Patrick knew Olivier a bit, but mostly he knew of him; in addition to being a farmer, he is the president of an organization of area municipalities known as Chardon Lorrain—the Lorraine Thistle, the symbol of the région. It was obvious from his demeanor that Patrick regarded Olivier with great respect. Olivier, though, was anything but formal, inviting us out onto his terrace, overlooking one of his fields—and, beyond it, Limey—for homemade apple cider and cheese. (France.) I waited a few minutes after we settled in, then asked, simply: “Is it true?”
He smiled, perhaps at my American directness. “It is,” he replied.
This is the story, as he told it to me.
Before the war, Olivier’s great-grandfather Alfred Guichard was elected mayor of the nearby village of Remenauville. As it turned out, he was the last mayor of Remenauville: It was destroyed during the war, and never rebuilt. Today it exists only as a village détruit, a destroyed village. Much like Fleury-devant-Douaumont and the other villages détruit around Verdun—too badly damaged during the war, and their denizens too widely scattered, for them to be rebuilt afterward—Remenauville can still be found on maps. And like Fleury, it still exists in ghostly form, a patch of forest with paths cut through it that correspond to what were, a century ago, the town’s streets. There are street signs, as well, and smaller signs scattered about indicating what once stood here or there—a woodcutter; a cartwright; the town hall; the vicarage; an inn—and, in a clearing, the ruins of its old stone church. I have a German postcard bearing a photo of the same ruins, shot when they were fresh, with German soldiers milling about.
In 1913, Alfred Guichard took out a loan and bought a farm in between Remenauville and Limey that he had been renting, and living on, for many years. His family at that time consisted of him, his wife, Louise, his 12-year-old daughter, Marguerite, and two sons, 16-year-old Fernand and 13-year-old Paul; two other children had died shortly after birth. Olivier says the five of them were happy there, weren’t rich but had enough.
One morning, Louise left the farm and went into Limey to do some shopping. It was a morning like any other, at least until the Germans suddenly invaded. Which is to say, it was September 19, 1914: the start of the Battle of Flirey. The Germans, as I said, moved quickly; if it wasn’t exactly Blitzkrieg, their notorious World War II tactic that involved planes and armored convoys, the literal definition of the term, “lightning war,” would have seemed fitting to Louise and her family—and the other residents of the area—that morning. Like lightning, the Germans scorched one patch of earth while leaving another patch right next to it untouched. In this case, they took Louise’s home, but didn’t take the street upon which she was then shopping, and from which she could easily see her fields, her house, and maybe, if she looked closely, her family. What she couldn’t do, even from such a short distance away, was get to them.
For four years.
For most of that time—three years, eleven months and twenty-three days, to be exact—the battle lines did not move. At all. Limey, right on the front line, was soon evacuated; Louise was relocated to the south, well behind the lines, and spent the next four years in what was effectively a series of displaced persons camps, where food was rarely plentiful and sanitary conditions often quite poor. She had no way of communicating with the rest of her family; and they had no way of communicating with her.
On September 12, 1918, the Americans launched an offensive to reduce the salient, an action known today as the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, during which they recaptured all two hundred square miles the Germans had taken in the Battle of Flirey, including Louise’s home. She returned to find it—and Limey, and Remeneauville, and every other town and village in the area—in ruins; to discover that shortly after she’d been evacuated from Limey, the Germans had forcibly relocated the rest of her family from their farm to the nearby now-German-occupied town of Thiaucourt; that her middle child, Paul, had died of typhus that first winter they’d been separated, nearly four years earlier; and that her youngest, Marguerite, had been evacuated from Thiaucourt by the Red Cross. No one knew where Marguerite was. Louise, still recovering from the shock and loss, had to leave her husband and her surviving son, Fernand, to try to track down her daughter, eventually catching up with her in Switzerland. The following year, Fernand was killed clearing unexploded shells from a field.
“My grandmother,” M. Jacquin said, referring to Marguerite, “was depressive. And mystical—religious. She had a strong personality, but was emotionally fragile. In 1939, terrified of the new war, she fled to the south of France, and didn’t return until it was over. She used to talk about the ‘dirty Boche’ every day.’”
