Now the Germans marched right past Napoleon’s old redoubt and continued uphill, taking a few small villages, including Vaux and Bouresches, and then seizing a little undefended forest nearby where they could set up base and, pushing through the other side, cut off the troops in Château-Thierry and gain an open route to Paris. That forest, a private hunting sanctuary that for centuries had belonged to a family named Paillet, and had heretofore been spared the ravages of war, was dense and surrounded by open fields and thus would be easy to defend against an Allied attack. It was known as Bois Belleau—Belleau Wood. It, along with a nearby village, which the Germans had also just taken, was named for a local spring that was said to produce water so clear and refreshing it was actually beautiful—belle eau.
The other American division in the vicinity, the 2nd, was hastily ordered up from Meaux, outside Paris, to root the Germans out of Belleau Wood. As the 3rd had, the 2nd marched to their objective against a strong tide of fleeing civilians and, frequently, small bands of retreating French soldiers who hurriedly warned them to turn back. “Beaucoup Boche,” was all one of them could spare the time to tell Eugene Lee of Syracuse, a 19-year-old private in the 2nd Division’s 5th Marine Regiment, who told me the story eighty-five years later. The marines, marching in the other direction as quickly as possible, were terribly excited; they had been in the country for close to a year but had yet to see any action. They really felt as confident as Pershing acted, marching, contemporary accounts reported, with broad smiles on their faces, laughing and joking even as they passed terrified French going the other way. According to a famous story, one such doughboy, when told that the Boche were coming, replied, “We’re here!” whereupon the Frenchman who had tried to warn him sighed, “Ah, oui, but the Boche, he is still coming.”
“If the Americans don’t stop the Germans at Belleau Wood,” Jacques Krabal, the mayor of Château-Thierry, told me ninety-six years later, “the Germans take Paris—the war is finished.” It sounds even more dire in the original: La guerre est finie. The German offensives had stretched the enemy’s army too thin; the French, M. Krabal explained, simply had no more troops to send at that point. If you look at a map, you can see that the only things standing in between Belleau Wood and an open highway to Paris—less than forty miles away—were two small villages, Lucy-le-Bocage and Marigny-en-Orxois, neither of which would have given the Germans any more trouble than Vaux and Bouresches had. Many French were certain the capital would fall within days.
The French government was making plans, as it had in 1914, to abandon Paris and flee south. Panique was spreading rapidly everywhere, it appeared, but in those American regiments. Despite the fact that the outcome of the war appeared to be resting upon their shoulders at that point, they continued their march undeterred. If anything, it seemed, their biggest fear was that the whole thing might be over before they got there.
It wasn’t. In fact, the battle they were rushing to was only waiting for them to arrive before it got started. By the time it ended, nearly a month later, those marching soldiers, and the place they were marching to, had already passed into the realm of legend: American and French.
* * *
A great deal has been written about the Battle of Belleau Wood, a little bit of it even by me, so I don’t feel the need to recount it for you here in great detail. I’ll just give you the basics: General Pershing, at the request of the French high command, dispatched his 2nd Division from Meaux to Belleau Wood. Like all American divisions, the 2nd was composed of two brigades of two regiments apiece, but it was unique in one regard: Only one of its brigades was Army; the other comprised two regiments of the United States Marine Corps, the 5th and 6th, the only marines to see combat in the First World War. Arriving after a march of about twenty miles at a pace as fast as the oncoming tide of French refugees and retreating soldiers would allow, the doughboys hastily dug into positions a few hundred yards from the woods, separated from the tree line by open fields. The Germans, hoping to dislodge the Americans before they could thoroughly entrench, attacked; the Americans held. Several times. After nearly a week of that, on June 6, 1918, the 2nd Division went on the offensive. One regiment, the 5th Marines, set out across an open wheat field, without the benefit of artillery support. (At that point in the war, General Pershing believed artillery cost more lives than it saved; so did General James Harbord, his former chief of staff, who commanded the Marine brigade. Both would eventually change their minds.) German machine guns, perched at the forest’s edge, opened fire. The marines kept advancing. “They started us in waves toward the Belleau Woods,” Eugene Lee told me eighty-five years later. “In four waves.” Each would advance a certain distance and then flatten themselves so the next wave could advance a bit further, again and again until the marines—those who’d survived the wheat field—made it to the tree line and managed to wrest a bit of forest from the Germans. The action cost the Marines 1,087 casualties. It was the deadliest day in the Corps’ 143-year history.
Almost immediately, the Germans counterattacked; the Americans, though, counter-counterattacked. Surprised but undaunted, the Germans went on the offensive again; and over the next three weeks, portions of that little forest—you can walk through the whole thing today in less than an hour—would trade hands more than a dozen times until, on June 26, a telegram to divisional HQ declared: “Woods now US Marine Corps entirely.” The Americans had won their first major battle against the Germans. Pershing was ebullient, something no one could recall ever having witnessed before, even at the man’s wedding. The Germans were stunned, not to mention impressed. An intercepted German intelligence report, written by an officer identified only as Lieutenant von Berg and published in American newspapers a few weeks after the battle, asserted:
The moral effect of our firearms did not materially check the advance of the infantry; the nerves of the Americans are still unshaken.
