Some of them had already fought elsewhere—at Bathelémont, and the Chemin des Dames, and Château-Thierry, and Belleau Wood, and the Marne, and the Vesle, and Saint-Mihiel. Others would fight even further afield: Two American National Guard divisions—the 27th, from New York, and the 30th, from the Carolinas and Tennessee—would spend the fall of 1918 fighting under British command (despite Pershing’s earlier policy) near the Somme, 125 miles west of the Argonne; two more, the 37th and 91st, would be pulled from the Argonne in the midst of the offensive and end up fighting in Flanders, across the border in Belgium, for the last couple of weeks of the war. One regiment of American infantry, the 332nd, was sent to Italy, where it fought high in the Alps during the Vittorio Venetto Offensive, which effectively knocked Austria-Hungary out of the war. Two more regiments, the 27th and 31st, were sent to northern Russia and Siberia, where they were supposed to protect Allied interests and maybe tip the scales a bit against the Bolsheviks in the civil war there.
Back in France, a few American units had spent part of the summer of 1918 in the Vosges Mountains in Lorraine and Alsace, including the 5th Division, which, though they didn’t do much fighting in the vicinity, nevertheless put up a monument to themselves in the village of Frapelle, the only such testament to an American presence in the Vosges; and the 92nd, the Buffalo Division, one of only two African American combat divisions to serve on the Western Front in that war. The other African American combat division, the 93rd (aka the Bloody Hand Division, after their insignia) was famously given to the French by General Pershing, and thus served throughout the spring and summer of 1918—in French uniforms, with French weapons, under French commanders—in parts of the Western Front that no other Americans saw. That fall, they fought in an area just a dozen or so miles from the sites of some of the fiercest fighting in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, yet their actions there are not considered part of that last great battle: segregated once again, it seems, though at least the French appreciated them, erecting their own monuments to the division’s regiments after the war. The most interesting of these, to the 371st Infantry Regiment, can be found outside the village of Ardeuil-et-Montfauxelles, atop a ridge in the middle of a working farm, the road to which is not the kind of thoroughfare you want to try in a rented car. I won’t say how I got there; only that it was worth the effort. It’s smaller and humbler than the other monuments to “colored” regiments, in part because its top was blown off during fighting in the area on June 12, 1940, but you can still read, among the names listed around its base, that of Freddie Stowers, who in 1991 became the first and only African American doughboy to be awarded the Medal of Honor, seventy-three years after he was killed trying to take this spot.
With the exceptions of the 27th and 30th Divisions, out in Picardy, and the 93rd here in Lorraine, pretty much every other American division in France that was deemed ready to fight was being massed along that twenty-four-mile line from the Argonne to the Meuse. From the time the AEF started showing up in France, the Allies had been working on the assumption that if the Germans could be softened up enough in 1918, they might be finished off in some grand Allied push in 1919. By the end of August, though, with the last German offensive stopped cold and then rolled back at the Second Battle of the Marne, some were thinking, even if they wouldn’t say such a thing aloud, that perhaps a big push that fall might do more than merely soften up the Germans. Thus were General Pershing’s plans for a push to Metz after Saint-Mihiel rewritten by the French and British, replaced with a major offensive at Meuse-Argonne, where over the previous four years the French had known only costly defeat, and the British had never even fought at all. Pershing, who had been very cautious with his men’s lives to that point, might have pondered those facts a bit more before he agreed; but in exchange he was offered what he’d always wanted—an independent American Army fighting under entirely American command—so he didn’t. Historians disagree on the wisdom of that decision. All those statistics I cited earlier, though, are beyond dispute.
