“I’ll tell you something,” he said once, after a long pause. “There’s two things about warfare. You want to be there, but you don’t want to be there. But you’ve got to be in both places, and you can’t do it. So you try to”—he moved his hand around from point to point, mimicking with his pinched fingers the dance one might do in trying to avoid incoming fire—“and you keep trying. But of course, you wind up in the graveyard.”
It was a point he kept returning to, this uneasy marriage of two extreme emotional states; it seemed terribly important to him that I understand. At first I thought it was the fear he wanted me to comprehend, but the more he revisited the subject, the more I started to wonder if in fact he was more concerned that I grasp just how exciting he’d found it all. The 76th had spent the second half of July on the offensive, chasing the Germans across the Aisne-Marne Sector. They moved often, almost always under cover of darkness. “Jumping from place to place,” Mr. Briant recalled. “You’re moving as fast—I mean, you’re here now, and three hours later, you get all packed up and be ready to leave. They don’t tell you where you’re leaving for, but be ready to leave in three hours. So you get all the equipment together, pack it all up, and in three hours you’re standing out there in the open field, like that, waiting, waiting. If they [the Germans] ever come down and see you there, they’re going to half-kill all of you.” He shook his head. “It’s something you can’t explain, it’s something—you’re in a warfare that you were never in before. In other words, you’re not a war man, you know what I’m saying? You’re just a soldier. And here you are, in the World War I. All of a sudden, overnight, you’re in World War I. ‘Pack up, pack up and get your things.’ Twelve o’clock at night. No sound. No noise. Everything’s quiet.” He raised a hand to his ear, then waved it in front of him. “Most mysterious things you ever seen in the war. You never see that, you never see a thousand men standing out there, all the packed-up guns and everything, waiting up there. Shhhhhh! Shhh! Three, four hours, standing there, waiting there. Then you get to line and march.” He silently swept an arm around, like a pinwheel: Hurry up! “A thousand men moving, and the enemy don’t know it. He don’t know it because he don’t hear a sound. He got sound equipment all over there, he hears everything, you see. But being it’s so quiet—we kept the sound down, you see. And it saved many of our lives. We’d have got killed by the animals. And everything is mysterious. Everything is Shhhhhh! No sound. You know they’ve got a thousand men out there with guns and everything, all the equipment, cannons and everything that they’re ready to fire. There’s a thousand men out there waiting—you don’t hear nothing. You don’t hear a sound. All of a sudden a guy comes in, he says”—he paused, slowly swung his arm across his chest twice: Move along!—“‘Go, march, march, march,’ until you get to three miles within that front line there, you see? Then you unload, pack up, dig in. Get your guns in position to fire, get that other stuff—you don’t hear a sound. A thousand men digging holes, preparing for war, and you don’t hear a sound. Everything mysterious. Every move you make is mysterious. And that’s what makes it so thrilling to young people. The movements—you never see the movements. You’re in the movements, and you don’t know it. All quiet, no sound. Don’t you dare light a light, a cigarette, because they could have shot at you.” He laughed, took a drink from a water cup he’d been holding in his left hand. I hadn’t noticed it there until that moment.
Reviewing the tape years later, I hear his wife, Germaine, interjecting comments here and there, though at the time he’d just talked over her, and I, transfixed by his story, hadn’t perceived she’d said a word. Now, though, as he took a pause, she seized her opportunity. “I’ve lived his life, over and over, what he told me,” she cried out. “Years ago. Every bit of it is true. How he went through all that, only by the grace of God, all without being mentally ill, I don’t know. And the best husband in the whole world! To the people! To one another! A wonderful marriage!”
She was shouting; but none of it seemed to register with him. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he finally said to me. “You dead, and you don’t know it. All of a sudden you’re marching, you’re marching, you’re marching. And soon you slow down, it slows down, it slows down. And you hear the Shhhhhh!” He turned his head here and there, hushing ghosts in every direction: “Shhhhhh! Shhhhhh! Why so quiet? You better be quiet till you know what’s buried there, you know what’s hidden over here, see. They got listening posts all over. They know just where you at. They hear you talking. And they don’t want to shoot because they don’t want to expose their position. They could kill us all at any time, see, but they want to know more about us, what we after, see?” He was even more animated now; he leaned forward, his eyes wide, looking into mine.
