Moan’s account is in line with Sibley’s from With the Yankee Division in France, particularly when it comes to the fascination with which the doughboys regarded the French countryside, and their interest in relic-hunting. “This place was once held by the Germans,” he wrote of one village they marched through, “and so of course was heavily entrenched and full of dugouts both big and small. There were all kinds of curiosities here both German and French for the French never pick up anything after a battle and this was the battlefield of one of the biggest battles of the war. I got some souvenirs off of a German aeroplane brought down by the French, such as wood out of the propeller, a washer and best of all got the French revolver bullet that killed the Boche aviator.” Moan, who was six years old when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, had a particular fascination with airplanes. “At about seven o’clock on February 12th, the Boche came over in aeroplanes and many of the boys beat it to the dugouts, but Brown, Tuell and myself stayed out to see the fun,” he reported. “The Boche were attacked by French aviators and they popped at each other in good shape with machine guns. Searchlights were playing around everywhere and anti-aircraft guns popping away at the Boche.”
He even managed to get in a bit of a sightseeing a few days later. “I visited an old French castle which had been bombarded by the Boche,” he wrote. “I was very much interested in the rich antique articles lying around, such as oil paintings, etc. Attached to this castle was the family tomb, which had also been blown to pieces. The Boche even went so far as to pry open the caskets to get the rings, gold teeth, etc.”
He’d seen and heard enough, in other words, to both respect and fear the Germans; so when he finally arrived at the old chalk mine, on February 19, 1918, he would have taken very seriously the stories he’d heard about the place. His only entry about it seems to belie Daniel Strickland’s contention, in Connecticut Fights, that the doughboys regarded the mines with delight, as children would have regarded robbers’ caves:
In this hill there is a big limestone cave big enough to hold two thousand men. It was at one time much bigger and able to hold about four thousand men. Twelve hundred Frenchmen were quartered in one part of this cave shortly after the Boche were driven out, but they were simply wiped out for the Boche had the whole cave mined. That whole section blew to pieces so not a Frenchman escaped. When we first entered the cave we were strictly forbidden to touch a single thing for fear of blowing up the whole cave.
Still, they felt safer down there than they did up top. The Germans shelled the Chemin des Dames intently. “The Boche bombarded us in good shape,” Mechanic Moan noted in one entry, “at least seventy big fellows bursting each minute. Believe me, the man who said he was not scared is a liar.” They were gassed, too, with almost every bombardment; men who didn’t get their masks on almost immediately suffered the consequences.
Ironically, it was neither high explosives nor gas that came closest to doing in Mechanic Moan at the Chemin des Dames, but some bad bacon, which sent him hiking to a French field hospital one day. “I was going down across the field,” he wrote, “when I heard a big shell coming directly for me, so I ducked and ran. It struck not more than thirty feet to one side of me and did not go off. If it had, there would not have been a piece of me left, for they are dangerous at a hundred yards. I ran as fast as I could and it was a mighty good thing that I did, for one struck and exploded exactly where I had been. It seems the Boche have the range of the French hospital and make it a habit to shell it every so often.”
And fairly quickly, it seems, the war started to lose its allure for Ralph T. Moan, who came to regard even dogfights with ambivalence. One day, he reported, he and a friend were lying down on a hillside, “basking in the sun,” when they spotted four French planes squaring off against three German machines. “All of a sudden a streak of fire came out of one of the Boche machines and then she began to fall,” he wrote. “One whole airplane burned in no time at all, and the Boche, realizing that they were goners, jumped. The machine and men dashed to earth about a half mile from us.” Moan and his friend ran off toward the crash site; they found the wreck—“the machine was all stove to pieces, yet I managed to get a small piece of wood for a souvenir”—but also found more than they had anticipated: “The two Boche,” Moan wrote, “were no fit sight for a nervous man to look at. They were all in a pulp, jelly form and one man’s head was driven way down into his chest.”
