I’ve written about Seicheprey before, as have others, though no two people seem to interpret what happened there on April 20, 1918, quite the same way. The village, which sat right on the front line, was in the hands of the 102nd Infantry Regiment—Connecticut National Guard—on that particular day. At 3:16 a.m., the Germans unleashed a two-hour box barrage around it, surrounding it on three sides with an intense bombardment designed to keep anyone within from escaping and anyone without from coming to their aid. (This was a standard German tactic; they had used it successfully hundreds of times, including near Bathelémont on November 3, 1917, the night Gresham, Hay and Enright were killed.) Around 5:00 a.m., the Germans flooded the open end of the box (which faced north, toward the lines and, beyond them, Saint-Baussant) with Stosstruppen, shock troops. This was not one small detail of specialists; it was twelve hundred men, shrieking, shooting, hurling grenades as they ran through at top speed, disorienting and terrorizing the five hundred or so Americans trapped in Seicheprey. More than two thousand German infantry, highly seasoned, many armed with flamethrowers, stormed in right behind the shock troops. The Connecticut men, many of whom had been sleeping when the attack commenced, and some of whom had become trapped in their dugouts, fought back with whatever they had, which in some cases meant shovels, pickaxes, even rocks; one mess sergeant managed to kill two Germans with a meat cleaver before they subdued him. Eventually, after an hour or so, the Americans, aided by American and French reinforcements that made it through once the box barrage ceased, chased the Germans out of Seicheprey and back across the lines. The Germans left behind fifty-two of their own, killed. But they also left behind eighty-one Americans in the same state. And they took with them somewhere between 150 and 200 American prisoners.
The outline and details presented above are largely agreed upon by historians; less settled is their assessment of how the Americans did there that morning. The controversy goes all the way back to April 21, 1918: American newspapers of the time hailed Seicheprey as a triumph for the untested Americans; the government trumpeted it to sell Liberty Bonds. General Pershing, on the other hand—who, I have been told by more than one historian, didn’t much care for National Guard troops to begin with—regarded the battle as a major screw-up on the YD’s part, and was seriously considering disciplining the surviving troops until the French high command stepped in and awarded them the Croix de Guerre, instead, which would have made handing out punishments to the same men for the same action a tad awkward. Pershing was not pleased.
My own view is that the men of the 102nd acquitted themselves very well that morning, especially when you consider that it was their first major encounter with the Germans—actually, it was the first major encounter between any American troops and the Germans—and that they were outnumbered by more than six-to-one, though I will admit that my judgment may be colored by having met and interviewed the last survivor of both the 102nd Regiment and the 26th Division, 106-year-old J. Laurence Moffitt, who had been at Seicheprey; eighty-five years later, the memory was so unpleasant that he didn’t care to say much about it, except that he’d been there. The real issue, I believe, for both Pershing and subsequent historians who view the affair as he did, isn’t how the doughboys acted under fire, but how many of them the Germans managed to haul off as prisoners. They regard it as an embarrassment, a propaganda coup for the Germans, who had been taking, and using, American prisoners for exactly that purpose since Bathelémont. In fact, that was almost certainly the primary objective of their attack that morning. The Germans took a lot of pictures of the captured Americans later that afternoon, which they disseminated as widely as possible: postcards, leaflets, posters. The most famous is a photograph of more than a hundred of them, lined up in front of Succursale No. 547, a shop in Thiaucourt. Today the building houses a craft shop for a foster home.
I had been to Seicheprey several times, had walked its streets, studied its layout. I had visited the church in the center of the village, rebuilt after the war (I have postcards of the old one in ruins); it bears a plaque with an eagle over the words “The Lord of Hosts, in Recognition and in Memory of the American Troops, January–November, 1918.” I had inspected the little fountain out front, erected by the state of Connecticut in 1923 to honor the men of the 102nd Regiment; had picked, out of the dirt at the base of the village’s own 14–18 memorial, cartridges, shrapnel, a button, the head of a spoon. What I had never been able to do, though, was get a sense of how, exactly, the battle had unfolded there that morning. And so, six years after I had first visited the place, I asked Patrick and Christophe if they might be able to show me in a way that I might grasp.
