“They say,” she explained, her expression a very odd mixture of distaste and pride, “that the Kronprinz used to have orgies here.”
* * *
David and Marian and I spent about twelve hours together that day, stopping for lunch at a nice restaurant in Dun, after which they walked me over to a long, low building on the banks of the Meuse. It’s a museum, and though its name, Maison de l’Histoire du Val Dunois, would seem to indicate that it deals with the entirety of Dun’s history, its sole focus is 14–18. Its proprietor, a burly, ruddy-cheeked retired soldier in his (I would guess) sixties named Jean Marie, doesn’t speak any English, but is particularly interested in the exploits of the American Expeditionary Forces. Part of that, I’m sure, is because Dun was liberated by the American 5th Division on November 5, 1918; General Pershing nicknamed them the Meuse Division for that action, since the Meuse River runs right through the town. The division later built a bridge over it there to replace one that had been destroyed in the battle, and festooned it with a handsome plaque. And they didn’t stop there: They built a total of twenty-four monuments—all obelisks—in the Meuse-Argonne, more than every other American division put together. David Howard took me to see what was probably the last, on the edge of a field outside the village of Remoiville. Its plaque reads:
Remoiville & Louppy
Captured by 11th Inf.
Col. R. H. Peck Comdg
10th Brigade 5th U.S. Div.
Nov. 9, 1918
Marking the most
advanced line of the
American Army
at the time of the
Armistice Day
It is identical to twenty-two of the other twenty-three 5th Division obelisks in this area, as well as the three near Saint-Mihiel and the one down in the Vosges, except for the tiny Tricolor and Stars and Stripes that decorate its flanks, and the commemorative knick-knacks laid at its base by a local man who has adopted the marker and takes care of it.
Despite the long shadow the 5th Division casts in this area, M. Marie’s interest extends to the entire AEF; he is particularly fascinated with the story of Native Americans in the Army, and has compiled a roster of them that is incomplete but quite extensive. “The Americans used Indian code-talkers in the first war, long before the second,” he told me, in French. “Indian code was actually invented in the Argonne in 1918. They called them ‘wind-talkers.’ They were Choctaw.” I’ve never been able to confirm that, but I really want it to be true.
There was certainly a need for such people, whether they existed or not; the Germans, as I have said before, had excellent intelligence operations. “The Americans learned to speak out loud only when they wanted to spread disinformation,” M. Marie told me. He knows a tremendous amount about the Sammies and their war, and has a knack for summoning a piece of information he suspects you will find particularly intriguing. “There were American ambulances here since the beginning of the war,” he told me. “They already had X-rays for lungs.” His museum is one large room, much of it taken up by scores of panels he has created dealing with different facets of the war—armies, battles, weapons, conditions at the front. A big chunk of the rest is a sandpit of sorts, filled with artifacts, the most striking of which, a large alabaster tombstone, had just been brought in. The epitaph, etched inside a bold knight’s shield, reads:
Eugen Nöller
Captain
123rd Grenadier Regiment
*
Born June 27 1879
Fell August 30 1914
FEARLESS AND FAITHFUL
He was killed, in the first month of the war, during a four-hour bombardment of a farm in the neighboring village of Douclon, and buried where he fell. A century and a year later, the family that still owned the farm found the marker, lying in one of their fields; wishing to preserve it—and to keep it from damaging their combine—they brought it to M. Marie.
Like the Argonne itself, things have a way of hiding in plain sight here. In Ornes, which lies between Stenay and Verdun, there are just two man-made things: the ruins of a church; and, across the road, a small, dark monument that reads:
HERE
WAS
ORNES
Destroyed
In 1916
But the real evidence of what happened here is what stands behind both. “Pine trees,” David said, as we walked between the two. “A quick postwar fix. The indigenous trees in this area are oak, beech, ash and elm, but none of them grow as quickly as pine trees. Anytime you see them, you know they were planted after the war, to replace what was destroyed.”
* * *
David’s wife, Marian, is one of only two Americans I know of who live in the Argonne. Very few Americans, it seems to me, even know the Argonne exists, and far fewer ever undertake a visit: It’s far from Paris, Bordeaux, Normandy, Saint-Tropez; there aren’t the kinds of hotels here that Americans are used to; no one speaks English. Most of the times I have visited the cemetery in Romagne I have had it to myself. Most of the times I have encountered other people there they have been French, Belgian, Dutch. In all the time I spent there I met exactly one group of Americans, a family from Iowa who came to the Argonne to find the place where the elderly paterfamilias’s father was wounded in the fall of 1918. I met one other American family, at Jean-Paul de Vries’s café, consisting of a history professor from Virginia, his wife and their son. That’s it.
