Back Over There

by RICHARD RUBIN

  We talked awhile about the battle and his research, and then I asked him about his collection. He chuckled, and shook his head. “I used to have a very large collection,” he said, wistfully. “All kinds of things, everything you can think of, almost. But my wife”—he looked at her, fondly; she smiled, faintly, and looked down at the table—“made me get rid of everything. She was afraid the grandchildren would get into it and hurt themselves.”

  “All of it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, still smiling, “everything. Out in the garden somewhere I still have a little pickaxe I found near a cemetery for Italian troops. Oh, and wait here.” He got up, slowly, and walked out of the kitchen. When he returned a few minutes later, he was carrying something shiny, cradling it in his hands as if it were a vase that had been in his family since long before the revolution. “She let me keep this,” he said, grinning, and handed it to me to inspect. It could have been a small vase—it was roughly the right size and shape—but it was actually the casing for a 75-millimeter shell, its copper buffed to a warm, modest glow. He told me he’d found it in an area where American artillery batteries had been posted. Clearly, it meant a great deal to him, and not just because it was oddly beautiful. For years and years after the war, I have been told, you could scarcely find a French house that didn’t have one, typically polished to a high shine, displayed on its mantelpiece, the ikon in a shrine to the family’s—and the country’s—war dead. Sometimes, the casing still had a projectile in it. Most of them, I imagine, reside in attics these days. Even the live ones. But his was still over the hearth. You wouldn’t think you could be moved so deeply by the sight of a simple copper cylinder. It was so radiant—and he looked so radiant holding it—that I took a photo of the two of them before he polished off our fingerprints and put it back on the mantelpiece.

  “Come,” he said, and beckoned me to follow him. We all walked outside, got into my car and drove for about fifteen minutes, down through the town of Dormans and across the river, past the village of Trélou-sur-Marne. Before we reached the next village, Vincelles, we pulled off the road and parked at the start of a muddy trail through some woods. “This was a road,” M. Vedovati told me as we headed in. “In 1918, there was German artillery all along here, firing across the river.” After a while he stopped, stared at the ground for a moment, then braced himself against his walking stick, bent over and picked up some shrapnel. A few moments later he did the same thing and came up with a horseshoe.

  After ten minutes or so we emerged into a green meadow surrounded on three sides by woods; the fourth side, straight ahead, was open to a vista of a lush valley. About 150 yards off, directly in between me and the open vista, was an object I could not quite discern, though I thought I could see a glint or two of what looked like pewter. M. Vedovati looked at me for a moment, smiled and then started walking toward it. It was metal. Low and wide. A piece of a guardrail from the side of a highway, maybe. But a little too tall. And what would a piece of a guardrail be doing sitting in the middle of a hilltop meadow nowhere near a road?

  Nothing; it wouldn’t be here. But the truth, which revealed itself to me clearly as I got still closer, was stranger yet: It was a boat.

  A metal boat. Probably aluminum. Twelve feet long or so. Streamlined, rounded hull, arched bow, flat stern. Much of the latter was missing, ripped away at some point. The rest was all there, if full of holes. Vegetation sprouted up through a couple in the bottom. You could still see the brackets all along the sides, placed there for oars or wooden supports. “This was in the woods over there,” M. Vedovati said, pointing to our left. “Since 1918. A relative of mine told me about it years ago. A little while back they pulled it out. They were going to use it in a new memorial in Dormans, but then they didn’t. So they just left it here.”

  “German?” I asked.

  “French,” he said. “The Germans appropriated it after they took this area at the end of May. They grabbed up a lot of French boats, for when they were going to cross the river. They rowed across in some, used others as pontoons for bridges.”

  “How did this one end up in the woods?”

  “Just before they were to launch their attack, the French and Americans opened fire on them. They had taken some prisoners and found out when and where the Germans were going to attack. The fire was too heavy here; the Germans couldn’t move fast enough carrying the boat, so they left it.” Later, in his book, he showed me a photo of it, still in the woods.

