Légion Étrangère—the French Foreign Legion. They really do exist. Still. And are apparently objects of as much fascination to the French as they were to me. An elite fighting unit with a storied history whose reputation has never dimmed even a little, it is, as its name indicates, composed largely of foreign-born men, though all of its officers and some of its soldiers are French nationals. Everything you’ve heard about the French Foreign Legion is likely true, along with a lot of things you probably haven’t: If you can get to an enlistment center and pass the physical, you’re in. By law, they are not allowed to investigate your background; tell them whatever you care to, don’t tell them whatever you don’t care to, enlist under a false name if it suits you. Basic training lasts four weeks and is notoriously brutal, but if you can make it through that, and at least five years in the legion with a good record and a recommendation from your commanding officer, you can earn French citizenship. (Those who are wounded in action have an even surer route through a provision known as “French by spilled blood.”) Even without it, you can probably stay in France as long as you like.
The ones I met that day were from Serbia, Ukraine, China, Nepal, Madagascar. Though heavily tattooed, they were also clean-cut, not to mention clean-shaven, which kind of surprised me because if you look at old photos of poilus, you see an awful lot of mustaches. General Pershing more or less forbade facial hair on doughboys (he gave himself and a few others a pass), but it was a very different story in the French Army. In France, Gilles Chauwin told me, “in those days, if you didn’t have a mustache, you weren’t a man.” In fact, French Army officers back then were required to sport mustaches; for that matter, all gendarmes were required to have mustaches until 1953. They were equally popular in the Kaiser’s army, I should note, with one important difference, as another French devotee of history (and, apparently, facial hair) explained to me: “If you look at the photos, German mustaches pointed up; French mustaches pointed down.” “Poilu,” he pointed out, means “hairy one,” a nickname that dates back to the Franco-Prussian War, when many French soldiers returned home after several months without, it would seem, having had many opportunities to shave at the front.
The French military band there that day, the Musique Principale des Troupe de Marine, had varying degrees of facial hair, not to mention dapper uniforms, although the women’s hats were, I regret to inform you, not nearly as snappy as the mens’ kepis. The 1st Marine Division Band, though—well, to start, I suppose it goes without saying that they all looked like they had been shaved with hot towels, warm foam and brand-new straight razors about five minutes before they marched onto the parade ground. Their dress blue uniforms, which I imagine look impressive even after you’ve slept in them, were immaculate, including the white pants, which in my experience defies the laws of nature. Their buttons, belt buckles and medals were all polished to a high shine, and yet appeared dull compared to their instruments, which probably looked better than they did when they left the factory. I haven’t beheld many objects of beauty that can rival the 1st Marine Division Band’s nickel-plated sousaphones. If I owned one I wouldn’t dare touch it, much less play it.
The bands played the “Marseillaise” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the ceremony proceeded with a flyover, opening remarks (in French and English), prayers (also in French and English), poems on the theme of “When Peace Returns” written and read by high school students from Château-Thierry (those were all in French), memorial addresses from the chief of staff of the French Army and the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, the laying of a great many wreaths by a great many individuals representing a great many organizations, and the firing of volleys. And then, from out of the chapel up at the top of the stairs, a doughboy emerged in full uniform—tin hat to puttees, it was perfect—produced a bugle, and played “Taps.” I doubt that many of the people there had ever experienced that simple melody quite that way before. When he was done, he disappeared back into the chapel like a wraith. I never saw him again; but for the fact that I took photos of him, and that I shared the experience with several thousand other people, I might wonder if he’d really been there at all.
Now the two military bands, and two honor platoons dressed identically to their country’s men and women at arms, took turns marching and playing concerts on the parade ground. The marines played time-honored American melodies I knew well; the French, some proud old tunes that sounded vaguely familiar though I was certain I had never heard them before. The elderly man standing in front of me turned around again, and told me: “That is traditional music, from Napoleon’s time.” As the dignitaries—who included the American ambassador, a lot of military personnel wearing a lot of medals, and some civilians who looked fairly important and certainly dignified—filed out, it occurred to me that, two centuries and a year earlier, people hunting in these woods could well have heard the same songs wafting over from Hill 204.
