The truth is, Foch wasn’t in the mood for niceties. Germany had invaded his country four years and three months earlier, and occupied much of it ever since. The Germans had killed more than a million poilus and an unknowable number of civilians. They had laid much of France to waste. Now, he knew, the Germans were finished, their military exhausted, their country swept by mutiny and revolution. And they were coming to Foch, Mütze in hand. He wasn’t about to lift his boot from their neck. Not a millimeter. The Germans, knowing they had no leverage, agreed to Foch’s extensive list of demands—read aloud to them by Foch’s aide, General Maxime Weygand—by 11:00 a.m. that morning: immediate evacuation by German forces of all occupied territories in Luxembourg, Belgium and France, including Lorraine and Alsace; immediate release of all Allied prisoners of war, without reciprocation; immediate surrender of twenty-five thousand machine guns, five thousand artillery pieces, three thousand trench mortars, all submarines, and more aircraft and warships than Germany actually possessed; and “reparation for damage done.”
All that remained was to get final approval from Berlin and put it all in writing. General von Winterfeldt asked Foch to declare a cease-fire, to take effect immediately, while the bureaucrats and diplomats did whatever they had to do. Foch refused. The war would proceed. The Germans had seventy-two hours to sign the deal, or it would evaporate. The next one would have even more onerous terms. If there were a next one at all.
Historians typically cite the Treaty of Versailles as the point at which the seeds of the Second World War were sown, but I think it actually happened here, in the Forest of Compiègne, on the morning of November 8, 1918. The armistice was supposed to be a halt in the fighting, not a surrender, but Foch’s terms for it were so severe that there was no way the Germans would ever be able to negotiate or resist the terms of whatever peace treaty the Allies would ultimately hand them to sign. They would have absolutely nothing to bargain with. In truth, they already had almost nothing to bargain with. The German Army was on the brink of collapse; so was Germany itself. Foch knew the strength of his hand, and the weakness of his opponent’s. He took everything he could, including the Germans’ dignity. Had he left them a little something, I believe, there might not have been a Second World War. I have presented this hypothesis to just about every French person I know. Most dismiss it out of hand. They are closer, I am sure, to understanding Foch’s mindset at that moment, to appreciating the incomprehensible losses the French had suffered in a war of German aggression. Foch was smart, and ruthless. Without him and men like him, they invariably tell me, France would have lost the war. I don’t mention that they did lose the war, twenty-two years later. On the exact same spot.
If you, too, are inclined to doubt my assessment that the roots of the Second World War trace back to this place on that morning, I’ll tell you this: In June 1940, after the Nazi Wehrmacht invaded and defeated France, Hitler insisted on traveling personally to the Forest of Compiègne to make the French sign a new armistice in the same railroad car. The site had changed quite a bit since 1918: The French had cleared the trees from the hub, erected cement blocks to mark the precise spots where the two railroad carriages had been parked, and turned the entire area into a monument, the Clairière (or glade) de l’Armistice. The train car itself had been moved into a new museum, built at the site for that purpose. The carriage contained all the original furniture, and signs indicating which delegate had occupied which seat at the long table inside. Hitler had it hauled out of the museum and set up on the tracks in the exact same spot it had occupied in November 1918. I’m sure he appreciated the French having marked it.
Hitler made a point of sitting in Foch’s chair during the talks, which were as one-sided as they had been the first time around, albeit in the other direction. The French, still tired and depleted from 14–18, had been defeated on the battlefield in just six weeks, and were in no position to refuse Hitler’s terms of surrender. The northern part of the country, much of which had been destroyed by the Germans in the first war, would be occupied by them, the southern part by a puppet government based in Vichy and headed up by Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun. After the new armistice was approved by France’s minister of defense—General Maxime Weygand, who had read the terms of the armistice to the German delegation in 1918, and who also later collaborated with Germany as a high official in the Vichy regime—and signed, Hitler ordered the train car moved to Berlin, and the Clairière de l’Armistice destroyed, including the large raised cement platform in the middle of the circular rail hub, in which was embedded, in big metal letters, an inscription that is the same today as it was then:
HERE
11 NOVEMBER 1918
SUCCUMBED
THE CRIMINAL PRIDE
OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE
VANQUISHED
BY THE
FREE PEOPLES
WHOM IT ATTEMPTED
TO ENSLAVE
It reminds one a bit of the inscription on the original monument at Bathelémont—the one that mentioned “German imperialism, the scourge of humanity”—which, you may recall, was also destroyed by the Nazis. They were rather thin-skinned, apparently.
Like that monument and the Clairière de l’Armistice, the museum was rebuilt after the second war and is, in most ways, like just about every other 14–18 museum in France, with its uniforms, weapons and informational panels. It does, however, have two things no other museum (or, at least, no other museum I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to quite a few) has: an entire room filled with wooden stereoscope viewing boxes, each filled with dozens of stereoview slides of war scenes; and the railway coach in which the 1918 armistice was signed. Sort of.