The cemetery, though, is where the other American I know of who lives in the Argonne can be found most often: Dave Bedford, its superintendent. A trim U.S. Army veteran (most of ABMC’s cemetery superintendents had previous careers in the military) in his late fifties with steely hair and a sharp jaw, Dave took the better part of two days during my 2015 visit to show me some sites in the Argonne, much as his predecessor, the late Joseph P. “Phil” Rivers, had in 2009. (It was Phil who had first told me: “The saying goes that the 5th Division put up a marker every time they stopped to take a piss.”) Tour guide is not part of the job description of an ABMC cemetery superintendent—they have, as you might imagine, a great many other things to deal with; it’s not easy keeping a 130-acre burial ground looking absolutely perfect every day of the year—but the Meuse-Argonne is a lonely post, and people who request it tend to do so because they love the history and wish to immerse themselves in it. Like Phil before him, Dave spends as much time as he can exploring both the area and its past, usually alone. He even, he told me, managed to find and follow the trail of the Lost Battalion, start to finish, despite the fact that for decades it seemed no one could agree on exactly where it was, and even if they could have they would have had a really rough time getting to it. That, at least, is what Phil Rivers told me in 2009; the closest we could get, he’d said, was a modern stone marker, alongside a winding forest road, that pointed down into a steep ravine so choked with vegetation that you could scarcely see ten feet ahead, much less the bottom of the slope. So when, six years later, Dave told me he had found and walked the trail, beginning to end, I asked him if he would take me back so we could hike it together.
The story of the Lost Battalion (which was, technically, neither lost nor a battalion) began on October 2, 1918, when, less than a week after they took Champ Mahaut, some 550 soldiers of the 77th Division—the Statue of Liberty Division, draftees from the city of New York—under the command of Major Charles White Whittlesey, a Manhattan attorney, set off in the Argonne, believing they were part of a line of advance. Within hours, though, as a result of poor communication and unexpected German resistance elsewhere on the line, they found themselves alone in a wooded ravine, surrounded by the enemy and greatly outnumbered. They withstood five days of attacks and bombardments (including some friendly fire), as well as entreaties from the Germans to surrender, which they refused. By the time reinforcements were able to break through to their position, more than 350 of the men had bee
n killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. The rest—194 of them—returned to the fight, much more famous back home, where newspapers had covered their tribulations extensively, than they were at the front.
The 77th had a very large number of immigrants in its ranks—Irish, Greeks, Jews, Italians, Slavs, Germans, and many others; it was said to encompass more nationalities and native tongues than any other division in American history. The press loved them, loved the story of the Great American Melting Pot forging war heroes. At a time when New York City alone had dozens of daily newspapers, almost all of them reported every day, sometimes in several different editions each day, on absolutely everything the men of the Lost Battalion did. People knew the names of the living, and the dead. The former became celebrities, and stayed such, if they wanted to be; having been in the Lost Battalion would have been enough to dine out on for the rest of your life. An extraordinary number of them, and their rescuers, were awarded the Medal of Honor, including Major Whittlesey, who was also given the honor of being a pallbearer at the opening of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in 1921. Shortly thereafter, he committed suicide.
Dave Bedford warned me this would be a tough hike: There was no clear trail and a lot of mud, dense brush, dense undergrowth, steep hills, deep gullies, slimy dead leaves, and slimy boulders. He really undersold it. It had rained recently, more than once, and the Argonne is a place that’s good at trapping water and using it to simultaneously support vegetable life and vex animal life. I slipped a lot. I tripped a lot. At one point, I fell backward into a very large, very prickly . . . uh . . . thing that slashed up my right arm pretty well. (Yes: I, too, shed blood in the Argonne Forest.) It could have been worse; I could have fallen into it face first.
It is safe to say there will never be the equivalent of a Sergeant York Trail for the Lost Battalion, which is a good thing, really, because doing it this way gives you a very good feel for what, exactly, the Lost Battalion experienced—excepting the shooting and shelling, of course. Despite everything that happened here, and the many decades that have passed since it did, this area looks very much—very much—as it would have in early October 1918. When Dave Bedford later took me to the Bois de Cheppy, the woods where the 91st (Wild West) Division jumped off on the morning of September 26, 1918, we found a lot of really interesting man-made stuff: deep trenches, concrete bunkers, entrances to underground dugouts (I was about to lower myself into one when Dave informed me that badgers sometimes nested in them, and that I really didn’t want to encounter them under such circumstances), dirt saps where the Germans hid until the first line of Americans had passed over them so they could attack the attacker from behind, a German canteen (totally flattened, perhaps by an American boot), a nose cone from an artillery shell, and even something I initially believed to be a large, cylindrical American pineapple grenade but which turned out to be the body of a German trench mortar known as a Taube, or pigeon. The most interesting discovery in the Bois de Cheppy, though, wasn’t something I spotted but something I heard, namely Dave’s answer to my question, posed as I looked out from the woods toward the jump-off line, plotting in reverse the course the Wild West Sammies would have taken that morning: to woods from field, to field from copse of trees, to copse of trees from more distant field, to more distant field from thicket of tall scrub, to thicket of tall scrub from yet more distant field, to yet more distant field from jump-off point just behind tree line.
“What would all this have looked like that morning?” I asked him.
“Exactly the same,” he replied.
“Really?”
“Exactly.”
