This area is the beginning of Champagne Country, and here I must tell you that whatever images those two words bring to your imagination cannot match the reality. First, you have to try to summon a shade of green that you typically only see here and there in that slender window of spring between the emergence of full leaves and the rising of the temperature to short-pants weather: light and adolescent, full and soft without a hint of being scorched or even mature. Now take that hue and douse it everywhere: hedges and arbors and fields and, especially, hills. And these hills are not hills like you’re used to, either. They’re plump and bold, big and friendly. They don’t hang back in dignified reserve; they jump right out at you, step in front of your windshield and preen for your benefit, crash into the fields like Hawaiian surf. The view is especially fine from the south side of the Marne: There are more hills on the north side, and they are larger and appear, in something of an optical illusion, to end right at the river’s edge. Trees ring their broad, inviting slopes like a picture frame but never encroach onto the canvas. That’s where the grapes grow.
Add to this image fields so lush they look like velvet, and slender winding roads and little stone farmhouses and little stone churches, and even if what you’re picturing isn’t that close to the reality of Champagne, you nonetheless know it’s not a place you’d want to see a battle fought, especially one in which machine guns and high-explosive shells and poison gas played such a prominent part.
For four years, one wasn’t. The Germans were turned back at the Marne in September 1914, and didn’t even approach this area again until the end of May 1918, when Blücher-Yorck brought them to the edge of the river. The French and Americans quickly blew up or blocked the bridges, holding the Germans to the north bank. The Germans probed here and there, like that time they sent a party across in boats at Jaulgonne, just east of Mézy, only to be stopped by the 3rd Division, which captured some and chased the rest back across. But mostly they bided their time.
The Allies knew the Germans were massing their forces across the river; they knew, as I said, that something big was coming. What they didn’t know, at that point, was what the stakes were for the Germans, which might have offered them a better picture of how frantic—how desperate—that something would be. Since the Spring Offensive’s first, too-successful phase back in March, the Germans had launched three more, including the also-very-but-this-time-not-too-successful Blücher-Yorck. And yet, for all this success, they hadn’t quite managed to get the Allies to the point of capitulation. They had gotten close, to be sure; there were those roads clogged with terrified refugees and retreating soldiers, those plans to abandon Paris and flee south. But the enemy tenaciously clung to life. And the Germans had lost a lot of time—and a lot of men. The Allied ranks, though, had started to swell, with more Americans arriving all the time, hundreds of thousands a month by that point. Erich Ludendorff, who bore the odd title Quartermaster General of the Imperial German Army but who was really, along with Paul von Hindenburg, its leader, calculated he only had time for one more big push before the numbers turned against him. This last offensive had to finish things. And he was certain that it would, as was his boss, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who boasted that his army would be in Paris by July 17. The Germans, in fact, were so confident Marneschutz-Reims would end the war that they nicknamed it Friedenssturm—the “Peace Offensive.”
So what you need to do here is take almost unimaginably beautiful countryside and transpose upon it an almost incomprehensibly frenzied military attack. Official divisional histories tend to play these things down and focus solely on the who, what, where and when, but the History of the Third Division United States Army in the World War, published just a year afterward, offers at least a few hints about what the awful barrage that started the Peace Offensive was like: “Within a minute of the time the first shot was fired,” it notes, “the entire Regimental area was filled with bursting shrapnel, high explosives and gas shells of all calibers. All telephone lines were cut by shells or falling trees, and the wireless was made useless . . . The forest had been turned into an almost impenetrable mass of brush . . . There was no break, no stop, no rest . . . Rapid fire continued until about 1:55 a.m. and then a moderately heavy schedule began, including tear and sneezing gas shells on the forward areas and lethal gas on the supports and reserves.”
And then half a million Germans threw themselves at the last natural barrier between them and Paris: the Marne River.
