The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  16

  The Last Night of the War

  IN THE YEARS AFTER the war ended, Americans built a whole lot of monuments in France. There’s that enormous column on Montfaucon, to commemorate the Meuse-Argonne; a beautiful marble rotunda atop Montsec, for Saint-Mihiel; a massive double colonnade situated on a hill looming over Château-Thierry. All of Belleau Wood is, in essence, a monument. There’s the huge Temple Memorial in Château-Thierry, and the little fountain that the 102nd Regiment installed at Seicheprey, and hundreds of others that fall somewhere between the two in both size and location. Former battle sites are littered with markers installed years later to commemorate some position held at some point by this division or that; near Limey, I came across a little concrete obelisk commemorating the 5th Division, dated September 12, 1918, to which had later been affixed a bronze plaque, dated September 1944, for . . . the 5th Division. I wish I could have been there to see those GI Joes stumble upon a monument to their doughboy predecessors. I suspect it happened often, especially to the men of the 5th Division; so many of their markers are scattered about that one American guide told me: “The saying goes that the 5th put up a monument every time they stopped to take a piss.”

  About forty miles northeast of that obelisk I found what is, in my opinion, the most poignant monument of that war, maybe the most poignant monument I’ve ever seen anywhere. I say I “found” it, rather than “came across” or “stumbled upon” it, because in fact I went out searching for it, and had to look very hard. To see it for yourself, you must first find the tiny and unceremoniously named Ville-devant-Chaumont—literally, the village in front of Chaumont—which rests in a pleasant green dale. If you see someone walking about, ask them for directions; you may have to ask several people before you find one who knows of the thing you’re looking for. If they do—and if they know, for sure, where exactly it is—you’ll be directed to a hard-to-spot road, narrow and overgrown as a cow path, that snakes up a rounded hill. It will probably occur to you at some point that the villager who gave you the directions is having a laugh at your expense; it doesn’t seem like the kind of road that leads anywhere at all, much less to something you’d want to see. But stick with it, and eventually you’ll arrive at a place where the hill levels off. To the right is a beautiful vista of farmland so lush it seems impossible that a war was ever fought here. I assure you, one was. Just look to your left.

  Planted upright in a small sandpit is a stone, a rough-hewn tablet just a few feet tall. Standing behind it is a modest white flagpole. The American flag—at least on the day I visited—was tattered all along the far edge, and looked like something had taken a couple of bites out of it, besides. In the fall of 1918, this area, only ten miles or so north of Verdun, was the far-right flank of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. There were two American divisions assigned to it in early November: the 26th, the Yankee Division; and the 79th, the Liberty Division, composed of draftees from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

  The 79th was credited with taking the eastern half of Montfaucon on September 27, the second day of the battle. By the end of October, having seen some of the offensive’s worst fighting, they were moved to this section of the battleground, deemed to be quieter. It may well have been, but it wasn’t by any means quiet. In what turned out to be the final days of the war, the 79th managed to wrest a number of French villages from the Germans, including, in the early hours of November 11, Ville-devant-Chaumont. Later that morning, some soldiers from one of the Liberty Division’s regiments—the 313th, known as “Baltimore’s Own”—were crouched atop this hill outside town, facing stiff German resistance. “The Boche fire was very heavy, and no sooner had the troops come into view than a barrage was put down,” writes Henry C. Thorn Jr., in the regiment’s history, published in 1920. “The soft, marshy ground was all that saved the Battalion from appalling casualties, as the shells sunk very deep upon impact. . . . The bursts seemed to throw mud, water and iron straight up into the air.” Then, Thorn writes, at 10:44 a.m., a runner from headquarters arrived, bearing “orders to cease firing at 11:00 a.m. French time, hold the lines at the spot, and neither advance nor give way to the rear. The Armistice had been signed and fighting was to stop.” The men hugged the earth; sixteen minutes to go.