They can be overwhelming. So can a visit to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, where 14,246 of those 26,277 Americans are buried. So can driving around the Argonne and getting a sense of just how vast a battlefield it is, and how varied: farms and forests, lush valley and rocky heights, Roman roads and tractor trails and cow paths. The area was settled by Celts three thousand years ago and by the Romans a thousand years after that, but a lot of it wasn’t actually settled by French people until the seventeenth century; it was regarded before that as impenetrable wilderness, and much of it seems that way today. Dave Bedford, the superintendent of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, once took me to a section of woods where the 368th Infantry Regiment, part of the Buffalo Division, pushed off on the morning of September 26; denied artillery support and accurate maps and adequate wire-cutters—while serving under a white commanding officer who suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be removed from the field—they quickly ran into all kinds of trouble, failing to achieve their objective of linking up with the 77th Division, a fact that was used to denigrate African American troops for a generation. Ninety-seven years later, Dave and I ran into all kinds of trouble there, too, barely making a few hundred yards through mud and holes and very dense brush before we had to turn back. And it wasn’t 5:00 a.m. at the end of September. And we didn’t have to negotiate any barbed wire. And no one was trying to kill us. Except, maybe, Mother Nature.
Courtesy of National Park Service, Cultural Resource GIS Facility
Even Mother Nature didn’t mess with the Germans, who’d conquered the French in the Argonne, and then the Argonne itself, in short order in 1914 and lived in it thereafter as if they were very well armed wood nymphs. They were so good at sylvan living and warfare, in fact, that they inspire awe and admiration in a great many present-day history buffs, a lot of them French. A group of them has even undertaken the restoration of one of the Germans’ third-line rest camps in the Argonne, Camp Moreau, near the village of Vienne-le-Château. Lager Moreau-West, as it was known during the war, was established in September 1914, in a section of the forest that afforded excellent natural defenses and resources. It was, like almost everything the Germans built, electrified and outfitted with hot and cold running water and excellent sanitation facilities, and housed up to four thousand men at a time. It was also served by narrow-gauge rail. The Germans laid out more than eight hundred miles of it in northern France during the war; they had already built more than a hundred miles of it in the Argonne by the end of 1914.
Innumerable German soldiers did stints in the Argonne at one time or another. Every month, three thousand of them became casualties in this part of the forest alone. The Germans built forty cemeteries here during the war; the Americans built one very large one, and the French eight, one of which contains the remains of ten thousand unknown poilus. So many French just disappeared in the Argonne that after the war an ossuary was built, by private subscription, in an area of the forest called Haute Chevauchée. Down in its crypt, the bones themselves are mostly out of view—you can see a few peeking out behind notches in the chamber wall—but the walls are covered with plaques commemorating the dead, commissioned and mounted by subscribers. Some are illustrated with photos of the deceased. The men wear their uniform, or coat and tie; they look right at you or a bit to the side, lips pursed in bravado or curled up ever so slightly in a shy smile. Son, father, brother, uncle; killed, died gloriously, fell, disappeared. 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918. Leon, Gustave, Louis, Henri, René, Alfred, Paul, Pierre, Raymond, André, Emile, Alexandre, Michel, Georges, Gabriel, Maurice, Jude, Jean, Charles, Fernand, Primo, Etienne, Robert, Ernest, Octave, Eugene, Antonin, Victor. A startling number of them died around Christmas and New Year’s. It is easier, I think, to just stare at the bones than it is to read those plaques. Between 1914 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of men were killed in the Argonne—not in any kind of discrete “battle”; just day-to-day conflict.
On the ground, i
t seems impossible to grasp something like the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. In trying to get a handle on the war’s last great battle, I have found it best to take the same approach I took with its first, the Battle of the Frontiers: Focus on something—a spot, a unit, a day, a story—until you have it in hand, then move on to something else, and, in time, assemble a mosaic that, if you behold it from the right distance, presents you with a picture.
But a lot of people get hung up on that first thing and never go any further.