“No problem,” Christophe said. “How about tomorrow?”
The next day, a bright, clear morning, Patrick and I got into Christophe’s Jeep and rode out to Seicheprey. We stopped briefly at the church, so I could get my bearings, then climbed back into the Jeep (Patrick granted me shotgun), turned right down the main street, and followed the road—D28A—east, heading uphill toward Flirey. About a mile from the church, at the crest of the ridge, we pulled off the road and got out. Suddenly, it was all spread before me like a diorama, the village down below on the left, the woods down on the right, a mile or so of open fields in between the two. “The Stosstruppen came out of there,” Christophe said, pointing to the forest. “From those concrete trenches at Saint-Baussant. They just walked across those fields and right into town. The only side that wasn’t under fire was theirs. The Americans were trapped.” The Germans had planned it meticulously, rehearsed it over and over right up until they launched the attack. The inexperienced Americans were greatly outmanned and outgunned, taken by surprise in the middle of the night. It’s a wonder, I thought, looking down at the battlefield, they did as well as they had.
Standing in that same spot, I suspect General Pershing would have agreed.
* * *
There’s another photo taken that day, more obscure than the one shot in front of Succursale No. 547, but also more haunting. It shows a group of newly captured American prisoners being marched up a hill, led by a German soldier on horseback holding a really long lance. (A lance!) More German soldiers bring up the rear; a few sit on a stone wall along the side of the road and watch the procession. The Americans look hot and exhausted and, frankly, pretty pissed off. Their uniforms are in various states of disarray; the most striking thing, though, is their faces: I don’t know if it’s the German camera or lenses or the film they used, or the men’s haircuts or expressions or state of dishevelment, but every last doughboy in the picture looks like someone you could know. They’re not figures in old sepia-toned photographs who make us think Wow, people don’t look like that anymore. These men are—well, they’re guys. They could be your friends. Or you.
I asked Patrick and Christophe if they were familiar with that photo. They were. I asked if either of them had any idea where it might have been shot. Patrick didn’t; Christophe knew exactly. “It’s outside Bouillonville,” he said, then drove us there. We climbed out of his Jeep and he walked around, searching for the precise place the photo had been taken. He tried maybe a half-dozen different spots on either side of the road, and a couple in the middle of it, before settling into one just off the pavement to the left, a point maybe a hundred yards uphill from a sharp curve. “Here,” he said after looking around some more, and as we joined him there it quickly became obvious that he was right. Much had changed—a hill that had risen up behind the stone wall had been leveled; a couple of houses were gone; a lot of new trees had been planted—but the road and the wall itself were exactly the same. It was startling: When I aligned the view with the image in my mind of that old photograph, I felt, for a moment, as if I were in it. I could see those men—those guys—shuffling up this hill, around that curve, behind a man on a horse carrying a pike; I could picture the German soldiers prodding them along from behind, while others sat on the wall and watched the spectacle. If the entire proc
ession had come around the bend just then and marched right by me, I would not have been entirely surprised.
We tend to assume that very little will remain after the passage of a century and two colossal wars, but in the Woëvre, that assumption is tested time and again. Outside Remeneauville, Patrick led me one afternoon to a large old linden tree standing by the side of the road; it is believed to have been planted there around 1700. “That’s on maps from a hundred years ago,” he told me. “They called it l’arbre en boule.” The ball-shaped tree. “Both sides used it to calibrate artillery,” he explained. I have no idea how it managed to survive one war, much less two.
Nearby, a little obelisk stands off the side of the road, red diamonds painted on each side. On the front, a small white porcelain plaque notes:
5th
Infantry
Division
U.S. Army
12 Sept. 1918
And below, on a much larger bronze plaque:
September—October
1944
5th Infantry Division
Assigned this sector after 700 mile
Drive from Normandy beaches
First Breach of Moselle River Defenses
Made by
5th Infantry Division
September, 1944
I love the thought of GIs from the 5th Division coming across a monument placed a generation earlier by doughboys of the 5th Division—including, maybe, their fathers, uncles, cousins or even older brothers. More precisely, I love thinking about what they must have thought at such a moment.