  Among them was a twenty-three-year-old private named Henry Nicholas Gunther. Photographs of the time show Gunther to be a handsome, mustachioed gent with thick, dark hair and a wry grin, a man you can easily picture hoisting an enormous stein of pilsner in a Baltimore beer garden. Like much of that city, and most of his neighborhood, he was of German descent; all four of his grandparents were immigrants. In 1917, he was drafted, left behind a good bookkeeping job at the National Bank of Baltimore and a fiancée named Olga, and headed off for Camp Meade, about twenty miles south. The following July, he sailed for France on the Leviathan, the same ship that later brought Howard Ramsey and Henry Roy Tucker to France, and that later yet brought Eugene Lee home. The Leviathan, you might recall, had started life as the German ocean liner Vaterland.

  By the time he shipped out, Gunther had been made his company’s supply sergeant, a position of considerable responsibility that would seem to indicate he was a dedicated and capable soldier. Nevertheless, when he got to France, he did something pretty stupid: In a letter to a friend back home in Baltimore who had yet to be conscripted, Gunther advised the man to stay out of the service for as long as he could, as conditions in the Army were very bad. Gunther must have known that all soldiers’ letters passed through censors’ hands before they were delivered; he should have figured that such a written sentiment would attract unwanted attention, especially given the author’s Germanic surname. That letter cost Sergeant Gunther his stripes—all of them.

  He took it very badly. According to an interview that Ernest Powell, Private Gunther’s platoon sergeant—and, before the war, his close friend—gave to the Baltimore Sun in 1969, Gunther was humiliated by the incident; once a gregarious fellow, he became sullen and withdrew into himself. Eventually, though, he started stepping forward, volunteering for dangerous missions and assignments. At one point, he was wounded badly enough that he could have been sent back home, or at least away from the front; but he refused, insisted on returning to the 313th. He seemed determined to redeem himself in the eyes of his comrades, and the United States Army. That, though, would take time. And, as he’d just learned, the war was about to end—and with it, his best chance at redemption. Perhaps that explains what Private Gunther did that morning, atop that hill outside Ville-devant-Chaumont. The little monument that sits there now tells the story in French, German, and English. The English text, translated by Christina Holstein from Pierre Lenhard’s original French, elaborates:

  Emerging from a bank of fog, Private Gunther and his friend, Sergeant Powell, found themselves confronted by two German machine gun squads manning a road block. The Germans watched in disbelief as the Americans came forward. Powell and Gunther threw themselves to the ground, as the bullets cracked overhead. The Armistice was imminent and the Germans ceased firing, believing that the Americans would have the good sense to stop. Their sacrifice would not change the war.

  Indeed, no one fighting in those last few hours of the war could have known how little their potential sacrifice would have meant; according to the terms of the armistice, which had been signed almost six hours earlier, all German troops would have to evacuate France entirely—including Alsace and Lorraine—within fourteen days. In other words, where the lines ended up being drawn at 11:00 a.m. meant exactly nothing.

  Even all these years later, historians still wonder why so many men fought so hard in those last few hours—to the point where hundreds of them died, within sight of the war’s end. It is without a doubt one of the most tragic and mystifying elements of a cataclysm that was almost unthinkably tragic and mystifying. I certainly don’t have an explanation to offer.

  Instead, I offer you George Briant.

  I found him, too, off the
French List, which seems appropriate because he was, he would tell you, French himself. By way of Louisiana. Whether his ancestors arrived there directly from France, or from Aca- dia or somewhere else, is unclear; all he could tell me was that they were “local people—local French people, you know.” They hailed from St. Martinville, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country (and site of the legendary Evangeline Oak), but he was born more than a hundred miles to the east, in the city of New Orleans, the fifth of nine children; the others were Ferdinand, Hamilton, Rose, Lassaline, Gabriel, Walter, Pearl, and Ruby. Lassaline was named for his paternal grandfather, Paul Louis Lassaline Briant, who had served in the 22nd Louisiana during the Civil War. If you think Paul Louis Lassaline Briant is one cool monicker, his next-door neighbor in St. Martinville in 1870 was named Oneziphore Delahoussaye.

