Back Over There

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “Do you know where, exactly?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve never been in there. But I bet we could find it.”

  I appreciate that kind of can-do attitude, so I just started walking gingerly through the field (as per Jean-Paul’s code) to the tree line. It was slow going—the crop, whatever it was, was already waist high—and by the time I reached the woods, Jean-Paul had already found some longer but less laborious route to the same point and was waiting for me. It took us several minutes to find a break in the wall of branches and weeds large enough for us to step through, but as soon as we got inside, things opened up, and I could both see clearly and ambulate easily. It was still dense, though unlike the Bois de Forêt, this place didn’t seem to have anything magical about it. The light that broke through the cover was stained a greenish brown in the process, lending the landscape an eerie air; it felt haunted. Maybe that was because I had just read a bit about a man who had been killed in these woods, although the marker had told only part of the story: Captain Harris was the son of Peter C. Harris, the adjutant general of the United States Army, and had graduated fifth in his class at West Point. According to his obituary, he was mortally wounded so close to enemy lines that his stretcher-bearers, carrying him to the nearest aid station, were captured by the Germans.

  “No,” Jean-Paul said to himself, looking at a patch of ground. He scurried on to another—the man can move quickly, even in a dense forest—while I wandered off in a different direction, more slowly than he and with less certitude, until I spotted what I was pretty sure was a trench. I called out to him; he hurried over, examined the trench briefly and declared, in his singsong Dutch accent: “Yes, it’s a German.” We started canvassing the area and found a couple more, but they only convinced him that the first one was the place. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot where the earthen parapet widened and flattened. “This is where a machine gun would have been. The others didn’t have something like this.” It was remarkable to me that such a detail might still be evident a century on. Jean-Paul said it shouldn’t be.

  As we emerged from the woods and made our way back to Jean-Paul’s car—really, a big Euro-mobile, the kind that can carry a dozen tourists, as is sometimes necessary—I got a good look at the field across the tractor road and noticed a very large divot in the earth, maybe thirty feet across and ten deep. The earth around it had been disturbed, too, and seemed to ripple away; a sprawling tree grew in the depression, the grass around it a much deeper green than the field beyond, likely because nothing mechanized could get in there to cut it. “Coastal artillery shell,” Jean-Paul said, though whose he couldn’t tell. It was jarring, this big hole out on its own, no others of any size within sight. Something really large had dropped out of the sky onto that spot, and had probably killed at least a few men, all of whose names were likely lost to history. For sure, there was no marker—not even buried in some woods—telling their story.

  * * *

  I can’t be certain, but I suspect Jean-Paul got a bit tired at some point of having me ask him if this or that looked the same back during 14–18, and then marveling when he replied, almost invariably, that it did. If he did, I would guess it happened the morning he drove us out past Romagne and into the country, and pointed to a field off to our right. “There’s the Roman wall,” he said. “Part of the settlement that gave Romagne its name.”

  Actually, at that particular moment I did not marvel aloud at the steadfastness of the landscape, or anything else. What I did say was: “Where?”

  “There!” he said, and jabbed his finger at the air as if pointing up at the Empire State Building from across the street. “By those trees.”

  I stared at the point he seemed to be referring to, squinted, and continued to see nothing. “You said that when we drove by here last year,” I told him. “I didn’t see it then, either.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want to be rude,” I said, a response that makes no more sense to me now than it did then.

  He stopped the Euro-thing and hopped out. “Come on,” he said, and marched off toward a trio of arbors, a few hundred yards away. I followed, hoping with every few paces that it would suddenly become apparent to me. But it didn’t, and soon we were at the trees. Jean-Paul looked at them, then at me, and raised his eyebrows; a silent Voilà!

  I just shook my head.

  “Right there!” he said, and stomped over in between two of the trees, crouched down, and slapped his hand against a slight hiccup in the ground, maybe a yard high, that ran behind the line of trees and across for some distance.