Monuments like that are nice reminders, but really, memory is stored everywhere here—in the soil, and the rocks, and the roads, and the trees. No one, I think, understands this better than farmers, who contend every day with that memory, plowing up shells and shrapnel, dodging dips and concrete, and who almost always know a great deal about the battles that occurred on their land. Townsfolk, too, take a proprietary interest in what happened in their villages; should you stop in little Bouconville, for instance, someone is sure to show you the monument near their mairie that commemorates Jean Bouin, an Olympic runner—his 5,000-meter duel with Finnish champion Hannes Kolehmainen at the 1912 Games in Stockholm is a track-and-field legend—killed here during the Battle of Flirey in September 1914. A stadium in Paris is named for him.
The Sammies who stayed here a while in the first half of 1918, the men of the 1st and the 26th Divisions, would have known about Jean Bouin, and the tens of thousands of other poilus killed in the Woëvre to that point. And somehow, they would have had to live with that, and with the understanding that those big concrete things in the forests and the fields and the crossroads were there to facilitate turning them into ghosts, too, like they did to Edward McClure Peters Jr., and Joseph Sokowich, and Stanley J. Shaw, and John Sweeney, and scores of others. I don’t think that, as the Big Red One and then the Yankee Division departed for other sectors, they were sorry to leave the Woëvre. And though what they left it for ended up being much worse, I don’t think they relished the thought of ever coming back here, either.
When they did, in September—both divisions, this time accompanied by nearly a dozen more—things would be much different.
* * *
Though less than three months had passed, much had transpired in that time—namely, the Second Battle of the Marne. The last great German offensive of the war had been stopped and reversed. American divisions had gained valuable fighting experience, and the confidence that went with it. At the same time, though, they had taken serious losses, many more than any of them had incurred during their time in “quiet” sectors. General Pershing was unhappy about that; a lot of dead doughboys would still be alive, he believed, if American divisions hadn’t been misused by their French commanders at places like Mézy and Fismette. His men had proven themselves, he said, in battle, were ready to fight together as an American Army under entirely American command. He insisted on it. Maréchal Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, agreed. Pershing said he knew just the place for his army to strike: the Saint-Mihiel Salient. His plan was for them to attack it from two sides, reduce it, eliminate it, and then push on to Metz, taking a major strategic and industrial center and becoming, in the process, the first Allied troops to cross the border into Germany.
The top British commander, Douglas Haig, didn’t care for this idea. He had a plan of his own that would focus on his sector, with support from the French and, serving under them, the Americans. He swayed Foch. Foch took it to Pershing. Pershing, outraged, refused. The two generals worked out a compromise: Pershing’s American Army would remain intact, and it would attack at Saint-Mihiel as planned; but as soon as the salient was eliminated, rather than proceeding to Metz, they would move up to the Argonne and launch a new offensive there—still under American command, but otherwise in line with Haig’s plans.
Since speed was of the essence in reducing the Saint-Mihiel Salient, Pershing assembled a mighty force for the assault. More than 400 tanks were to be deployed, and nearly 1,500 airplanes—the greatest massing of those two new technologies in the entire war. Some 3,000 big guns were enlisted. So were more than 500,000 doughboys, many from fresh divisions that had never seen combat. An additional 125,000 or so experienced French colonial troops would also serve under American command. (In a fanciful image, The Boston Globe’s Frank Sibley, embedded with the Yankee Division, later reported seeing “the Senegalese, knives held between their teeth, crawling up under the machine-gun fire, through the bushes whose tops were nodding in the gale of flying lead.”) A taut plan of attack called for most divisions to push straight ahead, while the two that had already spent the most time in the area, the 1st and 26th, would start at perpendicular points and head for each other in a pincer maneuver that would cut the German force in half. They were to meet, General Pershing decreed, at the town of Vigneulles on the morning of the second day.
