The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  “So how did you get into the artillery?” I repeated.

  “Well, at the time, they had no use for riders, you see. So the Army organized . . . the 76th Field Artillery. They organized that organization, and I was in that, see? And I was in that until the war ended . . . At my age, everything was wild,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Name and assignment, I didn’t care. Put me in here, put me there—made no difference what it was, make sure I was in the Army . . . I was at the height of my glory then.”

  By now he was quite animated—smiling, laughing, gesturing. “Yeah, it was the same outfit,” he recalled. “It was the same thing, but they changed the name, that’s all. In other words, instead of training with horses, we trained with guns . . . but it didn’t make no difference, as long as I was in the war. I was satisfied that I was fighting, and doing what I was supposed to do. And that was it. I had the young persons’ ideas, you know, and the ability to do what the young persons do. And that was all I wanted to do. I didn’t care if it was the artillery, the cavalry, or what. So between the cavalry and the artillery, I became a soldier.” He laughed again, and I began to notice that his laugh almost always arrived in the company of a singular smile, wide and thin and light, like a melon rind. He had started off our discussion by warning me that “quite possibly, I’ve forgotten much of it,” then adding: “It’s not a good thing to remember.” But now it seemed that remembering it was reviving him; he was becoming more and more energized the deeper he bored into that old reserve, which I suspect he hadn’t approached in a very long time. Compared to the other veterans I’d interviewed, George Briant seemed to have an entirely different vocabulary at his disposal. He was able to speak not only of what he’d done, but how it all had made him feel. Alone among the rest, he stood out for being human in a way that most of us can actually relate to much more than we can to the stoicism that characterized almost all of his remaining contemporaries: He was emotional.

  And, as it turned out, he was just getting started.

  The day after its official designation as an artillery unit, the 76th FA was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division. Although the 3rd was one of a handful of Regular Army units that had existed before the war, it didn’t get to France until April of 1918, ten months after elements of the 1st and 2nd started showing up Over There, and six months after the Yankee Division arrived in full. Still, the men of the 3rd Division were early American guests to the party, and first rushed into action to stop the Germans at Château-Thierry a few days before Belleau Wood got under way. They never really got a break after that, either. According to E. B. Garey, O. O. Ellis, and R. V. D. Magoffin, the excessively initialed authors of 1920’s American Guide Book to France and Its Battlefields, “The history of this division is unique. It had no service in a quiet sector. It learned how to fight by fighting.”

  I haven’t said very much about what went on in France in the summer of 1918, the time between Belleau Wood and Saint-Mihiel. The truth is, that summer is often overlooked in histories of the war. But it saw the last of Germany’s five great pushes that are now collectively re- membered as the Spring Offensive of 1918; in effect, it was the last time the German Army would go on the attack in that war. It was Germany’s last hope for the great gamble it had undertaken back in March, after finally knocking Russia out of the war and shifting a half-million seasoned German troops to France, its last attempt to break through the lines, take Paris, and decisively defeat France, Britain, and the United States before millions of fresh American doughboys could get into the fight. Had the Spring Offensive succeeded, it might have done just that. Instead, many historians believe, the failure of this final push, in the summer of 1918, mortally wounded the German Army—and Germany itself. Yes, Bill Lake and lots of others who were there believed the war was won that fall at the Meuse-Argonne; but many of those who take a long view of the war, who have the distance and perspective to do so, believe the Meuse-Argonne merely ended the war, and that it was, in truth, lost after weeks of vicious combat at the place where, nearly four years earlier, it began in earnest: the Marne River. Even some who didn’t have the benefits of distance and perspective believed as much: As the authors of the aforementioned Guide Book wrote just two years afterward, “During these battles the German Army had not lost its morale and the fighting was even more bitter than during the Argonne-Meuse Battle.” And that’s pretty bitter.

  The stakes could hardly have been higher. When they launched that last push, right around midnight on July 14, 1918, the Germans were only about forty miles from Paris. Panic once again flared up, terror that the hated Boche were about to storm into the French capital and do God-only-knows-what when they got there. And some believe they might have made it had it not been for George Briant’s 3rd Division. So many felt that way at the time that, after the battle, after the Germans had been turned back and the panic began to subside, people started calling the 3rd the “Rock of the Marne.” They still do. The division itself adopted the nickname the “Marne Division.” It, too, still stands.

  They earned these titles by holding steady in the face of a terrible attack on that first day. The Germans started off with a massive bombardment, high explosives and gas, that killed or incapacitated thousands. (One report I’ve read says that hundreds of American soldiers were blinded by gas that morning.) Then they sent forty divisions rushing forward into the French lines on either side of Reims. They were ef- fectively stopped east of the city by superb French defenses, but to the west—the side closer to Paris—they enjoyed great initial successes, crossing the river where they’d been halted four years earlier. Veterans later reported watching from atop the opposite banks as the Germans flung themselves at that river with tireless determination, using whatever they had handy—rafts, pontoons, wooden beams—to help them across. When the enemy blew up their new bridges, put up in a hurry under fire that morning, the Germans hastily rebuilt them, perhaps in the same spot, perhaps a few hundred yards up- or downstream. Accounts of the fighting that morning are among the most chilling I’ve ever read. The French and Americans (and there were some Italian troops present, too) brought an awful rain of shells and machine-gun fire down upon the Germans; still, they kept coming. The only way to stop them, it seemed, would be to kill them all.

