WE THE PEOPLE
AMERICA
THE BEAUTIFUL
He led me back wordlessly, groped inside the darkened vestibule, flicked the light switch; and then, before I could thank him, he started removing the tables and chairs, piling them up in the corridor outside. “Not is necessary,” I insisted, but he pointed to the plaque and then my camera and asked: “Do you want to take a picture?” I nodded.
“Vous êtes Amèricain?” he asked. I said I was, asked if he’d ever been there. He looked confused; I pointed to his T-shirt. “Ah,” he said, and smiled. “A friend of mine got me this. En Pennsylvanie.”
He continued removing furniture until the space was cleared, revealing a vestibule paneled entirely in rich, dark wood, the kind of thing I had only seen in Gilded Age mansions that are now museums. The plaque itself was enormous, easily eight feet square, maybe larger, in a space that was itself only about twelve feet square or so. The inscription starts with a reiteration of what the plaque outside says about the state of Ohio and the 37th Division, then goes on to recount the unit’s entire war record:
The division in spite of determined resistance
and most unfavorable conditions confronting it,
advanced nine kilometers against the
enemy positions held by him for over four years,
repulsing repeated counter attacks,
taking many prisoners, artillery, machine guns,
ammunition and other stores in large quantities.
And on like that for another couple of paragraphs, after which it tells the entire tale once more, in French. We stood together, silently, and read the whole thing.
“I don’t know why they don’t use this entrance anymore,” he muttered afterward, shaking his head, then started fetching tables and chairs and stacking them back up in front of it.
* * *
The old village of Montfaucon d’Argonne, at the mountain’s peak, was very, very old; American engineers excavating the area in the 1920s for the Montfaucon American Monument uncovered the remains of a Roman village and cemetery. The monument is a 180-foot-tall column. You can see it from Vauquois Hill, twelve miles away, even if it’s not a particularly clear day. You can see it from places all over the forest; and if you climb the steps inside it up to the observatory at the top, you can see places all over the forest back. If you look straight down, you can also see the only thing left of the original village, sitting just behind the monument’s plaza: the ruins of an old monastery destroyed in the war, sections of walls, pillars, arched windows. From aloft, you can clearly discern the perimeter of the medieval edifice against the grass, like a chalk outline of a corpse on a sidewalk.
Nothing remains of Kronprinz Wilhelm’s observatory; the site is now occupied by the monument and plaza. And his bunker, it turns out, wasn’t even here, as I learned when I visited Patrick Simons at the hospital in Verdun one day in June 2014. (You may recall that he was ill then, which is how I ended up exploring Bois Brûlé and other sites in the Woëvre with just Christophe that year.) I hadn’t called in advance to say I was coming, and when I arrived Patrick already had several other visitors—he’s a popular fellow—including a man named David Howard, a friend of a friend of Patrick’s. David is an English expatriate who lives in Stenay, a town about twenty miles north of Montfaucon that had, in fact, been liberated by American troops on the very last day of the war. The story goes that General William Wright, commander of the 89th Division, had heard that there were baths in Stenay, and though he knew the armistice would take effect in a matter of hours, he didn’t want to wait that long; so he sent his men into the town, where more than three hundred of them became casualties, most of whom, I am quite sure, would gladly have waited a few more hours to get cleaned up. Stenay, it turns out, had quite an eventful war, as David started telling me. Of course, a lot of places had an eventful war, especially in the Argonne; but as I made ready to leave, David told me something that made me stop, as I’m sure he knew it would.
“Stenay, you know, was where the real Crown Prince Bunker was,” he said, by which, I knew, he meant Wilhelm’s. “It was in the cellar of a grand house there. I know the woman who lives there now. She has all kinds of documents and pictures, even a very rare one of the crown prince’s secret French mistress. If you return to the area sometime, let me know, and perhaps I can take you to go see it.” Not the kind of invitation I was likely to decline.
