In Sacred Memory
Prayers in honor of the respected departed
Jakob Berger
Baker’s son from Endorf
Sergeant in a Bavarian foot artillery regiment
Knight of the Iron Cross
Who died heroically for the Fatherland
Far from home and his loved ones
On the 22nd of May 1916
On the heights near Verdun
In the 25th year of his life . . .
And then there was a poem about the Iron Cross, which I won’t even try to translate. It was maudlin and overwrought, but my! I could not look away for a long time. I stopped by just about every German cemetery I passed in France—and I passed a good number of them—but never saw anything else like this. I was, as always, completely alone in the place, and yet I only realized that fact when I came upon this little homemade memorial to one of the 11,148 German soldiers buried at Consenvoye. To many in Germany—and in France, and plenty of other countries, too—it sometimes feels as if the dead of that war are not long gone. Their absence is experienced yet, even though they would have been dead by now anyway; even though they are, in truth, so long gone that probably no one survives who carries any living memory of them.
Neat and orderly as these German cemeteries are, they are not uniform. Some contain personal monuments, and some mass graves. Some contain fewer than a thousand bodies, others more than ten thousand. In some the crosses are thin and iron, while in others they are fat and stone. One thing they all have in common, though, is a scattering of other markers, always stone, shaped like one of the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. These are the Jewish war dead.
Their discovery surprised me so much that even now, years later, I’m not quite sure what to say about them. It saddens me that I even feel that I must say something; surely, the men themselves saw nothing unusual or ironic in their military service, nothing tragic about it but the risk of death that attached itself to them no more or less than to their fellow soldiers who did not happen to be Jews. They served in every Korps, in every branch of service, enlisted men and officers, Kanonieren and Musketieren and Grenadieren and Infanteristen, doctors and stretcher-bearers, career soldiers and reservists and volunteers for the war. None of that is what surprised me, continues to surprise me; Jews had been in Germany since Roman times, were well integrated and even assimilated into the population at large, enjoyed many more civil rights than did their coreligionists in Russia, say, and certain other parts of Europe.
No, it’s not the presence of the bodies that surprises me. It’s the presence of the markers. Because the Germans came back a generation later, and stayed another four years, this time as instruments of the Third Reich; and wherever else they went in Europe in those years, they made a point of tearing up Jewish cemeteries, defiling them, carting off the stones and using them to pave roads and line sewers. Their objective was to degrade the Jewish people as a whole, to confiscate their humanity and obliterate their dignity and, ultimately, to erase even their memory. And yet, though they had four years to do so, they never touched those Jewish markers in their own military cemeteries, never tried to destroy this evidence that Jews were a part of Germany, too, and just as willing, and able, to die for their country as anyone else. I have no explanation to offer you.
But what’s all this about Lorraine? What’s all this about Verdun? What about the Somme? What about Flanders Fields, Where Poppies Grow? Where are the men going over the top wearing kilts and kicking soccer balls? Where are the bagpipes? Where are those guys who wrote poetry in the trenches?
They were all a part of the war; but they were not the war. Not even in France. The Somme offensive, while enormous and deadly, was actually launched as a diversion to relieve German pressure on Verdun. And yes, quite a lot of blood fertilized the ground in Flanders—but certainly not more than was spilled in Lorraine, where poppies did not grow.
If this comes as a surprise, it is probably because the image of World War I in the American consciousness has been shaped, for the most part, by sources that are not American; or, for that matter, French, or German. The most influential sources of information about that war in America—the greatest fashioners of World War I imagery in American minds—have been British. Americans wrote an awful lot about that war while they were in it, but for whatever reason, once it ended, they mostly stopped writing about it. The British, though, never did. If anything, they wrote much more about it afterward than they had while it was going on. The French and the Germans wrote a lot about it, too—but not in English. And so, when it came to America’s memory and understanding of that war, the British pretty much had the field to themselves. And, understandably, British historians tended to focus on places like Flanders and the Somme, where Tommies fought and died.
In doing so, though, they often engendered, by implication, the false impression that not much went on in places like Verdun and the Argonne, and that what did wasn’t terribly important to the war. And when they did choose to mention the AEF at all, they typically wrote that America arrived in France too late and too slowly and utterly unprepared for war; that American officers were poorly trained, incompetent, incapable of command; that American soldiers were cocky, unruly, lacked skills and discipline; and that America’s contribution to that war—beyond selling materiel to the Allies, which it did not for any altruistic purpose but simply to make money, a great big pile of it—was negligible. Britain, you see, bore a bit of a grudge against America, because, unlike Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa—which were all British dominions at the time, and had no choice in the matter—the United States did not enter the war when Britain did, in 1914;and once it did enter, in 1917, its supreme commander refused to break up his divisions and have his doughboys fight in smaller units under British commanders, having seen already what the British did with their dominion troops. Those grievances wrought an anti-American bias that infected British histories of that war for decades—some would say it still does—and, by extension, the Americans who read them, including, tragically, the parents and widows and fatherless children of some of the 117,000 or so doughboys who never came home.
