Back Over There

by RICHARD RUBIN

  They spent an awful lot of time here; knew the topography intimately and used it to their advantage. At one point, Christophe took me to an enormous gun pit dug behind a butte that naturally hid their big howitzers from French and American eyes. In Buxières Wood, he led me to the top of another butte and pointed out two round cement holes, a few inches apart and each the size of a tennis ball, peeking out beneath the grass; then we descended behind the hill and ducked into an entrance covered by a corrugated metal arch, down some concrete steps and into a subterranean observatory. The holes, he explained, were for a periscope that commanded views of the entire plain; it ran down a square, fifteen-foot-deep shaft, still lined with wood, to an observation chamber, all of it so well preserved it could be used tomorrow.

  Everywhere: Graffiti. Piles of animal bones, remnants of feasts enjoyed the night before deployment on the front lines. Rusted metal cans. Coal. And, of course, bottles. “Back then, there were vineyards near here,” Christophe explained.

  “Did both sides have the same kinds of provisions?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “The Germans had everything—food, drink, shelter, armaments. The French only had white wine, red wine and bread.” Each day, he said, every poilu was issued a liter of wine.

  “Which would you rather have been?”

  He thought for a moment. “In the early part of the war,” he said, “I would rather have been German than French.” He paused for a few more seconds, smiled. “In the latter part I would rather have been American.” Quite a statement for a Frenchman to make: The Americans weren’t issued so much as a thimble of wine per day; weren’t even allowed to drink anyone else’s, at least not officially. They must have been much better fed, and equipped, at that point for Christophe to have expressed such a preference.

  All that talk of provisions must have made Christophe hungry, because shortly thereafter, when we passed a small clover-covered bank, he sat down, gestured for me to join him and pulled out of his backpack a pie stuffed with some kind of cold meat paté, a covered bowl of salad, a long, flaky fruit pastry and two cold beers. “Typical Lorraine lunch,” he said, though I doubt many of the poilus posted here a century earlier had eaten nearly so well.

  When we finished our repast, we packed up and walked for a bit until we came to a dirt road. Turning left, we followed it for about ten minutes, until Christophe suddenly spun right and started walking through the woods again. There was nothing to mark the spot; I had no idea where he was going, but I followed, and after about five minutes we came to a path. It led us down through the middle of what I later learned was the Forêt de Buxerulles into a small clearing, in the middle of which, camouflaged by shadows—I didn’t see it at first—was an autel: an old Teutonic altar, elegant carvings all along its perimeter, a large Prussian cross flanked by an alpha and an omega carved in its center. It would not have looked out of place in any fine German church but for the fact that it was made entirely of cement instead of wood. It had aged well; I was quite moved by it.

  “Soldiers would gather here for mass,” Christophe explained, sweeping his arm along a large section of forest floor. “Hundreds of them, sometimes. There were ten to fifteen thousand Germans in this forest alone.” When I returned to the site the following year, with Christophe and Patrick, a local official tagged along, eager to show me what had transpired in the interim: Someone had decided to restore it, and the entire altar had been meticulously redone in bright white mortar, a new Latin cross installed atop its pedestal, areas where the intricate perimeter carvings had broken off re-created. The official went on for quite a while about the local artists involved in the project, and the grand ceremony staged for its rededication just a week earlier. As we turned to leave, I whispered to Patrick: “I liked it better before.”

  “Me, too,” he said.

  A year earlier, I had been struck, powerfully, by the sanctity that old altar somehow managed to project onto the other, more profane ruins that surrounded it, those concrete trenches and bunkers and tunnels, those hilltop observatories, the elaborate waterworks, the narrow-gauge railroad that once ran through it all. It left me marveling to an extent that robbed me of any eloquence or even, apparently, tact. A few minutes later, traversing yet another stretch of magnificently planned and executed German trench line with Christophe, I couldn’t contain myself. “How did the Germans lose that war?” I blurted.

  It’s an indelicate question, I realize, to pose to a Frenchman. But Christophe simply nodded his head thoughtfully and pondered it for a moment.

  “Les Américains,” he said, at last.

  Some time later, as we walked down another dirt road and Christophe indicated we were about to duck back into the woods to see yet another German something-or-other, this Américain, having spent the previous nine hours hiking through the woods, and presently afflicted with two aching feet, two sore legs, and a pair of arms that had been scratched white by branches and brambles, lost his composure and had what the parents of any toddler would recognize as a meltdown. “Pas de forêt! Pas de forêt!” I cried out. “Not forest! Not forest!”

  And Christophe, whose Golden Retriever energy and enthusiasm hadn’t even started to flag yet, took pity on me.

