A lot of Dutch visit the Argonne, many of them drawn by a fervent interest in 14–18, which has always struck me as strange, as the Netherlands saw no fighting, sent no troops to fronts elsewhere, and had nothing to do with the First World War, really, until the day before it ended, when it took in the Kaiser, who’d just been exiled from his former empire. It is a fact that I often point out to them when I encounter them in the Argonne. The Dutch being typically polite, they just nod, thoughtfully, although one couple I met while strolling among the markers at the American cemetery, when confronted with the bit about sheltering the former German emperor in exile, replied, “Yes! We shouldn’t have done that! It was the money, you know.”
Harry Rupert, who hadn’t known much at all about the war before he moved to the Argonne, now spends every Saturday at Camp Moreau, about which he knows a great deal at this point, all of which he is eager to share. Tall and thin with a mop of blond/gray hair, a shaggy mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, his appearance and unstinted enthusiasm make him seem like a retired surfer turned cheerleader, a rather dissonant sight in a place like the Argonne. He certainly did teach me a lot, though. “There were sixty of these camps in the Argonne!” he boomed the morning we met there. “All over the forest. They were all linked by narrow-gauge rail. The trains ran every day, several times a day. They even had timetables printed up! Ha!” he boomed. “The Germans!”
Jean-Paul, who knew of Harry Rupert but hadn’t yet met him, had taken me to Camp Moreau that morning, thinking I might enjoy it. I did, even as it became apparent to me, after ninety minutes or so, that Jean-Paul believed we had seen all there was to take in there, and was eager to move on. “Just one more thing, if you have a few minutes!” Harry said excitedly. He was the kind of person who said pretty much everything excitedly, especially if it concerned World War I and the Argonne. Just one more thing: the officers’ club. And just one more: the chamber where the Germans had kept the enormous diesel generator, brought in by rail from das Vaterland, that had powered the whole camp. And one more: a tunnel. And one more: a section of recently excavated water pipe. And one more: an obelisk commemorating Den gefallenen Helden in den Argonnen (the fallen heroes in the Argonne) that the Germans had built there in 1916. And one more: the showers, this section for officers, that one for soldiers. And one more: another tunnel. And one more: the officers’ mess. And one more: a large pile of wine bottles. And one more: what he believed had been a chapel. And one more: the enlisted men’s mess. And one more: a section of narrow-gauge rail. And one more: some postcards he had found that he believed were scenes of this camp. And one more: a stretch of electrical line. And one more: yet another tunnel. And one more—
At this point, Jean-Paul said something brusque to him in Dutch and started to lead me away. Harry ran after us, following all the way to Jean-Paul’s van. “Let me know if you can make it to Châtel-Chéhéry!” he called out. “I can show you a lot of things there! Sergeant York!”
It would have been a clean getaway but for those last two words. Winner of the Medal of Honor; namesake of York Avenue in Manhattan; subject of the top-grossing film of 1941, for which Gary Cooper, in the lead role, was given an Academy Award. Sergeant Alvin Cullum York, a pacifist from the mountains of eastern Tennessee who had unsuccessfully sought conscientious objector status, was drafted into the 82nd (the “All American Division”) and sent to France where, on October 8, 1918, he did what Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, called “the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe,” killing 20 Germans and capturing 132 more.
In Châtel-Chéhéry.
And so, a week later, when I found myself with a free afternoon, I went there and visited Harry Rupert. Though it was only June, it was the hottest day of the year, well into the nineties. I should have known better, should have suspected that Harry was one of those people who actually speeds up after retirement. I should have known that, despite the heat, he would insist upon showing me every site he considered interesting. I hadn’t anticipated, though, that after he led me several miles along the hilly, wooded Sergeant York Trail, and around the grounds of the local abbey (where American soldiers had been quartered), and through thigh-high grass to the sites of old German military encampments and cemeteries, the heat and the hike would somehow energize him. At one point, he took me through a neighbor’s garage and deep into the man’s backyard, to a large clump of weeds and reeds, then pulled them back to reveal a big square cement pedestal hiding within, carved garlands draping its sides. “This was all a German cemetery,” he told me. “There was a rest camp over there, and tennis courts, everything. And this under here was the base of a big German monument. The Kaiser came to dedicate it in 1916.” Later, in his house, he showed me photos of the ceremony, the Kaiser and other German dignitaries milling about in front of the monument in their Pickelhauben and long gray coats. The monument itself was, in my opinion at least, quite ugly, a squared pillar with a big German eagle, wings spread, perched atop; on one side, under a black Prussian cross, the inscription The German and French Heroes, which, to be honest, truly baffles me. Maybe they were hoping the French, having been included, might then leave it alone. They didn’t; would have destroyed the pedestal, too, I’m sure, if they could have figured out how. Harry told me the man who owns the property considers it a real nuisance.
After six hours roaming around in the heat, hiking along a trail that led up a steep hill into some woods, he actually picked up the pace, slapping his chest and crowing about how much better shape he and his wife had gotten into since they had moved to France. “Americans are so—so corpulent!” he crowed, and though I wasn’t sure whether he was basing this on me alone or was still watching American television, it would have been hard to disagree with him, even if I hadn’t been too winded to reply. Instead, I took his statement as permission to rest for a moment.
