Everyone seems to agree that Quentin was the family’s favorite; TR, who worked hard to maintain his image as a tough guy, nevertheless doted on his youngest, calling him “Quentyquee” and “Quinikins.” Smart and witty, cheeky and mischievous, young Quentin pummeled unsuspecting Secret Service agents with snowballs from the roof of the White House (history is mum about whether or not they fired back) and dispensed irreverent quips to reporters. TR’s other sons all served in the infantry—Theodore Jr. and Archie with the 1st Division, Kermit in the British Army—but Quentin dropped out of Harvard to join the new Army Air Service. (Daughter Ethel Roosevelt Derby also served in France, as a nurse.) For the most part, only wellborn young men became aviators in that war, largely because there were only a few dozen training aircraft in the entire country in 1917, and money tended to buy access to those kinds of things. Quentin was quite myopic; he never should have been allowed to fly. But he was. It is said that he memorized the eye chart in order to pass muster, but I seriously doubt anyone would have turned away President Roosevelt’s youngest son no matter how poorly he did on the test. On July 14, 1918—Bastille Day—Quentin’s plane was shot down near the village of Chamery, not far from Reims; he was dead before he hit the ground, two German machine-gun bullets in his head. The official story is that Quentin’s squadron had engaged a German squadron and he had been downed during a dogfight. Another version, though, holds that after a tussle, both sides, having lost no one, turned and headed back toward their lines—but that Quentin, nearsighted as he was, accidentally followed the Germans, who turned on him when they realized his mistake. They buried him with full military honors where he fell; the spot is still marked today.
His father, who had fiercely advocated for America’s entry into the war as early as 1914—and was so disgusted with President Wilson’s refusal to fall in line that he actively campaigned for Wilson’s opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, in 1916—was devastated. He himself would be dead within six months, snatched in his sleep by a coronary thrombosis; the family called it a broken heart, which, if you think about it, it kind of is. They built a monument to Quentin right in the middle of Chamery, a big, wide fountain bearing an epigram from Lieutenant Roosevelt’s father, one of the least equivocal declarations I’ve ever encountered:
ONLY THOSE ARE FIT TO LIVE WHO ARE NOT AFRAID TO DIE.
Lots of famous people served in that war. Some were already famous beforehand, like Quentin and his brothers—one of whom, Archie, was badly wounded in both World War I and World War II. (He was forty-nine years old the second time around.) Alfred Joyce Kilmer, who went by his middle name professionally, had already made a name for himself as a journalist, critic, and poet; he is best remembered today for a bit of verse that begins
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
and perhaps for the rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike that bears his name. Kilmer was thirty-one years old and serving as a sergeant with New York’s famed “Fighting 69th” Infantry Regiment (under Major William J. Donovan, who would go on to found the OSS, the precursor to the CIA) when a German sniper killed him at the Second Battle of the Marne on July 30, 1918. With his education—he was a graduate of Columbia—and prominence, he could easily have been commissioned an officer, but he chose instead to enlist as a private. Even before he set sail for France, he had contracted with a publisher to write a wartime memoir, to be titled “Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth.” Sometimes I wonder how it would have measured up against Over the Top.
New York sent quite a few men of celebrity to France, including thirty-eight-year-old Christy Mathewson, the New York Giants’ star pitcher who was so clean-cut and admired that his nickname was the “Christian Gentleman”—and, at the other end of the scale of renown, forty-two-year-old Monk Eastman, a legendary Manhattan gangster and opium addict. (The story goes that when Eastman stripped for his induction physical, the army doctor, stunned by Monk’s collection of bullet and knife scars, asked him what war he’d gotten them in. “Oh,” he replied, “a lot of little wars around New York.”) Eastman, serving (under an assumed name) with the 27th Infantry Division (composed of New York National Guard units and volunteers), is said to have performed heroically, bringing in wounded comrades under fire and single-handedly wiping out a German machine-gun nest; Mathewson, assigned to the Army’s new Chemical Warfare Service, was accidentally gassed during a training exercise. He never recovered, dying seven years later at the age of forty-five. Monk Eastman also died at forty-five, gunned down on a Manhattan street just a year after being honorably discharged from the Army.