The individual soldiers are very good. They are healthy, vigorous, and physically well-developed men of ages ranging from 18 to 28, who at present lack only necessary training to make them redoubtable opponents. The troops are fresh and full of straightforward confidence. A remark of one of the prisoners is indicative of their spirit: “We kill or get killed.”
They did a lot of both: The Marines alone took 9,777 casualties at Belleau Wood, more, according to official lore, than they had cumulatively taken in their entire history to that point. (One of them was Private Eugene Lee of Syracuse, shot through the wrist on June 12.) Then again, less than a mile away there’s a German cemetery with 8,630 dead in it, at least some of whom, I’m guessing, would tell you if they could that the Sammies already made redoubtable opponents.
Belleau Wood is something akin to an origin story for the modern Marine Corps; I have yet to meet a marine who can’t and won’t tell me all about it, including those statistics about their casualties and a few choice quotes (“Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”), at least one of which, attributed to the Germans, is of dubious authenticity: The enemy, the story goes, were so in awe of the marines’ ferocity that they nicknamed them Teufel Hunden, or Devil Dogs. Never mind that the correct term in German is actually Teufelshunde, nor that the claim first appeared in American newspapers two months before Belleau Wood, at a point when the Germans had never yet faced any marines; it stuck, even showing up on recruitment posters before the war’s end.
Another legend is that the French, equally impressed with the Americans, and grateful to them for stopping perhaps the most dire threat they had faced since 1914, renamed Bois Belleau “Bois de la Brigade de Marine,” or Woods of the Marine Brigade, immediately after the battle. This one is actually true, and the name holds to this day, though no one really calls it that, perhaps for the same reason that no one really calls Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue “Avenue of the Americas”—it’s a mouthful, and everybody knows the original, which is much easier to say. Hard as it may be to imagine, the Fre
nch are even more obsessed with Belleau Wood than the Americans are; unlike in the Argonne, you’re not likely to find any World War I artifacts here. Generations of French relic hunters, many of them armed with the reviled metal detector, beat you to them.
Despite all that, and the fact that many of the surrounding villages that also played a role in the battle were largely destroyed and almost entirely rebuilt to the point where there are few discernible battle scars to see in any of them, the forest itself is largely intact. This is due, in part, to the rural nature of the area, and in part to the fact that most of the older trees that survived the battle are so full of bullets and shrapnel—any one of which could badly damage a chainsaw, not to mention the person wielding it—that loggers are afraid to touch them. Nevertheless, it’s a felicitous fact for anyone who wants to see a real, largely untouched World War I battlefield in an area where there are few others to behold; actually, as far as I know, there are none at all. And while lots of people visit Belleau Wood, to the point where, in recent years, the superintendent of the local American cemetery even laid out a walking trail with designated spots of interest along the way, I have never hiked through that forest and not been totally alone. Under such circumstances, I have found, it is possible to imagine that the trail leads all the way back to June 1918.
The path meanders through the woods, past the kinds of things you don’t see in other countries’ forests, like trenches and shell holes and foxholes. Like the Argonne, it’s a wonderful combination of nature walk and history hunt, albeit in a much smaller area and with pre-identified places of note that, thankfully, are not beset with interpretive kiosks; without the guide, a few photocopied sheets of paper stapled together, you would not know what most of them are. There’s no mistaking the trenches and shell holes, though. They are so well preserved, in fact, that it makes me wonder if there’s actually some truth to what one U.S. Army veteran told me: that marines, returning to Belleau Wood after the war and not finding any of those things still there, took it upon themselves to install some. Then again, my source, knowledgeable as he is, readily acknowledges the rivalry, sometimes fierce and not all that good-natured, between the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, which dates back in large part to Belleau Wood, where the 2nd Division’s Marine brigade got all the credit for the American victory, and its Army brigade got none.
There’s one thing, though, that no American veteran could have put there. Stop 5—the Wheat Field. You branch off from the main trail, follow a smaller one down a slight slope and round a bend, and: There it is. You can walk right up to it. Actually, if you’re so inclined, you can walk right into it, this open stretch where so many marines were killed and so many more fell on June 6, 1918, twenty-six years to the day before the Allied invasion at Normandy. If you’ve timed it right—French farmers must rotate their crops on a schedule—it will actually be a wheat field; if you really time it right, as I did in 2014, you will not only have wheat but will also be there on the same day the 5th Marines were, and see more or less what it would have looked like on that morning when the course of the greatest war the world had ever seen was changed by a charge of men on foot, the oldest military maneuver there is. The grain that day was around knee high, perhaps a bit higher in spots—barely enough to cover a man lying flat on his belly with a pack on his back. And its stalks had already started to turn yellow, enough of a contrast with American khaki to add to one’s anxiety. You stand there at the edge of the woods, underneath the shelter of some stout old trees, and look across that open field, and perhaps your mind goes to Gettysburg, and Pickett’s Charge; but Pickett had artillery. And the Yankees didn’t have machine guns.