  I stared at that boat for a long time; I didn’t want to leave it. I felt as I had whenever I’d been in the presence of one of the many World War I veterans I’d interviewed. They were all very, very old, yet talking with them was like stepping suddenly into an unexpected current of warm air on a frigid winter night: It was as if I had stumbled upon something hidden, even invisible, and yet the antithesis of mysterious. A secret shortcut to a place you have never been but know well. This boat was then, and it was now. They’d grabbed its gunwales; I grabbed its gunwales. M. Vedovati was very patient, stood there silently for a long time. I think he understood.

  Eventually we turned and walked back. About fifty yards down the wooded path, M. Vedovati stopped suddenly and poked gingerly at the ground. I stepped over to look: There, embedded in the mud, was a shell, half again as long as my foot. “German?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “155-millimeter.” A large one, twice the size of the standard German 77. It would have gouged a really big hole in the ground. After a moment I realized that the groove in which it was embedded was made by a large tire. A lucky day for that truck driver, even if he would never know it.

  Something about the sight of that big piece of unexploded ordnance unleashed in my mind a flurry of unanswerable questions: What might have happened if that big German shell had been fired at the enemy instead of dropped in the mud? Could that French 75-millimeter shell, fired back across the Marne from the cartridge Jean Vedovati found nearly a century later, have forced a dozen or so German soldiers to abandon their boat before they could get it to the river? And if they had made it across, would that have tipped the balance, somehow? What would have happened if General Dickman hadn’t disobeyed his orders?

  Gilles Lagin once told me that the American 28th Division, in the line east of the Rock of the Marne, faced off against the 16th Bavarian Reserve Division; the Bavarians forced the Pennsylvanians to retreat several miles there, but then the Americans counterattacked and eventually drove the Germans back across the river, killing a lot of them in the process. One of them they didn’t kill, he told me—“he went through without any injuries, and got the Iron Cross First Class for his actions during the battle”—was named Adolf Hitler. “What if the 28th had killed a few more Germans?” he said. “What if one of them was Hitler? World history would be very different.” Maybe that explains why he and so many other people collect, even hoard, that war’s artifacts: It’s easier to just look at them than it is to contemplate the war itself—what transpired; what almost transpired; what almost didn’t. And what happened to Lucien.

  Back at the house, Monsieur and Madame Vedovati invited me in for some coffee, and we sat and talked some more; they asked me a lot of questions about the men and women I had interviewed. Mme. Vedovati seemed particularly interested in George Briant, who had served in this area as a 17-year-old boy before almost being killed at Le Charmel. After an hour or so, I thanked them and rose to go, bowing to Mme. Vedovati; her husband clutched my arm as we shook hands and walked me to the door. A couple of minutes later, as I was about to get into my car, I stopped for just a moment to gaze westward, believing I could make out, through the haze across the crowns of countless trees, the Château-Thierry American Monument—the radiator—sitting atop Hill 204, a dozen miles away. Then I heard Mme. Vedovati call out to me; but when I looked up, she was gone. Confused, I took a few steps back toward the house before her husband appeared in the doorway, smiling. He was c
radling that beautiful copper 75-millimeter shell casing in his hands; extended them toward me, and nodded.

  I tried to refuse. I really did.

  Chapter Six

  The Burnt Woods and the Ball-Shaped Tree

  Like many people who appreciate both history and fine storytelling, I enjoy a good urban legend. A lot. And as it happens, the First World War generated—and continues to generate—more of them than just about any other real-life event I can think of. Many are, shall I say, of questionable veracity, like the story surrounding the “Bayonet Trench” at Verdun, or the one about German divisions pursuing retreating British troops at the Battle of Mons in 1914 being stopped by a number of enormous, ghostly longbowmen, the spirits of English soldiers killed at Agincourt 499 years earlier—the so-called Angels of Mons. Others can never be proven or disproven—tales of soldiers killing other soldiers in hand-to-hand combat and then discovering, as they stand over the body of their slain enemy, that it’s their cousin or nephew or whoever from the wrong side of the border of Alsace or Galicia or some other frontier province; or of battlefield encounters with Corporal Adolf Hitler, which always seem to end with the other man’s rifle or sidearm jamming at the moment of truth and Hitler scurrying off. But some—like the one about soldiers on both sides spontaneously throwing down their arms on Christmas, 1914, and meeting in No Man’s Land for a game of soccer; or the one about Germany trying to entice Mexico to enter the war on their side by offering them Texas, New Mexico and Arizona—are actually true. Those kinds are my favorite. Patrick Simons told me two of them in one day.

