Foch’s terms were severe; he recognized the strength of his bargaining position, and the desperation of Germany’s. He also wanted to make sure that Germany was rendered so weak that it would not be in a position to fight again at the end of whatever armistice period was agreed to, and so impotent that it would be in no position to resist any terms that might come out during future peace-treaty talks. He demanded that Germany immediately evacuate all occupied territo- ries—including Alsace and Lorraine, which it had annexed nearly a half century earlier; that all Allied prisoners of war immediately be liberated and returned to their units, despite the fact that no German POWs would be liberated immediately; and the surrender of specific numbers of materiel—guns, aeroplanes, ships, etc.—including all U-boats. And they reserved the right to issue further demands in the future, including reparations. Oh, and the Kaiser had to go. The French gave these terms to the German delegation at around eleven o’clock on the morning of November 8, with a deadline of seventy-two hours hence. Erzberger asked that a cease-fire take effect immediately, to spare soldiers’ lives while he secured approval for the terms. Foch refused. He intended to press the Germans as hard as possible until they gave him every last thing he asked for; never mind that many of the lives that might have been spared in those last seventy-two hours were French. And British. And American.
The Kaiser abdicated the next day and fled to the Netherlands; good thing Germany hadn’t invaded it, too, as the original Schlieffen Plan had called for. The German government considered the terms, but there was little to discuss, beyond the fact that in some cases Germany did not actually possess as many of this or that as the Allies demanded they surrender. On the night of November 10, they radioed their delegation in Compiègne, authorizing them to sign the agreement; it was signed, in a railroad car, shortly after five the following morning. Erzberger, who hadn’t wanted to be a part of the delegation at all and had been thoroughly demeaned during the “negotiations,” attempted, at the last moment, to salvage some dignity for himself and his country with a brief statement written for the occasion: “The German people, which held off a world of enemies for fifty months, will preserve their liberty and unity despite every kind of violence. A nation of seventy million people suffers, but it does not die.” Foch, refusing to grant Erzberger or any other German even the slightest comfort, merely replied, “Très bien,” the 1918 French equivalent of “Whatever.” The Germans filed out, wordlessly; no one shook hands. Three years later, a right-wing German terrorist death squad assassinated Erzberger for his role in the affair. They literally shot the messenger.
Officially, the armistice was signed at 5:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918; for some reason, though, the cease-fire was set to occur six hours hence, at 11:00 a.m., the original seventy-two-hour deadline. I don’t know why this was done, except, perhaps, for symmetry. That symmetry carved out for the First World War the singular distinction of terminating at a precise moment, one that everyone knows, even if they know nothing else about the conflict. It also carved out an additional six hours of fighting, six hours in which hundreds of men died. Of course, that pales compared to the thousands—German, British, Australian, Canadian, Italian, African, American, and French—who died in the last seventy-two hours of the war, thousands who would have been spared had Foch been moved by Erzberger’s fervent plea to cease firing immediately while he procured Germany’s approval of the Allies’ severe terms.
But he hadn’t been.
“You said you wanted to see what the war was like,” I said to George Briant that afternoon in September, 2004. “But by the time you got to the hospital, you’d already seen what the war was like, hadn’t you?”
He laughed. “I saw all of it!” he said. “North, south, all directions.”
“So why did you want to go back to the front after that?”
“I don’t know—it’s just in you. It’s something that’s in you. You have no fear. You’re facing the guns, you know it. Young as you are, you know you can get killed. So there you are. I went back again. The guy that passes you to go back home, he says, ‘Look, I ain’t supposed to pass you. You’re supposed to go back home. . . .’” But he knew young Briant would find some way or other to get back to the front; so he passed him. “And when I went back, many a day I realized that I was a fool to go back. Because I risked my head so many times it was pitiful.”
He had missed the latter part of the Aisne-Marne, and all of Saint-Mihiel, but the Meuse-Argonne—where the 76th was when he caught up with them—was a place where one could easily risk one’s head. The 76th had already helped take Montfaucon, and afterward set up its command post on the slope’s north face, which act earned it special attention from the Germans. According to the Roll of Honor’s “Brief Narrative,” around the time George Briant returned, Battery B and the rest of the regiment’s 1st Battalion were set up just east of the village of Cunel, where Bill Lake’s Wild West Division had also spent time, and where Moses Hardy’s Bearcats would very soon. Battery B and the rest of the 1st Battalion were there primarily to support infantry attacks on nearby German strongholds, villages like Bantheville and Aincreville and Clery-le-Grand and Clery-le-Petit, and a troublesome stretch of woods called the Bois de Babimont. From there they would move northeast to help infantry cross the Meuse River at Dun-sur-Meuse (literally, “Dun on the Meuse”), the town where, twenty-seven years later, finally liberated from a very different breed of Germans, someone would think to append the civilian Familles Salomon to the local World War I monument.
