Back Over There

by RICHARD RUBIN

  The remains that nameless prospector found that day in 2009 were ultimately identified as 1st Sergeant George Henry Humphrey of Utica, New York, and the 6th Marine Regiment, shot through the head in these woods on September 15, 1918. His comrades buried him, with all his things, where he fell. After the battle, survivors were sent out in search of fresh graves so they could relocate the dead to Thiaucourt, but Humphrey’s was overlooked; it’s quite possible some exploding shell had obscured it. The following year, Sergeant Humphrey’s brother wrote to survivors from the regiment inquiring about his brother’s remains. One replied with a hand-drawn map. Still, they were never found—at least, not until that anonymous fellow with the metal detector came along, ninety-one years later, and dug them up.

  The remains were transported back to the United States and reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery. Two elderly sisters—first cousins once removed, the sergeant’s nearest relatives—attended the ceremony. Both had been born long after he was killed, barely knew of his existence. One told a reporter that when she got the call, she thought it was some kind of a scam.

  “Voilà,” Christophe said, pointing to the grave, a body-length depression near a tree.

  “Where?” I asked, my eyes still adjusting.

  “There,” he said, crouching down and pointing.

  “That doesn’t look like a grave,” I said.

  “It’s not as deep as it was,” he replied, “but that’s it.” And when I continued to look skeptical, he climbed into it and lay down on his back, arms crossed over his belly, his military haircut and camouflage pants only enhancing the tableau.

  * * *

  Saint-Mihiel was, in essence, the coming-out party for the American Expeditionary Forces. Anyone who was anyone in the AEF was there, including a lot of people who were not yet anyone but would be, someday. Colonel George S. Patton was with the tanks that didn’t get very far. Colonel Billy Mitchell, who is today regarded as the father of the United States Air Force, coordinated the air assault. Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, serving on Pershing’s operations staff, helped plan and coordinate. And Douglas MacArthur, who’d been promoted to brigadier general since his time in the Sommerviller Sector, was there in command of the Rainbow Division’s 84th Infantry Brigade, though judging from the headquarters he took for himself, he seems to have felt he was running the entire offensive. The Germans had used the château at Saint-Benoît-en-Woëvre as their HQ before the Americans had driven them out, and like the Germans, MacArthur had an eye for choice real estate. He was also something of a dandy—let’s just say he tweaked his wardrobe to suit his own sense of style, and rarely went into battle dressed according to regulations; he was once captured in the field by another American division and held on suspicion of being an enemy spy who hadn’t gotten the uniform quite right. More than that, he was a tireless curator of his own legend, and had lots of dramatic photos of himself taken at the château, some on its front steps and others inside, seated on what can reasonably be described as a throne.

  There isn’t much to Saint-Benoît-en-Woëvre these days: a handful of houses, a restaurant that I have heard is good but that never seemed to be open when I passed by, and the château. And it’s arguable whether or not the château is actually there. When MacArthur arrived he would have approached it from a long, straight driveway, lined on both sides by old stone walls culminating in a courtyard with a grand neoclassical mansion in its center. When Christophe and I arrived, nearly a century later, the driveway was the same, though the stone walls had been replaced, or perhaps plastered over, with cement. But the château—well, to start, it had lost its roof entirely (though probably not in a card game). The structure still has, to some extent or other, four walls, but almost all of its ground floor is now obscured by wild shrubs and tall grass, and the house itself is full of trees. Large, tall trees. They poke through the second-story windows and soar above its old roofline, making the edifice seem like nothing more than a façade, something you might find on a movie studio’s abandoned back lot. The stone walls and arched doorways inside are mostly there but also mostly covered with vines. It looks like something General Sherman torched in his march to the sea, except no one did any such thing. It seems no one has done anything at all to the place since MacArthur left.

  In the 1920s, General Pershing would choose the finest piece of real estate in the entire sector—Montsec—for an American monument, a beautiful rotunda that commands spectacular views of the plain and can be seen from just about everywhere in it. (In the next war, the Germans, who still appreciated a good position, loaded Montsec up with guns and observation posts; the Americans shot up their own monument in the course of chasing them out of there in September 1944.) In September 1918, though, Pershing made camp in another château, somewhat humbler than MacArthur’s in Saint-Benoît, about eight miles away in the village of Woinville. I hasten to explain in this case that “humbler” in no way implies “humble”—it looks like a slightly smaller version of a storybook castle, complete with ivy-covered walls, high arched windows and a turret with a conical roof. Unlike the château at Saint-Benoît, the one in Woinville has been remarkably well maintained—is, in fact, a bed-and-breakfast now. Its sign mentions its garden and “rooms with character,” but says nothing about the place’s most famous guest. Everyone in town knows, though, just like they all know that the Germans had used the local schoolhouse, built ANNO MDCCCXXXVII, as a hospital for four years before Pershing arrived.