I did return, the following year, and we met on a Sunday morning in the square in Stenay. David, a compact man in his sixties with lively eyes and a head of white hair, was joined by his personable blonde wife, Marian, who is American. I had given David a copy of my last book when I’d met him at the hospital the year before, and both he and Marian had read it in the interim; both greeted me as if I were already a friend, and knew well what I would and wouldn’t be interested in seeing. The first thing they did was direct my gaze to Stenay’s hôtel de ville, which features, in a cornice above the entrance and a set of second-story windows, a carving of the town crest and motto and . . . well, the devil. A fairly jolly-looking one, too, with a stylish Vandyke and a grin that says the drinks are on me. “Nobody knows for sure how that came to be there,” Marian told me. “People just embrace it. It’s actually one of the things that Stenay is best known for. They even have a Festival du Diable every fall.”
Stenay is in the northern part of the Meuse-Argonne vicinity, closer to Sedan and the Belgian border than to Varennes and Sainte-Menehould. David and Marian chose to live there because it’s a pretty area that’s roughly equidistant from a number of places David needed to get to for work, spots in Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland as well as France. It wasn’t until later that he started digging into the local history, and what he found encouraged him to dig more and more. Stenay is considerably older than those parts of the Argonne that were only settled by French after medieval times. The French, it seems, were always in Stenay, even before they recognized themselves as French; even as the Romans were here, too, and before them the Celts. “Dun is Celtic for hill,” David told me. “So anytime you see that in a place name, like Dun-sur-Meuse”—the next town over—“that’s an indication there was a Celtic settlement there once upon a time.”
“Like Verdun?” I asked. “Maybe that means ‘green hill’?”
David froze and stared at me for a moment, then broke into a broad smile and nodded his head vigorously. “Yes, I think you’re right!” he said. “That hadn’t occurred to me!” It may have been the only contribution to scholarship I made that day.
David then launched into a discussion of Stenay’s history that was neither linear nor thematic; I’ll do my best to impose some order on it. To start, since time immemorial, you had the locals. The names by which they referred to themselves changed from time to time. Then, around three thousand years ago, the Celts migrated here from the east. About a thousand years after that, the Romans came up from the Italian peninsula. When the Romans receded, around the middle of the fifth century, the Merovingians took over. The Merovingians, near as I can tell, comprised old locals who then called themselves Franks, and Gallo-Romans, other old locals whose customs and language had so thoroughly blended with the Romans’ that it was hard to distinguish them anymore; their culture and ruling structure were an amalgam of Frankish and Roman. One of the earliest Merovingian rulers was Clovis, who united all of the competing Frankish tribes into what we now recognize more or less as France, and who also, in 496, converted to Catholicism and strongly encouraged everyone else to do it, too. After Clovis died the factional squabbling got worse, and the kings had names like Childeric, Theuderic, Chlothar, Sigebert, and Dagobert. The two major Merovingian rival kingdoms were Neustria and Austrasia. I recognize these are names that, to an American at least, sound like something out of an epic fantasy novel, and may conjure strains of lute music, but I am not making them up.
Stenay was apparently a site of some importance for thousands of years, a hypothesis buttressed by the presence, in what is today the nearby village of Milly-sur-Bradon, of a menhir, a six-foot-tall upright wedge of stone that somewhat resembles a shark’s tooth and was erected by the Celts to indicate something of significance, though no one is sure exactly what. According to David Howard, the menhir, known by locals as La Hotte du Diable, or the Devil’s Basket—apparently people thought about the devil a lot in that area—was later used by the Merovingians to mark the point of convergence of Neustria and Austrasia and a third kingdom, Burgundy (no lute music with that one, but maybe a little classical guitar), which, if true, would certainly explain a lot. For instance, it would explain why King Dagobert II spent a lot of time here; he was assassinated here in 679 in what was, I am told, made to look like a hunting accident. Sometime before Dagobert was murdered, David told me, he is said to have undertaken a secret journey to the Middle East, and to have brought back a big chunk of King Solomon’s fortune, which he secreted somewhere in or near Stenay.