  * * *

  Pas de forêt: Most of the Woëvre is, in fact, not forest at all, but rather flat, open farmland, extending out in all directions to the horizon. Easy terrain to take, if your enemy is caught unprepared; hard to defend, even with those wooded, fortified heights, and Montsec. Almost immediately after the Battle of Flirey in 1914—and in some cases, while it was still being fought—the Germans started building formidable defense works on farms all over their section of the Woëvre; overbuilding them, really, though perhaps such a concept doesn’t exist in wartime. There were trenches, of course, everywhere, some of them concrete and extremely well preserved today, like the ones in Bois Brûlé or those in Saint-Baussant, a village near Flirey; most, though, were dirt, long since filled in and plowed over, not even a slight depression in the earth to hint at their former existence. Many, I imagine, rest at the bottom of Lac de Madine, a seventeen-square-mile lake that was created on the plain in the 1950s. It draws a lot of tourists; every time I’ve been to the area some or other vintage automobile gathering is going on, affording one the rare opportunity of simultaneously passing a World War I bunker and a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, both roughly the same color.

  I’m not sure the tourists in their old cars, both mostly French, even notice the old blockhouses. They’re hard to miss, and yet so common that they’re easy to overlook. One morning I drove by one near the village détruit of Regniéville, and though the road was straight and flat and the sky was cloudless, I was almost upon the thing before I actually saw it and realized what I was looking at. It was only a few yards off the asphalt, too, a big squat object, fearsome despite the tender young grass growing on top, dark gray blocks with a rounded roof and low rectangular openings for machine guns. There were iron rods poking out of one side, evidence that someone had once tried to demolish it; a nice thought, but no more realistic than the prospect of ridding yourself of lice during a four-week stint in a trench. I pulled off the road and walked around it a few times, slowly, before ducking inside. Rubble covered the floor; tiny stalactites hung from the ceiling. But it was watertight. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend the night there, but it was probably as safe as any house in the area.

  Elsewhere, such a thing might draw tourists, gawkers, history buffs, but in the Woëvre, it’s nothing special. If you see a clump of tall brush in the middle of an otherwise open field—a common sight here—it almost certainly masks the remains of a German bunker. Masking them with vegetation is pretty much all a farmer can do. “When you live here,” Olivier Jacquin told me, “you can’t escape the history—it’s all around you, in everything you see, all the time.” Some of those old bunkers are so interesting in appearance that they could almost pass
for art; one, set back maybe twenty yards from the road outside the town of Fresnes-en-Woëvre, has sharp corners and a whitish roof and looks like a dirty sugar cube pushed down unevenly into the back of a Chia Pet.

  One day Patrick and I set out to find the well-preserved remains of a covered emplacement for a German 88-millimeter gun, hidden in a stretch of forest along a main road; it had sleeping quarters with intact wooden shelves, and coordinates painted in white on the wall in fine old Teutonic script. En route, as we passed through the village of Varnéville, I spotted a modern house with a concrete outbuilding, separated by a driveway, that looked like it had survived a couple of world wars. Patrick confessed that he had never even noticed it before, though it was right along the road; I stopped the car, and we got out to get closer look. After a couple of minutes, a neatly dressed gentleman in his fifties emerged from the house and asked if he could help us. Patrick introduced us, told the man I was American and explained that we were wondering if his garden shed or whatever it was had been built by the Germans. He smiled and said oui, introduced himself as Alain (he hesitated just a bit when, pen in hand and notebook open, I asked him his last name, so I will refrain from using it here), told us he’d grown up here, as had his parents and generations before them. As he talked, I noticed the blockhouse stood at the intersection of two roads. A stream flowed next to it; flowers grew in front of it, and on its roof.

  “The Germans built this around the house,” Alain said. “Not this house, but the one that stood here before this one. They camouflaged the front of it, probably with shrubs like what’s there now. This was close to No Man’s Land, the French up there to the right, the Germans over there to the left. The sewer in town here is still full of cartridges. When I was young, my friends and I would go through those woods back there looking for shrapnel, and sell it for scrap. We made a lot of money.” Later, strolling through his little backyard garden, I found a German horseshoe.

  He went inside and fetched a key, then walked us around the corner and opened a red wooden door hidden in the blockhouse’s rear. There were a couple of chambers inside, one presently being used for garden storage, the other as a man-cave. Each had, underneath narrow openings in the concrete, platforms for rifles or, more likely, machine guns. Though it sat next to that stream it was, once again, completely dry inside. The foot-thick walls kept it cool.

  * * *

  This was the formidable landscape, and history, that greeted the American 1st Division in January 1918. They replaced the 1st Moroccan Division, a highly regarded French colonial unit. With the arrival of the Big Red One imminent, maps were changed, the Toul Sector being renamed the American Sector. It was a tremendous source of pride to those doughboys.

  They came here that winter not to launch an offensive, or to stop one, but to continue their training. Though not quite green—they had lost men in fighting, starting with those first three at Bathelémont two months earlier—it was felt they could use some more education in another “quiet” sector. The History of the First Division describes what its men saw when they first arrived:

  Opposite stood the picturesque hill of Mont Sec, which rose to a height of nearly four hundred feet above the surrounding plain and from whose summit the enemy could look down upon every movement behind the French lines for several miles. In front stretched the great Woevre Plain, dotted with villages, forests and ravines which afforded abundant cover for the enemy’s batteries, billets and rest camps . . . At some points the two lines were not more than fifty yards apart. The ground along the French front lines was so low that only shallow trenches could be dug and these were largely filled with water . . . The position had been established when the Germans retired in 1914, and during the early part of the war it had seen very hard fighting, as was attested by the numerous graves and the bones which had been torn up from their resting places by the bursting shells. During the three and one-half years of occupancy it had been strengthened by both sides with a series of trenches and wire entanglements, organized in great depth, so as to give a maximum of protection.