* * *
After the ceremony there was a great deal of milling about in the cemetery, where I noticed that all 2,288 graves had been decorated for the occasion with a miniature Tricolor and a miniature Stars and Stripes, and saw a few marines, their young children in hand, bending over before this marker or that, telling their toddlers just a bit about the significance of what they were looking at. Somehow I managed to find Gilles Chauwin and Gilles Lagin, both of whom attend every year. The two Gilleses do not know each other; though both are among the most knowledgeable World War I buffs you will ever meet, their specific areas of expertise do not overlap. Gilles Chauwin’s main focus is the Chemin des Dames; Gilles Lagin’s is Belleau Wood. M. Lagin is pretty much the go-to guy for Americans when it comes to that battle, in part because he knows so very much about it, in part because he’s fairly fluent in English, and in part because he loves Americans, in general.
He was pretty mad at me in particular, though, just then. I’d known Gilles since 2009, and had written about him a bit in my last book, the one about the First World War. He didn’t take issue with my description of him as “a swarthy man built like a shipping crate,” but he didn’t care for my likening his barn, in which he stores the many thousands of artifacts he has found over the decades, to “a hoarder’s garage sale.” In my defense, I said that only of his storage room, and not the section of the space that he has turned into a small museum; and in any event, if his English weren’t so good he would have missed the affront entirely. He still would have caught the part where I wrote that one of the many marines who has visited him over the years, with whom he is extremely popular, made him an honorary marine himself. “That wasn’t a marine,” he told me now, his voice spiked with umbrage. “It was the commandant of the United States Marine Corps.” I stood corrected.
Gilles, who is in his fifties, has been exploring and artifact-hunting since childhood; he grew up very close to Bois Belleau and cannot remember a time when he wasn’t fascinated by everything having to do with that battle. Back in 2009, he had taken me all over the battlefield and through his museum with great joy, then welcomed me to his house, which is filled with books and papers and which I will otherwise refrain from describing. The barn and house look to the untrained eye to be about the same age, though the former dates back to the seventeenth century and the latter was built in 1907. Both were damaged during the Battle of Belleau Wood, though much of his village, Marigny-en-Orxois (ahem: Mah-rin-YEE-on-Orks-WAH), fared even worse. Gilles has in his house all kinds of records and maps and records of maps, organized in a manner that, though invisible to the human eye (I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that), nevertheless enables him to find pretty quickly just about any piece of information concerning the war in the vicinity of Belleau Wood and the Marne and who knows where else. He was even able to help me pinpoint the field where 17-year-old George Briant of New Orleans and Battery B of the 76th Field Artillery Regiment, part of the 3rd Division, was very nearly killed by bombs dropped from German airplanes on July 28, 1918, a
story Mr. Briant related to me eighty-six years later. It’s just outside the village of Le Charmel, where, as it happens, Gilles’s grandmother was born.
Now, six years and a couple of arguably indelicately phrased passages later, Gilles was mad at me, although my apology, compounded by our surroundings and the ceremony we had both just witnessed, softened his heart; and by the time we made it to the cemetery gates, he had forgiven me. Just outside those gates stood a group of large men who looked like bikers, except that their black T-shirts and jackets bore patches and decals celebrating not Harley-Davidson but the United States Marine Corps. While Gilles hung back, I approached them and quickly discovered that they were French and spoke no English at all. They took quite a shine to me upon discovering that I was American, warmly shaking my hand one at a time while the others patted me on the back, even though I believe it was fairly obvious by any number of indicators that I was not a marine. One of them, a really big guy with a goatee, wore a “Marines” baseball cap and a black zippered fleece with an American flag patch sewn over the heart. He removed the latter to reveal a black T-shirt with the USMC emblem silk-screened over the heart, and a patch on each sleeve: 5th Marines on the left, 6th on the right. His entire upper right arm was covered by a tattoo of the Marine Corps’ symbol—eagle perched atop a globe and anchor—over a pair of crossed swords, the words “Semper Fidelis” inked in Gothic script above and below. Two more thematically similar tattoos graced his left arm. We shook hands; he introduced himself as Laurent Vanhée. I asked him if he’d served in the USMC, which I realize now was a stupid question, given that I had to pose it in French. He didn’t laugh; just said no, though he added that he had served in the French Army back in the late 1980s. If I hadn’t just met a few soldiers of the Légion Étrangère, I might have found his and his friends’ fascination with another country’s fighting force curious.