The fighting was hard; the Germans weren’t giving away anything at that point. Perhaps they sensed the end was near; perhaps they feared that they didn’t have anything left to go home to, or at least not anything they would recognize. Or perhaps they were just keeping their heads down, hoping that if they fought really hard, their dedication might pay off somehow. Whatever the reason, every one of those villages and scraps of forest had to be wrested from tightly clenched German hands and then held firm, with tightly clenched American hands, in the face of the inevitable counterattack. So did the patches of ground the batteries had to seize, and hold, so that those villages and scraps of forest could be taken to begin with. The Germans threw everything they had at the Americans: high explosives, shrapnel, gas, bullets, grenades, sharpened steel. “Everybody’s shooting at you,” George Briant recalled, with another of those thank-God-that’s-done laughs. “I got gassed—let’s see—maybe once or twice,” he said. It made him feel weak, “like there’s something wrong with you,” but that wasn’t the worst. The worst was the relentless onslaught of H.E. shells. “It’s ‘kill, kill, kill, kill,’” he said. “The dog kills the cat, the cat kills the dog.”
“Let’s go, Papa!” his wife called out; I don’t know if he willfully ignored her or just didn’t hear, but he laughed at the lethal absurdity that is war. One time, he told me, during a bombardment, he made for “a clump of bushes about fifty feet [around] . . . I figured I’d go behind it. The shrapnel flying through there, the trees would stop it, you see?”
I’d come across a similar tale before. In the book Company K, a lieutenant orders a sergeant to take some men and head out to “an isolated clump of trees. ‘That grove should be a good place for a squad of machine gunners, if the Germans should attack.’”
“I wouldn’t do that, Lieutenant,” the sergeant, a career Army man, cautions. “That clump stands out like a sore thumb. The Germans are sure to figure we’ll put men there, and shell the hell out of it—I been expecting that all morning.”
“I’m sorry,” the officer replies, “but I think you understand my orders.”
The sergeant takes the squad out; the Germans shell them for twenty minutes. The lieutenant hurries out there afterward, finds the sergeant “lying across a fallen tree, his body ripped from belly to chin.” All the men but one are dead; the lone survivor “stood upright looking down at his hand, from which the fingers had been shot away.” Before the war, he had been a concert pianist.
“I’ve had enough!” his wife called out; but he was smiling. It seemed to me that, pregnant with emotions and sensations as these memories of his were, he wasn’t doing too badly with them. Indeed, the cues—occasional smiles, laughter, the urgency in his tone—led me to believe that it was in fact doing him good to air these things out. It didn’t occur to me that these questions of mine might take him someplace he really shouldn’t go. So I asked him a few more, and he answered them, just fine; and then I asked: “Do you remember the last night of the war? The last day of the war?”
“Yeah,” he replied, his voice seeming to drop an octave or two. “It was a funny thing. The night before, you understand?”
He took a pause, appeared to be struggling to remember, or at least to convey the memory adequately. It didn’t help that Germaine Briant was shouting: “That’s enough!” I leaned forward, straining to hear what her husband was trying to say. He appeared to be doing the same thing. Irma and Mrs. Briant were now squabbling in the background; Irma told her godmother that if she didn’t quiet down, she’d wheel her out of there. “You’re not going to take me back, ’cause I’ll come right back!” Germaine spat.
Her husband closed his eyes for a moment. “I have to remember this right, now,” he said. “The night before . . . the night before, it was us that . . . us . . . we fired—we knew the war was going to end, you understand?”
“That’s enough!” his wife repeated, ever louder. Just a few minutes earlier, she’d let loose a loud, histrionic sigh, to indicate that she was terribly bored; now, apparently, she’d reached her limit.
“So we suddenly—they had the artillery shells laying on the ground, so they could shoot them back at us,” he explained. “We shot all the shells, all the ammunition, shot it at them that night. So we shot at them—”
“That’s enough on Papa’s mind!” Mrs. Briant shrieked.
He turned, looked at her for a second or two, then turned back to me. “We shot all our ammunition at them that night. And during that night, they shot what they had at us. In other words, instead of moving it, we emptied it at each other. I’ll always—there was more men unnecessarily killed—I’ll always remember that, as long as I live.”
Germaine started to sputter. “Papa’s mind!” she cried.
“Why?” he asked. “Why kill the last man? What did you gain by killing the last man?”
“You knew the war was ending,” I said.
He nodded, gravely. “Yeah. But that’s what they did.” He dropped his head. His lips pursed, bitterly. He turned away, looked down for an instant; but then, suddenly, his head snapped back up. He looked at me—and smiled. “What’s she want?” he asked me, laughing.
