps he had seen Cody’s Wild West Show in New England as a child. Several drew Indian chiefs. “Do you know of the Passamaquoddy?” Gilles asked me, and I was startled to hear the name of that old Maine tribe spoken in a French accent in a French sentence. “A colonel,” he said, “used several of them for bodyguards.” I have never been able to confirm that, but Gilles must have gotten it somewhere; it’s not as if everyone in France has hear
d of the Passamaquoddy.
The truly impressive stuff, though, is carved out of the chalk walls. It took time; they chose their subjects with care. Crosses. Celtic crosses. Eagles and shields. Croix de Guerre. Shamrocks. Crossed swords. Corporal J. P. Knox, Co. E, 101st U.S. Infantry, etched a nice harp, then colored in the strings and frame with blue ink. Corporal Joseph Papallo, Co. I, 102nd U.S. Infantry, was apparently so proud of the horse head he carved that he included his home address: Woodland St., Meriden, Conn. Someone a bit more practical-minded gouged a good-sized rectangular niche out of the wall at eye level and wrote in ink above: 4th Platoon Mail. A finely detailed scale rendition of the Bunker Hill monument; a stately battleship; a meerschaum pipe, the smoke from which contains a lady’s silhouette. On a large, low section of fairly flat wall someone created an arresting tableau: a naked maiden—France—chained to a post and being menaced from behind by a Prussian while, in front, an American flag charges in to save the day. And more crosses. A lot of crosses.
There is some French graffiti scattered here and there, too, mostly names and units, although there is a niche with a carving of Saint Laurent holding the gridiron upon which he was cooked, and an inked tableau depicting a notorious incident from 1902 that stemmed from a love triangle involving a Parisian prostitute and two leaders of the street gang the Apaches, which did not end well for any of them. And toward the back of one alcove where the ground was covered by a mound of white rubble several feet high, I spotted, drawn meticulously in black ink upon a flat surface, a square frame containing two cross-shaped and sweating candles, two skulls and crossbones, and a pair of crossed miner’s picks. They looked as dark and bold as the day they were drawn; written underneath, in beautiful script:
In Memory of Laurent Mullepa
and François Mullepa, his son
crushed in this place
the 11th of the month of May 1838
Pray for their souls
A cave-in, no doubt; for all I know, Mullepa père and fils might still lie together beneath that chalky pile. I looked at Gilles. He nodded, a piece of ash tumbling from his cigarette, then stoically turned away.
* * *
Up top, it no longer looks like a thousand cups of various sizes set rim to rim; in the villages, every house is no longer a ruin. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the place looks like it did when Adélaïde and Victoire went to visit the comtesse, but the terrain has been rehabilitated to a great extent: it can be difficult, in passing, to tell which cragginess is a result of nature and which is a result of 75- or 77-millimeter shells. One thing you can tell, however, is that the Germans didn’t have it so easy up on the Chemin des Dames, either: They built more than a half-dozen cemeteries in the area, none of them small. Gilles told me that during the war they also built monuments to their fallen in every village they occupied on the ridge. The French, he added, destroyed them all in 1923.
After that first visit, Gilles and I stayed in touch, e-mailing in French; he shared photos taken in the vicinity of the Chemin des Dames during the war, asked about my work and when I might return to the area, sent me e-cards on July 4, Thanksgiving, Christmas. When I did return, a year later, he invited me to his house in Laon, where he introduced me to his wife, made a pot of tea for all of us to share, showed me his library of American World War I books, of which he was very proud. After we visited for a couple of hours there, he took me to the only other accessible mine with graffiti from the Yankee Division, outside the village of Nanteuil-la-Fosse. This one has no iron door or locked grate; the only thing protecting it from vandals is that you have to know where it is.
This mine was perhaps not as extensive at the one outside Braye, but it was no less labyrinthine; once again, Gilles and I got lost. He was more relaxed this time, perhaps because we knew each other better, or maybe just because he hadn’t had to lie on his belly fiddling with an unseen lock and then descend two iron ladders just to get here. We walked right in. The Germans had, too: Throughout the mine the walls were studded with iron rings, evidence that they had even brought their horses in with them. In February and March of 1918, Sammies from the 103rd Infantry Regiment took shelter here; they were Maine National Guard, and apparently no more reticent than the Connecticut and Massachusetts men when it came to leaving their mark. They carved eagles and horses and Masonic compasses, drew crosses and Indian chiefs and themselves. Someone carved a splendid four-masted schooner in full sail; someone else rendered in bas-relief an excellent profile of President Woodrow Wilson—a tribute, I imagine, to the man who had sent them there. Mostly, though, they left their names.
