The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  The Germans, though, were not only concerned with pushing forward, but with holding what they had already taken. So they trucked in lots and lots of concrete and used it to build lots and lots of supply cellars and sewer systems, pillboxes and bunkers, dugouts and trenches, a great many of which are still there, more or less. In the Argonne, where he was commanding the German 5th Army, Kronprinz Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s oldest son, built himself a bunker that looked like a posh chateau, complete with marble fireplaces. It remains there, set into a slope in the forest, and still projects hints of its former elegance, even though souvenir-hunters long ago carried off the last of the marble.

  The Germans’ technological edge extended to their weaponry. They invented the flamethrower. Their Mauser rifles were superior to the French Army’s Lebels. Their barbed wire was thicker, with more barbs. Their wire cutters could easily cut through British wire, but not vice versa. Their Luger was better than any pistol a French officer might carry; their machine guns were better than those the French had. Their artillery fired 77-millimeter shells, while the French guns fired 75-millimeter shells; this meant the Germans could fire captured French shells back at the French, while the French couldn’t cram German shells into their own guns. You can’t help but get the sense that Germany really should have won that war.

  And yet it didn’t. The French did. But it was France, not Germany, that was largely destroyed in the process.

  France certainly didn’t volunteer to host a war that would drag on for four years and, in doing so, lay much of the place to waste. The strange thing is that Germany didn’t plan on it, either. Actually, its grand war plan promised the conquest and capitulation of France in just a matter of weeks. Ironically, it was only because the French managed to thwart that plan that so much of their country was destroyed.

  The roots of the First World War went back four decades, to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The French started that one, but it didn’t end well for them: In just six weeks, the Prussians killed or captured a huge chunk of France’s army, including Emperor Napoleon III. Paris fell after a four-month siege. France, which had prided itself on having the finest military in the world, was humiliated. The Prussians held a grand victory parade in Paris, occupied much of the country until the French paid them five billion francs in reparations, and annexed part of the French province of Lorraine and almost all of the province of Alsace, France’s industrial heartland and the source of almost all of its iron ore. France, devastated and demoralized, seethed to strike back at the hated Boche.

  Germany knew it, too, and gave a lot of thought to preparing for the next war. At first, the Germans were expecting just another one-on-one fight, and had no reason to worry things might go differently for them the second time around. But Kaiser Wilhelm II, prickly fellow that he was, managed to alienate once-friendly Russia and Great Britain, both of whom then entered into alliances with France. Uh-oh: Russia bordered Germany to the east and had the largest army in the world; Britain ruled the seas. Alarmed, the Kaiser asked the chief of the Imperial German General Staff, Count Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, to work up a plan that would enable Germany to fight a war on two fronts simultaneously and win both. The result became known as the Schlieffen Plan, one of the most storied strategies in modern military history.

  The Germans believed that the French, faced with overwhelming military opposition, would fold quickly, as they had in the last war, and that the real war would be fought in the east, against the “Russian Steamroller,” 150 divisions strong. An army that large in a country that vast, though, would take time to mobilize, so Schlieffen’s plan was to send 90 percent of Germany’s troops—including reserves—into France immediately following a declaration of war, not only across their shared frontier but also through the neutral countries that sat in between them elsewhere—namely, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Sure, violating Benelux neutrality wasn’t very nice, but doing so would enable a huge German force to sweep into France along a very wide front (Schlieffen famously called for “the last man on the right [to] brush the Channel with his sleeve”) and, swinging around like a scythe, encircle the French Army and precipitate a general surrender, just as they had thirty-five years earlier. Schlieffen determined that French military surrender would be achieved in six weeks, whereupon the bulk of German troops would be shipped east, in time to confront the steamroller. The diplomats would have plenty of time to step in and smooth things over with the Benelux countries after that.

  Count Schlieffen retired in 1906, shortly after submitting his plan, which proved unfortunate for Germany, because the count’s successor, Helmuth von Moltke—nephew and namesake of the great hero of the Franco-Prussian War—started to tinker with the established order, as successors are inclined to do. He moved troops around, even sending some of them to the eastern frontier, weakening the offensive army in the west; he also scrapped plans to pass through Holland and Luxembourg, opening up the potential for bottlenecks in the assault. Many historians believe Moltke’s revisions doomed the Schlieffen Plan to failure. It certainly didn’t help matters that Belgian resistance proved tougher than expected, throwing off Germany’s timetable. Moltke, trying to recover, made several more alterations to the original plan, all of which weakened it; while heading for Paris, he swerved off to envelop retreating French armies, and in doing so exposed his right flank (a year earlier, a dying Count Schlieffen had uttered, as his last words, “Remember to keep the right flank strong!”), a mistake the French and, now, the British, rushed to exploit. (In a famous episode, some ten thousand French reserve troops were shuttled from Paris to the front in taxicabs.) To everyone’s astonishment, they stopped the Germans at what would become known as the First Battle of the Marne. And so, six weeks after the start of their great offensive, the Germans found themselves not accepting a complete French surrender, as Schlieffen had envisioned, but retreating and digging the first trenches of the war. The lines they all established at that point would scarcely move over the next four years.

