The farmer in Baulny—his name was Patrick Julien—was driving something bigger than a tractor but smaller than a combine down the town’s narrow main street, which was paved but so covered in dirt and dust that you wouldn’t have known it. The dust blew in, unimpeded, from the surrounding fields. Baulny was once surrounded by forest; the Germans cut it down.
They also destroyed the town, more or less, almost as soon as they took it. “The church, the mairie, and one farm were allowed to stay,” M. Julien told me. “The Germans locked everyone in town in the church for two weeks. My grandmother was in there, too. She was sixteen years old, but she lost all her hair from the stress.” During those two weeks, the Germans built a network of tunnels underneath the village, connecting the few structures left standing, and some new bunkers. Baulny’s new church—the old one was eventually destroyed—is built on top of one of them. M. Julien knew that grandmother, Alice Legand, well; she told him the stories. He was seventeen years old when she died, in 1980.
In 1944, as the Americans approached, the villagers hid themselves in the tunnels the Germans had built during the previous war, afraid of what the Nazis would do to them before they retreated. There is still at least one entrance to them in the middle of town, right next to a house. It looks like a very short concrete slide, like you might find in a children’s playground. For a long time, actually, it was about as close to a playground as you might find in the village. “Children used to crawl into the tunnels all the time, even though adults always warned them not to,” M. Julien said. He was mum on whether he had been one of them.
Jean-Paul must have known what I was thinking as I heard this. “They’re sealed now,” he told me. “No one can get into them anymore.” And then, perhaps as a consolation prize, he pointed out across the distance at a hill, maybe four or five miles away. “Vauquois,” he said. “That’s why the Germans cut down the forest: It was blocking their view.” And that’s why they leveled the town and built all those tunnels: Baulny, a farming village hundreds of years old, home to dozens of people, was, to them, merely an observation post, a spot from which they could keep an eye on a more valuable piece of real estate.
War is vicious, of course. But somehow, what happened here, in the Argonne, seems especially so. Perhaps that sense is nothing more than the result of juxtaposing the place’s placid beauty with horrific tales of its past. But there’s no denying that at 5:00 a.m. on September 26, 1918, the whole war suddenly funneled into this area, spread with terrible frenzy over this land that had already been fought over for four years, and then, at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, just as suddenly burned itself out.
Hours before dawn on September 26, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers—doughboys; Sammies—crouched along that twenty-four-mile pushoff line while an uncountable number of shells flew over their heads toward enemy trenches. “All adjectives fail to give even a fair impression of the awful grandeur of such artillerying,” Clare Kenamore wrote the following year. “No combination of words is effective. It seemed that for a while the lid of Hell had been pushed back a little space.”
Kenamore’s account appears in a history of the 35th Division, National Guard troops mostly from Missouri and Kansas. The Santa Fe Division, as they were known for reasons that elude me, had arrived in France that May and spent the summer in “quiet” sectors in the Vosges and Alsace before being sent to the Argonne. They were put in the line between the 28th, the Bucket of Blood, which had a fair bit of combat experience already, and the 91st, the Wild West Division, which, like the 35th, had none. As they marched up to the line, Kenamore noted,
each infantryman carried his rifle, bayonet, steel helmet and gas mask. He had 250 rounds of rifle ammunition, carried in a belt, and two bandoliers, each one swung over one shoulder and under the other arm. On his back was his combat pack, in his pack carrier. This contained his raincoat, if he was not wearing it, his mess kit and two days’ “iron ration,” which usually was two cans of corned beef and six boxes of hard bread . . . A few men had a loaf or half a loaf of the excellent white army bread fresh from the baker. This usually was carried on the rifle with the fixed bayonet run through it. All carried a full canteen of water, about a quart. Occasional details carried Stokes mortar ammunition, four shells to a man, each shell weighing 10 pounds, 11 ounces. Infantry also carried ordinary explosive grenades, gas grenades, rifle grenades and incendiary grenades.