“That’s enough, Papa!” his wife called out.
“There’s action and danger,” he continued, unheeding. “There’s a thrill attached to it.”
“The nerves!” Germaine said.
“What’s thrilling about it—you know you’re going to die!” he concluded, but his hands kept moving after his lips fell silent; he was in the thrall of that thrill even yet.
And that thrill—it was not, as Winston Churchill once described it, the thrill of being shot at to no effect. The war, you see, had very nearly claimed George Briant’s life. He wasn’t waxing philosophical when he told me that he had sure learned too much about war, nor poetic when he recalled: “We were standing in an open field, and then they were sitting there waiting for us.” He really had; he really was. And they were, really.
It happened on July 28, 1918, two weeks after the Germans launched their last great offensive, ten days after it had faltered and the French and Americans launched their own. There had been quite a lot of fighting in and around the village of Le Charmel by then; the French and Americans would take part of it, then lose it to a German counterattack, then repeat the process again and again. “Le Charmel was probably reported captured as many times as any town in France,” the Roll of Honor’s “Brief Narrative” reports. On July 27, it seemed the Germans had finally been chased off for good. The narrative continues:
Le Charmel . . . had been before the war a quiet little farming town snuggled down under the hills with the inevitable Chateau on a small hill across the valley. It was quite a strong point for the Boche and was held by many Machine Guns. The regiment moved on July 27th, the day it was captured, the batteries taking position along a hedge near the Roncheres road.
I know two versions of what happened there the next day. “On the morning of July 28th the 1st Battalion limbered up and moved to the road preparatory to changing position,” the narrative reports, “then received orders to return and fire a barrage.” As George Briant remembered it, though, his battery—Battery B—was ordered to move in daylight; and then, already dangerously exposed, they—well, they got stuck in traffic. “We were changing positions,” he recalled. “We were going to take a French position, you see, and they were supposed to have moved. But when we got there, they had never moved. They left us out in the open.” Literally: Battery B was stuck standing in an open field, the sun high overhead, illuminating them, as if an artillery battery surrounded only by grass and hay needed further illumination. They could do nothing but stand there and wait, wondering which would reach them first—orders that they could finally move, or something very bad.
And then they heard it: something very bad.
The “Brief Narrative” is almost cavalier about what happened next. “It was while we were in this position that we made our first real acquaintance with the Boche ’planes,” it records, and you can’t help but marvel, nearly a century later, that aircraft were still so new at that point that “planes” required an apostrophe up front to remind you that it was short for “aeroplanes.” Planes themselves were also still objects of marvel for many; but for the men of Battery B on July 28, 1918, they were just objects of terror, moving unfettered overhead as you were trapped down on earth, as free to kill you
as were those unseen Ger- man soldiers hiding just off the road in the dark of night. Unlike those soldiers, though, the planes didn’t hold their fire; they already knew where the Americans were headed. “As ‘B’ Battery was going in a plane came quietly sailing over and let go four bombs that got 28 horses and 34 men,” the narrative explains.
“They couldn’t help it,” George Briant told me. “They were flying over; they saw us out in the field. And when they saw us out in the field, they were all ready with the bombs. All they had to do was drop their bombs.”
“However,” the “Brief Narrative” continues, undaunted, “everyone stuck to his post, including many of the wounded; put the battery in position and fired the barrage. It was excellent work and the ‘B’ Battery officers deserve great credit, particularly Lieut. Hopkins, who, though severely wounded, took command and stuck to his post until the battery was in position.” Sounds like a happy ending, or sort of. But then, the very next sentence: “Encouraged by this success several other ’planes came over bombing during the day and dropped many bombs.” The unnamed author then closes his tale with a true masterpiece of understatement: “It was a bad day.”
I’ll say; George Briant did say. “They got about, I don’t know, I think about seventy-five Americans,” he said. “Me, I was all shot up. My teeth were shot out. I got shot in the eyes. I was shot in the shoulders. I was shot—I think seven, seven shrapnel wounds from that one attack.”