* * *
Lager Moreau-West is, in many ways, emblematic of the Western Front: built by the Germans in 1914, abandoned when the Allies overran the area in 1918, forgotten shortly thereafter, and within decades more or less indistinguishable from whatever else surrounded it. In 1996, though, some enthusiasts decided to restore it. I can’t tell you why they chose this Lager, or camp, in particular; perhaps there was more to work with here. Jean-Paul de Vries has taken me to the sites of several of them, including the Hanover Lager, which he first showed me that day in 2009, when I picked bullets out of the roots of a fallen tree there; it could accommodate up to four thousand German soldiers on furlough, and had, among many other amenities, a hospital, a cinema, a church and a brothel, all laid out along roads named after streets in Hanover, Germany. Another we visited years later, in the Bois de Breuilles near the village of Cunel, had been called the Porta Lager. “There were as many as eight thousand German soldiers here at any time,” Jean-Paul told me as we walked around a section of woods that looked pretty much like any other, except it didn’t: The trees were younger, and there were fewer of them—not a lot fewer, but enough that you would notice it once you knew why that might be so. The ground was unnaturally level—again, not strikingly so, but enough. We’d arrived there by walking up what appeared to be a logging road, though Jean-Paul told me the Germans had built it for their trucks, which carried as much in as they did out. “There was a gate here with big stone mounts, and a sentry post, everything,” he said, his voice so infused with the excitement of a soldier on furlough that I could almost see it there.
“This was a big one,” he said. “It had eight bread ovens, operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They built a canal so the barracks would all have running water. There was a casino [officers’ barracks and club], a Kino [movie theater], brothels, bars. There was even a PX by the gate.” As impressive as Jean-Paul made the Porta Lager sound, I later found a description of an even grander German rest camp in an area of the Argonne known as Champ Mahaut, captured on September 29, 1918, by the American 77th (Statue of Liberty) Division, draftees from the city of New York, which appears in 1919’s History of the Seventy-Seventh Division by Major Julius Ochs Adler:
Our advancing troops uncovered a German paradise. Here was located one of the famous rest areas of the German armies, where battle-worn and weary Boches were taken to fatten up and recover morale amidst amazing comforts and luxuries.
On the reverse slopes of these hills, huge deep dugouts had been constructed, each capable of housing fifty men or more in perfect safety from hostile shelling. On the heights above these dugouts, more pretentious abodes had been constructed for officers and non-commissioned officers. These were built of concrete, with logs and concrete roofing, twenty feet in depth, and were ornamented to resemble Swiss chalets and Black Forest hunting lodges with peaked roofs and exterior fresco work of burnt oak. Within were oak wainscoted chambers, fitted with electric lights and running water, supplied from the power house in the valley below. Benches and tables, in rustic solid oak, were supplemented by plush arm chairs and hair mattresses to cater to the comforts of weary warriors and, outside the doors, rose-gardens and favorite flowers from the Fatherland were cheerfully blooming. “Waldhaus Martha,” “Waldhaus Albertin” and “Unter den Linden,” as they were variously named, vied with each other in coziness.
Adjoining “Waldhaus Martha,” was the bowling alley, with the open-air restaurant and beer garden built above it, where sat the onlookers on a sunny afternoon, quaffing their beer and cheering on the bowlers. Down in the ravine below, where the brook ran, was the great concrete swimming pool, a close rival to the one in the Columbia College gymnasium, and here also were found spacious shower baths supplied with hot water by modern boilers and concrete furnaces.
The Chapel, the Library teeming with the best works of German science and literature and including, even from hated England, the tales of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle, the officers’ club with its attractive bar, the big theater, fitted for moving-picture exhibitions—none of these was wanting to make the place an ideal spot for quiet life and recreation. In the photographer’s shop our men found hundreds of plates showing Germans, short and tall, fat and thin, single and in hilarious groups, having all kinds of good times with hunting parties, beer parties, singing parties, Christmas parties, high festivities generally in their valley paradise, where they had rested so securely for over four years.
