Oh, and the most important thing: This deadly behemoth had to be extremely well camouflaged. The French must never know where it was—not only to protect it, but because its very purpose was to terrorize them by raining down enormous shells upon Verdun without the French having any idea where they were coming from. The Big Max had a range of nearly twenty-five miles; it could hit Verdun, and even points beyond, easily. The Germans even hoped to wreak havoc on La Voie Sacrée with it. They never quite got that far, but they did an awful lot of damage with it, anyway, and killed an awful lot of people besides. How many, exactly, will never be known; some of their bones, I am sure, have yet to surface.
As I have said before, the Germans of the First World War were not the Nazis of the Second; I go to great lengths to segregate the two in my mind. And maybe, if the war had gone into Germany in 1919, instead of ending here, the French and British and Americans would have unleashed such things upon German civilians in German cities and towns. All I can say for sure is that the Germans did do it. And that, as you now know, they went to great trouble to do it. And that most of the top German commanders in the second war, and many of the officers, and quite a few of the soldiers, had also served in the first war. Maybe, somehow, there’s a Moving Sidewalk of Great Consequences running directly from the Big Max to Les Familles Salomon; or, conversely, maybe Hermann Katz’s and Ludwig Salinger’s personal memorials still stand in the German cemetery in Thiaucourt because one of the Nazi soldiers who came upon them remembered that he’d actually served with them the first time around.
I cannot deny it: War tourism can be a strange pursuit. No: By definition, it is a strange pursuit. If you can dash through trenches, poke in and out of bunkers, swing down to blockhouses on a vine, you must as a matter of course possess the ability to momentarily blot from your mind the knowledge that men died and killed in these places—horribly, gruesomely and far too young. That ability enables you to delight at the discovery of a shell that could have once—could still—blow you to pieces; or a bullet, even though it may have passed through someone else’s body before coming to rest in the dirt; or a button, even though it may have fallen off the tunic of a 28-year-old father of three who breathed his last on that very spot. Or it enables you to feel blasé about spotting a bottle that some teenager may have swigged from five minutes before a red-hot piece of shrapnel tore through his heart, because it’s the seventeenth bottle you’ve seen that day. It’s not your fault. You are alive; these things happened a hundred years ago.
But you are a human being. At some point, that ability will probably desert you, even momentarily, and you will experience a sense of—well, maybe not quite guilt; but obligation. You may walk slowly through cemeteries, peruse each marker you pass. You may scrutinize memorials—village, individual—and read the names out loud. You may make connections: between naval guns and deported families, pigs’ feet and the destruction of a continent. You will, for certain, want to make sense of it all. And you will, just as certainly, be unable to. Sooner or later, you will come to that understanding. All you can really do, for certain, is look at things.
Late in the day, after we were done with the Big Max and the sun had started its slow process of retiring for the night, David said: “One more thing. I think we have time.” We drove for about forty-five minutes, to the village of Lion-devant-Dun—Lion before Dun, as in Dun-sur-Meuse—then headed out into the country and turned onto what appeared to be a logging road, a rough one that ran up a pretty steep incline. Fifteen minutes later we crested and emerged onto a grassy plateau. A sign pointed in two directions: trenches to the right, marker to the left. We went left.
“There was a hermitage up here at various times,” David told me as we stepped out of his car. “This was a Roman site, and then Gallo-Roman.” It’s easy to see why they were all drawn here: Romans, Gallo-Romans, religious ascetics. The Côté Saint-Germain, according to a small green sign up top, stands at 336 meters, or 1,102 feet—taller than the Butte de Vauquois or Montfaucon. From its peak, the view extends into the Argonne, the Ardennes, Belgium, even Luxembourg. In 1918, you could have easily seen into Germany, too. “This point marks the end of the Heights of the Meuse,” David told me. “Once the Americans took it, the battle was won.” The doughboys who captured it must have felt as much: The spot commands everything around it—forest, farms, meadows, lakes, streams. They could see how little was left of the dreaded Hindenburg Line; how little stood between them and Sedan, and Germany. Those doughboys belonged to the 5th Division; and, yes, they put up a marker here afterward, a stout fieldstone obelisk different from the rest. You can’t begrudge them. It took them two days to wrest Côté Saint-Germain from the Germans. Two days of fierce, desperate combat. By the time it was done, on November 7, the Germans had already dispatched a party to negotiate an armistice.
Driving back down that rough road, David slowed his car as we passed a large protuberance in the dirt off to our left, a great big rounded earthen lump. “A burial mound,” he said. “Celtic.”
* * *
The last time I saw Jean-Paul de Vries, we set off, as we usually did, in his Euro-vehicle to look around. Our first stop was a German command post in the woods a couple of miles outside Romagne. Of all the ruins out there in the Argonne, it’s certainly one of the most impressive, well hidden despite the fact that it sits maybe fifty yards from the road. Built into a natural slope in the forest floor, it’s big and broad and very square, the corners of the steps that lead up to its parapet still sharp, the ones that lead down into the bunker still steady: an imposing structure that would make you feel safe if it were yours and scared if it weren’t. It was one of the first significant sites Jean-Paul discovered when he started canvassing the area, back in the 1990s when his explorations were limited to places he could get to on foot. He’d been visiting it for many years before he discovered, scribbled in pencil on a wall in one of its subterranean chambers:
Kansas City
Missouri U.S.A.
