Buglers play the “Last Post and Call” under the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium. The ceremony, which occurs at precisely 8:00 p.m. every night of the year, honors the hundreds of thousands of British Expeditionary Force soldiers killed at Ypres between 1914 and 1918.
The hill known as A81, outside the village of Bathelémont, from which Battery C of the 6th Field Artillery fired the first American shot of the war at 6:05 a.m. on October 23, 1917.
Eric Mansuy points to the spot, a few yards off, where the first three soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces were killed by the Germans during a pre-dawn raid on November 3, 1917.
“The First American Prisoners.” A German propaganda postcard featuring a photo of eight of the eleven Americans captured in that same raid; the other three were too badly wounded to pose. Note how much larger the Americans are than the Germans.
An Episcopal chaplain administers communion to men of the 101st U.S. Infantry Regiment deep in a mine on the Chemin des Dames, February 1918.
Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration
Mechanic Allie Ardine of the 103rd U.S. Infantry Regiment carved this shield and tablet into the wall of the chalk mine outside Nanteuil-la-Fosse. A painter by trade, he had a difficult time after the war.
Mechanic Ralph Moan of Eastport, Maine. His journal presents a vivid portrait of the Yankee Division’s time on the Chemin des Dames.
Photo courtesy of Fae Houck
The Wheat Field, as seen from inside Belleau Wood. Many believe that the Marines’ charge across this field, on June 6, 1918, changed the course of the war.
Laurent Vanhée, a French fan of the United States Marine Corps, shows off a couple of his USMC tattoos. He has more on the other arm.
Typical vista in Champagne. Though not visible in the photo, the Marne River runs in between the houses in the foreground and the vineyards in the distance; thousands of German soldiers came charging down those hills in the early hours of July 15, 1918, to attack French and American troops on the other side.
The hôtel de ville, or city hall, in Fismes.
Jean Vedovati holds the casing of a 75-millimeter shell that he believes was fired by an American battery in July 1918. Once part of a large collection of WWI artifacts, it was the only piece his wife allowed him to keep once their grandchildren started visiting.
An American postcard picturing the ruins of Fismes’s hôtel de ville in August 1918, “after being showered with German shells for three weeks.” The Americans had great trouble taking Fismes, as they did most towns and villages in the area.
A well-preserved concrete German trench in Bois Brûlé, the Burnt Woods.
A dirt French trench in Bois Brûlé. In some spots the French and German front lines were only twenty yards apart.
Just outside the village détruit of Regniéville, near Thiaucourt, the remains of a German bunker sit alongside the road to Pont-à-Mousson. Such ruins are a common sight in the Woëvre.
A similar bunker in the area, photographed shortly after American troops took it in 1918. The body of a German soldier, killed in the attack, lies out front.
Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration
Patrick Simons stands near the ruins of another German bunker in the Woëvre.
Christophe Wilvers lies in the shallow grave in the Bois de Rembercourt, where a relic-hunter found the remains of Marine Sergeant George Humphrey in 2009, ninety-one years after he was killed and buried here.
German soldiers march fourteen American prisoners up a hill outside Bouillonville on April 20, 1918, after capturing them at Seicheprey that morning in the first major clash between German and American troops.
Photo courtesy of Madison (CT) Historical Society
A German postcard featuring the Argonnenbahn, the Argonne railroad. During the war, the Germans laid hundreds of miles of narrow-gauge rail through the forest, and even printed up timetables.
Harry Rupert holds some French-American V-B rifle grenades he found along the Sergeant York Trail in the Argonne. He keeps them in his barn.
Local historian Dominique Lacorde’s grandmother, Emilienne, and her grandmother, Françoise, with German soldiers in their house during the war. The caption reads: “Easter 1915. Souvenir of the German barbarians.” The photographer was also German.
Photo courtesy of Dominique Lacorde
Maurice Ravenel and Denis Hebrard in Vauquois. M. Ravenel wears his 1914 poilu uniform to events throughout the Argonne; Denis sometimes takes visitors through the elaborate tunnels beneath Vauquois Hill.
Vauquois Hill from above. The large monument and flagpole are dwarfed by massive craters that render this landscape otherworldly. Between 1914 and 1918 the Germans and French dug and detonated more than 500 underground mines here.
Photo courtesy of Jean-Luc Kaluzko
French soldiers at Vauquois. During one day in October 1914, more than 1,400 French soldiers were killed here in just 30 minutes. The Americans took Vauquois in September 1918.
This century-old entrance to an underground German bunker (left center) is set into a knoll in a pasture outside Gesnes. No one can do a thing with it except for the cows, which use it as a shelter.
The badly damaged church in Neuvilly was used as a way station for wounded American soldiers during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918.
Photo courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration
The same church today.
Kaiser Wilhelm II (left), Emperor of Germany, and his oldest son, Kronprinz (Crown Prince) Wilhelm, pose on the terrace of the Château de Tilleul in Stenay. The Kronprinz, who commanded a German army, used the château as his headquarters during the war.
Photo courtesy of Archives Municipales de Stenay
The terrace today. Although the railing (and the château) have since been replaced, the terrace still hides the Kronprinz’s secret bunker. The Americans liberated Stenay on the morning of November 11, 1918, but the Kronprinz had already fled.
A German blockhouse in a dense section of the Argonne known as Bois de Fôret, or Woods of the Forest, that contains many old German fortifications.
Jean-Paul de Vries stands in a hallway inside the blockhouse. Some of its chambers still have remnants of the original wood paneling.
A well-preserved German wash house, hiding in plain sight in a field outside Éclisfontaine. Jean-Paul had only recently discovered it.
This coach, identical to the one in which the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, now sits in a museum in the Clairière de l’Armistice (the glade of the armistice) in the Forest of Compiègne.
About the Author
Photo credit: Franck Lallemand
RICHARD RUBIN is the author of The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War and Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, as well as scores of pieces for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian, among others. A fifth-generation New Yorker, he now lives in small-town Maine, which baffles his neighbors. You can visit him at richardrubinonline.com.
For email updates on the author, click here.
Also by Richard Rubin
The Last of the Doughboys
Confederacy of Silence
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Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Map of the Western Front
Epigraph
Prologue: Follow Me
One: Like Traveling Back in Time
Two: The Soul of the Battlefield
Three: Chemin des Américains
Four: From the Bowels of the Earth
Five: What If
Six: The Burnt Woods and the Ball-Shaped Tree
Seven: Red Giant
Eight: The Devil’s Basket
Epilogue: History and Memory
Appendix
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Photographs
About the Author
Also by Richard Rubin
Copyright
back over there. Copyright © 2017 by Richard Rubin. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Unless noted otherwise, all photos courtesy of the author, and all maps adapted by Mapping Specialists from originals furnished courtesy of National Park Service, Cultural Resource GIS Facility.
www.stmartins.com
Cataloging in publication data for the print edition is available from the Library of Congress.
e-ISBN 9781250084330
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First Edition: April 2017
Cover photographs: compass © Valentina Proskurina/Shutterstock; Montfaucon © Richard Rubin
Back Over There Page 38