  And that, more or less, is what the 3rd Division did at the western edge of the line, just east of Château-Thierry—so close to Paris that many people now commute from one to the other every day—on July 15, 1918, and on into July 16. Two other American divisions, the 28th (“Keystone”) and 42nd (“Rainbow”) were elsewhere in the line that day, but they’d only just been moved there in anticipation of the attack; the 3rd had been holding its ground ever since they’d taken it six weeks earlier, before Belleau Wood. It had been a fairly quiet six weeks, until then; they lost more men on that one morning than they had since they’d first arrived at the front. But they held the line. The Germans did not successfully cross the Marne in their sector. Many of those Germans never crossed any body of water—or stretch of ground—again. By the next day, according to the division’s commander, Major General Joseph T. Dickman, “there were no Germans in the foreground of the Third Division except the dead.” A lot of dead.

  On that first day of the battle that is now known as the Second Marne, the 3rd stopped the Germans at the western edge of the latter’s line. By the third day, the Germans had been stopped everywhere. On the fourth day, the French and Americans launched a counteroffensive, their first of the year. From that point until the armistice, the Germans would be on the defensive; but while many now view that battle as the beginning of the end, the Germans were far from beaten at that point. They fought ferociously. The battles that followed that summer would claim Joyce Kilmer, the journalist and poet and would-be author of “Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth”; and Quentin Roosevelt, aviator and favorite son of the former president; and Major George Rau, of Hartford, Connecticut, hero of Seicheprey; and thousands of other Americans.


  And Private George Briant—Battery B, 76th Field Artillery, 3rd Division—would come very close to joining their ranks one afternoon in late July, just outside a pretty little farming village in Picardy named Le Charmel.

  Field artillery regiments were assigned to specific infantry divisions, but since infantry and artillery can’t really be commingled—artillery units need a lot of space, and you wouldn’t want to be entrenched near them even if you could be, for any number of good reasons (“We had to be at least three miles behind the lines,” George Briant explained)—artillery’s location and movements are much more difficult for historians to pin down. Often, they were dispatched to some third point, distant from both the enemy and their own infantry; and sometimes they were loaned out to support other divisions—even other armies. I only know that the story I want to tell you happened near Le Charmel because I happened to find a remarkable little book.

  It’s called Roll of Honor of the Seventy-Sixth US Field Artillery. Small and thin, with a dark red cover that is plain but for the title embossed upon it in simple gold letters, it looks at first glance like a children’s reader. It doesn’t much resemble any of the other regimental or divisional histories I’ve ever seen from that war. There are no pictures, or illustrations of any kind; no sentimentality, no nostalgia, no ribbing or swagger. More than twenty of the book’s seventy-four pages are occupied by a roster of every last man who served in the 76th FA, from Colonel E. St. J. Greble Jr. to Private William B. Zolinski of Battery F. Thirty-six are given over to a list of every citation recommended for any soldier in the regiment, including nine Distinguished Service Crosses and more than a hundred Distinguished Service Medals. Each is accompanied by a detailed description of the action or actions for which the citation was considered appropriate, like this one, for Second Lieutenant Henry W. Clark of Battery F:

  Near Chateau-Thierry during the Second Battle of the Marne he maintained an exposed observation post throughout the most intense series of enemy bombardments. His steel helmet was partially torn from his head by a large shell fragment but he refused to quit his post until his operator was severely wounded. Finding himself unable to accomplish communications of any kind with his battery he saved his comrade from bleeding to death by carrying him through intense fire to a dressing station.

  The book opens with a memorandum from Colonel Greble, titled “Recommendations for Distinguished Service,” that begins: “In compliance with Memorandum Headquarters 4th Army Corps dated Dec. 18th, 1918, there are submitted herewith lists of names of officers and men of this organization whom the Commanding Officer has seen fit to specially recommend to higher authority for their continuous, meritorious, and distinguished service in action. . . . It is to be greatly regretted that every member who has helped compose a regiment, which has been able to perform the services which this regiment has rendered, does not receive from the Government some fitting recognition worthy of those services.”

  Colonel Greble goes on, in the next couple of pages, to furnish a skeletal accounting of the 76th’s history, concluding: “The regiment continued its fighting constantly with practically no rest during its entire operations nor a chance to re-equip or rehabilitate. It cheerfully and willingly at all times underwent its privations and suffered its hardships doing its duty as it saw it.” It really does read like a memo; perhaps it was conceived as a service document instead of a regimental history. Before it was published, though, probably in early 1919 (the frontispiece records that the book was printed by Lithographie von Deinhard & Co., Coblenz, Germany), some anonymous soul undertook to add and compose a short section titled “Brief Narrative of the engagements in the Great European Conflict participated in by the 76th Field Artillery.”