Eventually, the family—what remained of it—was able to rebuild their farm thanks to German reparation funds. “They used to joke that the damage of the war was good for the family, because they were richer after the war than before,” Olivier told me, a wry smile on his lips. Reparations took many forms, not all of them official; in addition to money, for instance, the family tore up the Germans’ narrow-gauge railroad tracks and used the ties as fence posts. I noticed a large pile of shrapnel atop a stone wall near the terrace. “When I was a child,” M. Jacquin said, “during the harvest, tires would be punctured by shrapnel every day. My parents would send all the children out in the fields to try to clear it beforehand.” It was never enough. Things are somewhat better now, he said, only because tires have improved.
Limey, and Flirey, and Thiaucourt and the Bois de Mort-Mare and the ruins of Remeneauville are all in a particular area of Lorraine that’s about 125 miles (or three hours, as the roads go) east of Château-Thierry, and maybe 50 miles (or ninety minutes) southeast of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. I refer to it as Saint-Mihiel, for the town, which is the largest in the vicinity, and for the battle to which it lent its name, which is what first brought me there; but the French know it as the Woëvre Plain. I’m pretty sure that you have to have lived there for a good long time before you can hope to pronounce “Woëvre” correctly, and I haven’t, so if we ever meet in person, please don’t ask me to try. Patrick’s friend and fellow 14–18 enthusiast Christophe says “WA-wa,” with a miniscule hint of a V in between the two syllables, the kind of thing you might be able to pick up with some microwave surveillance equipment.
The place, and its history, are as distinct as its name. The Woëvre is not Flanders, or Picardy, or Champagne or the Argonne or the Somme or the Vosges. There was no ten-month battle here like at Verdun. There was just one battle here—one three-year, eleven-month, twenty-seven-day battle. Though you’ve probably never heard of it, and likely couldn’t pronounce it, and quite possibly couldn’t find it on a map if you tried—I can’t, and I’ve been there several times—the Woëvre Plain saw as much brutality, as much savagery, and as much tragedy as just about any spot on the Western Front. Villages were leveled. Families were ripped asunder, at least one for no other reason than that the woman of the house decided to go to the grocery at precisely the wrong time. Entire populations were displaced. Legions of lives were destroyed, only some of them in the ways that might occur to you when you hear the word “war.” A century on, their descendants almost give you the impression that they can laugh about all that now. Do not be fooled.
There are many reasons why, even within the context of the largest, deadliest, strangest war the world had ever seen, the Woëvre is special. I’ll just give you one: It’s the only sector on the Western Front where American troops endured two seasons of fighting in 1918—spring and fall.
* * *
Christophe speaks almost no English, which can make things difficult if your French is tentative, because he has a lot to say and tends to say it with enthusiasm. He was born in Sedan, the northeastern French city where the Prussians captured Emperor Napoleon III in battle in 1870, which might explain his lifelong fascination with military history; he chases it, as he once told me, like a Golden Retriever chases a bird. He and Patrick h
ave been chasing it all over the Woëvre for more than a decade. The three of us had planned to go on a hunt of our own in June of 2014, but then Patrick fell ill and landed in the hospital in Verdun. He arranged, though, for Christophe and me to rendezvous on a Friday morning outside the American cemetery in Thiaucourt. I had never met Christophe before; wasn’t quite sure what to look for. Then a black Jeep pulled up—I mentioned a while back that I knew of exactly one in France—and a younger version of Patrick bounded out: same ex-military bearing, same medium build, same receding hairline (though Christophe took it further and just shaved his head), with eyeglasses thrown in for variety. “Je suis Christophe,” he said, and shook my hand as if he were pumping a well.
“Et je suis Richard,” I replied, though it was pretty obvious he already knew that. He bounced back to his Jeep, beckoning me to follow, and reached into the passenger-side door to grab something off the seat. “Voilà,” he said, and handed me a homemade scrapbook, fifty vellum-encased pages of old photos, maps and documents pertaining to the American presence in the area in 1918, all of it clamped together in a binder from Office Depot. He’d even made a title page, “Tour St. Mihiel Salient” written on it in cursive over the cover illustrations from both my last book and its audio edition. I was touched, and more than a little impressed.
