The next day, a denouement.
“It happened—with a vengeance! I went up to Amiens early. A short while before train time, Yvonne appeared. She had driven to the station with an old town official. I stayed in the background until she got on the train.
“She looked awfully sweet and was wearing one pair of the stockings I brought her. As soon as we moved out of the station, I started looking her up. I had watched where she got on. She was surely glad to see me. We stood in the passageway a moment.
“The train was loaded to the guards with soldiers going on leave to Paris. She didn’t have much to say and I didn’t either. She seemed to be waiting for something. Presently, I heard a voice behind us speaking English. She turned around and in the next moment was in the arms of an English Lieutenant. His name was either Rice or Ross or Moss, I don’t remember. But she said, ‘Lieutenant Hall, I want you to meet my fiancé,’ and the young Englishman blushed and went to shaking hands.
“The fiancé let the cat out of the bag when he said, ‘Well, now, I say, this took some planning, didn’t it?’ I told them good-bye and spent the rest of the trip looking out the window. The idea of that naïve little devil slipping one over like that. Of course, I had to make the trip anyhow, but then I had more or less planned on a bit of romance, and with Yvonne romance would surely be possible.”
In Paris, on his brief leave before he picked up a new plane to take back to his squadron, Bert ran into Lufbery, who was now a major in the United States Air Service and in command of two American squadrons stationed at Villeneuve, outside of Paris.
“I told Luf about how little Yvonne two-timed me, and he said, ‘Well, it serves you right. You had no business trying to ruin a high school girl.’ I said, ‘Ruin, hell! What about the Englishman, the fiancé?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘they don’t count in the life of a young woman; they’re so brotherly.’ But I don’t take any stock in that.”
During the course of an evening that began at the New York Bar, which Hall described as being “so full of Americans I could hardly get in the front door,” Hall introduced himself and Lufbery to a Frenchwoman named Paulette. The next day he wrote this in his diary:
“Mlle. Paulette and her partner Imogen cheered both of us up later. Luf said to me during the evening, ‘Bert, that Paulette girl has the most beautiful chassis I ever saw in my life.’ And I said, ‘Follow me around, lad, I know how to pick ’em.’ And he said, ‘Yes, you old bastard, like the little school girl up there at Amiens,’ and he made a nasty noise at me through his fist.”
As both men finished up the duties that brought them to Paris, they had lunch in the arcade off the Boulevard des Italiens before heading to their respective airfields.
“I asked Luf what he supposed would happen to us after the war—what would we work at, etc.? He said, ‘Work at! After the war?’ ‘Why,’ he said, ‘who the hell expects there will be any “after the war” anyhow?’ And he kept sayin’, ‘“After the war” for aviators!’”
Back at the front, Hall made this diary entry:
“Over to Yvonne’s to dinner tonight, and she was there—a little sadder but a lot wiser, perhaps. She is scared stiff that I will say something to her aunt that would let the secret out. The old girl does not know anything about the fiancé. Yvonne said she would explain the entire affair some time, but just now she couldn’t talk about it. I said, ‘Same stockings?’ She said, ‘Yes, I saved them while I was away.’ And to prove it, she pulled up her skirt and showed me the top of the one she had cut off. It had been all sewed over to prevent it from raveling. Lufbery’s statement about Mlle. Paulette’s beautiful chassis applies to Yvonne too. She’s a beautiful baby. I wish she could be interested in one man at a time. I suggested this to the little devil, but she said, ‘C’est la guerre.’
“The fiancé’s name is Lieutenant Brewster-Price—a double name and he seems to be more than just an ordinary Limey cockney. Yvonne says the ‘Leftenant’ means to do right by her and marry her. Lufbery was right about the Englishmen as lovers. The ‘Leftenant’s’ family is rich, but he is a machine-gunner. Too bad!”