“How many bombs did they drop on you?” I asked.
“I tell you,” he said, “we weren’t counting.” He started taking an assessment again: “I got my teeth knocked out. I got some—I got poked a hole in my shoulder about the size of a dollar . . . where else?”
His wife couldn’t stand it. “That’s a real, real man!” she called out.
“I forgot,” he continued, as calm as she was agitated. “I was walking around with blood running all over me—my face, my shoulders . . . they picked me up and took me to the hospital.” But he didn’t forget, not at all; rather, he returned to it time and again. “I had seven holes in me,” he repeated at one point. “Biggest one was the size of a silver dollar, right in here.” He touched his right shoulder. “Then I had one over the eye”—he raised a hand to his left eye—“how I didn’t lose my eyesight, I don’t know. It was a miracle. Right inside the eye, right alongside the eyeball, without damaging the eyeball. It was a miracle.” Later, he said that he’d been hit in one of his hips, too.
I have stood on a road just outside Le Charmel and looked out over that field where Battery B’s bad day played out. I found the spot with the help of Jeffrey Aarnio, superintendent of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, where some six thousand of the doughboys killed during that last German offensive and the subsequent Allied counteroffensive, including Joyce Kilmer and men from Battery B, are buried. Though he had never heard the story of Battery B, Mr. Aarnio knew the area well; Le Charmel is still a quiet little farming village, a pretty spot with narrow old streets that wind around buildings and up hills. The field is like something out of a Van Gogh painting, the kind of place you might stroll through lazily, hoping to get lost in thought and the scent of tall grass.
On July 28, 1918, young men, Americans, died in that field. George Briant, seventeen years old, was not one of them. Red-hot shrapnel tore through a shoulder, a hip, an eye socket of his that day; it knocked his teeth out. But it did not kill him. “They picked us up,” he explained, “brought us over to the hospital, and they dressed the wounds. Then they put us right back in the war again.” He laughed, perhaps because he knew quite well it wasn’t like that at all; he spent three months in the hospital, and even after that, the Army was inclined to just ship him home. He pleaded with them to send him back to the 76th, instead. “I said, ‘I didn’t come here to go home, I came here to see what the war was like.’” The Army, though, wasn’t convinced by that line of reasoning. They still wanted to send him back to Louisiana.
“Let me tell you here,” he said, eighty-six years later. “I really rethought that conversation many times. Because many times I thought to myself I should have went back. I should have gave up.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he offered another argument. “I said, ‘I never saw the beginning of the war, and I want to see how the war ends.’”
That one worked. He was discharged from the hospital on October 20, 1918, and was back with Battery B within the week. And he saw how the war ended.
For the rest of his long life, though, he wished he hadn’t.
While George Briant was in the hospital recuperating from his wounds, Germany’s were festering. One by one, its allies, worn down by relentless assaults that culminated in grave military defeats, signed separate armistices with the Allies: Bulgaria, on September 29, 1918; the Ottoman Empire, on October 30; and, worst of all, Austria and Hungary, on November 3. It was the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had, arguably, started the war four years earlier, and then dragged Germany into it. At the end, there was no empire, and no Austria-Hungary; in the face of its final humiliating defeat, at Vittorio in northeastern Italy, the whole thing had split apart, Czechs and Slavs and Magyars going their own ways. Austria and Hungary sued for peace separately from one another. Germany remained, alone.