A strong tide of ceremony attendees was moving now at some pace or other down the hill to the Château de Belleau, which sits behind a set of gates, a key to which is kept at the museum, next door. Many marines make a pilgrimage here because the château grounds contain a fountain, the spigot of which sits in the mouth of a sculpture of a bulldog. This is said to be a tribute to the Marines, the Teufel Hunden, even though anybody local will readily tell you that the sculpture predates the First World War by a very long time. Marines are said to consider it good luck to drink from this fountain, though given the experiences I’ve had drinking the tap water in rural France, I would have to respectfully disagree.
No key was necessary that day: The gates were wide open. There is always a reception here after the Memorial Day ceremony, I’ve been told, for anybody who wants to attend, and from what I’ve seen a lot of people want to. The Marine Band was playing in the courtyard, as was a local band from Château-Thierry, and soldiers and civilians mingled freely. There were drinks and snacks enough for everyone and more, and little French, American and Marine Corps flags for anyone who asked. Almost everyone I made eye contact with greeted me as if I were a distant cousin they hadn’t seen in many years; from what I could see, everyone was greeting everyone that way. It looked like the thing that happens between a wedding ceremony and a wedding reception. To be honest, for a few moments I didn’t know quite what to make of it, until I realized that what I was looking at, and drinking at, and talking to the two Gilles and some marines and some French soldiers and some French and American dignitaries and quite a few légionnaires at, was the greatest celebration of Franco-American amity I had ever experienced, an occasion so warm and unreserved that you would think the battle had ended just yesterday, and not ninety-seven years earlier.
* * *
Everyone who attended that reception got there by walking down a narrow street that runs through the small village of Belleau, winding past houses, a building labeled “bakery” that hasn’t been one in a very long time (what a tease), a booth with a pay phone that miraculously still works, and the museum before arriving at the château. If you continue to follow it, though—and not one of them did—it leads out past a little grove and ends at another road, across which, up on a bank, is the village cemetery. It’s old and surrounded by a stone wall, its graves packed in close and terraced to accommodate the topography. In the back row, third plot from the left corner, in between Marcel Félix LeJeune and several members of the family Benier, is a cement bed filled with gravel. Someone had left a little crucifix on it when I visited last, and a couple of bouquets, the smaller of which had a Tricolor and Old Glory stuck in it. The marker, a small stone cross, reads, simply: Ernest Stricker.
Stricker had immigrated from Switzerland to the United States in 1910, at the age of 19, and settled in Umatilla County, Oregon, where he worked as a farm laborer. When the war came, he enlisted in the American Expeditionary Forces; it’s not clear which unit or units he served with, though there is some speculation that it was an engineering outfit attached to a combat division like the 3rd or the 26th. After the war he was honorably discharged with the rank of private first class, granted American citizenship—the two witnesses on his naturalization petition were his lieutenants—and returned to Oregon, where he took up alfalfa farming.
On April 1, 1928, nine years to the day after his discharge, Ernest Stricker came to Belleau. It is believed he strolled around the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery for a while, perhaps even until it closed for the night. Later, his sister, who still lived in Switzerland, would say that her brother had been suffering some serious physical ailments—I have heard he had a gastrointestinal issue that required surgery—and had endured some other, unspecified “reverses,” besides.