Hall’s life continued precariously, with days in combat at the front, and the relief of an occasional visit to Yvonne. He noted this emotional seesaw a month after he met Yvonne. Referring to a narrow escape in a dogfight, he said of the enemy bullets that hit his new plane, “I came off with several well-placed patterns of machine gun fire, any one of which might have abbreviated my life, but Yvonne’s stocking top did the trick this time. That sweet little devil! I was mistaken about the stocking coming off the wrong leg . . . I saw her a little while tonight. She says she is worried about the Leftenant; that is Price, the machine-gunner. According to her story, he was going into the lines near Ribécourt. How she found this out, God only knows, and if the Leftenant wrote it to her, I surely have no faith in British censorship. But anyhow, Ribécourt is in that bulge in the lines just a little this side of Cambrai. I looked it up on the Headquarters’ map, and I don’t think much of the Leftenant’s chances if the Boche start a push, because that will naturally be straightened out and the machine-gunner Leftenant will naturally be straightened out with it. But, oh, hell, I tried to get her to stick to an aviator. She would go and get herself mixed up with a really hazardous branch of the service.”
In mid-March, Hall came down with a severe cold. Recovering to some extent, he learned that Russia had signed a peace treaty: “That will free all those divisions on the Eastern Front, and now those smart Boche will transport all those free divisions over here to pester us . . . Saw Yvonne tonight a while. She is worried frightful about her man. I said why not have a man she could depend on, but she said I didn’t understand, and then she went into the café crying. It’s serious!”
A few days later, what Hall had foreseen occurred.
“It happened. Up at Headquarters, they told us that the artillery bombardment started at 5.00 a.m. on a front of more than sixty miles . . . By sundown tonight the Boche had penetrated five miles everywhere, except at Flesquières. That’s where Yvonne’s lover is located, and may the Lord have pity on him!”
Hall added that “the air is alive with German planes,” and that Richthofen’s famous “Squadron 11 is opposite us.”
A day later, Hall wrote this: “When I told Yvonne that the place where her lover had been is now in German hands, she screamed and carried on something terrible. The poor little thing is pregnant by him. She said the child should be born in September; that’s why she had been ill recently.”
As for his own situation, he said that “my throat is worse and my plane is shot to hell. Only made one patrol. The casualties in our group are too awful to recount . . . It is rumored at Headquarters that the German divisions involved in this offensive are dying off like flies from a new disease called ‘influenza’; some call it ‘Spanish influenza.’”
On March 24, seven weeks after he met Yvonne, Bert made this grim diary entry:
“Everything is shot to hell . . . the Fifth British Army is practically out of the war. Twenty-five kilometers lost in three days! And it took months to gain 500 meters in some places.
“We have moved back. I told Yvonne good-bye and begged her to pack her stuff and come on, but she would not leave the old woman and the old woman believes that the war will never get to her again. So here they are—those two defenseless females—and they won’t leave.”
A few hours later: “From the air, I saw some activity around Yvonne’s place . . . they must still be there.”
Three days after this, Hall once again mixed military intelligence, his deteriorating physical and mental health, and his thoughts of Yvonne.
“A German dispatch picked up and sent to Headquarters says that seventy-five Allied planes have been accounted for in five days . . . the bombardment is coming closer all the time. Yvonne’s place still seems to be going; at least, it is from the air. My throat is getting be
tter, but I’m getting mighty tired. With the casualties we are having, I don’t see how I can expect to last it out.”
Two days after that, the curtain started coming down.
“Today I flew over the spot where Yvonne’s place used to be. It was just at sundown. The artillery bombardment has completely obliterated any trace of the cottage where she had her café. And Yvonne! I wonder! Poor pregnant little devil! And the Leftenant—just a month ago now those two were in Paris . . . God, I’m weary! I wish it was all over. Somehow, I believe I’ve had enough.
Then: “March 30. If they still want to send me to the hospital I think I’ll let ’em do it tomorrow. The offensive is nearly over and Yvonne’s gone and I’m ready for a rest.”