“Soldiers would spend twenty-eight days at the front and then fourteen days here, over and over,” Jean-Paul said as we picked our way through the Porta Lager site. “They were Württembergers, Bavarians.” There wasn’t much left of it, mostly the brick ruins of some bread ovens, but I found a lot of other stuff there: shrapnel, of course, and cartridges, but also an iron vent from a cook stove. The most exciting discovery was a two-inch-long cylindrical battery from a German flashlight; the most chilling, a large and very heavy piece of a 340-millimeter American coastal artillery shell, fired from a big naval gun that had been transported inland by rail. “This was taken by the 3rd Division,” Jean-Paul said. “October 1918.”
Volunteers at Camp Moreau told me they often found things in the woods, especially electrical insulators, which look like white porcelain toadstools, and chevaux de fries, so-called cavalry stars, arachnids of sharp iron spikes that the Germans tossed around liberally to pierce the hooves of enemy horses, though they worked just as well on human boots, with dire consequences in an era before tetanus shots. In the campsite there are plenty of sleeping quarters built into the hillside, corrugated metal half-pipes that the Germans shipped in, prefabricated, from foundries back home, then installed upon wooden platforms and left open at one end for air and quick egress; and cement foundations and walls; and collapsed tunnels, untold hundreds of yards of them, extensive networks used for both shelter and communications and built by Silesian miners, said to be the finest diggers in the world and brought to the front by the thousands for no other purpose than to excavate. In old photographs, many of them sport mustaches that look like push brooms.
Those tunnels, surprisingly, were among the first things volunteers undertook to restore. Personally, I would have made all kinds of excuses to get to them last: Though well lit (as they were a century ago), they are also forbiddingly damp and narrow and, above all, intricate. The Germans did as well underground as they did in the forest, and perhaps best of all underground in the forest, though their campgrounds did have quite a few aboveground amenities, too, as Jean-Paul (and Major Adler) pointed out. At Camp Moreau, local volunteers rebuilt a public bath and a bandstand, while a group of schoolchildren from Bavaria visited every week for a year to rebuild the camp Kino, complete with an original bench and projector. There are plenty of other structures scattered throughout, some complete, some partial; and, everywhere, artifacts. On a table in one reconstructed mess hall, among the plates and cutlery, sat a recently exhumed oxygen tank, to be used in the event of a gas attack. The company that manufactured it, Dräger, still exists, and still makes them, for premature newborns.
I first heard about Camp Moreau from Denis Hebrard, an unassuming yet genial man in his sixties who owns a bed-and-breakfast in the Argonne and informed me, the Friday I checked in, that I should visit the camp the next day, as it was worth seeing but was open to volunteers and visitors only on Saturday mornings; what’s more, he told me, he thought something special must be in the works, bec
ause he had heard through the grapevine that a reporter from The New York Times would be visiting the camp that morning. I was impressed and intrigued, at least until the following morning, when I figured out, after about an hour at the place, that the reporter was me.
It was the old game of telephone: Jean-Paul, who knew I was coming—and who wasn’t supposed to mention to anyone what (or, more precisely, who) was bringing me to the Argonne—let it slip to someone, who told someone who told someone who told a man named Harry Rupert, who volunteered at the camp, that I would be in the area. Somehow, in Harry’s mind, that tidbit metamorphosed to the notion that an unnamed reporter from a named American newspaper was coming just to do a story about the camp, which spread quickly throughout the 14–18 network in the Argonne, and was eventually fed to me. The next day, when I arrived, Harry figured out that I was the journalist in question well before I did, then proceeded to show me every last square foot of the camp, which is what finally made me catch on.
Harry is Dutch, which means he speaks English. As Jean-Paul de Vries had explained to me, the Dutch all speak English, as they all grow up watching American television. In his case, that meant Donny & Marie and The Love Boat; for Harry, it was more likely I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. He and his wife had retired to the Argonne a few years back and were renting a house in Châtel-Chéhéry. Jean-Paul, who had grown up in the Netherlands, told me that a number of people from there had, in recent years, started retiring to the area. Land in Lorraine was relatively inexpensive, and the Dutch, he said, were known for being cheap.
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