They had done this kind of thing before. They knew to use a rolling barrage, also known as a fire curtain—an artillery maneuver in which the line of bombardment slowly moves toward the enemy, your infantry following closely behind—to push any Allied stragglers back from the shore and the fields leading up to it and into the woods beyond the railroad tracks; they knew to lay down a smoke screen so the French and Italian and American troops on the other side of the river couldn’t see them crossing it, first in boats, then with pontoons to build bridges of their own. Still, it’s hard to hide that many men for long. And maybe you don’t want to. Maybe you want the troops on the other side, men who have already endured an unrelenting two-hour barrage, to see the hordes of well-trained, well-equipped, determined enemy troops coming at them. I don’t know that the Germans cared to be called “Boche,” but I’m guessing some of them, at least, didn’t mind the other popular epithet Americans had for them: “Hun.” People feared the Hun. The Germans were counting on it. They knew that from the other side of the Marne, in the brief flashes of shell fire and rocket’s red glare, it would look to their enemy as if the hills themselves were coming after them.
The Allies were not unprepared. They hurled everything they had at that river. They machine-gunned and shelled whatever moved. They killed a lot of men in the water, blew up a lot of new pontoon bridges. But the Germans just threw more men at the river; built more bridges. They got across.
East of Reims, the elastic defense worked pretty much as planned; the Germans landed on the shore but could not break through. West of Reims, they did much better, advancing miles, four or five in some places. But at the far western end of the line, where General Dickman defied orders and opted for his own form of elastic defense, the American 3rd Division once again stopped the Germans from moving on to Château-Thierry and thence to Paris. The division is known, to this day, as “the Rock of the Marne.”
The ground the Rock of the Marne held is bottomland, flat and open with the occasional compact rise or small stand of trees. The nearest village, Mézy, isn’t much more than a meandering road in no hurry to get to the Marne, some small houses, and a little stone church from the thirteenth century. One evening, having spent a few hours tromping around the area trying to get some small sense of what the 3rd Division experienced that night, I decided I needed a little more distance, so I got back in my car, made for that winding road and headed down toward the river. It sprang up on me suddenly; before I knew it I was crossing a bridge. It was plain, humble, without even much of a railing; but oh, what the Germans would have given for such a bridge on July 15. A venture that took weeks of planning back then took me less than four seconds now, and I barely noticed that I had done it.
Before I realized it I was in Mont-Saint-Père, a pretty hillside village with houses and another old church and, hanging behind it all like a curtain, broad vineyards spread out along slopes with southern exposure, ideal for growing grapes in the sunshine. The church is up at the top of a hill, hard to get to through the town’s labyrinthine streets; you’d be much better off doing so with two people in the car—one to keep an eye on the steeple, the other on the streets—but I didn’t have that luxury. I managed to reach it anyway, and saw something from its yard that startled me so much that I felt I needed to confirm it from a different perspective, so I got back in my car and drove a few minutes east, through the village of Chartèves to the town of Jaulgonne, and found a spot on a ridge with an open vista. And I did confirm it: Though it can be
tough to see them when you’re on the other side of the Marne—the south side, the Mézy side—there are, in fact, hills and ridges over there, too. There is flat bottomland extending from the riverbank on that side of the river, much more of it than on this side, the northern side; but behind it there are heights. In other words, the landscape here is a bowl: a killing ground so perfect it chilled me to look at it. Without that river to slow them down, the Germans—with their vastly superior numbers, and their artillery, and gravity—would have cut through the Allied lines like a scythe through a grape. Even with the river standing in their way they managed to do it everywhere on this side of Reims, except for Mézy, where they very nearly did it, too.