Oct. 30, 1918
As he recounted that story and shined a light on the graffiti, I chided him, reminding him that he’d shown me the same site, and the same graffiti, the previous year; and that he’d taken me to see it in 2009, as well. I knew, too, that this was something he took just about everybody to see, and I started to feel like a tourist whose double-decker bus stops in Times Square so everyone aboard can grab lunch at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. “OK,” he said, and smiled. “Let’s go.”
We drove about fifteen minutes south to Montblainville, a small farming village where the Germans had taken the relatively modest château for their headquarters. They installed bunkers all around it, including one in the château’s cellar, for which they added a concrete appendage onto the side of the house. It’s still there today, and in very fine condition; it looks a bit like one of those 1920s toasters you see at flea markets. The château and farm, both named La Forge, are presently owned by a gentleman from Holland whom Jean-Paul knows, and who was happy to show me the bunker. He was especially proud of its two doors, an iron outer one and a wooden inner one, both of which were original, in excellent shape, and working. “Châteaux all had tunnels,” Jean-Paul told me. “The Germans just expanded them.” He walked me out to the woods that lined the house’s driveway, where I discovered an odd wonderland of holes and concrete, the latter sheltering entrances or exits or who knows what and shaped like tuffets and bars of soap and bread ovens. “I discovered these in the winter,” he told me. “I saw steam rising up out of the holes, and went to take a look.”
We headed back toward Romagne by way of Varennes, where he showed me a steep hill once laden with German dugouts; the remains of a German narrow-gauge rail station; some very well preserved open-air baths that would not have looked out of place in ancient Rome. Behind the wall of the old town cemetery, he led me to a whitish marker, maybe four feet tall—German—which had sat there for a century, covered by vines a
nd unnoticed by the local population until a friend of his thought to cut them down and see what might be hiding underneath.
I nodded appreciatively, but it must not have been enough, because Jean-Paul turned to me and said: “OK, I’ll show you something I found recently.” And we drove off toward Romagne, pulling to a stop alongside a road near the little hamlet of Éclisfontaine. I recognized the field—we had visited it a few days earlier; the Wild West Division had crossed it, Jean-Paul had told me, while heading toward woods filled with German machine guns—but hadn’t noticed, or paid attention to, a copse of trees a couple hundred yards off the road. Jean-Paul hadn’t noticed it, either, he told me, until a few months earlier, when suddenly he did.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Come on,” he said, already walking briskly into the field. The trees weren’t very large, but they were just dense enough to hide that which had been built not to stand out in the first place: A stone barrel-vaulted arch receding back into an earthen rise, a huge half-pipe, closed at one end, covering a long, narrow little pool. At the far end, water still trickled into it from a cement spout set into a small opening, shaped like a doorway, in the back wall. I looked at Jean-Paul and waited.
“A bathhouse,” he said, and suddenly I saw it clearly. It was solid and complete, no chocks in the walls, which were as watertight as any bunker I’d been in. It was a hot day; I could easily picture a company of German soldiers stripping down and splashing around. If the water level had been a bit higher, I would have happily done the same.
“When the Americans took it,” Jean-Paul told me, “they turned it into an aid station. I found lots of things in there,” he added, pointing to a stream that flowed out of the front. “Lots of buttons, German and American. I even found a sign from a Pierce-Arrow ambulance.” We walked out and straddled the running water, gazed into it, but I spotted nothing. I didn’t care. After all the bunkers and blockhouses and tunnels and craters, all the bullets and barbed wire, shells and shrapnel—after all the sites and artifacts related to killing, and dying—here was a place men came to get clean, and to heal. What could I have found in that stream that might possibly have meant more to me, after months and months of war tourism, than this?
“I’ve known this farmer for a long time,” he explained, “but he never mentioned this to me. He said he didn’t know it was anything special. Can you believe that?” He was quiet for a moment. “I’ll tell you, it’s very special to me,” he said, softly. “I don’t bring anyone here.”
* * *
Whenever possible, I had lunch at Jean-Paul’s café in Romagne, whether or not we had gone out exploring that morning. It’s a pleasant spot where at least one other person is sure to speak English; the Wi-Fi works well—no small thing if the SIM card you bought from a French telecom company was supposed to include two gigabytes of data but no one at the aforementioned company can help you figure out how to access it—and it’s usually cool despite the lack of air-conditioning, and the food is pretty good. My favorite item on the menu is a baguette with lettuce and some other vegetables and rosette, a type of cold cut, which I got most days, even though Jean-Paul looked at me as if I were crazy the first time I asked him for some mustard. Apparently, the birthplace of Dijon doesn’t know what to do with it.
I always tried to take a nice long lunch, French style, during which I would read a book and respond to e-mails from people who were just waking up back home. I’ve eaten there with Jean-Pierre Brouillon and Dave Bedford, but mostly I’ve been there alone, except for Jean-Paul, scurrying around doing this or that, and Darius, his Beauceron—a French German shepherd—who really enjoyed trotting over to me when I was seated, standing up on his hind legs and clamping his jaws gently around my upper arm. Sometimes he stayed in that position for five or ten minutes. If I could find a place like that here, I’d go there every day.