  “That?” I said, and walked over and up to its tiny earthen crest; looking down at the other side, I saw that it flattened out as quickly as it had buckled up. I had been looking for New England–style stone walls. I’m an American; we don’t have Roman ruins.

  “Over here,” Jean-Paul said, gesturing me to another section, where I spotted an arc-shaped hole in the side, burrowing into the ancient earthworks. “A Roman well,” he said, then pivoted around and pointed just behind us to a squared U of concrete, obscured by tall grass. “A German well,” he said. “Both probably still work, if you cleared them out. The Romans built things to last. The Germans knew that. They built roads on old Roman roads, wells near old Roman wells.” What he didn’t say—didn’t have to—was that the Germans also built things to last. And those things did last, especially in a place like the Argonne, so different from Flanders, the Somme, Champagne.

  “The poverty of this region protected its history,” he explained. The land was not deemed valuable enough to be “developed”; in many cases, it wasn’t even deemed valuable enough to merit undertaking the extensive and expensive processes necessary to reclaim it for farming. There are fields in the Argonne, a lot of them, that haven’t even been worked since the first war, and others that haven’t been worked since the second; it’s as if the farmers figure that after two there’s bound to be a third, so why bother? In a strange way, as Olivier Jacquin said they joked in his family, the war may have even been good for some of the poor farmers of the region. “Eighty percent of the fences in this area are made from German railroad track,” Jean-Paul told me. “Or from ‘Spanish riders’”—metal barricades, typically wrapped in barbed wire—“or the sides of German beds.” People took the doors off German bunkers for their rebuilt houses or barns; the building Jean-Paul uses as a warehouse, a few blocks from his museum, has one. Its walls are also lined with stones from German structures, one of which still bears the name of the Pionier-Kompagnie that built it. Of course, none of that war salvage would have been necessary to rebuild French fences, houses and barns if the original fences, houses and barns hadn’t been destroyed. In the war.

  I think what Jean-Paul was trying to do, in showing me the Roman wall and then the Roman well and, right next to it, the German well, was prove to me once and for all that what he’d told me every time I asked him What did this look like back then? was really true, as hard as it was for me to believe: Exactly the same as it does now. What he actually did, though, without knowing it, was push me toward a realization far more profound, one that took me a long while to figure out how to articulate. This field, this land: The Romans fought here. The Germans fought here. And in between the Romans and the Germans, the Merovingians fought here, and then the Carolingians, and then the knights and soldiers of one royal house, and then another, and then another. And before the Romans it was the Franks or the Celts or maybe both, and no doubt many others whose names I’ll never know. So many names. But they were all here. They walked to this place to fight. They were of this place. It had always been thus. Always.

  Until 1918.

  That’s when men, millions of them, sailed for weeks across an ocean, then packed themselves into railcars for days, then marched for hours and hours, all just to get here. To fight here. It was the first tim
e in all of human history that an entire army from the New World set off to fight in the Old. It was a new kind of army, too, unlike any the world had ever seen, one composed entirely of citizens and residents, not subjects, men of several different races and many different ethnic and national backgrounds, men who came to France in 1918 not to stay but just to win the fight and then go back home. Which they did; and then they did. And it changed everything.

  Everything.

  Something really big happened that had never happened before, and afterward, nothing was the same. The world we live in today is the world wrought by the Great War; the world that existed before it is gone, entirely and forever. That moment—men showing up here, in this field, and others like it nearby—was the watershed. Those men—doughboys, Sammies, soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces—almost certainly didn’t realize the greater significance of their actions here. They probably didn’t even spot those two wells.

  I didn’t, either. Until I did.