  The news from the Eastern Front was much better. It turned out that the men chosen to drive the Russian Steamroller, the czar’s top generals, were incompetent, a fact that effectively neutralized their great numerical superiority. The Germans trounced them regularly—an early defeat, at Tannenberg in August, 1914, was so spectacular that after the battle was lost the commanding Russian general, Alexander Samsonov, skulked off into the woods and shot himself—and, though Russia would stay in the war until March, 1918, the Germans never had to worry about them too terribly much after those first few weeks. Instead, they focused on France, where the war ground on, month after month, year after year, never advancing much in either direction but quite deadly for all present nonetheless.

  And also terribly destructive for France. When I visited Reuben Law in Carson City, Nevada, in 2004—he was the truck driver and mechanic who had barely survived a bout with influenza while sailing to France in the fall of 1918—I found in his photo album a snapshot of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, taken at the precise moment when a German shell struck it: medieval construction meets modern firepower. I don’t know how he came upon it, but Reims, which dates back to Roman times, unhappily found itself near the front lines during the war, and well within range of enemy howitzers. The Germans did not spare it. Whether or not they took aim specifically at the cathedral—where French kings had traveled for centuries to be coronated—they hit it an awful lot, doing so much damage that it took twenty years to restore the edifice afterward. To this day, perhaps two-thirds of its windows are clear; the stained glass they once housed will never be replaced.

  Reims and its cathedral are, of course, just one example among an innumerable litany, but for many they came to symbolize the country’s losses. Owen Johnson, an American writer who traveled through war-torn France before the United States entered the conflict, writes, in his 1916 book The Spirit of France: “Nothing has sown more bitterness in the French mind than this incomprehensible destruction
of the treasured monuments of the past. A thousand men dying under the barbarism of asphyxiating gases are nothing to burning Rheims . . . for what is being destroyed there is France itself.” Perhaps those thousand men and their families might have felt otherwise, but what happened to Reims—what the Germans did to Reims—was truly outrageous. “No photographs can adequately visualize what has been wrought,” Johnson says of it.

  That remains true to this day of France and that war, even though Notre-Dame de Reims looks much better now than it did in 1915. The earth is constantly regurgitating the detritus of that war. One morning, in a small, freshly plowed field outside Romagne, I found five identical bullets sitting atop the loose brown soil. Later, I brought them into a gun shop in Augusta, Maine, to see if I could learn anything about them. The owner picked up one of the bullets—a bit shorter than the first segment of my thumb, with a very sharp point—examined it for a minute or two, and smiled. “It’s a 7- or 8-millimeter,” he told me. “German. Probably from a Mauser 98. It wouldn’t make a big hole, but it was designed to go through you and the person behind you and the person behind him.” The Mauser Gewehr 98 was the primary, and by far the most popular, rifle among German infantry units in the First World War.

  In addition to those bullets, I found several five-cartridge clips—known as stripper clips—in that field, as well as a button from a Bavarian uniform, and a piece of a comb. Oh: and an unexploded shell. It was reddish-brown and almost as large as my foot; like the rest, it was just sitting atop the soil, as if it had all been dropped there that morning. My guide told me, politely but firmly, not to kick it or attempt to pick it up. Even now, a few people are killed or maimed every year by World War I shells. They are prized as souvenirs; the French often take them home to display atop the mantelpiece. Sadly, my guide, Jean-Paul de Vries, called the sighting in to the police instead. He knew better, and besides, he already had a garage full of souvenirs.

  M. de Vries is a slight, dark-haired, and energetic fellow who spends a tremendous amount of his time exploring the terrain of the old Meuse-Argonne battlefield, whether accompanied by a fellow World War I buff or alone. (Among other notable traits, he possesses an alarming sangfroid when it comes to the status of his fuel-tank gauge.) There’s a great deal of that terrain—the offensive ranged over a fair chunk of Lorraine—and though he seems to know just about all of it as well as most people know their favorite corner of their own backyard, he is always out exploring and inspecting this area or that because he knows it is, all of it, perpetually changing. In just a few hours he had us zigzagging through a network of French trenches, still around eight feet deep; scurrying up a hill to inspect several shallower American trenches, just deep enough, he told me, for doughboys to gain some cover while kneeling and firing at the Germans (some of the action was moving so quickly at that point that there was no time to dig deeper trenchworks); ducking into part of a German waterworks; poking around the cement entrance to a large German dugout; examining, mixed in a patch of ivy, a great tangle of barbed wire (probably German); and stumbling upon artifacts almost everywhere, like a cluster of three rusted conical shell-caps—again, probably German. At one point he led me to a patch of woods where the forest floor seemed tiered, like a grand staircase in which each step was a quarter the size of a football gridiron. Well before the Americans came through during the last great battle of the war, he explained, this had been the site of a German rest camp, where soldiers might be furloughed for a couple of weeks to relax, visit baths, get medical attention if they needed it, eat well, drink well, and enjoy the company of willing French ladies, of whom, he assured me, there was no shortage. The Germans occupied this area for four full years; they weren’t the only ones who just assumed they’d stay forever. Compliant French girls were welcome to share the Germans’ gastronomical bounty (as evidenced by an empty wine bottle we found nearby) and, of course, their Papiermarken, which were then accepted as currency throughout the area.