  That’s what passed for “quiet” at that point in the war. The Americans learned, very quickly, exactly where the Germans were, how close, how slender was the No Man’s Land between them, all while hunkering down in shallow, wet trenches amidst human bones. And then there was winter:

  The weather was cold, with frequent heavy rains. The roads soon became sloughs, and the country, a mire. Rubber boots were issued for the trenches and emplacements, and the men wore them constantly. The ground was so low and marshy that on the sunniest days there was mud under foot and both infantry and engineers were employed in repairing existing trenches and constructing new defenses.

  Not that that slowed down the Germans. They dropped hundreds of shells a day on the American Sector. Attacked the Sammies with airplanes. Ambushed American patrols. Raided American trenches, took American prisoners. And there was gas. A lot of gas. The History says of one particular episode, on February 26, that its “suddenness and the violence of the attack, coupled with the overwhelming fumes of the gas, were even more horrifying than the raid at Bathelémont.” At that point in the war, the Germans were deploying sulfur mustard, which blistered the skin, broke down the lungs, and, in some cases, caused blindness. Death often followed, sooner or later.

  Not that the Germans were the only ones using poison gas; “the Americans,” the History notes, “were learning rapidly the German methods of frightfulness.” By early March, the doughboys’ own raids were becoming more daring, more effective. When the Germans launched the first phase of their Spring Offensive in Picardy that month, the French, needing all the troops they could muster, deemed the 1st experienced enough and asked Pershing to shift them over there hurriedly. In just over two months in the quiet American Sector, the Big Red One had lost more than five hundred men, among them 1st Lieutenant Edward McClure Peters Jr., killed on March 11, 1918. After the war, his mother, Eleanor Bradley Peters, moved to France to be close to her son, who was buried in the American cemetery in Thiaucourt. She took an apartment in the nearby city of Toul, and never left, even after the Nazis invaded. When she died in 1941, at the age of 86, she was buried in the Thiaucourt town cemetery, under a marker—a plain white cross—that is an exact replica of his.

  For the 26th, the Yankee Division, brought over from the Chemin des Dames to replace the 1st, things were destined to get even rougher here. The story goes that when the New Englanders first arrived and settled into their trenches, having gone to some lengths to hide the transition and their own identity, they looked out across No Man’s Land to see a sign hoisted over the enemy’s first-line trenches: “Welcome 26th Division.” “This was a livelier front than the Chemin des Dames,” Major Emerson Gifford Taylor of the 102nd Regiment—Connecticut men—wrote in his 1920 history of the division, New England in France. “Officially designated ‘quiet,’ it was very far from deserving that name in actual experience.” He elaborated:

  From the very outset all ranks were impressed with two absolute necessities—that of keeping under cover during daylight, and of observing extreme care in the matter of communications, lest information should get to the enemy, who proved, as was told by the outgoing division, to be both alert and aggressive. From his watch-towers on Mont Sec, as from his drachen [“dragon,” or observation] balloons, he kept a vigilant eye on every corner of the forward area . . . It was a fact that, for days at a time, a motor-car, a group of three or four soldiers in the open, a thread of smoke from a kitchen, for instance, was nearly sure to draw fire from the “seventy-sevens,” or, from what was especially dreaded, the so-called “Austrian eighty-eights,” a gun of uncanny precision and very high velocity . . . Occupants of the trenches received continual attention from snipers and machine guns. It was hazardous, indeed, to be abroad “up front” at any hour between daybreak and dusk . . . And by night there were frequent concentrations of gas or high-explosive . . . At all times
our men were made aware that the war was still going on.

  The regiments were distributed along a nine-mile front; the 104th, mostly men from western Massachusetts, were sent up into Bois Brûlé, where the enemy was happy to shoot at them, or shell them with trench mortars, from behind those superb defense works.

  The men of the Yankee Division quickly acclimated to the American Sector despite its hazards, which, along with the ever-watchful and all-seeing enemy, included things like the weather, and the terrain itself. Captain Daniel Strickland, in Connecticut Fights, recounts that the onset of spring had turned the Woëvre Plain into a hellish gumbo, its trenches—except, that is, the concrete German variety, with their built-in drainage systems—perpetually filled with water and, due to the lack of any “latrine system,” as he put it, a generous helping of human waste. Nevertheless, with the benefit of lessons learned there by the 1st, the 26th started pushing back against the Germans, more than the latter cared to accommodate. They decided to teach the Americans a lesson at a little village near Flirey and Saint-Baussant called Seicheprey.