Walk around the Meuse-Argonne and you also hear a lot about people who were not yet famous when they served there: Captain Harry Truman of the 129th Field Artillery’s Battery D, who had also memorized the eye chart in order to enlist, and who once corralled his men, scattering in the face of a German attack, by unleashing upon them a wave of profanity the likes of which they had never heard; Colonel George S. Patton, who commanded the 1st Provisional Tank Brigade, and whose life was once saved by his orderly, Private First Class Joe Angelo; Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, of the 42nd Infantry Division (the Rainbow Division), who eschewed military uniform regulations, preferring to lead his men into battle wearing a cardigan sweater and carrying a riding crop, and who was gassed twice and once taken prisoner by another American division, which mistook him for a German general; and Colonel George C. Marshall, a favorite of General Pershing’s, who played a major role in planning the offensive.
And one more name. Standing at the edge of a large field outside Romagne, Jean-Paul de Vries pointed out a lonely farmhouse several hundred yards away; in 1914, he told me, as the Germans were first taking the area, a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant named Erwin Rommel stopped with his men at this farmhouse to eat and drink and rest a bit. Moving on, he came across some German infantrymen who had become separated from their units, and then some more, and they all fell in under his command, until he was leading a band of some 270 men. When he finally caught up with his colonel, the man did not commend Rommel, but rather excoriated him for having so many men under his command; he was, after all, a lowly lieutenant. “To my intense regret, an older officer was given command of this outfit,” Rommel wrote in a memoir twenty-three years later. The colonel sent Rommel away, and went back to doing whatever it is colonels do. I wonder if that long-forgotten senior officer ever shared that story with his grandchildren.
Rommel would return to France a quarter century after that first visit; Patton would be back, too, while Marshall oversaw the whole operation from Washington. World War II was also fought in this area, but you’d have to look pretty hard to see any evidence of that. It’s as if the First World War has consumed all of the local memory. The military cemeteries are all World War I cemeteries; the military monuments are all World War I monuments. When people here speak of battles, they are World War I battles. “The War” is the first war, not the other one. Lorraine bled out during the First World War, and never really recouped its strength. Even so, that war is a tremendous source of pride there—there, and throughout France.
After the armistice, the French government allotted funds for every town and village and hamlet in the country to construct a monument. In all of France, I am told, only five settlements—five—failed to do so. In many places—like, say, the village of Richecourt in the old Toul Sector, which was occupied by the Germans for four years and completely demolished—the World War I monument is the only thing of note: a giant, old-style Cross of Lorraine bedecked with flags and laurels, in front of which, on a stone, sits a poilu, his rifle, bayonet, and helmet all resting on the rock beside him, his head thrown back onto his left shoulder, eyes gazing skyward; I think he’s supposed to be dead. The monument bears only about a dozen names—a great ratio of splendor to fallen.
Occasionally, in these towns, you’ll find that someone, a generation later, updated their monument to add a new name to the roll of
the dead—victime, as the appendix in Seicheprey reads, de la barbarie Nazie. In Dun-sur-Meuse, one of the larger towns in the old Meuse-Argonne Sector, someone added two Second World War victimes—a Celine Thierion, and Les Familles Salomon. I don’t know about Mme. Thierion, but I have a pretty good idea of what happened to the latter. More often, though, you’ll see nothing at all; it’s as if the Second World War didn’t even occur. Which, in a sense, it didn’t: The Battle of France, which began with Germany’s invasion on May 10, 1940, ended just six weeks later with France’s surrender—an even more spectacular, and humiliating, defeat than the one the Germans had dealt them in 1871.