  It was June 17, 2009; the day we met. I had just arrived in France the day before, and was still gravely jet-lagged, but Bobby Bell had advised me that this was the only day he had free to show me around, so rather than recuperate, I drove the ninety minutes down from the Argonne, where I was staying, to Thiaucourt, where Bobby was the superintendent of the Saint-Mihiel American Cemetery. I didn’t know Bobby at all—I had only been referred to him by someone at the Washington offices of the American Battle Monuments Commission, which maintains all American cemeteries and monuments overseas—and was surprised and gratified that he would do me such a favor; I later learned that the Saint-Mihiel Cemetery gets even fewer American visitors than the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, which doesn’t get very many. I think Bobby was intrigued by my interest in the area, and determined that I get the most out of my visit. He invited along two local 14–18 aficionados who knew even more about the subject than he did: Stan Bissinger, an Englishman who had married a French woman and retired to the area; and Patrick.

  Patrick, who is French, wasn’t native to the area, either, but I didn’t know as much back then, and would never have guessed it, given how well he knew the place. I also wouldn’t have guessed that he’d served twenty years in the French Army, and another thirteen with NATO, including three years at HQ and eight tours of duty in the Balkans. A genial man of middling stature and a receding hairline, expressive eyes and a big, openmouthed smile, he was still possessed, at sixty years old, of a child’s sense of wonder, especially when it came to history. And all things American.

  He was born in 1949 and raised near the small city of Chaumont (not to be confused with Ville-devant-Chaumont or Chaumont-devant-Damvillers, both about a hundred miles to the north), which had been the site of General Pershing’s headquarters during the first war. After the second war, the United States Air Force built a base there; Patrick’s father operated the base’s bowling alley. “My dad used to take me with him on Thursdays,” Patrick told me, “spending the day at the bowling alley, where I met many airmen. It was a very special and marvelous period in my life. These young Americans were so kind.” Patrick’s mother worked as a housekeeper for some American families, and would often bring him along to play with their children. He grew up, he explained, around American clothes, American cars, American décor and culture: “another world than the other French kids,” as he put it.

  The base closed in 1966, when Charles de Gaulle essentially shuttered all American military installations on French soil. It was, I believe, a sad time for Patrick; he lost a lot of friends. He never lost his fondness for all things American, though. After retiring from NATO in 2002, he accepted a position at a transport firm in the town of Saint-Mihiel, about fifteen miles from Thiaucourt; one day, he told me, he visited the Saint-Mihiel American Cemetery, and was shocked to see “how many young guys gave their lives for us.” He had never been particularly interested in history before, he said, but now he started to learn about what happened in the area during 14–18. Soon thereafter, he took a job at the Saint-Mihiel shop of DEKRA, a motor vehicle inspection company, where he befriended a co-worker twenty-five years his junior named Christophe Wilvers, who shared his interest in la Grande Guerre. Together they started exploring local war sites on their lunch hour. And then after work. And then on weekends. And then during vacations.