“La Woëvre,” he said, sweeping his arm around outside the Jeep as we sped across the plain. Lying between two major rivers, the Meuse and the Moselle, it was of tremendous strategic importance to both sides during the first war: to the French, an essential link in their supply chain; to the Germans, an invaluable weapon for hobbling the French. Both sides filled it with artillery, machine guns, barbed wire, trenches, bunkers, blockhouses and observation posts. The Germans had distinct advantages when it came to both position and technology. The French tried to make up for them with what they called élan—fighting spirit. Each, as you now know, was good for fifty thousand enemy deaths over the course of four years. It was Christophe who’d first furnished me that figure; he said it was conservative.
Strangely, this area, then known as the Toul Sector, was deemed “quiet,” and I suppose, when compared to Ypres in 1915, Verdun and the Somme in 1916, and the Chemin des Dames in 1917, it was, which might explain why, in the winter and spring of 1918, two American divisions—the 1st, and then the 26th—were sent here to get more experience on the front lines. It wouldn’t have taken them long to learn about all the killing that had been going on in this quiet sector since September 1914, to acquire an understanding of the particular savagery they were just joining that must have informed, and even shaped, their own experiences here. Patrick and Christophe knew that I would need such an education if I hoped to grasp what the Americans went through in the Woëvre; they decided it should begin in some forested heights known as Bois Brûlé—the Burnt Woods. The name itself should give you some idea of what went on here for four years, and not by happenstance: The defense works the Germans built in these woods were so elaborate, so brilliantly planned and capably constructed, that you have to wonder why the French kept attacking them over and over again. The only thing I can figure is that those installations were so advanced—so novel—that French commanders might not have understood, even if they beheld them with their own eyes, what they were looking at.
There’s a lot of concrete, to start with. The French had concrete, too, of course. But, with few exceptions, they weren’t allowed to use it. It was deemed bad for morale: Concrete implies you plan to stay put for a while, and the French Army, its leaders believed, must never do that. They must, rather, constantly be pushing forward, driving the Boche ever backward until they were in Germany. The French trenches in Bois Brûlé are dirt, and shallow; the German trenches, though, are deep concrete gullies that zig and zag through long stretches of forest. Christophe and I descended into one that was about four feet wide and eight deep—no Tarzanning necessary; there are several built-in cement staircases, all of which have aged quite well—and poked around. “Fusil,” Christophe said, pointing to the first in a series of small rectangular openings in the side: rifle. “Rifle,” he repeated, pointing to the next. “Rifle. Rifle.” He pointed down, to a drainage channel in the floor. “No standing water in this trench,” he said. We came to a pair of concrete platforms, each a yard or so square, one atop the other, with several feet in between. “Mitrailleuse,” he said, slapping the one on top: machine gun. Then he slapped the lower one, and I could see the two together formed a deep covered shelf. “If you start taking fire, you pull the machine gun from the top and slide it in here.” He stuck his arm in deep. “Totally protected.”
“And what about you?” I asked.
“Ah.” He stepped back and beckoned me to do the same. “There,” he said, and suddenly I spotted near my shins a hole, large enough for a burly man, slanting down into the earth; reverse-engineering it in my head, it seemed to me the Germans had first dug a large shaft into the ground at an angle, slid one of those corrugated metal arches into it—in this case shaped more like an open safety pin than a half-pipe—then secured the arch in place by pouring a couple of feet of concrete along the topside, leaving the passageway it created open and solid, the kind of thing that could probably sustain an indirect hit or two. It had aged so well, in fact, that in recent years someone had to bolt vertical metal bars onto the front of the opening, to keep people (like me) from descending into it. Still, I put my face right up to them and could make out cement steps. “Bunker,” Christophe said. As we made our way through the trench, we passed several more entrances to the same underground shelter.