  M. de Vries described this enormous furlough camp so vividly—gesturing about, “this was all beds, and that was a spa, over here a tavern,” etc.—that I actually started to see some of it, faintly. He could see it all in detail, it seemed, and occasionally I found myself wondering if he had, somehow, actually been here when the operation was still in full swing. At one point, spotting an old tree that had just been felled during a storm, M. de Vries darted over to it and gestured excitedly for me to follow. Beckoning me to the thicket of gnarled old roots, he pointed: There, resting in the tangles, were bullets. A lot of them. The roots, he explained, drew them up out of the soil along with the water, then held onto them until the old trees fell and offered their buried treasure up to the world. We picked them out and he gave them all to me, along with that wine bottle and everything else we’d found that day. He had no room for any of it; his garage, in Romagne, was, as I said, already full of things he’d been finding for decades.

  I call it a garage because it had a vehicle door in front and sat in the midst of a village, but inside it was much more like a barn with a large loft. Whatever it once was, it is now full of locally found bayonets, rifles, grenade launchers; trench knives, “persuaders,” entrenching tools; helmets, gas masks, wristwatches; mess kits, eating utensils, pots, pans, jugs; horseshoes, saddles, harnesses, ammunition crates, wicker shell carriers; Bibles and religious statuettes; enough bottles to supply several bars and pharmacies; and many, many photographs—wallet- and wall-sized, framed and loose—of men in uniform. On one wall hangs an old propaganda poster featuring a huge photograph of a kindly German soldier feeding a little girl who sits on his knee; the caption reads: “An infantryman shares his lunch with a hungry French child, recorded on October 22, 1914 in Romagne.” The title, up top, is simply: “A German ‘Barbarian.’” The text is German; who was this poster meant for?

  Walking through the building—which you have to do carefully, as stuff is strewn everywhere and the passages are narrow and serpentine—you find yourself asking some variation of the question “who was all this meant for?” over and over again. You can’t help but wonder: Why did so many men carry so much stuff to the battlefield with them?

  It’s a museum, now, like Gilles Lagin’s near Belleau Wood: haphazard and compelling, wondrous and sad. M. de Vries accepts donations but does not charge admission. Everything he has here was offered up to him, for free, by the earth. Experts say France’s World War I battlefields will continue to regurgitate artifacts of that war for another two or three centuries.

  The garage—or barn, or whatever—that houses Jean-Paul de Vries’s museum looks like it has been there since the time of the Bourbons. All of Romagne does. Drive through little villages in that part of Lorraine, and you’ll see they all look that way—old, quaint, untouched by the passage of hundreds of years.

  It’s all a lie.

  None of the buildings predate the war. Whatever had been there before the fall of 1918 was destroyed by November 11 of that year. In the case of Romagne, I have the postcards to prove it.

  What the French did here, typically, was rebuild villages so that they looked pretty much the way they had before German, French, and American shells reduced them to rubble, with only certain subtle improvements—cement lintels over windows, iron braces along mortar walls. I’m not sure whether they did this out of reverence for what had been destroyed, or simple necessity; there wasn’t a lot of money to spread around for rebuilding, especially when Germany fell behind on its reparations payments, as happened often during its period of postwar hyperinflation. Fortunately, the French got a bit of help from their transoceanic allies, who apparently didn’t consider their debt to Lafayette fully squared when the guns stopped firing. Americans, it turned out, had a proprietary feeling toward the places they’d liberated (and sometimes helped destroy in the process), and so the 37th Division constructed a new hospital in the village of Montfaucon-d’Argonne; the Yankee Division rebuilt the church at Belleau; the 315th Infantry Regiment put up a public bathhouse in V
arennes; and so on, hundreds of times over. All of it was paid for by the units’ veterans’ organizations, which included soldiers, wives, parents, and neighbors back home. Sometimes, they’d send a delegation back to France for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

  Perhaps the grandest such project was the Temple Memorial, a church built in Château-Thierry in the 1920s that features, as its centerpiece, a large stained-glass window depicting General Pershing arriving in France and being greeted by the Marquis de Lafayette. Parents of slain doughboys donated to build the place; so did institutions that lost members or alumni. Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania, gave a pew; Mercersburg Academy, also in Pennsylvania, donated the church bell. An association of military chaplains built the altar in honor of their colleagues who did not survive the war. And Edith Carow Roosevelt, wife of the former president, donated a large Bible in memory of their youngest son, Quentin.