  * * *

  A year after he caught me trespassing on his property and punished me with a five-hour educational tour, I met Jean-Pierre Brouillon again at his farm. “My old friend Tarzan,” he greeted me, shaking my hand vigorously and slapping me on the back before climbing into his 4x4 and beckoning me to follow. We drove off and revisited all the things he had shown me on his land a year earlier, the fields where machine-gun nests had been set up and narrow-gauge rail laid, the woods with their trenches and two enormous German blockhouses. A bit more of the Musarde farmhouse appeared to have crumbled in the interim; M. Brouillon’s mind hadn’t changed, though: He still insisted he knew nothing about Rommel stopping there in 1914, and still steered the conversation at every opportunity to 1918, and MacArthur. “He had to take La Tuilerie several times, you know, before he managed to hold it,” he told me. Examining the house again, I had to restrain myself from asking aloud if the place had really been worth all that trouble. Of course, it hadn’t always been the roofless, tree-filled husk before us now. It had once been a house, a home, and, judging by what remained of its windows and walls and the beams I could see poking out tentatively here and there, a pretty nice one. I mentioned this to Jean-Paul de Vries the next time I saw him.

  “That’s probably my favorite area in the Argonne,” he said.

  “Jean-Pierre told me the house hasn’t been occupied since 1964,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he mused. “But the family who lived there until then had really been broken in 1944. Two of the sons took some butter one night and set off for the American fuel depot to try to trade it for fuel, but they probably took a shortcut, went someplace they shouldn’t have been. Some Americans on patrol saw them coming in the dark and warned them to stop, but they didn’t, so they shot them. Killed them. They didn’t know who they were. And they didn’t know what to do with the bodies. So they just left them in front of the church in Bantheville. Mass was being celebrated inside. It was Christmas Eve.”

  Bantheville: where six civilians had been executed on September 9, 1914, because of a misunderstanding sparked by German soldiers firing off a salute to one of their fallen officers. It’s a sunny place, narrow streets and lazy hills, people outside on their lawns, working on cars, smoking, talking to each other; the first time I went there, looking for the monument to those six shot civilians that Jean-Paul had told me about, two different older men approached and asked me if they could be of assistance.

  I saw Jean-Pierre again shortly after that conversation with Jean-Paul, but didn’t share that story with him. I assume he knows it and didn’t choose to mention it to me, perhaps because I’m American and he didn’t want me to feel guilty. It wasn’t his family; his father acquired the property later. It was his father, he told me, who first told him about MacArthur, the narrow-gauge railroad, the Kriemhilde Stellung, those blockhouses. He’d known the farm all his life, had spent time in those woods years before he bought it. “He was in the resistance,” M. Brouillon told me. “They used those blockhouses. They were still in excellent condition during the second war. Farmers didn’t try to blow them up until the 1950s.” It was also his father who’d first told him about Americans. “He used to say the Germans were very orderly and disciplined,” he told me. “But they were like wild pigs—they just ran straight, that’s all. The Americans, by contrast, were very relaxed and laid-back, but when the time for action came, they always stepped up and got the job done.”

  “Is that right?” I asked.

  “Oui,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something else he told me: The Germans were very aloof to civilians. The Americans were just the opposite.”

  I can’t say how much that part of the story is responsible for the abiding fondness so many people I met Over There have for Americans, long after Americans have forgotten them and this place and what their own ancestors did here a century ago. But that affection—that devotion, really—is what drives them to keep alive the memory of those deeds, and that friendship, in the hopes that some future generation of Americans might someday return to reclaim it.

  * * *

  One of the very first things I ever saw in this part of France, even before I met Patrick and heard those two urban legends, was the 14–18 monument in Dun-sur-Meuse. It’s nothing special, really—an awkward-looking poilu charging forward, clutching his Lebel rifle with Rosalie bayonet at an angle that makes you think if he trips, that’s going to be trouble. On the front of the statue’s pedestal is a tablet, in French and English, commemorating the soldiers of the 5th Division who fell while liberating the town in 1918. But I didn’t understand, yet, how rare a thing that was. What really made an impression on me that day was the Aux Victimes Civiles section of the monument, engraved on the back of the pedestal. There were three names listed under it—Charles Seillier, Albert LeFevre and Mme. Ambroise-Adam—and, under them, in a different font, the dates 1939–1945, and two more entries: Mme. Céline Thierion; and Les Familles Salomon.