“Come on!” he said, pointing up the trail, which was overgrown and growing steeper every twenty yards. “It’s not much further!”
But I had heard those same words too many times already that sweltering day. “How much further?” I gasped.
“A kilometer,” he claimed. “Maybe a little more.”
“What are we going to see, again?” I managed to say.
“A German ammunition dump!”
“Did the 82nd capture it?” I asked.
“Yes!” he said. “And they blew it up!” He swept an arm over his head and started up the hill again.
I didn’t move. “So . . . it’s just a big crater now?”
“Very big! Most of it is covered with vegetation, but you can perceive out a piece of it.”
That was it; I told him I was done for the day. He cajoled for a few minutes, then agreed to head back to the car, somehow securing, in the process, a promise that I would come see his library before I left and look at some pictures he had of the village during the war. I assumed he had a couple of chairs.
He did, and a large computer monitor, where he set up a slide show. The “pictures” were mostly old battlefield survey maps in French or German, the kinds of things I would have had trouble making sense of even without the heat exhaustion. He had the slide show running on its own, lingering on each old map for a minute or so as he prattled on in the background—about what, exactly, I couldn’t tell you. It was all blurring into one piece, the maps and the chatter; I was just happy to be sitting down indoors. And then, suddenly, an image came on the monitor that wasn’t a map. It was an old photograph. Vaguely familiar. The caption read:
A BRIGHT SUNDAY MORNING AT CHATEAU DE CHEHERY
There was the abbey he had taken me to that afternoon, minus a century of dilapidation, and in its courtyard were maybe 150 or 200 soldiers wearing the uniform of the American Expeditionary Forces. They stood at attention in perfect columns, posture proud, behind a single line of officers of equally perfect bearing. The cap
tion identified them as “Company E”—that was all—but listed the officers’ names in order: Lieuts. Haar, Locke, Ooley, Preston, Capt. McGrady, Capt. Abbett, Chaplain Custer, Major Bliss, Colonel Humphrey, Lieut. Col. Bacon, Major Mitchell . . .
I only read as far as Bliss and Humphrey to confirm; I knew it at Ooley. There couldn’t be two Lieutenants Ooley in the AEF. I realized I had seen the photo before: It came from a book called Victory! published in a limited run in 1919. I happened to have a copy back home.
“This is Company E of the 805th Pioneer Infantry Regiment,” I said. “The officers up front are all white, but the soldiers in formation behind them are all black.”
Harry stood up, walked to the desk and pressed the tip of his nose against the monitor for a minute. “My God!” he said. “They are! I never saw that!” He turned and stared at me for a moment. “How did you know?”
I knew what he was thinking: By the time that photo had been taken, there were dozens of American divisions in France—hundreds of regiments, thousands of companies. Two million doughboys in all. How could I possibly know which specific unit was in his photo?
I pointed a finger at the formation behind the officers. “Somewhere in there,” I said, “is a private named Moses Hardy from Aberdeen, Mississippi. I interviewed him three times in person. The last time was eight years ago. It was his 113th birthday.”
And for the first time since I’d met him, Harry Rupert was silent.
* * *
The Sergeant York Trail is a site of some controversy among historians, who dispute its accuracy. Indeed, though only one is marked and landscaped and fitted with signage, there are at least two more that I know of, and probably more than that, each championed by a different camp of historians and archaeologists. Alvin York himself returned to the area just a year afterward and expressed some confusion about what had happened where. Harry Rupert has taken me through the “official” trail twice, and both times offered without reservation his opinions on what it gets wrong. He knows York’s story well, citing the old war hero’s accounts almost verbatim as he points out this or that topographical feature that doesn’t jibe with the account on the kiosks. He is particularly dismayed by the misidentification of a medieval creek dam—the real one was supposed to be near the spot where York and his cohort surprised a large group of Germans, caught while eating breakfast—which frankly looks like a dirt mound to me. Then again, I don’t live there, and I’m not Harry Rupert, who also told me that despite its inaccuracies he hikes the trail often, sometimes hunting for the exceptionally delicious mushrooms that grow at the base of older trees there. I never found any, but on our second visit I did hear a cuckoo bird, an experience I enjoyed more than any mushroom I’ve ever eaten. The Argonne is a forest, after all, despite everything unnatural that happened here. It has also been logged since time immemorial; these days, a lot of its timber is being shipped to China, a fact that seems to vex just about everyone who lives here, even those who sell their trees to that market. Harry Rupert told me that old French woodsmen can look at the stump of a tree and tell you whether it was cut down by a French logger or a German. Once, while hunting for mushrooms, Harry found several French-American V-B rifle grenades under a tree. He keeps them in his barn.