Later: “Hospital O. K., food good, beds soft, girls pretty, cigarettes plentiful, war still going on.”
Discharged from the hospital, on April 12 he wrote, “I am still groggy. Took off a little while today to try my hand. The news from the north is still disquieting. Flew over the place where Yvonne’s cottage used to be. The ground is absolutely smooth. I’m going to get one of the men in the adjoining photographic sections to take an aerial picture of the place, so as to be sure I’m not mistaken.”
Bert Hall mentioned Yvonne just twice more. On May 22, a hundred and two days after he first saw her, he made this diary entry.
“Over to Paillart, where the Yanks have one of their Field Hospitals—it’s No. 3, I believe—there is a little girl who reminds me of Yvonne. When I first saw her the other day I nearly dropped dead, but I was mistaken. Just the same, she made some very soft eyes at me. It isn’t worth while working up a friendship with her though, because there are too many American doctors and hospital sergeants around to put up competition. The little peach runs a pastry shop. Her name is Edith and she can’t be over nineteen.”
There is an interesting tone in Hall’s reference to “the Americans” or “the Yanks” in this and his other diary entries of that time, as if Americans had a separate nationality from his own, and yet he never identifies himself as being French. Perhaps the war, and its uncompromising nature, made him a man without a country.
Bert Hall had a bit of unfinished business.
“Yesterday I went out to the Passy district and visited with Mother Pivot who used to be the concierge and took care of my apartment. Her son Philip went away with the first mobilization in August, 1914. He was going to the Beaux-Arts and studying to be an architect. Mother Pivot was still there, but very bent and very sad. Philip never came back. He was last seen somewhere up near Charleroi [Belgium]. I gave the old girl a present and came away sadder than before.”
Twenty-seven
Good-Bye, Luf.
And Thank You.
By May of 1918 Major Raoul Lufbery was assigned to the United States 94th Aero Squadron, known for its famous “Hat-in-the-Ring” insignia depicting a red, white, and blue top hat inside a circle. At this point Lufbery had sixteen confirmed kills. In addition to helping break in new pilots, he was authorized to fly by himself whenever he had time to go hunting for unsuspecting German planes.
On the morning of May 19, a German photo-reconnaissance plane came into view above his squadron’s base. The only pilot on the ground ready to “scramble” and intercept the lumbering three-seater enemy plane, a Rumpler, was a lieutenant who had never flown in combat.
Lufbery came out of a squadron building to watch how the fledgling American pilot would handle himself. He saw the novice open fire from too great a distance, nervously keeping up a long burst that probably used up all his ammunition, while the intruder, now receiving antiaircraft fire, started to head back to the German lines.
Deciding to get into the air and take charge of the situation, Lufbery leapt onto a motorcycle and raced down to the hangars. Shrugging into his flight suit, he learned that his own plane was not ready to fly, and climbed into another one, taking off without his usual meticulous check of the machine guns.
Catching up on the slower enemy plane while keeping an eye out for German fighters that might ambush the inexperienced American pilot, Lufbery fired several short bursts before his guns jammed. He broke off contact, cleared the jam, and then slid into position to attack the enemy plane from the rear.
His plane staggered in the air, struck by a round fired by the observer seated facing backward in the rear seat of the enemy plane. The bullet had come through his fuel tank, setting it afire and cutting off the thumb of his right hand, which had been gripping the control stick.
Lufbery tried to put his falling plane into a sideslipping maneuver that would keep the spreading flames away from him—a movement that had been known to extinguish such a fire—but this failed. He climbed out onto a wing, but flames from the body of the plane reached out and set his flight suit on fire. Lufbery spotted a stream two thousand feet below him that might conceivably break his fall and save his life by plunging him into water.
He leapt, landing a hundred yards from the water and fatally impaling himself on a vegetable garden fence made of rough, vertically arranged logs with sharpened tops. In a photograph taken soon after his death, a French peasant woman stands in front of the fence holding a large, wrapped-up fragment of wood that she removed from Lufbery’s throat as she pulled his body off the spike-ended logs.