When I drove back to Mézy a few minutes later, I found it looked different to me; it felt different, too. It’s one thing to behold a perfect killing ground from a distance, as if you are looking at a chessboard; but when you’re standing on it, and you know just how much blood was shed there, you can almost feel yours draining out of your body. The men of the 3rd Division stood here that night and saw, in the flash of flares, the hills across the river teeming with men coming to slaughter them. They beheld, spread out before them, this perfect killing ground. Thousands of them fell here, on this land, in these fields, by these houses, near those railroad tracks, around that church. The French on their right, adhering to the failed inelastic defense, fell back several miles, exposing the 3rd Division’s flank dangerously. But the Sammies stood here, held their ground, and in doing so stopped what would be the last German offensive of the First World War.
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To their east, from just beyond Mézy all the way to Reims, the Germans advanced for three days, but with the 3rd Division sticking at the extreme, like an anchor in a game of tug-of-war, their progress was slowed and then ground to a halt by July 17. It was their high-water mark of the war; but they were still fifty miles or more from Paris. The next day, the French and Americans launched their own massive counterattack.
Courtesy of National Park Service, Cultural Resource GIS Facility
Just below the city of Soissons, twenty-five miles to the north and west, the 1st and 2nd Divisions jumped off and headed east, toward crucial German supply lines, along a route that took them through miles of wide open fields that offered no shelter at all from relentless German machine-gun and artillery fire; half the French tanks that accompanied them were destroyed in the process, their charred carcasses still sitting there well into the 1920s, by which point they had become tourist attractions. That same day, also under severe fire, the 3rd Division crossed the Marne at Mézy and slowly scaled the hills on the other side, until, reaching a plateau, they became part of a patchwork column driving north toward the Vesle River, twenty miles away. The 28th Division was there, and the 42nd, and the 26th would soon join in; so would three untried American divisions, the 4th, 32nd and 77th. So would French divisions, and French colonials, and some Italian troops. The terrain in this area is largely flat, mostly farmland; there certainly aren’t a lot of places to hide, mostly small groves and patches of woods that might offer some cover but would surely attract enemy artillery fire for exactly that reason. Many of these fields are now dusted with bright red poppies, which congregate most heavily at the edges. You see a lot of poppies in northern France, especially, it seems, in spots where the fighting was bad. The correlation is so strong, in fact, that you might wonder if locals plant them as a memorial. They don’t. In fact, the poppy doesn’t symbolize war and remembrance in France: The cornflower does. You often see those ringing the bases of war memorials, where they actually are planted.
The Germans had heavily fortified many of the towns between the two rivers and ceded absolutely nothing without a bitter fight, not even a little farming village like Le Charmel, where Gilles Lagin’s grandmother had been born. The 3rd Division reached its outskirts, a couple of miles north of the Marne, by July 22; it took them five days to take it and hold it. “Le Charmel was probably reported captured as many times as any town in France,” the regimental history of the 76th Field Artillery—George Briant’s outfit—noted in 1919. More people died trying to take it or defend it than live in it now.
That story played out over and over again throughout the three-week struggle history now remembers as the Second Battle of the Marne. The 42nd Division got held up at a point of particularly fierce German resistance, on a farm named Meurcy just outside the village of Seringes-et-Nesles, about seven miles north of Le Charmel. “We captured the place, but at what a loss,” Corporal John J. Casey recounted years later to General Henry J. Reilly, who recorded the sentiment in Americans All: The Rainbow at War, the division’s official history. “Deeds of valor were performed in the capture of this farm of which nobody knows anything about because few of those engaged in it returned.” In Seringes, which sits atop a butte, the little church contains two massive stone plaques recording the names of 208 Americans killed in the immediate vicinity in the last few days of July 1918. They are listed in alphabetical order; it is merely coincidence that Joyce Kilmer’s name sits at the top of one of the columns. Sergeant Kilmer set out on the afternoon of July 30, accompanied by two other men, with orders from his commanding officer, Major William J. Donovan, to locate a machine-gun nest that was vexing his company. Progress was halting; after a while they split up, on Kilmer’s order, at the crest of a hill near Meurcy Farm. As one of the other men, Private Edwin Stubbs, recounted later for The Rainbow at War:
We again awaited the signal to move forward and, not receiving it, I looked in the direction of Kilmer. In a fox hole, slightly to my rear, he lay slumped with his head and shoulders somewhat exposed. We called to him, but there was no response, so we crawled to him and saw that he was beyond the need of our aid. Due to our exposed position, it was only possible to perform a superficial examination. We determined he had been struck in the head and chest by bullets and that he had died instantly. There was hardly any evidence of bleeding.