That evening, after the cemetery closed, Ernest Stricker, 37 years old, shot himself outside its gates. A note was found on his body, addressed to his fellow veterans at American Legion Post No. 1 in Paris. It read:
I’m writing you these few lines with a heavy heart and deep thoughts, but sincerely hope you will understand me. As I was moving among the white crosses under which my truest friends are resting forever, a feeling came over me that I too can’t go on anymore. My health is failing, my hopes for which I have been striving all these years are shattered. I can’t go on, comrades, I can’t go on. It is my last wish to be buried under French soil among my comrades at arms as well as peace.
Your comrade,
Ernest Stricker
His last wish could not be accommodated: He was not eligible to be buried in the Aisne-Marne Cemetery because he had not died while in the service of the American armed forces. The mayor of Belleau, though, took pity and donated a plot in the village burial ground.
A few hundred yards uphill, thousands of people gather every year to commemorate the Americans who died driving the Germans out of the area and, in the process, helped save the Allied cause. But down here, a plain white cross marks the lonely grave of a man who would tell you, if he could, that there really is no cohesive narrative to war, and no order behind whose deaths it invests with meaning, and whose are consigned to oblivion.
II.
You would be forgiven if, having just attended that Memorial Day ceremony and not knowing otherwise, you believed Belleau Wood ended the war. It did not; it didn’t even end the German Spring Offensive. From the moment that telegram declaring “Woods now US Marine Corps entirely” arrived at HQ, everyone knew something else would hit. Something big.
They waited for it eighteen days; and when that something else finally came, it was even bigger than everyone had feared it would be.
Shortly after midnight on July 15, 1918, the Germans launched Operation Marneschutz-Reims, the name of which—it translates, roughly, to “Marne defenses–Reims”—may have lacked the panache of Blücher-Yorck but was direct and to the point. And the action itself was certainly no less ambitious. Forty German divisions were hurled at the Marne River along a fifty-mile front. The Germans hadn’t had much luck attacking the city of Reims in recent attempts, so
this time they just went around it, twenty-three divisions to the east, seventeen to the west. A half-million men. Maybe more.
The Allies had had just a little bit of luck, capturing a couple of German prisoners on the night of July 14 who gave them an idea of what was coming, and when. In anticipation of the massive German barrage that they expected to initiate the assault just after midnight, they launched one of their own a few minutes before that. Historians disagree about how effective it was, though I personally have seen one piece of evidence that it did at least some good. But I’ll get to that in a bit.
Long before the Allies captured those German prisoners, the French high command had had a good idea of what was coming, and where; its generals, though, had not been in agreement on how to best deal with it. To the east of Reims, they decided that their first line of defense would be “soft,” composed of relatively few men in units that could fall back quickly to a much larger and better-protected second line; their rationale was that this zone, closest to the line of attack, would be most susceptible to enemy artillery, so rather than try to defend it with strong lines, they would lure the Germans into it, instead, and then pummel them with French and Allied artillery, followed by an assault from the real line of defense. West of Reims, though, while some units were told they would be following this “soft line” (also known as “elastic”) strategy, others were told to form a hard line right at the river. Some were told both. And in the sector at the far western edge of the line, which stretched some twelve miles from the village of Mézy to Château-Thierry, the American 3rd Division, one of three American divisions in the line—the other two being the 28th, National Guard troops from Pennsylvania, and the 42nd, the Rainbow Division of Joyce Kilmer and Rouge Bouquet—was having a hard time figuring out exactly what it was supposed to do. Its commanding officer, General Joseph T. Dickman, had been ordered by his French superiors to place his troops pretty much at the river’s edge, but Dickman didn’t care for that strategy; he worried that his men, facing German artillery on the heights across the Marne, would get blasted to pieces. He much preferred the elastic strategy he knew the French were deploying to the east. So he more or less pursued that on his own, taking care to create an illusion of greater strength at the waterfront, a ruse intended to fool the French as much as the Germans. (He was mum about this particular point of history in his postwar memoir, The Great Crusade.)
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