One afternoon, after I finished my salad and rosette hoagie, I got up and walked over to the front counter to ask for an ice cream just as a school bus pulled up out front and a couple dozen children, nine or ten years old, spilled out and filed inside. Jean-Paul emerged from out back and scurried up to greet them. He started telling them a bit about his museum, but a few of them, it seemed, were more fixated on the man standing behind him, silently waiting for a Popsicle. Jean-Paul looked at them, then at me, then back at them. “Ah,” he said. “C’est un Américain.” They stared at me; a few nodded, earnestly. One boy stepped forward and shook my hand.
Epilogue
History and Memory
I had a lot to contend with in rural northern France—lack of English, lack of gas stations, lack of cell phone coverage, lack of wireless data, lack of air-conditioning, lack of ice cubes, lack of restrooms when you could find a gas station, lack of American-style hotels with spacious American-style hotel rooms, lack of NPR, lack of CNN, lack of pumps at unmanned gas stations that would accept an American credit card that didn’t have one of those digital chips in it—but one thing I never had to deal with was a lack of parking. Even in Château-Thierry, which was about as close to Paris as anyplace I spent significant time, I could always count on finding a spot in the town square, the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. Technically, you were supposed to feed a municipal meter—one of those centralized machines that spits out a ticket that you then display on your dashboard—but the first half hour was free, and you could always go out and get a new free ticket every thirty minutes; the guy at the cell phone store told me that, even as he failed to tell me that the two gigabytes of data that were supposedly included with the SIM card he was selling me existed only on paper. I’m a New Yorker; I hate driving around looking for parking at least as much as I love the hard-to-find pastry Americans call a Napoleon. In France, they call them mille-feuille—a thousand leaves—and they are everywhere. So is ready parking. In most of the towns and villages I visited while following the trail of the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, I could have left my Renault Scénic in the middle of the street and no one would have cared, or even noticed.
With one exception.
Compiègne. It’s a city, sure. But I’d been to much bigger cities—Reims, Nancy, Metz—and found an open spot almost immediately. Maybe I just picked a bad day to go to Compiègne. It was a Saturday, in June; that probably didn’t help. Some kind of festival seemed to be going on. Maybe more than one. Compiègne is about fifty miles north of Paris. Before the revolution, it was one of three seats of the royal government, the other two being Fontainebleau and Versailles. Kings had been spending time here since at least the fourteenth century, especially in summer, as the dense forests that surround the city made excellent hunting grounds. In 1750, during the reign of Louis XV, renovations on the royal château, built in 1378, began; they were completed nearly forty years later, well into the reign of Louis XVI. Napoleon renovated it again, and spent a lot of time there. So did Napoleon III, before the Prussians captured him at Sedan. The château, now a museum, is enormous and sits right in the middle of town; the square out in front is very large, and full of parking spaces. All taken.
Eventually I found something in an alley about a fifteen-minute walk away, then hurried back to the city center through a series of open plazas, each of which was hosting a band or dancers or what I believe were contortionists. No one spoke English, which didn’t bother me a bit until I found my way to the tourism bureau and discovered that no one spoke English there, either. That surprised me, I’ll admit, though even that wouldn’t have bothered me so much if anyone there could have given me directions in any language to the place I was looking for. But they couldn’t, not really. One told me to find a road she couldn’t spell for me and turn left at the site where something used to be. Another drew me a crude map on the back of a flyer for the festival that was going on outside. That was the best they could do; this place, it seems, was very hard to find. Which had been precisely the point in 1918.
On November 7 of that year, a delegation left Berlin in a small motorcade and headed west, into France. They quietly slipped across the French lines under a flag of truce, though apparently not quietly enough; the sight of them immediately touched off rumors of an armistice, which spread throughout the Allied ranks and then across the ocean. The rumors, presented as fact, actually graced the front pages of American newspapers. They all had to print retractions shortly thereafter. I imagine they broke quite a few hearts.
The rumors were right in one respect: The motorcade was carrying a party of Germans into France for the purposes of negotiating an armistice. Both sides had their reasons for keeping the negotiations, and even the fact of their existence, quiet. Not long after they crossed enemy lines, the German delegation stealthily boarded a French railcar to carry them to their final destination; the coach had once belonged to Napoleon III. The top-ranking military officer in the German delegation, Major General Detlev von Winterfeldt, was the son of the Prussian who had drafted the terms of France’s surrender in 1871. So much symbolism; so much secrecy. In the predawn darkness, the coach slid into a railway siding deep in the Forest of Compiègne, about a mile from the village of Rethonde. When the sun rose, the Germans could see another coach parked on tracks about fifty yards away: The field headquarters of Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. The negotiations would take place there. The rail hub was surrounded by dense, tall trees, and invisible from the air. Foch had chosen the spot. A sign there today reads: “The quiet seclusion of the forest seemed more suitable for such an occasion than his General Headquarters.” It’s a nice little bit of historical spin.
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