Heed Jean-Paul de Vries’s rules and step gingerly out into the field, and you can get a sense of how it appeared from the marines’ perspective. It doesn’t seem nearly as wide, I imagine, when machine-gun bullets aren’t spraying over the top of the wheat from the place you’re trying to get to; but still, you can get some small glimpse of what it looked like on that morning a century ago, if not what it felt like. I have stood on Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg and tried to imagine Pickett’s Charge, and it doesn’t come close. These woods, this field—there are no markers here, no statues; none of it is landscaped or even maintained, except to the extent that this field is worked as farmland, exactly as it was back then. Even when it’s not planted with wheat—as was the case in 2015, when they were growing sugar beets, which are not nearly the same thing—it’s still the Wheat Field. And you will still, if you go there alone, have it all to yourself.
Unless you believe in ghosts. If they’re anywhere, they’re here.
* * *
Strangely, the woods themselves are really the only part of Belleau Wood you’re ever likely to have to yourself. The little museum down the hill in the village of Belleau—the only commercial establishment of any kind there—always seems to have at least a couple of people poking around its glass display cases full of artifacts and old photos. The captions are bilingual, a rarity in France outside of Paris, though everyone I’ve ever encountered in there is French. Outside, though, across the lane, you’ll often find a few young marines on leave, lunching on a shady knoll. They always seem surprised to encounter another American there, too, especially one with no ties to the USMC. Once, during the conversation that inevitably ensues, I told them that I had met and interviewed the last survivor of the battle of Belleau Wood. They nodded reverently; then one of them grimaced and started shaking his head. “Can you imagine if we go back a hundred years from now?” he said to his buddies, obviously referring to a place that was far from France. “They’ll probably still want to kill us.” His friends nodded at that, too.
Up the hill and across the road are the gates to the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, where Earle Madeley, Joseph Kelly and 2,286 other doughboys are buried. It’s one of the smaller American World War I cemeteries in France—Meuse-Argonne, the largest, has nearly seven times as many graves—but someone or other is almost always there visiting, and usually someone else is there mowing the grass. Unlike in every other big American cemetery I’ve visited in France, where everything is perfectly straight and even, the rows in Aisne-Marne’s two plots curve delicately away from its center walk, which leads to a chapel and bell tower poised atop a stone stairway: curiously intimate for a space that’s actually not small at all. Once a year, though, it feels really, really small; perhaps that’s because, for a few hours that day, it’s as crowded as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
That day is Memorial Day—or, more accurately, the Sunday before the Monday when Memorial Day is observed back in the United States, though it has on occasion been observed at Aisne-Marne on the Saturday before Memorial Day, and also, in 2015, on the Sunday after it. That’s the year I went; it was scheduled then, I was told, so as not to conflict with a local holiday. If it felt a bit strange to an American to celebrate Memorial Day twice in one year—I attended the parade in my hometown that Monday, then flew to France a few hours later—it didn’t seem to matter much at all to the people in attendance at Aisne-Marne that day, perhaps because the vast majority of them were French. And there were a lot of them: The official tally was 4,000, though someone in a position to know later told me the real figure was more like 5,500. Even that number sounded conservative to me.
Just the logistics of managing such a crowd in such a place are daunting. The parking lots in the cemetery can accommodate maybe two dozen cars. Across the road from the gates are a couple of small fields that can hold perhaps a hundred more. To park in one of those you need a special pass, the kind of thing that, when flashed to a classically blasé gendarme, results in the raising of eyebrows, if only for an instant. Most people park in a much larger field a few miles down the hill, from which they are shuttled to the gates in a convoy of large buses. The driveway from the gate to the cemetery is lined, for the occasion, with the flags of all fifty American states, planted at perfectly uniform intervals. The crowd pouring in
is diverse but, for the most part, very well put together; if you didn’t shave that morning, you’re going to feel self-conscious. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The lawn that spreads out before the stairway and chapel and separates the two cemetery plots serves as a parade ground. Every inch of its perimeter that day was occupied by spectators, who were backed by a half-dozen rows of other spectators. I realized the futility of that situation just in time to grab the last spot on the base of one of the flagpoles off to the side, which gave me an extra eighteen inches or so that made all the difference. From that vantage I could see the stage set up on the lowest platform of the stairway, with a few dozen chairs that would soon be occupied by various dignitaries. Lingering with quiet poise next to the flagpole base where I was standing were four soldiers wearing what looked, at least to my eyes, to be unusual uniforms: white kepi, tan short-sleeved khaki tunic with deep green epaulets fringed with long red tassels, slightly darker pants, blue sash around the waist cinched by green canvas belt, legs bloused into black boots—exactly the kind of uniform, in other words, that makes you want to join whatever service those guys are in. “Qui ils sont?” (Who they are?) I asked the woman standing next to me, but before she could answer, the man standing in front of me, an older gentleman who must have heard my accent and poor grammar and deduced my nationality, turned around and said, in French: “They are Légion Étrangère. And you are very lucky to see them—they have never attended this ceremony before.”
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