Back Over There

by RICHARD RUBIN

  The postcard bore the imprimatur of the International Red Cross; it was clearly meant to soothe consciences back home. Many others, though, were intended to assuage the local populace, who were often recruited for the effort. Jean-Pierre Brouillon, the farmer who caught me trespassing on his land and then gave me a five-hour tour of the area, told me that his wife’s grandmother had spent much of the war doing German soldiers’ laundry in Romagne; “all the local women did,” he explained. Whether they were paid or coerced or a little of both remains unknown, at least to me, but I have seen a photo of a cohort of German soldiers sitting outside M. Brouillon’s farmhouse, Musarde, with three French women, three little girls, and a dog. Only the smallest toddler is crying. Not far away, at the Hanover Lager, Jean-Paul de Vries told me, German soldiers regularly enjoyed the company of willing French women. “Things were pretty tense here for a while after the war,” he added.

  At the same time, French men who were too young or too old or unable to fight and had stayed at home were conscripted by the occupying Germans for noncombat duty, sent to labor camps or otherwise interned. There were work camps and civilian POW camps all over the Argonne; the Germans sent their photographers around to all of them to document daily life and offer the inmates souvenirs. If the French women in Germans’ staged photos look resigned and maybe just a touch wary, the French men in theirs look more than a little tired, and yet defiant. If the Germans later distributed these photos to their French subjects, I’m not sure what the French did with them after the war; but they didn’t, as I might have expected, burn them all, because quite a few ended up in the hands of a gentleman named Dominique Lacorde.

  M. Lacorde looks like you would want to look if you were a writer and historian in your sixties—sage but fit, with wise eyes, rimless eyeglasses and curly salt-and-pepper hair; he’s a friend of Jean-Paul’s, and lives in the village of Gesnes-en-Argonne, a place I regard with a certain fondness because one of the World War I veterans I interviewed, a 107-year-old named Bill Lake, was involved in liberating it on September 29, 1918. Private Lake’s beloved captain, a 31-year-old stockbroker named Elijah W. Worsham, was killed in that same action, in a field that Jean-Paul helped me locate ninety-six years later. Dominique Lacorde knows all about Captain Worsham; he knows all about pretty much anything relating to the history of this part of the Argonne, especially if it happened during 14–18. He has photos of the captain, and of Major Oscar Miller, mortally wounded here the same day, who was later awarded the Medal of Honor, in part because the Germans had to shoot him three times to get him to stop leading his men forward. Mostly, though, he has photos of the men, women and children of Gesnes and surrounding villages, taken during the four years of that first German occupation. He can name an astonishing number of the people who appear in them; knew quite a few personally when he was growing up. He’s used them for books he’s written, and for chapters he’s contributed to other books, but even when he’s not working on anything like that, he spends time studying them, trying to identify relatives, people he knew, people he’s heard stories about. He could even name the three children in that deutscher Barbar postcard: The boy on the German soldier’s knee is Marcel Gatelet; the girls in the doorway are Jeanne Barat and Maria Augusta Legand. He knew them all as elderly neighbors.

  I spent hours with Dominique going through his photos, hundreds of them (including some of several of his relatives hunkered down at the Musarde farmhouse, where they took shelter after the Germans drove them out of their homes; he knew all about Rommel, even if Jean-Pierre Brouillon did not), but there was one in particular that really made an impression: a picture of two German soldiers kneeling on the floor near a large hearth in a parlor, one wearing a Mütze, the other bareheaded but sporting a thick brush mustache that would have done any Silesian miner proud. In front of them, in wooden chairs, sit two women, one young with long, dark braids, the other elderly and wearing a white cap. All four are looking toward the camera. Mütze appears a bit shy; Mustache is, I think, trying on a smile that he hopes will project benign strength as he rests his arm on the chair behind the old woman’s head. The expression on the old woman’s face says Can you believe this?, the young woman’s I’ll tell you about it later, after they’re gone. “That’s my grandmother Emilienne,” M. Lacorde told me. “And that’s her grandmother Françoise.” Françoise was 82; Emilienne was 17, already forced to work as a housekeeper at the local château, which now housed German officers. They were allowed to remain in their house, but the Germans appropriated their farm, turned it into a sawmill. The caption on the photo reads, in French: “Easter 1915. Souvenir of the German Barbarians.” I doubt Emilienne and Françoise found it all that funny. They would have known about Cunel, and Bantheville, and other such villages.