The Merovingians went out in the eighth century, replaced by the Carolingians, whose number included Charlemagne. They lasted about a century and were then replaced by, well, a bunch of other stuff that gets kind of confusing, at least to me, but eventually we end up in medieval France, with kings but also other people of influence and power, one of whom was Godfrey de Bouillon, a Frankish knight who was, as the name suggests, from Bouillon, in present-day Belgium near the English Channel. Godfrey’s “second city”—that was a thing then—was, David told me, Stenay. Godfrey was kin to a lot of powerful, landed people, and cozy with a lot more, and he inherited some titles and was given some others, all of which helped him, it seems, amass quite a fortune. He is probably best remembered today, though, for selling both Bouillon and Stenay—that was also a thing then—to other nobles, and using the money to raise and then command one of the largest armies to participate in the First Crusade, which began in 1096, and from which he never returned, dying in the Holy Land four years later. According to David, a lot of Godfrey’s subjects from the vicinity of his second city went off to fight under him, and some who returned, it is alleged, bestowed upon the area several town names that are, according to some historians, suspiciously Middle Eastern sounding, like Jametz. I don’t have any idea if that’s true, but Jametz does happen to host my favorite old wall-painted advertisement ever, which adorns the broad sidewall of a large house that was once, according to another fading painted ad on the same wall, a hotel and restaurant. Above that it says simply:
VERDUN Historic City
Visit its Battlefields, 1914–1918
It’s kind of like one of those century-old ads that reveal themselves on the side of an old tenement when the building next door is torn down. Only fainter, and cooler.
* * *
Between the Merovingians and Godfrey de Bouillon, apparently, a lot of rumors arose over the centuries regarding Stenay, some involving strange mystical phenomena that may or may not bestow powers upon those who get close enough to them, and some involving enormous hidden treasure. According to David, Kronprinz Wilhelm was drawn to Stenay because he wanted both. Of course, there were lots of other reasons a German military commander might want to occupy Stenay and even base his command there. For one thing, it’s equidistant from the heart of the Argonne and Verdun, with excellent access to each. It’s a good-sized town with a lot of housing for troops; it had played a significant role in many battles and wars over the centuries. And, David told me, there is an intricate network of tunnels beneath the streets, reaching to every corner of Stenay, with connections to all the sites of import. “They go back to the Middle Ages,” he explained. “Some are large enough to ride a horse through.” All of this may have factored into the Kronprinz’s thinking, but David is pretty sure that it was the weird mystical stuff and hidden treasure that really tipped the scales. Wilhelm certainly didn’t do much that undercut this theory. At one point, he even had his engineers affix a massive new cement tablet to La Hotte du Diable that read:
Dedicated to the Fallen
Warriors at Verdun by
The German Crown Prince
General Command
VII Army Corps
General von Francois
1917
The Teutonic Gothic script indicates which Verdun warriors, exactly, the Kronprinz had in mind. (General Hermann Karl Bruno von François was, despite his surname, thoroughly German.) Local farmers destroyed Wilhelm’s new tablet after the war, but left the tall stone to which it had been affixed standing. It’s still there today, sticking out of some family’s yard, with a prominent indentation where the Kronprinz’s tablet used to be.
Whether it was Dagobert’s hidden treasure or the mystical power of the menhir or some other ancient lure that drew the Kronprinz to Stenay, it surely didn’t hurt that the town had a pretty nice place for him to make camp in while he was away from home. It was called the Château de Tilleul: a large, splendid villa, thirteen bedrooms and six or seven baths, that had been built in 1865 by the Comte du Verdier, who owned a large chunk of the town. It survived the war, but was destroyed in 1940, not by the Nazis but by French engineers who understood the house’s symbolic importance to the rapidly advancing Germans.