The French spent four years occupied by the Nazis in the second war, which gave them a lot of time to think about what they would do with the Clairière de l’Armistice once the Germans were gone. They decided to rebuild it exactly as it had been before 1940. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the Germans took the monument’s centerpiece, Foch’s train car, back to Germany with them after the second armistice was signed. I’m sure the French had hopes of recovering it if and when the Germans were eventually defeated; but as American troops approached the place where it was on display, in April 1945, SS troops burned it to the ground. After the war, the French, distraught at the loss of such a national symbol but determined to re-create the Clairière nonetheless, tracked down an identical railway carriage, one that had been manufactured at the same time, and in the same series, as Foch’s. They outfitted it exactly as Foch’s had been in November 1918, complete with long table, chairs, and signs indicating who had sat where. They even included some original artifacts from the scene, among them Foch’s telephone, and—and I have no idea where they found this—one of the maréchal’s half-smoked cigars.
It’s a remarkable re-creation and, based on what I saw, very popular with tourists, most of them French. It’s no flimflam—there are signs by the car telling the story of how the original was destroyed and replaced by a contemporary twin—but visitors nonetheless regard it as the real thing, and spend a lot of time peering through its windows. An awful lot of the twentieth century emanates from this (almost) one train car—so much, really, that (almost) is more than enough.
The small room that leads from the carriage to the exit is, it will not surprise you, a little gift shop. It sells the usual tchotchkes: mugs, plates, binoculars, tiny soldiers and cannons and aircraft carriers. For six euros, you can get a die-cast replica of the railway carriage you just visited. I did. It’s the only souvenir I ever bought in all my time in France.
* * *
Something strange happened. In 2014, following the publication of my last book, The New York Times sent me back to France to write a four-part series on American World War I battle sites Over There. That’s not the strange part; the strange part is that, after the last installment ran, in December of that year, I received
an e-mail from a reporter at L’Est Républicain, a daily newspaper in Lorraine. The reporter, Léa Boschiero, had read that last piece, which was mostly about the Argonne, and was surprised and gratified that someone had written an article about La Meuse, an area that doesn’t get many American visitors, for a large American newspaper. She asked if I would mind answering some questions about it. She wanted, in essence, to write an article about an article. I said I would be happy to answer her questions. When it was all done and her article published—they titled it La Meuse dans le New York Times—she said I should let her know the next time I was in the area, so we could meet for a drink.
Five months later, we did, only by that time a drink had grown into lunch with her and her editor, Frédéric Plancard. They treated me to a fine meal at a restaurant on the deck of a boat in Verdun; the mayor, seated a few tables away, came over just to say hello. A day or two earlier, Léa had written to ask if there was anything in particular I wanted to see in the vicinity. I replied that I would like to visit La Voie Sacrée in the company of people who knew more about it than I did. That would be fine, she said. At lunch, we talked about this and that: Verdun’s plans for the centennial of the battle the following year; the different ways different generations there regard Philippe Pétain; why the French have such high regard for Jerry Lewis. As we were finishing up our crème brûlée (not to be confused with the Bois Brûlé), Léa sheepishly confessed that they were hoping to write another article about me, and that a photographer from the paper—Franck Lallemand; his last name means “the German” in French—had already been dispatched to meet them on The Sacred Way. I said that was fine. I wasn’t sure there was anything worth writing about, and I probably would have skipped the wine if I had known what they were up to, but pourquoi pas?
The article ran the following day, teased on the front page as Un Écrivain Américain sur le Champ de Bataille (“An American Writer on the Battlefield”) and continuing inside under the headline Le Grand Reporter de 14–18. I didn’t know in advance when it would run, and I couldn’t remember if I had said anything really stupid around Léa and Frédéric—or if my frank assessment of Jerry Lewis’s oeuvre would offend people—so I didn’t tell anyone about it. It didn’t matter: People saw the article (which did not mention M. Lewis) anyway. Denis and Bénédicte Hebrard saw it. Jean-Paul de Vries saw it. Jean-Pierre Brouillon saw it. Dave Bedford saw it. Patrick Simons and Christophe Wilvers saw it. It seems everyone in a pretty large section of Lorraine reads L’Est Républicain. Cover to cover. For the next two weeks, wherever I went, people recognized me. They mimicked my stance in the picture—arms crossed over my chest with one hand clutching my camera, a goofy pose that had been the photographer’s idea. (Sorry, Franck, but you know it’s true. It’s also true that the angle and lens made my arms and hands look enormous and my head tiny, but they couldn’t mimic that.) But a lot of people also e-mailed Léa asking her how long I was going to be in the area, and telling her they would be happy to show me this or that if I had the time. That’s how I met some of the people, and saw some of the things, I’ve written about here.