A drive through Lorraine, though, will certainly lead you to question the stereotype that the French cannot fight. Should you take that trip in the right company, you will hear stories; a retired French soldier named Patrick Simons gestured to a vast field just outside the town of Flirey (pronounced “Flea-Ray”) and told me that after a battle there in the fall of 1914, you could walk from one end of the field to the other, a mile or more, treading upon the body of a dead French soldier at every step. This was the early war, before trenches, when things moved quickly and surprise carried the day. The Germans had attacked so swiftly on September 19 that a mother and two of her children, who had unsuspectingly left their farm that morning to do some shopping in the nearby village of Limey (“Lee-May”), were trapped there when the Germans stormed through, and could not reunite with the rest of their family for four years.
Quite a few villages in this part of France, like Montfaucon-d’Argonne (where the 37th Infantry Division built that hospital) and Flirey—to name two that I just happen to know about—were rebuilt after the war in a different location, their original sites having been destroyed or contaminated beyond reclamation. Quite a few more were completely demolished during the war and never rebuilt. What Lorraine seems to have gotten in exchange for all those lost villages are cemeteries, a lot of them. You can’t drive very far in any direction without passing some field or park or walled-in yard full of war dead. America took great care with its cemeteries; General Pershing, even before he became chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, took a significant personal interest in them. They are among the most perfect public green spaces you will ever see. The fourteen thousand or so markers at Meuse-Argonne, the largest American cemetery in Europe, are precisely spaced and aligned. Even the angles at which the grass is cut are beautiful. After the armistice some twenty-three thousand Americans were buried in this one cemetery, but in the 1920s a campaign was launched—by the funeral industry, I am told—that used fear and guilt to persuade many Americans to repatriate their loved ones’ remains to the United States, at government expense. Many of them now repose in small, obscure cemeteries, unvisited by relatives who have forgotten about them, or moved away, or both.
The French, who had a great many more bodies to bury, did not have the luxury of building vast, wonderfully landscaped cemeteries; theirs tend to be flat, plain affairs, studded with thin, tan concrete crosses. (The markers at the American cemeteries are all plump white marble.) There are quite a lot of them; the largest, with some sixteen thousand marked graves, is at a place called Douaumont. Before and during the war, Douaumont was the site of the biggest and most strategically important of the nineteen French forts that protected the city of Verdun, which, in the wake of the defeat of 1871, came to be seen by the French as an essential bulwark against future German invasions. Whether it really was or not is a question that military historians have debated for decades; what’s indisputable is that Verdun was tremendously important to the French people, even if that importance was, in fact, no more than symbolic. Its fall would have damaged French morale immeasurably. Even so, France’s high command came to understand, early in the war, that Verdun’s defenses, once believed impregnable, could not withstand an indefinite German assault and bombardment. In 1915 the French started to transfer Verdun’s armaments elsewhere, and even to plan the demolition of that ring of nineteen forts.
The Germans, with their superb network of spies, discovered what the French were up to and decided to launch a massive attack on Verdun, reasoning that French public opinion would never stand for the loss of—much less the abandonment of—Verdun. The Germans, you see, knew that the old city wasn’t all that valuable in and of itself; their objective, as they put it, was to use Verdun not to achieve a strategic victory, but to force the French to defend it at all costs and thus, in the parlance of the day, “bleed them white.” And the French obliged them by taking the bait, especially after, on February 25, 1916—only the fifth day of the battle—a small German raiding party snuck into the impregnable Fort Douaumont and, without firing a single shot, captured it from the even smaller French defending party. Well, then: All of France now rose up under the cry “They shall not pass!” They threw everything they had into defending Verdun, shuttling men and materiel around the clock along a slender forty-five-mile road that would become known as La Voie Sacrée—The Sacred Way.