Kilmer’s body was recovered the next day, when the area was safer. No one I’ve ever asked seems to know where, precisely, he was killed; but based on Private Stubbs’s account and others, I’d say you could throw a baseball from the spot to the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, where Kilmer and 6,011 others are buried.
* * *
Though Oise-Aisne is in Seringes-et-Nesles, it is often listed, even on French road signs, as being in the town of Fère-en-Tardenois, which is actually a mile to the west. Like the rest of the area, Fère was more or less spared the ravages of war for four years until the Germans stormed into town that May. Then it suffered plenty. As a good-sized town (it’s about ten times the size of Seringes) in a strategic location, it appealed to the Germans as a site for a military headquarters; and for the actual headquarters, they chose, as they were inclined to do, the largest and most elegant house in town. In many such towns that would be (and was) the château, but Fère’s château was a special case: Built in the thirteenth century and owned for generations by a noble family who were favorites of the royal house, its last seigneur was a notorious gambler—and, apparently, not a very good one—who, having lost at cards almost everything he owned of value, wagered his château’s lead roof on a hand and lost it, too, rendering his home uninhabitable. This was before the revolution, so perhaps his heirs comforted themselves with the thought that even an angry peasant mob doesn’t want a château without a roof. It is, even in its ruined state, magnificent, two proud old stone castles perched atop steep artificial hills surrounded by moats and connected by a bridge that looks like a Roman aqueduct. Though they couldn’t occupy it, the Germans, it is said, used its massive round turrets to store and test explosives; they are riven with huge cracks.
Instead, the Germans selected for their headquarters in Fère the largest and finest serviceable home in town, with expansive grounds and tennis courts (not to mention a roof). It’s surrounded by a high stone wall, yet it sits right in the middle of everything, acr
oss the park from the hôtel de ville, or city hall. Adolphe Ferdinand Moreau, an aesthete and art collector, built it in 1856. His grandson Étienne Moreau-Nélaton (EMN), born in 1859, was quite a polymath: an art collector and critic, biographer and friend of renowned painters, and an artist and photographer himself. When the Germans took over his house, in the spring of 1918, they neglected to confiscate his appareil de photo, which he then used, after they were driven out, to document what they had done to both his home and his hometown. The images, published in a book he titled Chez Nous après les Boches, illustrate a community in ruins, entire streets of houses and shops reduced to rubble, public buildings and landmarks damaged to the point where they were unusable. In many photographs, American soldiers linger on EMN’s front lawn or in his backyard, his great house looming behind them, its walls and roof pocked with large holes. He would never live in it again.
The house was not even deemed safe to enter until 1930, three years after EMN’s death; eighteen years after that, his grandson Jean Brodin, a doctor from Paris, relocated to Fère-en-Tardenois to set up a general practice and moved into the house with his family, which included a three-year-old son named Marc. Marc also became a doctor, studying in Paris, spending two years in Boston (where he learned excellent English) getting a master’s in public health at Harvard, then working for the United Nations and European agencies in Africa for a number of years before returning to Paris, where he taught medicine and chaired the European Public Health Association. When he and his wife retired several years ago, they moved into EMN’s house and continued its restoration, a process that has now been under way for nearly a century. I had been referred to him by Fère’s mayor. Marc met me outside his gates, wearing a sharp checked blazer and sunglasses; in his early seventies, he’s tall and solid with a dignified, confident bearing. If you were sitting in an emergency room with a loved one and saw him walk through the door, you would feel relieved.
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