  It was evening but still quite light out when I left M. Lacorde’s house, so I decided to walk over to the church—the one whose steeple you can see so clearly from the field where Captain Worsham was killed—and take another look at a small plaque that I had first spotted a year earlier on its façade:

  The 362D U.S. Infantry

  during the great offensive

  which began Sept. 26, 1918

  took Gesnes and the ridge

  beyond on Sept. 29, 1918 and

  were the first troops to

  reach the American Army

  objective. In spite of severe

  losses this regiment held

  the ground gained until

  ordered to withdraw by

  higher authority because

  it was so far in advance of

  the troops on its right

  and left.

  It is extremely rare to find any kind of marker in English, and only English, Over There, especially in this part of France. (No one in Gesnes, I am told, speaks any English at all, including M. Lacorde.) The fact that the veterans of the 362nd Infantry Regiment did it that way indicates that they expected future generations of Americans to travel to Gesnes-en-Argonne and see for themselves the town their fathers and uncles and grandfathers fought, and in many cases died, to liberate. A History of the 362nd Infantry, written anonymously and published by the regiment’s veterans association in 1920, reports that as its men approached the open field between their position outside Épinonville and Gesnes—the same field Jean-Paul and I found and explored ninety-six years later—they realized:

  Almost every foot of the ground was directly under the observation and fire of the Huns . . . So sure were they that no man could ever cross that open ground alive, under their fire, that they had also brought up light artillery to the crest of the hill for point-blank open-sight firing.

  After holding still for a while, their regimental commander, Colonel John Henry “Machine Gun” Parker, who had been in command of the 102nd Regiment at Seicheprey back in April, “received the astounding order that the advance must be continued at all costs. To him the order seemed suicidal, but he asked only for time to join his men in the carnage that was inevitable.” When it was all over,

  only a handful of men had emerged from the slaughter. Hundreds of dead and wounded were strewn over the battleground. Many officers were among the fallen. Colonel Parker was himself wounded early in the action and evacuated to the hospital . . . The burial party found the bodies of over 100 of our men in 200 yards . . .

  But soon after nightfall the order came for the regiment’s withdrawal, directing that it retire to the same line which they held before the attack.

  No one can describe the feelings of the men when they received the order and realized what it meant: that the ground which they had taken at such terrible cost was to be given up and that the blood of their comrades had been shed in vain.

  You can see why the regiment’s survivors would want to leave a brief record in Gesnes of the tremendous heroism and waste involved in liberating the town (the division ended up having to take it from the
Germans again, also at great cost), and why they might expect future generations to make pilgrimages to the site. The fact that the people of Gesnes accommodated such a marker, and even gave it some choice real estate on the front of their church—really, the only communal space in town—indicates that they expected the same thing. Those veterans are all gone, now; the last one, Bill Lake—the ultimate survivor of their entire division, the 91st (aka Wild West)—died on June 19, 2004, at the age of 108. They don’t know that their hopes weren’t realized, that I might just be the only American who has stopped and read the thing since they put it up. I’m not sure what their French contemporaries in Gesnes made of the fact that the expected American tourists never came, but the people who live there today would be much more surprised if anyone did.

  Dominique Lacorde and his fellow residents of Gesnes are patient; like their parents and grandparents, they seem satisfied to safeguard the memory until someone comes back from across an ocean to reclaim it. They’ve even managed to keep that little plaque on their church, for now. Not far away, scavengers stole several much larger bronze plaques off a monument to the American 1st Division; melted them down, presumably, for scrap in a hard economy. I only hope that, in mentioning it here, I have not doomed the one in Gesnes to a similar fate.