  Now, I knew all about what the occupying Nazis, and some French collaborators, had done to French Jews during World War II. But it’s one thing to read about something like that in a book, or even on a museum wall, and quite another to see it acknowledged, or at least sort of acknowledged, at the scene of the crime. I say sort of because, unlike that marker in Sainte-Menehould, which I only discovered six years later, there is no mention of what, exactly, happened to the families Salomon. So when David and Marian Howard introduced me to Jean Marie at his museum in Dun that day, I asked him if he knew any more. He said he didn’t.

  A few months later, though, he sent me an e-mail telling me he had looked into it. He still had no idea about Mme. Thierion, but the Salomons, he had discovered, were a well-known family in Dun, where they’d owned a butcher shop and a popular grocery-café. The paterfamilias, Edmond, had been a 14–18 veteran; he and his wife, Louise, had two young sons, Robert and Jacques. Louise’s elderly aunt Sarah Israël lived with them, too. All were “evacuated” from Dun after the Nazis rolled in—by whom, Nazis or French neighbors, was not specified—and ultimately deported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered upon arrival, except for Robert, their elder son, who perished at Buchenwald on March 9, 1945, just a month before it was liberated by the 89th US Infantry Division, the same unit that had taken Stenay on the morning of November 11, 1918. In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the second war’s end, there was a push to add the names of each family member to the monument, rather than just “Les Familles Salomon.” Twenty years later, it still hadn’t happened.

  On the day that I had met M. Marie, after David and Marian had taken me to his museum and then to Mme. B’s house, the three of us—David, Marian and I—drove out to a large parking lot at the edge of the forest near the village of Duzey, about twenty-five miles southeast of Stenay and twenty northeast of Verdun. On the edge of the lot, in between the macadam and the trees, something really, really big lay on its side, longer than an eighteen-
wheeler and painted a grayish blue. “The Big Max,” David pronounced. “A naval gun.”

  The word “gun,” while technologically and historically appropriate, seemed rather insufficient to the task. By the end of the war, everybody was using these—I mentioned earlier finding a chunk of an American coastal artillery shell on the grounds of what had once been the Porta Lager—but, as was typically the case when it came to martial technology, the Germans were first. In 1914, they tore through supposedly invincible fortifications at Liège and Antwerp in Belgium with their notorious “Big Bertha,” a 420-millimeter howitzer with a range of nine miles that terrorized their enemies and symbolized their ruthlessness. In 1918, they shelled the French capital from seventy-five miles away with their “Paris Gun,” the largest cannon ever made: its 110-foot barrel hurled a 200-plus-pound, 234-millimeter shell into the stratosphere, the first time humans ever achieved such heights.

  The Big Max had a much greater range than Big Bertha, and fired 380-millimeter shells, much larger than those hurled into space by the Paris Gun. While it had ostensibly been designed for ships, the German fleet never did get to do much in that war, being pinned down in harbor by the British Navy, so someone decided those big guns would be put to better use elsewhere. Here’s what that entailed: Suitable locations had to be identified and made ready; the guns, which weighed 220 tons, had to be dissembled, transported somehow to rail facilities, loaded onto special flatcars, moved by rail to a point as close to the new location as possible, removed from the flatcars, transported somehow to the deployment site, and set up. And “set up” meant more than just maneuvering it onto some rods. This was, after all, a naval gun, designed and calibrated to be used on a battleship at sea. An installation had to be designed and built that replicated such an environment. It included an enormous concrete vat, filled with water, as well as holds, a deck, and metal pivots and girders; they’re all still there, as are several tunnels the Germans built on-site for various purposes. Rail was laid down—it’s still there, too—to carry the shells, each of which was nearly seven feet in length and weighed more than 1,600 pounds (there’s one of those there, too—a dummy, I imagine), to the breech, the door of which weighed two tons. Special units were created and trained solely for the purpose of operating this one gun. When fired, flames would shoot out of the Big Max for a distance of nearly fifty feet. The gun was so large, and contained so much steel, that Pioniere had to outfit the surrounding area with metal rods, lest it draw lightning.