The best-laid plans are still subject to the whims of luck; the Americans were the beneficiaries of one piece and the victims of another. The lucky break was that the Germans, on the defensive since July 18, had already decided to withdraw from the Saint-Mihiel Salient in order to shore up the line that ran behind it and had, by sheer coincidence, begun to do so the day before the Americans launched their offensive. The bad break was that it rained for several days, right up to H-hour on D-day—yes, those terms were first coined for Saint-Mihiel, twenty-six years before they were used for Normandy—and beyond. And that kind of rain turned the Woëvre into a sea of French mud.
Courtesy of National Park Service, Cultural Resource GIS Facility
The rain effectively neutralized the tanks. It didn’t stop the planes, though, or those thousands of big guns, which had started firing several hours earlier; Frank Sibley would recall in With the Yankee Division in France:
The artillery preparation was set for one o’clock [a.m. on September 12, 1918]. And promptly at one o’clock there turned loose such an inferno of sound as we had never before heard. The whole top of the earth seemed to burst into flame. From right and left and rear, from every hilltop and from every valley, the cannon began to bang, and the echoes ran round and round until the whole sky was roaring continuously.
It lasted four hours, stopping as suddenly as it had started, according to Sibley, at five o’clock, although this was done apparently just to mess with the Germans, many of whom emerged from their shelters and thus were caught out in the open five minutes later when the barrage resumed, this time with gas thrown in for good measure. Then the Americans’ barrage started rolling forward, and the Sammies pushed off.
Despite the mud, they moved quickly: Some of the Germans’ big guns, as I mentioned, had already been displaced. So had some German troops. Some of those still in place had already geared up to evacuate and thus found it easier to retreat than to dig in and fight. Even the German barbed wire, most of i
t strung out four years earlier, had rusted a bit and was somewhat easy to overcome. Most histories published shortly after the war, divisional and otherwise, refer to Saint-Mihiel as an “easy” battle. “The price paid had been small,” Emerson Taylor later wrote. “Casualties were not numerous.” This assessment would have been of no comfort to the seven thousand or so American soldiers—nearly two-thirds of them killed in action—who had become casualties before the battle ended.
The dead were buried at the American cemetery in Thiaucourt, though apparently not all of them, as Patrick explained to me one afternoon while he and I hunted for another grave in the Bois de Rembercourt, some woods outside the village of the same name. I should say Patrick hunted, since I had no idea what it looked like, while he had seen it before; and though he was sure it was right over there, or maybe there, after an hour or so he pulled out his phone and called Christophe, the Golden Retriever, who drove over and led us right to it. It seems we had pretty much walked right by it, though I don’t blame Patrick for missing it, since it doesn’t have a marker—or even, at this point, a body.
Patrick told me the story: In the fall of 2009, while hunting around these woods for artifacts, a local collector came upon the grave—human remains still in it—and notified the authorities. The collector’s identity remains unknown to me; to Patrick, too. “It was an anonymous call,” he explained.
“Why?” I asked.
“He was probably doing something he wasn’t supposed to,” he said, and added, in response to my raised eyebrows: “Metal detector.” Like Jean-Paul de Vries, Patrick regards their use as dishonorable; besides, it is illegal to employ them for such a purpose on public land.
The Bois de Rembercourt has long been known as fertile ground for relic hunters. The men of the 2nd Division had approached the woods through a large, rolling wheat field—deeper than the one they had crossed at Belleau Wood—protected by two German pillboxes, the remains of which are still present. “With only two machine guns, the Germans controlled the whole field,” Patrick told me. You can still see dimples in the wheat—evidence that the Germans had something bigger than machine guns trained on this field, as well. The Americans had a hard time getting across it; things didn’t get much easier once they made it to the woods, either. Though the section where we’d hunted for the grave was fairly flat, a large part of the forest lay on a steep hill; we negotiated the slope as the Sammies had—scuttling sideways across rather than up or down it, hopping over roots and branches at every step—and had a pretty hard time of it, even without anyone shooting at us. Plenty of shooting had happened here, though. Despite the fact that scavengers have gone over the woods many times with metal detectors, I found an unfired rifle bullet (American) and a mess-kit lid with a handle (German) on that hill.
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