  * * *

  The Argonne is a secret hiding right out in the open. Not from the Dutch, Jean-Paul tells me, ruefully; every October, he says, after the crops are harvested, too many of his former countrymen swoop down, metal detectors in hand, and crawl over its fields like bloodhounds. And there are large handfuls of tourists who come to visit, mostly in summer, from all over France, and from Belgium and Luxembourg and Germany, occasionally for the area’s artifacts but mostly for its natural beauty. Few other people seem to have even heard of the place.

  Except for historians, that is: French, German, American. They know all about it.

  Even they, though, can’t seem to agree on exactly why everyone wanted it so badly. As far back as 1919, Frederick Palmer, an American war correspondent, wrote in his account of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Our Greatest Battle:

  If a soldier from Mars had come to earth at any time from October, 1914, to October, 1918, and had been shown a flat map of the fronts of the two adversaries, he would have said that the obvious strategic point of a single offensive would be between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. This would be a blow against the enemy’s lines of communication: a blow equivalent to turning his flank.

  These days, many historians will tell you that the Germans needed the Meuse-Argonne area to protect Sedan, the site of the rail hub from which they supplied the entire Western Front; that the French wanted it to get to that hub and hence cut off German troops in France and Belgium from their supply lines, and also because it was perilously close to Verdun; and that the Americans wanted it because the French told them it was very important, and because they were excited at the prospect of doing something the Allies hadn’t been able to do and, in the process, winning the war. Others, though, think the Argonne didn’t really become important until the lines started firming up after the First Battle of the Marne, in September 1914, and on into early 1915, at which point everything had set in place and the Germans suddenly realized that the area was among their strongest defensive points. The Germans, this theory goes, were in the habit of doing everything they could to hold whatever territory they had taken, while the French were in the habit of doing everything they could to take back whatever territory the Germans had taken, and the Americans, presumably, were motivated by the same factors listed in the previous theory. Of course, it’s entirely possible that all these schools of thought are correct, and also that, at some point, everyone more or less forgot why they wanted the Argonne so badly, but that they nevertheless continued to fight, and die, in order to keep it or take it. One thing is for certain: As important as everyone considered the Argonne during the war’s first three years, in 1918 its significance was heightened by an order of magnitude. “The Argonne was the Germans’ last line of defense,” Jean-Paul says. If the first two lines should happen to fall, they figured, they still had the unbreakable Argonne. “But the Americans had too many men,” he asserts. “Otherwise, the Argonne would have held.”

  But never mind the historians and local experts. You can tell everyone involved regarded the Argonne and the heights above the Meuse River as really, really important just by the defense works the Germans built, and the number of lives everyone expended on the area, and the fact that they all sent their big names here. The Americans sent pretty much every top field commander they had. The French sent the likes of General Henri Berthelot, who had started out the war as a top aide to “Papa” Joffre—still, to the war’s end, the most beloved figure in France—and General Henri Gouraud, who became something of a legend when he returned to active duty on the Western Front after losing an arm at Gallipoli. And the Germans sent royalty: Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the Kaiser’s oldest son and heir to his throne, who was not a very good military commander; and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who was.

  Rupprecht’s command post was in the Argonne, on that high wooded plain known as Champ Mahaut, the same area where the Germans built that splendid rest camp with the library, beer garden, and swimming pool that rivaled Columbia’s. Rupprecht, heir to the throne of Germany’s largest state, was in his late forties during the war and, judging by what remains of his former command post, he lived pretty well at the front. The bunker, for one thing, had some style to it—big windows, scalloped doorway; it even had two marble fireplaces. It was, in other words, not the typical concrete box, though the other four bunkers in the compound were. None have been maintained, though all five are still standing, and still in very good condition, considering they’ve been abandoned for a century. (Souvenir hunters made off with the last of the marble a long time ago.) One still bears a cement plaque that reads, simply, “1 Pi. 16,” for the 1st Company, 16th Pionier Battalion, the outfit that built the compound. The trenches they built to connect the five bunkers are still solid and deep; so are the craters they detonated to protect the area. There are signs here and there directing visitors to the Abri du Kronprinz, or the Crown Prince’s bunker, but few visitors seem to take the bait, which fact has probably spared me some embarrassment, because something about the place leads me to behave in a manner I wouldn’t care for too many others to witness: dashing through trenches, charging into shell holes, crawling through open windows. Though the Kingdom of Bavaria no longer exists—nor, for that matter, do any other German kingdoms, principalities or duchies; all ruling houses and accompanying titles were abolished after the war—if the Germans ever come back, they could fix up Kronprinz Rupprecht’s command post and use it again in about a week. Maybe less.