Everywhere Hall saw American units moving up to the front for the great final offensives, but his best memories were of the war’s early days. He flew over the little village where he had met and started his dalliance with Yvonne, and found the village leveled, with no sign of where the restaurant had stood. He made the laconic diary entry, “Yvonne has disappeared.” He knew that Lufbery’s latest girlfriend had died of the influenza epidemic now sweeping around the world. The office housing American aviation headquarters in Paris was filled with fliers veterans like him called “kiwis”: birds that had wings but never flew. As for the fate of many Americans who had fought at the front, he wrote of a day in 1918 when he visited what he called “the American 5th Hospital,” located in the infield of the thoroughbred racetrack at Auteuil on the outskirts of Paris. What stuck in his mind were “the rolls of bloody bandages under those hot tents,” but he had a worse experience than that.
“At the Bacouel dressing station I saw two Yank boys who had been burned with a ‘flammenwerfer’ [flamethrower] . . . Those things shoot a hot burning stuff like tar, and these poor boys were in a terrible condition. One of them was completely insane. He screamed every time anyone made the slightest noise. A doctor told me that neither one of them could possibly live because of the great area of skin affected by the burning. When they took their clothes off, skin, flesh, and all came off in some places.
“Two mothers will get flowery notes from the War Department saying that God decided to call Willie and Charlie home to be with the angels, and the boys will be put away in a grave with a wooden cross on top.”
Twenty-eight
Different American Wings
in French Skies
On October 3, 1918, roughly five weeks before the war ended, five hundred American soldiers were surrounded in the Argonne Forest by a greatly superior German force. This isolated unit, which became known as the “Lost Battalion,” was part of the 77th Division, all New Yorkers, whose shoulder patch depicted the Statue of Liberty. Their commander was a scholarly, bespectacled peacetime lawyer named Charles Whittlesey. They were out of food and ammunition, and more of them were being killed or wounded every hour.
By the next day, only 190 men were left. In addition to the fire being poured down on them by the Germans holding higher ground, American artillery units were mistakenly shelling their area, increasing their casualties.
With all other forms of communication cut off, Whittlesey turned to the three messenger pigeons his unit had with them. If one of these birds could get through to the loft at division headquarters to which it had been trained to return when released, the surviving m
embers of this unit might yet be saved.
Each bird had a small metal cylinder attached to one of its legs, into which a rolled-up message could be put.
The first bird, carrying the message, “Many wounded. We cannot evacuate,” went up in the air. By now all of Whittlesey’s men were crowded into a small area, and everyone knew that the bird was carrying what could be their only hope of survival. The Germans shot the bird down.
Whittlesey sent off a second bird, carrying the message, “Men are suffering. Can support be sent?” In full view of everyone, it too was killed in flight and came plunging to earth.
The third bird, mistakenly listed as being a male and named “Cher Ami,” was readied for flight. In the cylinder on her left leg was placed this last desperate note:
“We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake stop it.”
As Cher Ami rose into view, the Germans fired at her a number of times before she, too, was hit. She went down, “shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, covered in blood and with a leg hanging by only a tendon.” She struggled into the air again, and managed to get to division headquarters, twenty-five miles away, in only sixty-five minutes. Her message stopped the lethal “friendly fire” bombardment, and, now knowing where the remnants of the “Lost Battalion” were, a strong relief column fought their way through and saved them.
Army surgeons worked hard to save the heroic pigeon’s life. Unable to save her nearly severed leg, they carved a wooden leg for her. When Cher Ami was well enough to be sent to the United States on a ship, General Pershing was there to salute her as she was taken aboard.
Back in America, she received two medals, including the French Croix de Guerre. She died a few months later, as a result of her wounds. Taxidermists prepared her body and she was placed in an honored position in a display case in the Smithsonian Institution. To this day, she remains in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of History’s “Price of Freedom” exhibit.
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