The battle lasted nearly ten months. In that time, each side dropped more than twenty million shells on the other; it is believed that 70 percent of the casualties at Verdun—more than 700,000, in all—were caused by artillery. The Germans very nearly did bleed the French white, killing more than 160,000 of them. But 140,000 of their own were killed in the process. The French retook Douaumont, at a very high cost, after eight months; in the end, they held Verdun. Whether, strategically, it was worth all that—to either side—is another matter for debate. To the French, though, the fact of having saved Verdun—and the memory of all they had to do to save it—were of immeasurable value to their morale. Even today, to many French, Verdun is World War I.
Just knowing that much, you could be forgiven for looking at that enormous graveyard at Douaumont and wondering: Is that it? But of course, if you were there, you’d know that it isn’t, because the whole thing—all sixteen thousand or so graves—rests in the shadow of what is commonly known in that part of the continent as L’Ossuaire. The French claim that the bones of 130,000 men repose in the underbelly of the massive Douaumont Ossuary, and I’m certainly not going to challenge them on it. The only other ossuary I am familiar with, at Arlington National Cemetery, is said to hold the bones of 2,111 Civil War dead. That one—they call it a “vault” at Arlington—is about the size of a large delivery van. What they have at Douaumont is, well, not like that, or like anything else you’ve ever seen, for that matter. To my eyes it resembles a giant stone submarine, 137 meters long, with a 46-meter-high periscope rising up in the center. The periscope is a tower; you can climb to the top and look out over the cemetery and the battlefield beyond it. The hull is a cloister, with an area for religious services—a Catholic Mass was being held there when I visited—and alcoves containing the bodies of unknown soldiers, arranged geographically according to where on the vast battlefield they were recovered. Just about every little block of stone in the place is inscribed with the names of those who went missing at Verdun during those ten months in 1916. It makes quite an impression.
But that’s not why this ossuary is here. The real reason for its existence is mostly out of sight, kept below the place’s stone floors: the skeletal remains of those 130,000 men, French and German, recovered from the battlefield after the war. If you walk around the outside of the building, you will see, embedded at around the height of your shin, little windows that peer into the chambers where the bones are kept. Press your face against the glass and you’ll discern seas of them: femurs behind one window, ribs behind another. In one chamber I saw nothing but skulls; one, very close to my own face at that moment, had a large hole in it, above the eye sockets. I don’t know who came up with the figure of 130,000, or how they did so, but having looked into some of those windows it sounds conservative to me. No one knows how many men are still out there, unrecovered as of yet; some estimates put the number at around 100,000. When remains turn up—and they still do—they, too, are taken to Douaumont.
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L’Ossuaire is the only place I know of in France where French and German soldiers’ remains commingle, or even rest in the same general vicinity. There are, though, a whole lot of German military cemeteries from World War I in France; in certain areas, they are a more common sight even than French cemeteries. The ones I saw were, without exception, lovely spaces, quiet and green, sometimes hosting among the tombstones a number of large old trees, the kind that lend a natural dignity to everything around them.
Some of the cemeteries contain a few small monuments dedicated to this or that fallen soldier (Hier ruht in Gott unser Kamerad) during the earlier part of the war by his surviving comrades—many of whom, I imagine, died themselves just a year or two later, when there were no longer enough of the living remaining to pay for such personalized memorials, and no room for them in any event. Most of the rest now lie under a simple black cross shared with three other Soldaten gefallen. Some German war cemeteries also contain large cement slabs marking mass graves; one I saw, in the cemetery at Consenvoye, near Verdun, bears a cold metal plaque stating that it contains the bodies of 2,537 German soldiers. Of those, 933 are unknowns; the names of the rest are listed, along with their service title and date of death, on other cold metal plaques, a long line of them. Resting on one on the day I stopped by, held in place by four stones, was a vellum sheath, inside which had been placed a greenish old photograph of a German infantryman: rifle in hand, Pickelhaube on head, trim mustache above upper lip. He looked off to the left, away from a bit of prose that some other German, nearly a century later, composed and printed on the page next to him. It read, in perfect twenty-first-century typeface:
The Last of the Doughboys Page 38