  * * *

  The first place they might head is the Butte de Vauquois, or Vauquois Hill. One of the highest points in this part of the Argonne, it’s just outside the village of Vauquois. The village was actually on top of the butte until the war; if you visit, it will become immediately apparent to you why they had to rebuild it elsewhere afterward. Captain Daniel Strickland’s description in Connecticut Fights of the blasted terrain of the Chemin des Dames a century ago as many “cups of various sizes,” set “rim to rim as closely as they could be packed,” could apply to Vauquois Hill today; but only if you substitute “buckets” for “cups.”

  Most of what I know about the place and what happened there during the war I learned from Denis Hebrard, who lives about twenty minutes away in Le Neufour, a little village with a church whose bells are certain to awaken you every morning at seven, whether you’re Catholic or not. In case you’re wondering, “Le Neufour” translates, near as I can tell, as “the neufour.” As is the case in the United States, and probably everywhere, many French towns have names whose meanings are lost to time, if they ever existed at all. The next town over, Les Islettes, means “the little islands,” despite the fa
ct that there are no islands of any size, or even bodies of water, in town. Denis, as I mentioned earlier, owns a small chambre d’hôtes, or bed-and-breakfast, in Le Neufour; he and his wife, Bénédicte, moved to the area after Denis retired from Air France, where he worked as a purser for many years after serving in the French Air Force. I’d stayed with him on two successive visits and had known him for a year before he casually mentioned that he’d been involved in a hair-raising rescue mission in Saigon in 1975. Before that, I probably would have told you that the most remarkable thing about Denis is that, with his receding black hair, kind yet always slightly amused eyes and rakish grin, he bears a striking resemblance to my late uncle Gilbert, my father’s brother, who, as far as I know, had no ancestors from France or any country that borders France. More important, Denis speaks English quite well. More important still, he is fascinated with the history of the Argonne and World War I, particularly Vauquois Hill, where he has volunteered for more than a decade. There’s one thing, he told me the first time he took me there, that really makes it—and the Argonne as a whole—special.

  “Gaize,” he said. Pronounced exactly like “gaze.” I’d never heard the word before, which, it turns out, is not really my fault. “It only exists in this part of France, and Japan,” Denis explained. It’s a type of rock, fine-grained and porous, left over from when this area was entirely under water, eons ago. Gaize is very hard, he explained, but because it’s fragmental—it’s composed of tiny granules subjected to tremendous pressure over the course of eons—it’s easy to dig through. Imagine a type of rock unlike any other on earth—somehow strong enough to withstand a direct hit from an artillery shell, yet pliable enough that your Silesian miners could tunnel through it with relative ease: The Germans couldn’t resist it. Add to that the fact that at surface level the Butte de Vauquois commanded unbroken vistas of Verdun, fifteen or twenty miles away; the Silesians could build a subterranean camp to shelter, securely, all the soldiers the Germans would need to hold the hill. Best of all for the Germans, the French, in their fervor at war’s opening to retake Alsace and Lorraine, didn’t leave Vauquois Hill adequately defended. The Germans took it in September 1914. Denis told me that 4,600 poilus died trying to stop them. The Butte de Vauquois is not the highest point in the area—that would be Montfaucon—but Vauquois, in fact, has the better view of the Argonne; it could easily be used to direct fire at Verdun. Papa Joffre ordered the French to take it back at any cost.