  I found all of this information in census records, where I also discovered that, in 1900, Paul Louis Lassaline Briant’s son, James Philippe Briant, lived at 1434 North Roman Street, in New Orleans; his neighbors, two doors down at number 1438, were a black family, which fact alone made that block one of the more integrated in the South at that time. The man of the house at number 1438, a Mr. Homer Plessy, was the Rosa Parks of his era. In 1892, he boarded a train in New Orleans, sat in a whites-only first-class car, and promptly summoned a conductor and informed the man that he was, in fact, what the law in Louisiana then called “colored,” or possessed of mixed-race ancestry. The conductor must have been surprised; Plessy, who was what was then known as an “octoroon”—that is, he was one-eighth black by ancestry—was quite light-skinned, and certainly capable of passing for white. But he chose to challenge the law instead, got himself arrested for it, and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it did not fare well. That’s right: James Philippe Briant’s neighbor on North Roman Street was the Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson.

  The 1900 census lists Homer Plessy’s occupation as “day laborer”; James Briant’s is “dry goods (clerk).” His son told me later—104 years later—that the dry goods store was in fact D. H. Holmes, a legendary (and now, sadly, defunct) emporium on Canal Street in New Orleans. That son, George Leon Briant, was born in that city on March 3, 1901. A few months later, another child named Louis Armstrong would be born in New Orleans. Though they grew up in very different parts of the city, their childhoods did bear certain similarities, none of them fe- licitous. Louis Armstrong, for instance, was abandoned by his father at a very young age; his mother—just a teenager when she’d had him—was unable to care for him, and he was shuttled around between various relatives. I don’t know what, exactly, happened to George Briant’s family when he was a child, but I got the impression that it was more than just one thing. “My schooling was very limited,” he explained, “because I was—so many deaths in the family, the disruptions in the family affairs. Everything is tipsy-topsy. Nobody knew where—you go your way, I go my way, do the best I can do, that was it. Most of us had to bring ourselves up, to a certain extent.” He even spent time in an orphanage, he told me. His tone was steady, but the words came out haltingly; part of that was just the way he spoke, but I got the distinct sense that there was something inside him that I hadn’t perceived in any of the other veterans I’d interviewed.

  George Briant seemed sad.

  A little housekeeping:

  Mr. Briant pronounced his last name “BRY-ant.” I visited with him at the nursing home in which he was then living, which was in Hammond, Louisiana, about an hour north of New Orleans. We talked in an empty common room; he was seated in a wheelchair throughout. He looked to be a slight man in large wire-rim eyeglasses, with perfectly white hair, thinner on top, crowning a somewhat oblong head. He wore a tan jacket over a gray shirt and trousers, and an abbot-sized crucifix that hung down well below his sternum on a long leather thong.

  George and his wife had had but one child, a son named George Hamilton Briant, born in 1923. George H. had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, earning the rank of captain, and afterward went to work as a stunt flier for the movies; word is he was a dashing fellow. Around 1947 or 1948, he was killed on the set during some sort of accident—I’ve seen it described as a parachute jump, though it may have been a plane crash.

  In 1921, a friend of George’s introduced him to eighteen-year-old Germaine Thibodeaux at her cousin’s house in St. Martinville; the friend was dating one of Germaine’s sisters. When George asked her out, though, Germaine informed him that she was already engaged to another fellow. Nevertheless, as they liked to tell the story, it was love at first sight, and Germaine quickly broke off the other engagement. She and George were married four months later, on July 20, 1921.

  They were still married when I visited, on September 18, 2004—eighty-three years later. He was then 103 years old; she was 101. I don’t know what she was like at eighteen, but at 101, Germaine Thibodeaux Briant was a handful. I was told as much even before I made the trip. “I’m going to have to distract her while someone brings Papa to you,” their goddaughter, Irma, advised me on the phone. “She doesn’t like to let him out of her sight.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I find it helps to have someone else present when I’m doing an interview. I want her to be there.”

  “No, you don’t,” Irma replied. “Trust me.”