One night, after they’d been at the Chemin des Dames for several weeks, Moan and his company lay in wait for a group of Germans. “The Boche were on patrol March 11th about 10 o’clock at night and the second platoon got wise,” he reported. “They jumped up onto the railroad and put the hand grenades to them and machine guns and so forth. They laid up twenty that night and left them hanging in the wire. One man had his head blown off and it made a ghastly sight, suspended in the barbed wire.”
There is just one more entry that follows, a single paragraph dated March 30, 1918:
Have decided to cut this diary out right now, for no man wishes after seeing what we have seen to recall them but rather wishes to forget. From now on all we see is HELL.
No doubt he saw a lot more of that before one of the Germans’ “big fellows” blasted him through the air and out of the war that fall; but perhaps, somehow, the diary he kept for six months inoculated him, for afterward he returned home, married, and moved to Manhattan and then New Jersey as he pursued a career as a vocalist—he performed on the vaudeville circuit for a while—and retired to Tucson. After he died in 1982 at the age of 85, his wife, Kathleen, discovered his diary, typed it up, and gave it to the archives at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It is the only contemporary firsthand account I know of from an American soldier at the Chemin des Dames in 1918.
* * *
Deep in the mine at Nanteuil-la-Fosse, well past the section where Ralph Moan and his buddies inked and chiseled their names, my flashlight beam fell upon another smoothed tablet on the wall. It was much smaller—maybe fifteen inches square—and the blue ink inscription was faint; it might not be there at all, I realized, but for the fact that it has spent the last century so deep in an underground mine that without an artificial source of illumination, you cannot see your hand in front of your face. I had to get really close to read it well:
John R.
Elliott
Co. K 103 U.S. Inf.
A.E.F.
France
John Russell Elliott. Born in Bangor, Maine, May 29, 1900, and delivered by Dr. William P. McNally. His father, John, a laborer, had been born on Prince Edward Island; his mother, Rebecca, was from Nova Scotia. John Russell was their first child. Eventually they had ten, eight boys and two girls. Their oldest lied about his age when he enlisted on June 11, 1917, said he was 18 when he had barely turned 17. He listed his height as five feet, four-and-a-half inches, his eyes and hair as brown, his complexion as medium, his occupation as laborer. His current address is Plot A, Row 38, Grave 21 in the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery; he was killed in an attack on November 10, 1918, the last full day of the war.
Gilles and I had spent around five hours in that mine, too; as we stumbled out into the daylight afterward, I tripped over something embedded in the earth and nearly fell on my face. It could have been worse: The thing I’d tripped over was a German 77-millimeter shell, live and still in its casing. I shuddered; Gilles stepped over and gently brushed the chalk dust out of my hair and off my shoulders. It was a nice gesture, and comforting, but not enough to chase from my mind the horrible notion that even a hundred years past, that war could still blow you to pieces. How terrifying it must have been, I thought, back when the shells were not half buried in the mud, but flying through the air; not one, but hundreds, thousands.
Of course, that’s not what I was told by a 106-year-old man who’d actually been there. “After a while, you disregarded it,” J. Laurence Moffitt ex
plained to me back in 2003, eighty-five years after the fact. “You felt, If I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t. And you just paid no attention to it, the shells dropping all about you. You couldn’t worry about it all the time.” He’d been a corporal in the Yankee Division; like Joseph A. Kelly and Stanley Shaw and P. J. Kochiss and Michael Jay, he’d enlisted in the Connecticut National Guard, which became the 102nd Infantry Regiment. He’d spent time in these mines. But I never found any graffiti of his on the walls.
Maybe he never left any. Maybe that sort of thing was more popular with men who hadn’t quite made their peace with the omnipresent threat of sudden death, men who might have felt, on some level, that scratching their names on a wall in an underground chalk mine in France was, in effect, writing their last will and testament. In some cases, sadly, those men turned out to be exactly right.
Chapter Five
What If
I.