  And that, really, is what makes this area different from those that Americans had fought in further to the west: four years. The Germans had taken those towns and villages north of the Marne just about six or eight weeks before the Allies took them back; they had taken Belleau Wood and the villages around it just days before the Marines set out across that wheat field. But they had taken their chunk of the Woëvre in September 1914, and had held it—and all the towns and villages and people in it—for those four years; had, effectively, held all those French civilians hostage, including Alfred Guichard and his whole family, except for his wife, Louise, who, though safely behind French lines, was also a hostage of the Germans, in a sense. “In the villages . . . a civilian population, freed from four years of slavery, welcomed our men as saviors,” Emerson Taylor wrote in New England in France, and though it sounds like self-congratulatory hyperbole, it wasn’t. Taylor ends his chapter on Saint-Mihiel with a letter written by the village priest of Rupt-en-Woëvre on September 13, 1918, the day after it and many other towns were liberated; in it, he thanks the men of the YD for releasing him and his parishioners from four years of German brutality. He closes:

  Several of your comrades lie at rest in our truly Christian and French soil.

  Their ashes shall be cared for as if they were our own. We shall cover their graves with flowers, and shall kneel by them as their own families would do, with a prayer to God to reward with eternal glory these heroes fallen on the field of honor, and to bless the Twenty-Sixth Division and generous America. Be pleased, Sir, to accept the expression of my profound respect.

  In Thiaucourt, whither the Guichards and a lot of other families were removed after the Germans seized their farms, the town’s World War I monument is a life-sized statue of a poilu and a doughboy warmly shaking hands as their respective flags flutter behind them. There are plenty of markers, memorials, plaques and even statuary Over There commemorating America’s role in the liberation of France in the First World War; but nothing else like the one in Thiaucourt. Of all the things Patrick showed me that first day back in 2009, it left the strongest impression—stronger, even, than those trenches and shrapnel we’d found in the woods. When I returned in 2014 it was gone—removed for restoration, I was told, though its pedestal, pocked with bullet holes from the second war, remained. I was greatly relieved to see it back in place the following year.

  * * *

  You can’t go many places in the Woëvre without co
ming upon a 14–18 cemetery. The American cemetery, in Thiaucourt, contains 4,153 graves; the largest French cemetery in the area, in Flirey, has 4,407. The largest German cemetery, which is also in Thiaucourt, has 11,685 graves—around one-fifth of the German soldiers killed in this area between 1914 and 1918—spread out in endless rows over acres and acres. The last time I was there, I met a German couple who were searching for the grave of the man’s great-grandfather, killed here in 1916. I wished them luck.

  The Thiaucourt cemetery’s acreage indicates that it was built during the war. Those that were constructed afterward are much smaller, with many of their dead consigned to mass graves; as Gilles Lagin once explained it to me, the French didn’t want to give the Germans any more ground than they had to. Thiaucourt, though, has no mass graves. Most of its markers are laid out in straight rows, though the Germans occasionally arranged some in circles, too, especially around trees. Way in the back, you’ll find a gallery of custom-made individual monuments. Unlike the French and Americans, who only allowed standard government-issued markers in their cemeteries, the Germans permitted comrades or loved ones of the fallen to commission private memorials, stones that were chiseled and carved back home in Germany, then transported to France and installed in the same military cemetery in which the memorialized soldier was interred. The larger stones, in particular—I’ve seen some that were four feet tall or more—feature expert craftsmanship, exquisite lettering, flowery language (“Here rests our beloved, brave fallen comrade . . .”), and beautiful imagery: blossoms, swords, Pickelhauben (the spiked helmets Germans wore early in the war), a snuffed-out torch, an oak branch with an Iron Cross dangling by a ribbon. They are beautiful and fascinating, but above all strange, speaking at once to the Germany of that era’s imperial ambitions—their very presence indicates that the Germans intended to keep this conquered territory forever—and its surprisingly romantic, sentimental ethos. French postcards from that war typically feature photos of men in uniform, or destroyed towns, or tanks, or trains, but German postcards often showcase a poem, or a photo of a soldier standing before ein einsames Kriegergrab—a lonely war grave—or a hand-tinted image of a soldier in uniform, the soft field cap known as a Mütze on his head, canoodling with a buxom Fräulein back home over a caption like “The kiss is the seal of love.”

  Most German World War I cemeteries have at least a few individual memorials; the Thiaucourt cemetery has dozens, including at least two dedicated to Jewish soldiers, Kanonier Hermann Katz and Feldunterarzt Ludwig Salinger. Katz’s features a beautiful chiseled image of an artilleryman’s distinctive Pickelhaube, which features a cannonball instead of a spike on top; Salinger’s identifies him as Ritter des Eisernen Kreuzes—Knight of the Iron Cross. They died, respectively, in December 1914 and January 1915, cold and far from home. Their families, if they stayed in Germany for another few decades, have no gravestones at all. There are standard-issue Jewish markers—tablets, like those Moses carried down from Mount Sinai—scattered throughout the Thiaucourt cemetery, too, as there are in every German 14–18 burial ground. Twelve thousand Jewish soldiers gave their lives for das Vaterland in that war; more of them, proportionate to their share of the population, than Germans as a whole.