  Christophe wasn’t with us that day in 2009, but Bobby and Stan and Patrick showed me all around the old Saint-Mihiel Salient. Bobby and Stan spent much of the time discussing some project, leaving Patrick, whose English was much better than my French, to be my guide. We spent the morning bushwhacking through forests in search of old fortifications. At some point, Stan mentioned in passing that France has a serious Lyme disease problem, which kind of killed the buzz I had gotten from seeing my very first trenches and finding my very first shrapnel; it was certainly the last time I wore shorts in the woods Over There. Afterward, we enjoyed a fine lunch in a nice little bistro in the village of Flirey (pronounced Flea-RAY), during which I paid only slightly less attention to my exposed legs than to my steak and pommes frites and red wine; I was still searching for ticks an hour later when, back on the road, we passed a field maybe three hundred yards deep and twice as wide, and Patrick said: “Early in the war, you could have gone from one end of that field to the other walking on the body of a dead poilu every step.” Between the jet lag and the wine and my paranoia about Lyme disease, I might not have been sharp enough to ask for more detail just then. But I heard it. And it’s not the kind of thing you forget.

  The next time I returned to the area, in 2014, Patrick was in the hospital in Verdun, recovering from an illness, and while I visited him there I didn’t want to grill him about anything. The following year, though, he was back home and doing well, and we got to spend several days together exploring the area. One of the first things I asked him to show me was that field. That’s all I had to say: that field. Six years had passed, but he knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “Up there,” he said, pointing to some densely wooded heights off to our left as we drove. “The Bois de Mort-Mare.” The woods of the dead pond. “The Germans took it in September 1914. Very strategic—it gave them coverage of this whole area.” Of course: The Germans always held the best real estate. “The French thought they could push the Germans back,” he continued. “They started out one morning in April 1915”—April 3, to be precise—“across this field. And as soon as they did, BOOM! The Germans threw everything they had at it—bullets, shells, everything. They killed fifteen hundred poilus there, and thirty officers.”

  It wasn’t all one-sided: Between February 1915 and April 1917, the French launched 130 attacks on German positions in the Bois de Mort-Mare; most failed, but the French did manage to dig a number of tunnels underneath the German lines and detonate enormous caches of explosives. “There are huge mine craters in those hills,” Patrick told me. But I remained fixated on that field. What happened there was chilling even by the standards of that war, which makes it all the more dissonant to me that a new subdivision now stands on part of it, complete with a playground and a soccer pitch: a perfect little exurban idyll. The juxtaposition between what was there now and what I knew had been there exactly one hundred years earlier was disconcerting. But for a small, hard-to-spot kiosk that explained, in brief, “The War of Mines in the
Flirey Sector,” you’d never know you were near anyplace where anything had ever happened, except maybe a cookout. Yet over the course of four years, fifty thousand German soldiers died trying to hold the ground they had taken in this area. And another fifty thousand French soldiers died trying to take it back.

  It started with what is now known as the Battle of Flirey, which began on September 19, 1914, just one week after the First Battle of the Marne, while the lines that would very soon settle into stasis for the next four years—and in so doing direct the course of the war—were still taking shape. The Germans attacked that morning: Their objective was to create a salient, or bulge, in the Allied lines, disrupting road and rail traffic, and thus supply lines, between the industrial centers of French Lorraine, like Nancy, and cities like Verdun and Paris. Over the next three weeks they seized some two hundred square miles, including spots like the Bois de Mort-Mare, and Montsec, the highest ground in the entire vicinity, giving them command of a much larger area and all but ensuring that they would hold it for as long as they liked. The Germans moved fast on September 19, charging in from the east; despite the fact that the war had been going on for seven weeks at that point, they caught the French completely unawares. By the time reinforcements arrived, three days later, it was far too late. Which leads me to the other urban legend Patrick told me that day in 2009.

  Six years later, after we revisited that fateful field near the Bois de Mort-Mare, he and I drove to the village of Limey (Lee-MAY), then turned and proceeded north about a mile or so until we came to a placid farmstead set back a good ways from the road. Its owner, Olivier Jacquin, met us in the courtyard. M. Jacquin appeared to be in his late fifties or so; in his short-sleeved button-down shirt and khakis, he looked more like an actuary on a casual Friday than a farmer. He invited us into his house and introduced us to his wife, a stylish woman from Seoul, where they’d met. “It took her a while to get used to it here,” he told me. “But now she likes it very much.” She smiled; I returned the gesture, grateful for a glimpse of ethnic diversity, so rare in this part of France.