“Shut up, already!” his wife moaned. I turned the camera off for a moment, swapped out the tape. Mrs. Briant moved closer to her husband and threw an arm in front of him.
“So you were telling me about the last night of the war,” I said to Mr. Briant, the camera rolling again. “That you emptied all your shells, and they emptied all their shells . . .”
“Yeah,” he said. “We went out to see what damage was done on the outside, because we were hiding in the woods, you see? And we got to the edge of the woods to see what happened. And we got out there, walked along the edge of the woods, and there were dead Americans that took shelter at the edge of the woods.” He’d stumbled over the word “Americans,” made himself repeat it. “And that was exactly where the enemy was shooting at, you see? They knew they were going to hide there.” His wife tried to protest, but he wouldn’t stop now. “There were more American soldiers killed there than at one time during the war, because they hid in—they hid in the wrong place, you see? And the enemy knew they were going to hang there. And at twelve o’clock at night, the enemy opened fire, you see?” He swept an arm in front of him. “And all the edge of those woods there, they fired. And there was American soldiers hiding all up in those woods there.” He shook his head. “It was a sad affair, when I went along there and saw these men laying there, dying—six, seven, eight at that time. And I—I cried for their parents. That was sad.”
And he cried—again, now, eighty-six years hence, in that common room in Hammond, Louisiana. He turned away, narrowed his eyes and tensed his lips—and sobbed. “The last day of the war!” he gasped. “They sacrificed their life!”
“You think it’s good for him, this?” his wife asked their goddaughter. “Now see what’s coming on!”
“Papa,” Irma said, “if it’s upsetting you, we will quit, OK?”
He looked at her, and wept, rubbed an ancient hand on his ancient scalp and fell back into his chair. “It was too sad,” he uttered over his wife’s protests, and leaned forward again, looked at me, shook his head in grief; it was almost more than I could bear. “The last—the last night of the war. Such—these fine, big healthy men—had to lose their lives!” He cried so that his body shook, and fell back again, deflated.
“That’s the real stuff!” Germaine shouted. “You’re coming up with the real stuff. Y’all shouldn’t do that. That’s a mortal sin!”
I asked him if any of his friends had been among the dead; he didn’t seem to hear me. “That’s so sad,” he said. “It’s too sad.” He sat up again, still weeping, and looked right into my eyes. “On the edge of the woods, figuring they were safe—and they sacrificed their lives without knowing it . . . I had nothing to do.”
And then George Briant stopped weeping as suddenly as he’d started. “I had nothing to do,” he said, and that was it. He was done crying. His voice reverted to normal; so did his expression. You couldn’t tell he’d been sobbing just a few seconds earlier; in fact, his mood was better than it had been all afternoon. “At eleven o’clock exactly, everything stopped dead,” he said. “No more fire. It was all over.”
“And what did you do at eleven o’clock?”
“Nothing.” He laughed. “We had nothing to do.” It was the opposite of what he’d meant when, just a minute or so earlier, he’d said, “I had nothing to do,” by which he’d meant: There was nothing I could do for them. Now: “We had nothing to do”—nothing more needed to be done. “You put the guns and cannons in a safe place in case, you never know if it would start again, you see,” he said. “But after eleven o’clock it was all over . . . Yeah, everything looked funny.” He smiled. “You looked like you was in a new land. You couldn’t believe that everything is quiet. You just didn’t believe you were there. It was a different place. Everything is so different during war . . .”
“All the sorrow is unnecessary!” Germaine Briant declared.
He said: “It’s so funny to walk out in the open. I mean, it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real, you’re out there walking in the open, and nobody’s shooting at you. You couldn’t believe that! But that’s what happened. Eleven o’clock. Eleven o’clock, the last shot was fired, the last man was killed.”
And most accounts I’ve read, or heard personally, are pretty much like that. There was firing; then, suddenly, there was none. In many of those accounts, at 11:01 a.m., doughboys and German soldiers poured into No Man’s Land and celebrated with the men who had been their enemies exactly one minute earlier—shaking hands, dancing, sharing pictures, exchanging souvenirs. Even Eugene Lee, who had lost his best friend just hours earlier to a German shell—even he recalled doing so.
But George Briant did not. For one thing, his battery, like most artillery, was not within sight of German soldiers. “We celebrated by walking around,” he told me; but that wa
s it. They could have gone in search of German troops with whom they might rejoice, but as far as he was concerned, at least, “we were still enemies.”
I started to ask him about his experience in the Army of Occupation, but by then Germaine Briant seemed to be edging close to hysteria. When I asked her husband about the German prisoners he saw, his wife squawked at their goddaughter: “You tell him he better quit before I have a . . . a . . . a suit on his hands!”
This made her husband laugh. “I’ll tell you later,” he said to me.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 52