I’m not going to tell you that America “won” that war. But neither did Britain, nor France. Britain’s naval blockade of Germany, and France’s refusal to stop fighting and surrender, were both essential to breaking the German war machine in 1918; but so was the threat of four million fresh American soldiers charging onto the battlefield. From the time America entered the war, in April, 1917, Germany knew time was short. In the spring and summer of 1918, having dispatched the Russians at last, the Germans threw everything they had into a few great offensives on the Western Front, gambling on winning the war before a handful of Americans turned into a horde. But the thing about gambles is: They don’t always pay off. Those offensives ultimately failed—due, in no small part, to that “handful” of Americans—and, come fall, left the Germans in a precarious position. At which point there were enough Americans in France to capitalize on that precarious state and, along with the rest of the Allies, actually win the war.
Sadly, America has forgotten that. Instead, decades of British histories and voices have convinced Americans, for the most part, that they got into it too late, that they arrived just in time for the war’s end but didn’t do very much to bring it about. And that, I believe, is why America has all but forgotten World War I.
You know, though, who hasn’t forgotten that America played an essential role in winning that war?
The French.
If you don’t believe me, just go to Saint-Mihiel.
In September, 1914, just weeks after the war began, the Germans launched an offensive in Lorraine that is now known as the Battle of Flirey. It proved to be a tremendously successful endeavor for them. Not so much for the French, who left all those bodies strewn about that vast open stretch of farmland, so many that you could walk from one end to the other without touching the ground; but for the Ger
mans? Tremendous. Not only did they kill all those poilus, but they seized some two hundred square miles of French territory—and not just any two hundred square miles. For one thing, they contained Montsec, strategic high ground that commanded the entire area; more important, though, they jutted into French lines, creating what became known as the Saint-Mihiel Salient. (“Salient” is a cartographical term for a bulge in a line that protrudes into neighboring territory like a hernia. If you want to see a good example of a salient on a map, look up Browns Valley, Minnesota.) The Saint-Mihiel Salient bedeviled the French; it cut off the main route connecting Nancy, a major French supply center, with Verdun and Paris. Over the course of four years, the French tried repeatedly to drive the Germans back and reduce the salient, but they never could. The Germans held those heights, and had fortified their position heavily. They did like their concrete.
Four years later, after a summer of brutal fighting that started at Belleau Wood and trudged through Château-Thierry, and the Marne, and Soissons, and the Oise-Aisne—throughout which American troops, though under American commanders at the divisional level, ultimately served under French high command—Pershing, bristling at what he and many others perceived as a number of misuses of American troops by the French that resulted in heavy American casualties, decided that the AEF had earned the right, and now had enough troops in country, to fight in cohesive and independent American armies, composed entirely of American divisions and under entirely American command. Having spent much of the past several months eliminating large German salients at Amiens and the Marne, Pershing set his sights on the last one left: Saint-Mihiel. From there, he intended to push on across the German border and capture Metz, which the Germans had seized from France in 1870 and annexed. The French said: Godspeed. They would even lend him artillery, aeroplanes, tanks, and French colonial troops to support him.
But then, just days before the Americans were to launch their first independent offensive, France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Commander of all the Allied armies on the Western Front, changed his mind. Now he said he wanted to split the force Pershing had assembled for the offensive—fourteen American divisions in all, collectively the American First Army—into three pieces, two of which he would pull from the offensive and assign to a new one he was planning elsewhere. Pershing refused; instead, he offered this compromise: The First Army would remain intact and launch its offensive on the Saint-Mihiel Salient as planned; once the salient was eliminated, instead of pushing on to Metz, they would hustle up in time for the launch of Foch’s new offensive, at a place called the Meuse-Argonne.
Despite their elaborate intelligence network, the Germans knew nothing of this; conversely, the Allies did not know that, in one of those marvelous coincidences of history, General Erich Ludendorff issued orders on September 8—four days before Pershing’s offensive was to commence—for the German Army to begin withdrawing from the salient in order to strengthen their fallback defensive position, the Hindenburg Line. That’s the thing about salients: While they vex your enemy, they require a lot of men to hold, since you’re surrounded on three sides. And so, on September 11, the Germans started what they reckoned to be the long, slow process of packing up and moving on out. The very next day, more than two hundred thousand American troops, joined by nearly fifty thousand French and French colonials, attacked them on three sides at once.
It started at 1:00 a.m., with a four-hour artillery barrage; at 5:00 a.m., supported now by another barrage that rolled forward ahead of them—and by nearly fifteen hundred aeroplanes, the largest air assault in the entire war (and, to that point, history)—a quarter million Allied troops, all under American command, poured into No Man’s Land. It was muddy ground—it had been raining steadily for days—but the troops moved quickly, surpassing their objectives in many cases. (One exception to this was the Yankee Division, which, attacking from the west, met particularly fierce German resistance.) Many of them must have been surprised at how well it all went.
Not nearly as surprised as the Germans, though; Ludendorff, it is said, was rendered inarticulate upon receiving the news. On the morning of the second day, American troops attacking from two sides linked up, enveloping those German troops who remained. By evening, every objective for the offensive had been achieved. The Americans and French had completely eliminated the Saint-Mihiel Salient in less than forty-eight hours—capturing, in the process, some fifteen thousand prisoners and 450 big guns. It was one of the shorter battles of the war.