They didn’t completely obliterate the site: The foundation upon which the château had stood, complete with a large stone terrace facing the back and, underneath it, a cellar, remained. The house was rebuilt from scratch in 1950 by the late father-in-law of its current occupant. I shall refer to her as Mme. B, because she is elderly now and lives there alone, and both she and her son are nervous about prowlers. She had, however, responded affirmatively when David had asked her, a few days earlier, if he and Marian might bring me by. Now she welcomed me with gracious hospitality. An older woman with fine posture and a firm countenance, she possessed a powerful dignity—I wouldn’t call it understated—and was coiffed and dressed to greet a guest of great importance, even if what she ended up getting was me.
We sat at a large, dark old table in her dining room, and she presented me with a stack of books, postcards and photographs: of the Kronprinz’s private salon in the old château; the Kronprinz welcoming Prince August Wilhelm, his younger brother, at the front door; the Kronprinz and his father, the Kaiser, standing on the back balcony; officers of the American 89th Division standing in the courtyard behind the front gate; a man in an overcoat standing in front of the villa’s shell after it was destroyed. And a sketch of a woman, pretty but not beautiful, named Blanche Defferey. “The Kronprinz’s mistress,” Mme. B told me. “Very few people even know he had one. Fewer still know her name.” She related this in a tone that conveyed a sense that there would be trouble if certain people were to learn what she had just shared with me; I guess now I’ll find out for sure. I will say that when I asked Mme. B about it, she told me that Mlle. Defferey lived out her life after the first war in peace, not suffering any of the indignities that were heaped upon collaborators after the second. But again, she said, very few people knew.
“Mme. B, may we see the bunker?” David asked, and she assented, taking us out through the terrace, where the Kronprinz and Kaiser had posed for that photograph. It’s entirely possible that neither the 1940 French nor the 1940 Germans even knew about the bunker underneath: It had been a secret, after all, and a lot had transpired in the interim. Mme. B walked slowly down the stone steps, clutching the banister; when she reached the bottom and stepped onto the ground, she suddenly seemed to feel more at ease, as if she no longer needed to protect anything. She hadn’t allowed me to take any photos inside her house, nor on the terrace, but now she pointed to my camera and said “C’est bon,” even recommending things I might shoot, like the staircase we had just descended, and the two wooden double doors, festooned with ornate wrought-iron bars and grates, set into the side of the terrace’s base. “All original,” she said of the
latter. “Go into the yard, way back, and take some pictures from a distance,” she suggested. She was proud of the house, clearly—and, I imagine, the yard, one of those deep, green plots, with old trees and benches and statuary, that you often find behind old châteaux, made for croquet or lawn bowling or privacy.
She asked me not to mention the location of the entrance to the bunker, and so I won’t. I will say that the bunker itself is both well disguised and not, the kind of thing that if you already know to look for it won’t fool you a bit. There are vents here and there, for one thing, none of them particularly well hidden. On the other hand, Mme. B told me there was a secret entrance way out in the garden, and even after I was led to it I had a hard time actually seeing it. The bunker itself contained several chambers, each with concrete walls, wooden doors, and ceilings made of those corrugated metal half-pipes the Germans brought from home by the thousands. The doors and benches were all original. So were the wooden plank floors. David bent over one of them and pulled up a hidden door, revealing a long niche that held several jugs. “There used to be a live shell in there,” Mme. B told me.
The bunker had been electrified and had running water and even a fireplace, and there was no doubt it was solid; still, it didn’t look particularly comfortable, and it was hard to imagine a notorious sybarite like Kronprinz Wilhelm enjoying himself there, with or without his mistress. Then again, I doubt he spent very much time there. The Germans, as I mentioned, held Stenay until the morning of November 11, 1918, by which time the heir to the German throne, which had been abolished, had fled with his father to the Netherlands. And if he’d really been concerned with security, I imagine he would have kept a lower profile in Stenay. Before I left, Mme. B showed me her copy of Le Boucher de Verdun, a bestselling book about the Kronprinz written by Louis Dumur and published shortly after the war, and directed me to a particular passage, which I studied for a moment but could not seem to decipher. Finally, at the risk of compromising her dignity, she translated it for me into less indirect French.
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