The story of Sergeant York is one of the best-known tales to emerge from the offensive that closed out the war—everyone knows it: American, French and German—but it is just one event from one day of that 47-day battle, which was just one part, albeit the final part, of a 1,500-day battle in the Argonne. You have to figure that any place people would spend so much time fighting over, and send so many men to die for, was important: important to the French, who tried and tried, at great cost, to take the place back; important to the Americans, who saw it as their proving ground, and did, ultimately, take it back, also at great cost. But it was perhaps most important to the Germans. They seized it quickly, in the opening weeks of the war, as soon as they could get to it. They took care to fortify it, not just in 1914 but perpetually, for four years. They lost thousands of men a week just to keep it. They photographed it incessantly. They printed postcards of it: pictures of food wagons traversing lonely roads, soldiers standing by lonely graves, officers emerging from lonely dugouts, and many, many of the railroad, the Argonnenbahn. They may have been the original trainspotters. They wrote poems about the Argonne, and songs, and printed those on postcards, too. The most famous, the Argonnerwald Lied, or Song of the Argonne Forest, was written in 1914–15, enjoyed great popularity even among German troops who never served on the Western Front (much less in the Argonne), and was revived for the next war. Often accompanied by a drawing of a Pionier, or combat engineer, pausing in the midst of digging a trench or tunnel to lean on his shovel and gaze out across No Man’s Land, it begins:
The Argonne forest, at midnight,
a Pionier stands watch.
A little star stands high in the sky
and brings him a greeting from his faraway homeland.
And with the spade in hand
he stands ahead in the trench.
With longing he thinks of his love:
Will he ever see her again?
And the artillery thunders threateningly.
We are standing before the infantry.
Grenades are hitting us.
The Frenchman wants to get into our emplacement.
The attack comes; it’s terrible, but the brave Germans stand their ground, beat back the French assault and take some prisoners. The poem concludes:
Argonnerwald, Argonnerwald
A quiet cemetery you will be soon!
In your cool earth rests
some brave soldier blood
And if I come one day to heaven’s door,
with an angel of God standing before:
Argonne fighter, come in,
Here shall be for your perpetual peace.
You Pionier at midnight,
today all of Germany stands watch.
In steadfast loyalty, in pure will,
as a new, strong watch on the Rhine.
It’s a nice bit of verse, I think, of a piece with that romantic German sensibility so common at the time. And maybe the Germans did harbor romantic sentiments about the Argonne; they certainly did spend a lot of time there, and doubtless got to know it as well as many people who’d been born and raised there. But I also think that last couplet hints at something darker: steadfast loyalty; pure will. A new, strong watch. To be sure, there was nothing romantic about what they did there, especially in 1914. On 14–18 monuments in cities, towns and villages all over France you will see, listed after men morts aux champ de bataille, or killed on the field of battle, victimes civiles: civilian victims. No other details are given, leaving you to wonder if they died of hunger or disease or an errant shell. But in the Argonne, I also know of several monuments that specify fusillés par les Allemands, or morts en captivité—shot by the Germans, or died in captivity. “The Germans,” Jean-Paul offered, by way of explanation, “were so afraid when they came into this area.”
If that seems like a strange thing to point out in this context, it isn’t, really. The Germans felt they had good reasons to fear a “conquered” populace, going back to 1871. Although the Prussians had made short work of the French Army in that last war, after the shooting stopped, while they occupied part of the country and waited for the five-billion-franc reparations promised them in the peace treaty, they had a terrible time with what were called francs-tireurs, literally “free-shooters,” partisans who weren’t in uniform and didn’t abide by the surrender which bound the military. Francs-tireurs were, in essence, guerrillas, sniping at soldiers and blowing up things those soldiers found useful, like buildings and bridges, not with artillery but bombs. This really shook the Germans’ sense of order and decorum, and they were determined not to subject themselves to such
terrors this time around.
And so, in essence, they became terrorists themselves, especially in places like the Argonne, where the natural terrain and layout of the villages favored guerrilla attacks. Their typical modus operandi, after taking a town, was to line up several of its denizens against a wall and shoot them. They did it in the village of Cunel, just on the other side of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery from Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, on September 4, 1914; used the church wall. You can still see the pockmarks today. “They usually took four people,” Jean-Paul explained. “A lady, a child, the mayor, and the local priest. Just to show that nobody was sacred to them.” They didn’t do it in every town; just enough of them, here and there, to spread the message. In the village of Bantheville, on the night of September 9, 1914, things really got out of hand: “The Germans heard shooting there,” Jean-Paul explained. “They thought it was francs-tireurs, so they rushed into town, took a bunch of prisoners, killed some of them, and burned the village to the ground.” Shortly thereafter, they figured out that the original shots had actually been fired by other German soldiers, in ceremonial salute to their fallen officers; oh, well. The local memorial lists the names of six villagers shot by the Germans, and another three who died in captivity.
Strangely, at the same time, the Germans were apparently rather concerned with their image, and rolled out a propaganda campaign intended to make their soldiers look more like civilizing humanitarians than executioners. One postcard they produced shows a photo of a kindly German soldier, Mütze on his head (presumably, a Pickelhaube would have looked too militaristic), feeding a French toddler, balanced on his knee, while two girls look on, smiling. Ein deutscher “Barbar” (“A German ‘Barbarian’”) its title jokes. The caption underneath explains: “An infantryman shares his lunch with a hungry little Frenchman.”
Back Over There Page 26