I’ll tell you the truth: There was a part of me that wondered: How could he know? Then, a couple of days later, I found myself with Jean-Paul de Vries just inside another patch of woods east of Romagne, this one called the Bois de Forêt—the Woods of the Forest—because, he speculated, it was so dense. We’d had to walk several hundred yards across a nascent cornfield to get to it—I’d found a lot there, including a French 75-millimeter shell casing, green with oxidation but still full of powder; that German spoon I referred to a while back; something Jean-Paul swears is a piece of roof tile from Roman times—and, reaching its edge, had to scale a steep berm (where I found a large old German beer bottle, embedded in the dirt up to its punt) and immediately start bushwhacking. It was slow going, but, as always, it could have been worse: There could have been German machine guns firing at us. “The 3rd Division came out of those woods over there,” Jean-Paul said, turning around and pointing over the field we had just traversed to get to this spot. “It took them half a day to get across that field to where we’re standing.”
“Did it look anything like this back then?” I asked him.
“It looked exactly like this,” he replied. I threw a Really? at him, and then another, but his certainty never wavered, nor his good humor. As usual, I started to get the sense he was watching it happen right before us; his eyes narrowed. “They met some very hard resistance in these woods,” he said. “It took them three days to advance 1.5 kilometers.” Less than a mile.
“Because they were so dense?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “And very heavily fortified.” We didn’t have to go far for him to show me what he meant: bunkers, concrete behemoths, some built into bluffs with only a slender observation deck peeking out, others boldly squatting in ravines. We ducked into one of the latter (I figured Jean-Paul would know if there were badgers in it) and made our way through several passageways and chambers before emerging into a large room that still had—and I almost can’t believe this, even as I’m typing it now—wood paneling on the walls. Jean-Paul directed me to one plank where someone had scratched “XXXB” into the wood—perhaps the 30th Battalion? “I found this blockhouse only a few months ago,” he said, and slapped the plank. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
The Bois de Forêt can feel a bit like a magical playground, even if you’re not really into this sort of thing: In addition to the bunkers there are, of course, trenches, and concrete vents for subterranean shelters, and concrete waterworks, and hidden entrances and egresses, and brick cookstoves with iron surface plates, and a metal lampshade that still dangles from one branch even as another has grown through it, and the remains of a quarry that predates the war by centuries. “There’s a famous photo of American soldiers resting and eating breakfast here,” he told me, as we negotiated the vine-covered blocks down into the pit. “They were having Corn Willie”—their term for canned corned beef. A few minutes later, I stumbled into an upright stone tablet commemorating Willoughby Marks and George M. Hollister, two lieutenants from the 61st Infantry Regiment, part of the 5th Division, who were killed nearby on October 12, 1918. Not really a magical playground after all.
That same day Jean-Paul and I drove to Cunel, that village behind the American cemetery where the Germans had lined up and shot four civilians against the church wall (you really can still see the bullet holes in it) in September 1914. They are all buried in the village cemetery: The woman bore the beautiful name Euphrasie Pageot; the mayor, Narcisse Poulain, was 63 years old and had been awarded a Legion d’Honneur for his service during the Franco-Prussian War. Across the road is a large open pasture that Jean-Paul told me the Germans had used as an airfield throughout the war. “They always built their airstrips to align with the wind currents,” he explained, once more bolstering my belief that they thought of absolutely everything.
Outside Cunel, Jean-Paul drove us up a tractor road that was pretty narrow but otherwise in good condition, coming to a stop next to a white stele—I use that term loosely; it actually kind of resembles a stylized tree trunk with stumps where its large branches were amputated—just off to the side, at the edge of a field. It’s surrounded by four posts and a thin plastic chain, which I imagine is there for aesthetic purposes only, as it clearly doesn’t and couldn’t keep anyone or anything out, in
cluding that year’s crop, which was lurching over and under its little white links. The marker itself is kept in nice shape, its surface scrubbed white, its bronze plaques clean and legible. The first of these, designed and cast to look like a tablet suspended by chains from a garland, reads:
In This Trench
Captain
Charles Dashiell Harris
6th Engineers
United States Army
MET HIS DEATH
While Leading the Attack
That Drove the Germans
From Clairs Chenes Woods
October 20th, 1918
AGED 21 YEARS
HE WAS AWARDED
THE DISTINGUISHED SERVICE CROSS
“His Initiative And Bravery
Were An Inspiration
To His Men.”
And in between those last two columns is a likeness of the medal. The other plaque reads:
With a small detachment
in advance of his company
Captain Harris captured
two German machine guns
& three prisoners in the
trench within the enclosure
20 M to the south of this spot
Though I have come across many individual memorials out in the field—here, and in the Woëvre, and Champagne, and Picardy—none have been as detailed, nor as specific, as this one. Still, it left me confused: There were no signs of any trenches or enclosures nearby—just fields and, beyond the one in which the marker stood, a stretch of forest. Jean-Paul must have read this in my face. “It’s been moved,” he said. “The marker used to be back in those woods somewhere.”
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