Pershing had planned the offensive meticulously; without that, it would almost certainly have lasted much longer, perhaps even come out some other way. But in war, well-laid plans that come off almost without a hitch still exact a price. Even with those meticulous plans—and that added bit of luck that had the Germans inaugurating a withdrawal almost simultaneously—that price was 7,000 American casualties; 4,153 of them are buried in the St.-Mihiel American Cemetery, just outside the town of Thiaucourt.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Thiaucourt was where the Germans had marched some two hundred American prisoners from the 102nd Infantry Regiment, mostly Connecticut men whom they had captured when they’d stormed Seicheprey nearly five months earlier. The Germans hadn’t held Seicheprey for more than a few hours; they’d held Thiaucourt for almost exactly four years, having taken it, along with two hundred square miles’ worth of other towns and villages, during the Battle of Flirey. The Americans liberated all of those places on September 12, 1918. To this day, no one in any of them needs to have the significance of that date explained to them. The town of Essey, liberated by the 42nd Division—under the command of Douglas MacArthur (who, against orders, wanted so badly to go on and capture Metz that Pershing took pains to restrain him)—even renamed its main thoroughfare Rue du 12 Septembre.
You probably wouldn’t know that, though, unless you traveled to Essey and saw it for yourself. You probably wouldn’t know that in Flirey, after the war, they took the government’s allotment and built two monuments—one to the French soldiers, local and otherwise, who perished in the war; the other to the Americans who fought in the region. You probably wouldn’t know that in Thiaucourt, they used their allotment to build just a single stone pedestal, upon which stands a life-sized statue of two soldiers shaking hands: a poilu, holding a rifle; and a doughboy, carrying the Stars and Stripes. You probably wouldn’t know that, though America has largely forgotten what Americans did Over There—what a difference it made in the war and how much it meant to France—the French haven’t.
And you certainly wouldn’t understand, without seeing the place for yourself, just what a hell the heights above the Meuse River and the depths of the Argonne Forest were for four years. And how, though it could hardly have seemed possible to the French and Americans coming off their exultant victory down at Saint-Mihiel—and to the Germans, still stunned from their defeat—things were about to get much worse there.
14
A Wicked Gun, That Machine Gun
IN SEPTEMBER, 2003, having returned from a swing through the South and a trip to Wisconsin, I began planning a visit to the Pacific Northwest. I wanted to get to Portland to meet Howard Ramsey—formerly of the 302nd Water Tank Train—and had a few more prospects lined up, mostly in the Seattle area. Still, I felt that I needed more; I suspected that some of those prospects might not pan out. I was correct: The 107-year-old who’d served with the 1st Engineers and now lived near Tacoma—he had been gassed in France, I’d heard, but had fully recovered—turned out to be unable to answer any questions beyond his name and date of birth; and the 104-year-old cavalry veteran at the Soldiers Home in Orting, Washington—he’d served in the Panama Canal Zone—told me I was an idiot for imagining that he might remember anything at all about his youth or military service, and that the secret to his longevity was nobody else’s damned business. I may have mentioned him before.
Fortunately, before I headed west I went through the French List and tracked down every prospect list
ed as living in Washington and Oregon. Unfortunately, they were all dead.
The day before I departed for Seattle, though, I went through the list again, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anyone. I’d called everyone recorded as living in those two states, with one exception: one William J. Lake, of Yakima, Washington. I hadn’t even bothered with Mr. Lake, since his date of birth was listed as October 30, 1885, which would have made him 117 years and eleven months old. No man, I knew, had ever lived to that age. But as I looked over his application one last time, it occurred to me that he would have been 113 years old when he’d been awarded the Legion of Honor, at which point he would have already been one of the oldest men who’d ever lived. Yet I had never heard of Mr. Lake, had never seen his name on any of the lists of the world’s oldest people, which lists I had been studying quite frequently of late. I wondered: Was 1885 a typo?
I confirmed as much after I called his last listed place of residence, a retirement manor in Yakima, and learned, to my delight, that he was still alive and healthy and clearheaded and would be equally delighted, I was told, to visit with me. Some group, in fact—the Boy Scouts, maybe, or the American Legion, something like that—had not too long before come and presented him with something or other, and everyone had had just a fine time. I got there as quickly as I could.
Yakima is not what most people envision when they think of Washington. That image—green, mountainous, rain-soaked—is accurate, but only in the western part of the state. When you head east, you hit a certain point—I’d peg it just past Cle Elum, a nice little town about eighty miles southeast of Seattle that boasts a telephone museum and a gas station convenience store that sells every kind of jerky one can imagine—where that Washington disappears pretty quickly, leaving you in a Washington that is a lot flatter and strongly beige, a desert without cacti. Yakima, which sits in a valley surrounded by ridges about sixty miles beyond Cle Elum, is the largest city in this particular Washington, but it’s actually a fairly compact place, one of those settlements in the middle of a whole lot of nothing that begins suddenly and ends just as quickly. Don’t let all that beige fool you, though—they grow a lot of apples there. Hops, too, I am told.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 39