  She was right. Germaine Briant was jealous of any attention that wasn’t directed entirely toward her. She insisted on answering just about every question I posed to her husband (Irma’s attempt to keep her godmother away during the interview had failed), and doing so in a voice that was, petite and aged though she was, much louder than his. Her Cajun accent, too, was much thicker even than his. It all made for one of the more difficult interview experiences I’ve ever had, and one of the most memorable; if George Briant hadn’t been so determined to share his story with me despite all the distractions—and if his story hadn’t been what it was—I might have just given up, gone to New Orleans, and gotten drunk instead.

  But enough of my trauma; back to his.

  “Where were you living when you joined the Army?” I asked him.

  He laughed, smiled broadly; I got the impression that he’d had to move around quite a bit in those days. “Let’s see,” he said. “Where was I then?”

  “Mrs. Garcia’s house!” Germaine Briant called out, pronouncing it “GAW-shuss.”

  He didn’t even seem to notice she’d said a word; eighty-three years is a long time in which to learn how to tune someone out. “I think I was living with my mother and my sister—”

  “And an old lady,” his wife interjected. Irma whispered to her to be quiet.

  “—and her husband, at the time I joined the Army. I think I was fifteen years old when I joined the Army.” Actually, he was sixteen, and looked it; the recruiters turned him away, several times, before he made such a pest of himself that they finally just let him enlist. “The guy says, ‘What are we going to do with him?’ And the [other] guy says, ‘Take him!’” he recalled with a laugh.

  I asked him: “Did you have to lie about your age to get into the Army?”

  “Yes, I did,” he declared.

  “How old did you tell them you were?”

  He laughed again. “I had to tell them I was about seventeen, I think,” he said. “They found out afterwards, but they cast me over, let me pass over because I was anxious to join.” I cannot explain why the Army did this, except that I doubt “the Army” did anything at all; it seems to me that recruiters were given a great deal of individual discretion when it came to enlistment. “And I was in the war from then on,” he told me.

  “Did you tell your parents when you joined the Army?” I asked him.

  “My parents weren’t alive,” he said. “My parents were dead.”

  I asked him why he’d joined up. “To become a man,” his wife declared; he, though, just chuckled at the question, and considered it for a moment.

  “The conversation,” he said finally, “was generally on warfa
re at that time, you see. This one was going to join, that family was going to join—in other words, families were being separated right and left. Young people—young people wanted to join because of youth, age. They all wanted to know what warfare was. So did I. And I sure learned too much about it.”

  I asked him where he had gone to enlist. He said he couldn’t quite remember; “I think he told me Jackson Square!” Mrs. Briant announced.

  He turned and asked me: “Why does a person, fifteen years of age, want to go to war? You tell me.”

  “For adventure?” I offered.

  He laughed. “I was anxious to join the war,” he told me. “I wanted to go to war. Of course, I only knew about the war what I’d heard, you see. You know what I’m saying? And what I could visualize. But after I was in it, I learned a hell of a lot more.”

  “You said you wanted to be a man,” Germaine Briant called out. “You told me.”

  “I was tickled to the death that they let me [enlist],” he recalled with a smile at one point; but then, suddenly, he grew serious. “But let me tell you, it was no fun,” he said, leaning forward as his voice softened a bit and started to waiver. “War is hell, it’s real hell. It’s nothing to joke with, nothing to laugh with. You might think it’s a journey, having fun or something.” He shook his head. “There’s no fun in war. War is do or die. It’s you or me. And who can pull the trigger faster.”

  And with that, he fell back into his wheelchair.

  “How did you choose the artillery?” I asked him.

  His response was one I’d heard before. “First, I wanted to be a rider,” he said. “I wanted to be a horse rider; I wanted to join the cavalry. So I went to join the 18th United States Cavalry. And if I remember right, they sidetracked me because of my age, you see. They put me into some smaller department. I wound up in the 18th United States Cavalry, and I learned how to ride horses.” He chuckled. “And I mean, you had to learn. Yeah. They’d take you rough—through woods, like a roughrider. They’d turn your horse loose with you, and your horse followed the leader, that’s all. He’d pay no attention to you at all.” He laughed. “One after the other. I liked it. I never tried to get out of it. That’s what I wanted.”