There were more rifle galleries, too; someone had cast a Prussian cross in the concrete atop one of them. A little ways down, at a point where the trench took a sharp turn, generating an angle that created a bit more space in the narrow passage, we came to a chamber the size and shape of a shower stall. It had a rifle opening in the front, and a thick rear wall—five or six inches of cement—that only extended about three-quarters of its width; squeezing through the quarter-width opening in it, I discovered another, smaller chamber behind it, protected by the wall. I poked my head out, perplexed. Christophe beckoned me up front: “For snipers,” he explained. “If you start taking fire,” he said, then stepped behind the rear wall and gestured for me to follow. “Safe here.” I was reminded of that hole the Germans had built into the floor of one of the blockhouses on Jean-Pierre Brouillon’s property, designed to direct an enemy grenade’s blast upward, where it could do the least harm. They really did think of everything.
All along the tops of the trench walls were petrified bags of cement; you could still see clearly the grain in the sackcloth. “The Germans just stacked them up there,” Christophe explained, “and the first time it rained, voilà! Instant protection.” He led me to another shelter, this one with a wider entrance, over which its builders, a Bavarian engineering corps, had left a cement plaque bearing their motto: In Treuefest. In steadfast loyalty. Maybe fifty yards away, across some flat, lightly wooded ground, a modern sign points out some French trenches. At one point in these woods, the two front lines lay only twenty yards apart. The French trenches, being dirt, are much shallower and narrower these days, maybe forty-eight inches deep and thirty wide; their sloping sides are covered with ivy and clover, their floors with tree roots and branches, making them appear even smaller. We walked through them, too, and very quickly I understood: No rifle galleries, no machine-gun platform, no sniper’s chamber, no petrified cement bags; nothing to protect you but élan. The following year, revisiting with Patrick, I eavesdropped on a pair of French tourists as they marveled at how much deeper and sturdier the German trenches were than the French. There was nothing but admiration in their voices.
* * *
Christophe and I spent that entire day in Bois Brûlé and neighboring forests, and after a few hours I started to get the distinct feeling, though I do not believe in ghosts, that these woods, burnt or otherwise, were ha
unted. There were, for one thing, ubiquitous subterranean portals like the one I described earlier, not just in trenches but scattered throughout the forest floor in a pattern I could not discern; they hinted at a vast network of tunnels leading, as far as I knew, all the way back to Germany. There were bunkers, including one massive concrete shelter with at least a half-dozen entrances and exits; and waterworks; and all kinds of little monuments and memorials, French and German, most of them to units that fought in the area. Some, though, were for individuals, like one Christophe led me to in the middle of the woods, a stele resembling an enormous artillery shell, standing at the head of a cement bed the size and shape of a grave:
Here Rests in God
Major Otto Staubwasser
Fallen
As Battalion 5 Leader, 7th Bavarian Infantry Regiment
Weltkrieg 1914/15
Weltkrieg: World War. Already, in 1915, they knew what this was, what they were a part of. What they did not yet know was the horror that word, Weltkrieg, would one day and forevermore evoke. To them, this was still a field of honor, a glorious adventure, the birth of a new German Empire. Posterity, they were sure, would regard these memorials as we do the markers at Saratoga. I think that mistaken belief, that tragic disconnect, haunts me even more than all those tunnel entrances.
It is a humbling exercise to set out in search of ruins but in the process start piecing together an image of the enormous fortress—the killing factory—that the Germans constructed in these woods. To start, for all the supremely armed and trained men manning those trenches and bunkers, there were thousands and thousands more at any given time in camps a few hundred yards behind the lines, awaiting their turn. You find remnants of their stay here: shelters, kitchens, stone stoves, those omnipresent tunnel entrances. There are concrete platforms, all that remains of soldiers’ barracks that were otherwise built of wood; and sections of walls of officers’ barracks—they were built entirely of concrete—though little that hints at their former splendor, the time when they were furnished with electric lights, telephones, fireplaces, pianos. There is a field hospital, concrete covered with earth, one large chamber and several smaller ones; and another smaller structure, rectangular with bars in the windows. “That was a jail,” Christophe told me. “For German soldiers.” Even the Germans’ legendary discipline wasn’t enough to keep every last soldier in line, it seems, during endless months in the woods.
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