About fifty miles south of the Chemin des Dames you’ll find the town of Château-Thierry, known for being the birthplace of Jean de la Fontaine, a seventeenth-century writer and poet who is regarded as France’s Aesop, and for a charming little bridge over the Marne River that is flanked by supersized statues of naked women in repose. The most remarkable thing about the town, though, is actually two or three miles outside it, perched atop a butte known as Hill 204. The Château-Thierry American Monument—built in the 1920s by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) and maintained by it ever since—is massive and bold, a broad alabaster terrace topped by a double colonnade and fronted by enormous statuary, the kind of thing you expect to see depicted on the back of a large coin, like a half dollar. Locals call it “the radiator,” because—well, because it looks like a radiator. They are drawn to it, climb all over it as if it were a tree fort. The last time I was there, a group of teenagers splayed on the staircase that leads up to the terrace, sharing a pizza. I stuck around just long enough to see one of them accidentally drop his slice onto the steps. Face down.
There’s nowhere to go in town where you can’t see the monument; it looms over Château-Thierry like a protective fortress, which fact might engender resentment elsewhere but doesn’t seem to here. Quite the opposite, actually. Even the owner of a local kebab shop, upon learning that I was American, proudly declared that he loved America; told me Ankara, Turkey, his hometown, had so many of my countrymen in it that it was practically in the United States. (That didn’t mean he spoke any English.) The following year, when I walked into the shop, he and his Moroccan-born wife both recognized me immediately, hailed me as a long-lost friend returned at last from across the ocean. They even brewed me a special glass of tea, on the house. I’d been there exactly twice before.
The first time, while I waited for my gyro, the owner told me about all of the American TV shows he enjoyed, then asked me what I thought of my president, who was in Normandy at that moment for the D-day anniversary; before I could answer, a man who had just walked in the door demanded (also in French) to know if I were really American. I hesitated: He was an enormous biker clad in painted leather pants and vest, with a shaved head, a face (and scalp) full of piercings, and full tattoo sleeves on both arms. Aside from that, though, he bore a striking resemblance to Rob Reiner.
“Oui,” I said. “C’est vrai.”
“You’re here to see Belleau Wood?” he asked.
“J’étais vais hier,” I said. I was go yesterday.
“And the monument?” he asked, undeterred by my poor grasp of the past tense.
I told him I’d been there, too. “So you know what all the statues on it mean?” he parried. “And the symbols?”
I hesitated—just for a couple of beats, but it was enough. “Let’s go,” he said, in a tone that didn’t invite discussion. I had just been handed my gyro, and he hadn’t even ordered anything yet, but that didn’t matter: He nudged me out the door and toward a black Triumph motorcycle parked a couple of spaces away, quickly unlocking the helmet from the back of the seat and handing it to me.
“But . . . my gyro?” I said.
He looked at me with a glare that took me back to fourth grade. “You can hold on with one hand,” he said, and kicked the starter.
Courtesy of American Battle Monuments Commission
The gyro and I somehow managed to hang on all the way up to the monument, where my new tour guide insisted on lecturing me at length about every architectural and artistic detail of the place—the gigantic statues of Columbia (the feminine embodiment of America) and her French counterpart, Marianne, holding hands (giant fingers interlaced); the significance of the numbers of stars and stripes on the other side; the stylized map embedded in the concrete at our feet; the symbols of all the divisions who fought in the area embedded in the face of the monument; the names of the places they liberated chiseled into the frieze up above—even though, as I chose not to mention just then, I already knew all of that. It was clear that this monument, which listed not a single human being, was nonetheless deeply personal to him. Perhaps he could even visualize the men it honored: untested American troops who, in the spring and summer of 1918, stepped into a fight that turned out to be one of the most critical of the entire war.