II.
Those names: They raised a lot of questions. I could not look at them, study and photograph and strain to decipher them, without wanting, almost needing, to know who they were and how they’d fared in the war, and afterward; if there had been an afterward. And why some men chose to write their names alone on some isolated patch of wall while others chose to group a half dozen or more together, like:
G Co. 101st Inf
Roll of Honour
Corp. John B. Shanahan
Priv. J. Joseph Mara
Priv. John J. Shaughnessy
Priv. Joseph Donahue
Priv. John V. Carney
Priv. Albert Flagg
Priv. Thos. F. O’Halloran
The Midnight Squad
Some inked their names both alone and with others, like Corporal Shanahan of the Midnight Squad, who claimed another spot on a nearby wall and drew a cross and a hand pointing to a pierced and radiant heart, and wrote:
Merciful Heart
of
Jesus
Have Mercy
on Us
Corporal Shanahan, who’d been born in Ireland and was living in Worcester when he enlisted, was 25 years old when he inked his plea to the Merciful Heart of Jesus, and apparently made it through the rest of the war intact, at least physically; he was promoted to sergeant that June, cited in General Orders at the end of August for meritorious service in the capture of a number of villages that summer, and cited in another GO dispatch in October for going on “a particularly dangerous raid.” He is, in other words, proof that one can be simultaneously frightened and brave.
I know all this about him because General Leonid Kondratiuk of the Massachusetts National Guard sent me a scan of Joseph Shanahan’s service record, which had been typed shortly after the war on two sides of an index card. The 102nd Infantry Regiment’s complete and annotated roster was published in 1930 in Captain Strickland’s Connecticut Fights; the 103rd, from Maine, published its records in two different books. But the Massachusetts regiment has never published theirs anywhere, nor even compiled it; I had to send General Kondratiuk a list of more than a hundred names—many partial, some just initials—and hope for the best. He and Keith Vezeau, his archivist, managed to identify most of them. When you finally have that much information in your possession, you come to realize that these things on the wall aren’t merely inscriptions; they’re stories.
And some are yarns, like this one, in blue ink that has faded to a nice purple, that reads:
In Memory
of
The Details
of Company G, 101st INF
Joe Dunn
Jim Dunn
Billy Smith
Ch. Talbot
Tms. O’Connor
Bill Sweeney
May they rest
in Peace
All six of those men were alive and well when one of them—my guess would be Joe Dunn, since his name comes first—inked that cheeky little epitaph. Perhaps he thought it might ward off such a fate in reality. Did it work? Well, several of them were later wounded in action. Sweeney was listed as being “slightly” wounded on June 6, 1918; O’Connor was also wounded, on July 22—again, the official record says “sligh
tly,” though he spent the next three months in the hospital and never returned to the front again, instead being assigned to guard German prisoners of war. Billy Smith was gassed on May 29 and spent more than six months in the hospital; the 1920 census shows him, at age 29, living with his parents in Worcester, and not working. So, no, it didn’t exactly keep them safe. Still, only one of the six actually died in the war—Joe Dunn himself, of “broncho pneumonia” (perhaps a result of being gassed) on October 28, 1918.
Gilles beckoned me over to a nearby section of wall and pointed to another ink inscription:
Corp. Earle Madeley
Co. I 102nd U.S. Inf.
AEF Mar 6 1918
Age 20 years
Years earlier, he told me, he’d been walking one day through the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, outside the village of Belleau, and spotted that name on a stone: Plot B, Row 6, Grave 51. He took a picture of the marker and later tacked it up on the wall above that piece of graffiti; when he pointed it out to me, he touched its ink tenderly.
On another occasion, on a different wall, Corporal Madeley had written his name alongside a friend’s, each in their own hand. They must have been close; there’s just the two of them together there, the lettering modest:
Corp. Earle Madeley
Seg. J. Sokowich
Co. I 102 U.S. Inf.
Corporal Madeley, a native of Plainville, Connecticut, is listed in the official roster as DW—died of wounds—on July 21, 1918. Records show he was 5'8" tall, weighed 150 pounds, and had worked as a clerk before the war. Sergeant Joseph Sokowich had been born in Ku Ku Ki, Russia, in 1887, immigrated to America as a child, and was working for the P & F Corbin Manufacturing company in New Britain when his adopted country entered the war. His occupation—“laborer”—and previous service in the Connecticut National Guard, which dates back in chunks to 1910, are listed on a questionnaire that the state had everyone complete after the war. His was completed by his mother; Sergeant Sokowich was killed a month after he left the Chemin des Dames, on April 20, 1918, in the first major clash between American and German troops, at a place called Seicheprey.
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