Kenamore estimated that the 35th Division alone fired forty thousand rounds—some of them, at least, shot off by Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery Regiment, under the command of Captain Harry S Truman—in the three hours before they pushed off early that morning. “There was no breakfast and little ceremony about it,” he recounted; just the words “Prepare to advance” a few minutes beforehand, and then: “All right, let’s go.”
If they were fortunate, the men hadn’t heard very much about one of their first objectives:
Never before or afterward did the 35th Division find a place better defended than Vauquois. It was the result of four years intensive work by the Germans. Among the many good men killed on this slope was Lieut. Malcolm MacDonald who made up in dash and daring what he lacked in stature. When he joined the guard he weighed 102 pounds and a kindly examining board, observing his earnestness, had written down the weight as 122.
Kenamore described a chaotic assault—fog, smoke grenades, elite Prussian Guard troops, Sammies taking fire from in front, to the sides and behind. And a lot of deaths. Two of the Americans killed there that morning, a captain and a private, were later awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. But, as Denis told me after I had taken in tunnels and trenches and massive craters and tales of men marching solemnly toward enemy machine guns to the tune of their own national anthem, after four years and many thousands killed over control of the Butte de Vauquois, “the 35th Division, U.S., came and took the hill in half a day.”
Kenamore’s history of the 35th Division is titled From Vauquois to Exermont. If you look at a map, you’ll see that Vauquois and Exermont are less than ten miles apart. The Santa Fe Division was pulled from the line after September 30. Their fighting war was five days long. But in those five days they sustained nearly eight thousand casualties, around a thousand of them killed in action. Just one division among many; just five days out of forty-seven. The war was fought elsewhere, too; it was fought all over the world. But it converged upon this beautiful place to die. And it did not die quietly.
Chapter Eight
The Devil’s Basket
The first time I visited Vauquois with Denis Hebrard, in 2014, I made it out of the tunnels all right but then tripped in one of the German second-line trenches and banged up my left knee. There was blood—yes: I, too, shed blood on Vauquois Hill—and dirt, and a six-inch horizontal tear in the leg of my pants. The rest of the day was pretty full, and I didn’t have time to stop at Denis’s and wash up and change my clothes before going into Sainte-Menehould for dinner if I wanted to get there before the restaurants all closed. When I walked into one I had eaten at a couple of times before, a place called La Passarelle (the Gangway; it’s perched above a stream), the proprietress, Murielle, looked at me and shook her head. “Qu’est-il arrivé?” she asked. What happened?
“I fell,” I said. “Do you know if there’s a tailor in town? I have only one other pair of pants.” I actually had a third—I wouldn’t go to France for a month with just two pairs of pants—but they had quickly proven themselves unsuitable to bushwhacking, and had remained in my suitcase ever since.
“Bring them in here tomorrow morning,” she said. “I’ll give them to my seamstress.”
I did, and that evening she gave them back to me, not only mended but washed. The seamstress had done a wonderful job, too, not just closing the tear but covering the whole area in a rectangle of tight stitching a couple of shades of green lighter than the pants, which were olive. It was the kind of effect th
at people much more stylish than me would deliberately tear their pants to achieve, and pay a lot for. But when I pulled out my wallet and asked Murielle how much I owed her, she smiled and shook her head. “C’est un service,” she said.