  According to the “Brief Narrative,” the 76th first went into position on the night of July 5–6, 1918; the following afternoon, “Battery ‘D’ sent the first message from the Regiment to the Boche.” Still, their initial ten days at the front were pretty quiet—until, the narrative declares, “On the night of July 14th–15th the Germans launched their grand offensive from Rheims to Soissons that was to prove their Gettysburg. The heaviest pressure came just to our right in the now famous bend of the Marne at Jaulgonne. At 11:50 p.m. on that night the following message was received at Regimental Headquarters: ‘Enemy crossing at Gland, fire your general OCP [offensive counter preparation—that is, a barrage you lay down on the enemy before he attacks you, to dissuade him or at least render him less effective] until further orders.’ We fired it without a moment’s intermission until about noon the next day. For the remainder of that night the whole sky was lit by the flashes of the guns, as though there was some tremendous fire extending for miles.” Compare that to what Mr. Briant told me when I asked him if he remembered how he’d felt that first night he went into battle.

  He laughed, and leaned forward. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “the first battle is something you never forget in your life, you see? Everything is Ssssh!” He raised a finger to his lips. “Ssssh! No noise. No noise.” He dropped his voice to a loud stage whisper for a moment, looked around and gestured with his hand here and there, as if addressing men standing all around him. “‘Quiet! No noise. Quiet.’ And you worried all the time, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ But if you only knew what was going on”—he broke into a chuckle—“you were dying. So we finally caught on, the reason we were being shushed down was because our life was at stake, you see?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned in closer. “The enemy had secret posts out in the fields, you see,” he said, extending a hand and sweeping it across a pasture only he could see. “And they knew every move we was making. And every time we moved the troops another mile, a half a mile, they knew all about it. They knew more than we did, because we didn’t know we were going to be moved. But they knew in advance we were going to move, and they were waiting for us, you see.” He punctuated that thought with a deep nod. “Our officials should have known there were going to be secret listening posts out in the fields and everywhere, taking messages all the time,” he asserted. “And that’s one of the reasons we got shot up. Because the enemy knew what we were doing all the time, better than we did. We were standing in an open field, and then they were sitting there waiting for us.”

  I thought he was speaking metaphorically. “They were tough, the Germans,” I said.

  “Yeah. Between the boom-boom-boom-boom,” he continued, stretching out his hands to mimic the motion of firing a machine gun, “and they was always up there dropping those bombs, we didn’t know which way to run.”

  “Were you scared the first time you went into battle?” I asked him.

  He was silent for a beat. “Yeah,” he said soberly, then shook his head. “It’s a funny feeling. There was a thrill, you understand?” he explained, raising both hands. “You knew you were in real action then, you see. They wasn’t saying, ‘We’re going to train you,’ or nothing.” He raised his hands again, pointing both forefingers to form rifle barrels. “You’re going to take those guns and you’re going to fight for your life. Man to man, him or you. So we grew to be adult persons at that age of fifteen years old. In other words, it was do or die.” He shook his head. “And even though we were kids, it was do or die. And me, I got my share.”

  None of the other veterans I interviewed, before or after, had ever gotten near a word like “thrill” when describing combat. They all must have understood, on some level, that such a composite of terror and excitement is an awfully heavy thing to carry with you throughout a life, and that you’d better find a way to set it down and move on without it if you wanted yours to be a long one.

  But not George Briant. He had borne an awful lot of pain in his life, not just during the war but throughout what sounded like a wretched childhood—and then he lost his only child, his son, his namesake, at a terribly young age. Any one of those is the kind of thing you might never get over; all three together could kill you. But they didn’t kill George Briant; in fact, by
all accounts he led a happy, fulfilled, godly life. He never had much money—eventually, after passing through several other jobs, he set up shop as a sign painter—and spent most of his retirement living in a trailer. But I read, in one of his obituaries, that he and Germaine were in the habit of plucking old toys out of the trash, repairing and restoring them, and then giving them to needy children.

  A crushed man doesn’t do that sort of thing.

  So I wonder if, maybe, George Briant managed to do something that seemingly no one else I’d met had—that perhaps like them he had, a ways back, set down his load, but that he had also, somehow, always kept track of where he’d left it, always knew where it was so that he could, if the occasion should call for it, run back and fetch it.

  And now, having picked it back up, he never put it down, at least not that afternoon. That potent cocktail, terror and excitement—once he sipped from it again, for the first time in who knows how many years, the taste stayed with him. “But I’ll tell you, that’s a thrill,” he said at one point, using for a second time that word I’d never heard anyone else utter in this context, “that’s a thrill you should never want. Because your life is at stake every instant. I mean, every instant! You know which[ever] way you turn, you’re going to get shot at. But we didn’t realize that at the time, you understand? You’re in the war, and you never was in war before. And first thing you know, you’re being shot at from all directions.” He laughed.