  One day, on my way to somewhere else—I can’t recall where anymore—I passed through little Bouillonville, outside of which those American prisoners had been photographed by their German captors on April 20, 1918. The village is mostly one street, narrow and curving with houses and shops huddling just off the sidewalk, the kind of place you drive through very carefully. As I rolled forward, slowly, a woman approached my car on foot and cautioned me to take care: A cow had gotten loose and was in the road just around the next bend. The heifer was all white—a Charolais, a breed very popular in France—and loped this way and that, in no hurry to move, despite a few townspeople’s prodding and entreaties.

  At an intersection on the outskirts of town I saw a little sign shaped like an arrow (or, more accurately, a grain silo tipped over on its side) pointing to the right: “Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof 1914–18.” Another German cemetery.

  Now, for as long as I can remember I have been in the habit, when passing by an old burial ground and not in any particular hurry to get wherever it is I am going, of stopping in and poking around; but this one was only about two miles from the enormous Soldatenfriedhof in Thiaucourt, where I’d just spent a considerable amount of time, and I was experiencing a bit of cemetery fatigue right then. I was about to drive on past when I spotted, on a stretch of grass just outside the cemetery’s low black wrought-iron gate, a man working in a garden. Yes, he said, when I asked: He does find things in the dirt there. Mostly cartridges and horse’s bones and, once, a piece of a French Lebel rifle. Had there been fighting here? He pointed over my shoulder at the landscape on the other side of the cemetery; it was speckled with craters. I sighed, thanked him and walked over to the gate. A plaque on it reported that there were exactly 1,368 German dead within. At least, I thought, this will be quick.

  It wasn’t.

  Bouillonville sprawls. It’s easily as large in area as the cemetery at Thiacourt, which contains almost ten times the number of dead; it was clearly laid out during the war, when the Germans had the liberty of taking as much land as they wished. It starts narrow and then widens, then widens some more, and some more, and then expands up a hill to the left, crosses a road, and continues into a mezzanine and then an upper terrace. There’s an area on the lower level where graves are planted in a circle around a big old tree, and a garden section nearby with some modest personal memorials lined up against a fence. In the middle of one section stands a small stele bearing an eagle and a Prussian cross and the motto Für Gott, König und Vaterland. Other than that, and despite the slopes (which continue across the road), the rows are perfectly orderly. More orderly, in a way, than any other cemetery I have ever visited, because these graves are laid out exactly as they had been during the war, with 1914 in the narrow corridor closest to the front gate, 1915 by the stele, 1916 in the section with the tree, 1917 in the mezzanine, 1918 up top: the entire war plotted out chronologically for anyone with the time and inclination to stroll on through.

  There are seven rows in the ultimate section, in two plots bisected by a brick path. On the left, in the very last row, I found three markers dated September 12, 1918; the last three graves in the cemetery, dug on the morning of the Americans’ attack before whoever was doing the digging realized there would be many, many more, including theirs if they stayed around to dig further. On the right, in rows four and five, I counted forty-eight graves dated April 20, 1918—forty-eight of the fifty-two seasoned soldiers of Reserve Infanterie Regiment 259, most of them from the vicinity of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, who’d been killed by Connecticut troops during that attack on Seicheprey, the one that many historians consider a debacle, the one that resulted in the deaths of 81 doughboys.

  If you look at it on paper, fifty-two to eighty-one doesn’t seem terribly skewed; if you then hear that the Germans outnumbered the Americans that morning six-to-one, you might even start to feel some pride, a sense that, all things considered, we got them about as good as they got us that day. But I can tell you, from personal experience, that walking down those rows and reading the names of some of the fifty-two men who died trying to capture American prisoners for propaganda purposes—Johann Kapels; Mathias Verkennis; Heinrich Knop; Emil Winkelmann—doesn’t engender any sense of satisfaction. All you really come away with is an understanding that those men—or, more accurately, their commanding officers’ commanding officers—gravely underestimated their American enemy.

  By the time they met there again, five months later, two more urban legends would be put to rest: the Germans’ belief that their superior positions and defense works and weaponry made them invulnerable; and the Americans’ notion that they could rout the tired and all-but-defeated Germans in battle without paying a very high price themselves. The
war in the Woëvre was once new, then old, for both of them; in far too many cases, it took their spirit and then their lives. But what awaited them next was something far worse, something that history would come to regard as both Germany’s last stand and America’s deadliest battle, something akin to the greatest military urban legend of all.

  If you think about it, “Argonne” even sounds a bit like “Armageddon.”

  Chapter Seven

  Red Giant

  The last great battle of World War I began around 5:00 a.m. on September 26, 1918, and ended promptly at 11:00 a.m. forty-seven days later. Some 1,200,000 doughboys, six of every ten in France at that time, fought over an area about half the size of Rhode Island, bordered to the west by the Argonne Forest, to the east by the Meuse River, and to the north by hundreds of thousands of experienced German soldiers ensconced behind four years’ worth of defenses. The attack was launched along a twenty-four-mile-long front, fanning out as it advanced. Before the offensive was over, it would claim the lives of 26,277 American soldiers, more than any other battle in American history. Another 100,000 would be wounded, shot or gassed or blown up or hammered by shrapnel. For most of the men involved, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive would epitomize the First World War, as Verdun did for the French and the Somme for the British.