Sainte-Menehould is one of the larger towns in the Argonne. The Germans didn’t occupy it during the First World War, and it didn’t see any fighting; its hôtel de ville, a stately building with the date 1730 mounted in large wrought-iron digits above its entrance, survived just fine. It was already sixty-one years old in 1791 when Louis XVI, fleeing the revolutionary mob in Paris, stopped in Sainte-Menehould to partake of a local specialty, pieds de cochon—pigs’ feet. They’re still a local specialty, touted all over town like cheesesteaks are in Philadelphia. I resisted trying them for a year, then gave in, curious to see just what was so good that the king stopped for it when he really needed to get out of the country right then. They’re OK, I’ll say, but nothing all that special; to be honest, I prefer the pickled variety I had a few times when I lived down south. They’re certainly nothing I would trade my head for, which is, in essence, what Louis ended up doing. Recognized while dining—it’s hard to maintain anonymity when your visage is on every coin in the realm—he was captured about fifteen miles up the road in the town of Varennes, surrounded while he dithered before crossing a bridge over the Aire River. His escorts, the story goes, were ready to shoot and slash their way out of there, but the king demurred, saying he didn’t want any blood to be shed on his behalf. He was escorted back to Paris under armed guard, and put to the guillotine eighteen months later. So while Sainte-Menehould may have escaped the destruction of the First World War, it did play a role in some of the other horrors human beings have inflicted upon one another. A tablet under a stairway inside the hôtel de ville lists the names of nine members of a local Jewish family, deported and morts à Auschwitz in 1942. The youngest was 7 years old. My father, still living as I write this, was 7 years old in 1942.
The Argonne is evidence that history folds in on itself again and again, and that, as I often view the First and Second World Wars as one conflict with a two-decade cease-fire in the middle, a case could certainly be made that that plaque under the stairs might not be there if the king hadn’t stopped for pieds de cochon just steps away. No decapitated Louis, no First Republic; no First Republic, no Napoleon; no Napoleon, no rise of Prussia; no rise of Prussia, no Franco-Prussian War; no Franco-Prussian War, no First World War; no First World War, no Second World War; no Second World War, no Holocaust. Not everyone draws out that chain, of course, and not everyone is comfortable discussing every link in it, especially in France. But if you go to a place like Sainte-Menehould and walk around with your eyes and ears open, it can be hard not to feel as if you have stepped onto a Moving Sidewalk of Great Consequences, one that starts with a plate of local pigs’ feet and ends at that tablet under the stairs in city hall. You feel the continuum in Varennes, too, as you stroll the few hundred yards from the Bar Louis XVI, which is next to the spot where he was captured, to the Pennsylvania monument, a massive plaza, complete with classical colonnades and terraces and an enormous cauldron for an eternal flame, built here by that state in 1927 in honor of its sons who’d liberated the town nine years earlier. It’s beautiful and august, but also sprawls over two entire city blocks (a street actually cuts through it) and utterly dominates Varennes, looking like it was dropped in by some enormous hand. The men it honors—primarily from the 28th Division, the Bucket of Blood, who took so much damage at Fismes and Fismette—took a lot of damage here, too. So did the town itself, which was more or less destroyed.
If you compare photos of what Varennes, a picturesque hill-and-river town, looked like before the war with what it looks like now, you’ll note that they’re very similar. Most towns and villages in the Argonne that were destroyed during the war were rebuilt, afterward, to look almost exactly as they had before. Houses and shops were carefully reconstructed or replicated; so were churches, like the one in Neuvilly—famously photographed during the war with its left wall blasted out and its floor covered with American wounded—which was meticulously restored in the 1920s, down to its black and white floor tiles. It’s indicative, I think, of a desire to treat the entire episode as just one great four-year aberration. Not that any of it was to be forgotten: not the suffering, nor the dying, nor, certainly, the victory at last. But there wasn’t, it seems, much of a willingness to acknowledge that everything had changed, forever, most of all France itself. None of it—not the rubble, nor the blockhouses, nor the ubiquitous memorials, nor the stuff that litters the forest floor and comes up every time fields are plowed—seems to touch on the fact that the Red Giant imploded, as Red Giants will. I don’t blame the French: Who wants to ponder such a thing every time you pull into your own driveway?
They do, however, ponder everything and anything else connected to that war: Shrapnel. Barbed wire. Buttons. Boots. Shells. Shell casings. Shell holes. Bunkers. Trenches. Craters. Photos. Names. And, most of all, stories. The Argonne, which looks like something out of a book by the Brothers Grimm, is full of people who tell a lot of good stories. Perhaps they might have preferred it otherwise, but they have a lot of good stories to tell.