It wasn’t so much that Germany had relied on its former allies for their military prowess, but they had been invaluable for their resources, especially oil and food. Without them, Britain’s naval blockade would have smothered Germany years earlier. As it was, Germans were starving; they didn’t have their own Herbert Hoover working tirelessly to supply them with wheat. Chronically hungry people are disinclined to just go along quietly, especially when that hunger is accompanied by the news that the war effort for which you are doing without is slowly failing. Such news started reaching the German people in the fall of 1918. The streets quickly filled with grumbling. In an example of what would later come to be termed “blowback,” the revolution that Germany had fomented in Russia started to seep back across its own eastern borders. At the same time, General Erich Ludendorff, one of Germany’s two top military commanders, was slowly being undone by bad news from the front. On September 28, 1918, Ludendorff suffered a breakdown; one account I read has him collapsing to the floor during a meeting, literally foaming at the mouth. That night, frantic, he convinced Germany’s other top military commander, Paul von Hindenburg, that Germany must try to effect a truce immediately. Ludendorff then brought his case to the Kaiser, warning also that President Wilson, from whom the Germans expected they’d get the best terms, would not even begin to negotiate with Germany until that country put into place a more democratic system of government. The Kaiser, with great reluctance, signed an order replacing his government with one more closely resembling a parliamentary system, to be headed by his cousin, the relatively liberal Prince Maximilian von Baden. Ludendorff—who would, after the war, become an early supporter of Hitler’s—later changed his mind, deciding to continue prosecuting the war with great vigor. He later changed his mind about Hitler, too.
In both cases, he was too late. The turmoil in Germany never abated; and as news from the front became worse, the calls for revolution at home grew louder and more insistent. Morale within the Army plummeted, too, and desertions climbed. German sailors, ordered to take the fleet out to sea for one great last battle, mutinied instead. Prince Max, as he was known, wanted the war ended immediately; he reached out to President Wilson, careful not to divulge how weak Germany’s position was. Privately, the Germans’ most hopeful scenario was that they would withdraw to pre–August 1914 lines, and from there negotiate terms from a position, if not exactly of strength, then at least not of desperation, either. Germany couldn’t claim to be victorious, but it could claim to still be undefeated.
Poor Prince Max. How do you even start a conversation like that? I’m not saying we want to stop this war—why should we want to do something like that, with everything going so well for us?—but let’s say, just for fun, that we did . . .
? Caught between German pitchforks and French bayonets, he did his best, but no one was particularly eager to work with him. If the French or British had detected a hint of weakness, they would have borne down mercilessly; they’d been in this thing for four years, and had lost more men than they cared to count. And President Wilson, well, he was high-minded enough in word, but when it came to actually talking peace—a real, immediate cease-fire—he dithered, waivered, changed old terms, added new ones. Finally, he grew cold, told the Germans he was seriously considering demanding something like unconditional surrender, and implied that they’d better just go talk to the French directly. They did.
The French received the German negotiating party less than graciously. They didn’t see them as coming to negotiate a truce, but rather a surrender. Prince Max assembled an armistice-negotiation party devoid of high-profile German military figures, and headed by a civilian, a forty-three-year-old politician and member of the Catholic Centre Party named Matthias Erzberger. A former schoolteacher, Erzberger had initially supported the war, but in the past year or so had grown sour on it, and had since been speaking out loudly in favor of peace; Prince Max calculated that the French would be more likely to deal respectfully and fairly with such a man than with, say, von Hindenburg. He was wrong. The French delegation, headed by Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch, regarded the prince’s gesture only as a sign of weakness, and Erzberger as a sapling easily trampled.
The German delegation was to meet its French counterparts at a spot in the Compiègne Forest. When its motorcade crossed into French territory, on the evening of November 7, its appearance touched off rumors of an armistice—not negotiations, but an actual, already-existing truce—that raced to the coast and appeared, as fact, in American newspapers the next day. The Germans were not warmly welcomed; the French didn’t do that thing where they spread their arms wide and then kiss you on both cheeks. Rather, Foch wordlessly looked over their credentials and then said: “What is the purpose of your visit? What do you want of me?” Erzberger, flustered, replied that they had come to receive the Allies’ proposals for arriving at an armistice, the implication being that Germany had its own proposals, and the final terms would be a compromise of the two. Foch, though, had no interest in compromise. “I have no proposals to make,” he spat, adding that he was perfectly satisfied to continue the fighting. The Germans were speechless. Finally, another member of their party humbly asked Foch for his conditions for an armistice. “I have no conditions to give you,” Foch replied, haughtily, then added: “Do you wish for an armistice? If so, say so—formally.” He intended to humiliate the Germans, make them grovel. With Germany on the brink of collapse into anarchy—as far as its negotiators knew, it might already have collapsed while they were en route to Compiègne—they were in no position to deny him that, or pretty much anything.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 51