Over lunch, in between talk of Pétain and Lewis, I asked both of them if they had any personal connection to the war. Frédéric immediately volunteered that he was a cousin of the first poilu killed in the war, Corporal Jules-André Peugeot. It had happened on August 2, 1914—a day before war was formally declared—in a little French village way down by the Swiss border called Joncherey. Peugeot, a distant relation of the automobile manufacturers, had been born in Étupes, another small town on the Swiss border; he was 21 years old and stationed with a small cohort in a remote outpost that none of them, I’m sure, expected would ever see any fighting. And it never did, after that day. But a little before ten that morning, a German cavalry patrol that had just charged across the border was spotted approaching the village. Peugeot called out for them to stop; told them they were under arrest. The patrol’s leader, Lieutenant Albert Mayer, who hailed from Alsace, took aim with a pistol that had been engraved Pro Bellum—For the War—and shot Peugeot in the shoulder. Someone—either Peugeot or another poilu, or maybe both—fired back at Mayer and killed him. Peugeot died about a half hour later. Frédéric and Corporal Peugeot share a common direct ancestor, Peugeot’s great-great-grandfather Jean-George Peugeot, who died in 1851. Frédéric’s great-grandfather Edmond Rigoulot was a year older than Jules-André Peugeot and went to school with him in Étupes. “He was wounded several times in the war,” Frédéric told me. “I knew him.” I had heard the story of Jules-André Peugeot’s death before, but had never imagined I might meet, by happenstance, someone related to him. Now, though, I realize that it was inevitable, and that it’s entirely possible I met even more of Corporal Peugeot’s relatives without even knowing it. France is larger in area than any other nation in Europe west of Russia; it has more people in it than any besides Russia and the united Germany. But it is, in many ways, a small country. And even smaller since the First World War.
* * *
Late that afternoon, while driving from Verdun back to Denis’s chambre d’hôtes in Le Neufour, I decided to stop by Romagne-sous-les-Côtes. I thought I might be able to find the house on my own, but, small though the village is, I couldn’t, so I asked a fellow who was working on a car in his yard for directions. It was just two streets up, he said, and even gave me the house number. I recognized the place immediately. Madame George, who had led me over rough tractor roads to the Henry Gunther monument a year earlier, was working in her garden as I pulled up. I thought she might not remember me, but she smiled and beckoned me to come and sit down with her at a table she had outside. I told her I was happy to see her again. She smiled and said, “The same.”
I asked her if she’d ever told anyone about our shared adventure a year earlier. She stood up, walked into her house, and emerged a few minutes later holding what looked like a sheet of copy paper. She handed it to me: It was actually five sheets, printed front and back and stapled together twice along the left margin. A colorful banner up top read Le Romagnole. The local newspaper; published, I imagine, at irregular intervals. There were a few one-line items:
Summer is ending soon. Enjoy the last beautiful days.
The proposed multi-activity room has taken a big step forward. Companies were chosen, and we expect the approval of the proper authorities for the start of work.
The pizza party on September 13 should be the last event in the hall as we know it today.
The renovation of the cemetery gate should be completed in the coming weeks by the afternoon recreation volunteers.
A typo in the last item was corrected by pen. The rest of the front page was a list of phone numbers—the police station, the firehouse, the mairie, the nearest post office and pharmacy and hospital. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing with all that information.
She reached across and flipped to page 6, a spot typically reserved, at least in American tabloids, for gossip. Instead, up toward the top, I saw a picture of myself—the jacket photo from my last book, no doubt scanned from the copy I had left with her as a token (symbolic, given that she spoke no English) of my gratitude a year earlier. Above it, the headline:
A PERSON OF HONOR IN THE VILLAGE
A PROVIDENTIAL ENCOUNTER
The paper was dated September 10, 2014; Madame George had scooped L’Est Républicain by five months. Her article ran a full page, recounting the story of our meeting from her perspective (“I realized he spoke very little French . . . Once before the monument, his face showed altogether his surprise, his satisfaction at successfully completing a quest, and deep emotion. He then took several photos.”), and concluded: “This fine man and I shared a nice encounter, and it was a fond memory.” I’m pretty sure that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever written about me.
“Would you like a copy?” she asked. I said I would, and she phoned a friend of hers to bring one over. While we
waited, we went through a folder of flyers she had accumulated for historical events, sites and ceremonies. “There will be a reenactment here in August,” she told me, and smiled sadly when I said I would be back in America by then. To change the subject, I asked if anyone in her family had served in the war.
“My father,” she replied. I asked his name, and what his occupation had been; Prosper Louis, she said. He was a farmer. “He served in the reserves from 1910 to 1913, went home to his family for a year, and was called back up in 1914. He served for four years. He never talked about the war much. He was fifty-three years old when I was born. And in your family?”
“My grandfather,” I said, and told her he had died when I was 11, long before I ever thought to ask him about it. She nodded thoughtfully.
I asked if she remembered what day it was that we had met. “June 8,” she said immediately. “I was attending a family get-together in Azannes.” And she started to recall how forlorn I had looked when she first spotted me, standing in the middle of the road. Just then her friend, a petite woman about her age, walked up. As I rose to introduce myself, she glanced at me, smiled and nodded, as if we had already met. “I was just telling him,” Madame George said to her friend, “how sad he looked when I first saw him, when he asked me if I knew how to find the monument.” She turned back to me. “My children were . . . concerned,” she said. “They fussed at me afterward for getting into a car and going to such a place with a total stranger.”
“You were lucky,” her friend said to me. “If you had asked anyone other than her, they wouldn’t have done it.”
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