* * *
If any term seems well-suited to a fairytale, it’s “Crown Prince.” There were, as you know, two of them in the Argonne during the war: Rupprecht, of Bavaria; and Wilhelm, of Prussia, next in line to be Kaiser. Rupprecht was hunkered down in that bunker in the Champ Mahaut that looked like a lovely country house. Because signs in the forest directing visitors to it read Abri du Kronprinz, a lot of people (including, once upon a time, me) mistakenly assume that the Kronprinz in question was Wilhelm, not Rupprecht, which I guess makes it a better story for the folks back home, one that might cause them to stir to attention as they sit through an interminable vacation slide show. The heir to the throne of the German Empire, after all, trumps the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Bavaria, which was just one part of the German Empire.
Though this will probably rob the tale of some of its mythical luster, I should tell you that I’m not sure how well the two men even knew each other, or how much contact they would have had with one another during the war, since each was in command of an entirely different army; so, while only one of them (Rupprecht) was actually a capable military commander, there was no good-Kronprinz/bad-Kronprinz rivalry playing out in the Argonne. The closest Kronprinz Wilhelm got to Champ Mahaut was his observatory about ten miles away, on Montfaucon, the highest point in this part of the Argonne. Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s oldest son, was commander of Germany’s 5th Army. He wasn’t much good in either role—his father was constantly upbraiding his namesake for, among other things, carrying on with women who were not the Kronprinzessin—but he was given a great deal of authority in the field due to the circumstances of his birth. In 1916, that meant that he was, at least nominally, in charge of the assault on Verdun. How much he actually did there is an open question, but the French had no qualms about assigning him the sobriquet Le Boucher de Verdun—the Butcher of Verdun. And he certainly watched all the action from his post atop Montfaucon. The village that surrounded it, Montfaucon d’Argonne, was liberated on September 27, 1918, by the 37th Division, National Guard troops from Ohio, though what little of it that was still intact by that point was destroyed in the process. After the war, it was rebuilt down the mountain a bit; the state of Ohio constructed a little hospital in the new village and dedicated it in September 1929, one month before the stock market crashed. It still stands, a dignified stone edifice with a high-pitched roof, though it is now used as a nursing home. There’s a nice enough cement plaque, crediting Ohio and the 37th, affixed to its façade, but Jean-Paul de Vries told me over lunch one day that I really needed to see the one inside. I tried to; couldn’t find it.
“Try again,” he said the next time I saw him, a couple of days later. “It’s there.” He was tied to the café that afternoon, so I went b
ack alone and, once again, walked all through the place; but still I couldn’t find it. I passed lots of elderly residents sitting hunched over in little white plastic chairs—watching TV, watching each other, reading L’Est Républicain, the local newspaper—and though I’m sure none of them would have minded the interruption, I didn’t want to bother them, so I just smiled as I passed by, and they smiled back. Eventually I found an office, and in it a couple of nurses. “Pardonnez-moi,” I said. “I have a need to find the plaque to the American memory.” They looked at each other and faintly shrugged, but then a third staffer walked in and they asked her, and she bunched up her eyebrows and nodded and told me to take a left out of the office and walk all the way down the hall; at the very end, she said, there’s an alcove to the left, the vestibule to an entrance no longer used. She was mistaken: It was still used—not as an entryway, but as a storage space. It was dark, and I couldn’t take more than a couple of steps inside, but behind a dozen folded conference tables and many more folded chairs, I could see rich mahogany panels rising all the way up to the ceiling, one of them engraved top to bottom with gold-leaf letters. I walked back to the office, told them what I’d seen (or tried to see) and asked if they knew where the light switch was. One of them left and came back a minute later with the custodian in tow, a burly man with close-cropped gray hair who just happened to be wearing a white T-shirt featuring the outline of the continental United States, silhouetted in stars and stripes, with a bald eagle’s head and the words:
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