* * *
Back in March, while the Yankee Division was still hunkering down in the chalk mines, the Germans had launched what history now remembers as their Spring Offensive of 1918, the purpose of which was to end the war decisively before too many American troops could be deployed on the Western Front. The offensive would unfold, over the next four months, in five phases. That first phase was, in fact, too successful: The Germans broke through the lines so quickly and with such force that their own supply lines couldn’t hope to keep up with them. They pressed on, though, with varying success, and on May 27, 1918, launched their third phase. They named it Operation Blücher-Yorck, hoping that the names of two Prussian field marshals who enjoyed successes against Napoleon might help it succeed, too, and perhaps put the fear of God into the French. It did: Almost immediately, the Germans took back the Chemin des Dames (including the two mines the Yankee Division had vacated a couple of months earlier) and kept pushing forward, on and on. Within days, they had captured tens of thousands of Allied soldiers, killed or wounded twice as many, seized thousands of artillery pieces, machine guns and other weapons, and were closing in on the Marne River, where they’d been turned back in 1914. By the end of the month, they were less than forty miles from Paris.
The French were in a panic. And not just civilians, who quickly clogged the roads, desperate to get away; the French high command believed the war was all but lost. Pershing, dining with Ferdinand Foch, one of France’s top generals, noted afterward that neither Foch nor anyone on his staff said much during the meal; they were all too depressed about what Pershing called “probably the most serious situation of the war.” The British were no more sanguine. And even Pershing, who always took care to present an unfailingly optimistic façade, privately expressed grave concerns. “The Allies are done for,” he wrote to Colonel Edward House, President Wilson’s chief adviser. The only thing that could keep them in the war, he believed, was the assurance that the American Expeditionary Forces would soon assume a lead role in the fight.
On May 30, the same day as that grim dinner, General Pétain, by that point one of France’s leading tacticians, asked General Pershing to at least take a big step in that direction. Specifically, Pétain asked Pershing to rush as many American divisions as possible to Château-Thierry, on the Marne, to keep the Germans from taking it. This was no “quiet” sector; the stakes could hardly have been higher. If the Germans could take Château-Thierry, they would have access to the Paris-Metz Highway, without much left to keep them from taking the French capital. It wasn’t clear what, if anything, the Allies would be able to do to continue fighting if that happened.
Ever since he’d arrived in France, nearly a year earlier, Pershing
had made it clear that he was and would remain particular about where his troops would be posted, what they would be doing, and who would—and wouldn’t—have the authority to order them around. America’s peculiar status as a cobelligerent in the war, rather than an ally, granted Pershing such discretion. Time and again, the American commander refused French requests and British demands to deploy his men as replacements in their units, as they had done throughout the war with their own commonwealth and colonial troops. It drove the British and French nuts, but Pershing would not be moved: He alone would determine when American troops were ready; he alone would determine to whom they reported.
Even he, though, understood that at some point he would have to say yes instead of no, and that if he didn’t do so now there might not be another chance. He looked at his maps and figured that he had only two divisions that could be pulled from the line and moved to Château-Thierry in a hurry: the 2nd and the 3rd. He gave the order right away. The 3rd Division was there the next day, May 31, just in time to help the French—under French command—stop the Germans at the Marne. They trained machine guns on some bridges; blew others up. Three days later some Germans managed to get across the river at Jaulgonne, a village a half-dozen miles or so to the east, but troops from the 3rd got there before more could cross, captured about a hundred of them, and chased the rest back across the river.
By that time, though, the Germans had already undertaken Plan B, a workaround that would lead them to a point on the highway even closer to Paris than Château-Thierry. It took them along a road that winds for several miles up a steep incline, passing in its course Hill 204. The hill—like most similarly named slopes in France, the number is a reference to its height, in meters—commands a fine view of the town and the surrounding area; Napoleon chose to set up camp here in 1814 to drive the Prussians from Château-Thierry after they had captured it. Under fire from Napoleon’s guns, the Prussians, commanded by Field Marshal Blücher, soon had to relinquish the town; from this spot, you can see both how vulnerable Château-Thierry would have been to Napoleon, and also why, from its position on the Marne, it has served so many times throughout history as an essential defense of Paris.
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