by Gay Talese
The collapse of Russia the year before had allowed the Germans to transfer to the western front many troops who had fought on the eastern front, and thus obtain a numerical advantage there. This prompted the French to recall four of the six divisions, and the British two of the five, that had been loaned to Italy after the Caporetto setback in 1917. If this decision at first did not please the Italians, it did at least flatteringly attest to General Diaz’s own sense of himself as an obstinate commander who could hold the line south of the Alps in 1918 with his fifty Italian divisions (plus three British, two French, and one Czechoslovak) against sixty Austro-Hungarian divisions that were not as well positioned or well armed as Diaz’s forces. The British also transferred men into France from detachments in the Middle East, where Field Marshal Edmund Allenby had been harassing the Turks with increasing vigor, aided by Colonel T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. And the Italians, too, now that their line seemed secure and their munitions industry productive, were called upon to contribute men of their own to the western front. General Diaz complied in January 1918 by releasing the advanced elements of a promised fifty-thousand-man contingent (Antonio had been among the first trainload, accompanying ranks that included eighty other soldiers who spoke French well enough to serve as officers’ interpreters), and he promised to send an even larger number of Italians before the middle of the year.
All of Diaz’s men, organized into fighting units and ready for battle, would become affiliated with larger Allied units and serve under French generals entrusted to defending Verdun, or the Argonne Forest, or the Marne River near Paris, among other vital points, or under those British generals who were in charge north of Paris near Amiens and the Somme River, and on up to the tip of Flanders edging the English Channel. The Italians would thus be bivouacked in dozens of camps in the proximity of French, British, and Belgian troops, as well as troops from French and British colonies and other Allied nations—there were Tunisian, Senegalese, Sudanese, Annamese, Australians, Canadians, Portuguese, Moroccans, and many others. Encamped around the provincial city of Chaumont, far southeast of Paris near the headstreams of the Marne, were the first Americans, including segregated, all-black divisions, such as the 369th Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters.”
This influx of Allied troops into France at this moment, however, would not offset Germany’s numerical advantage. Nor was it merely the enemy’s larger number of troops and guns that made the Allies pessimistic about the outcome. The Germans also had their men in locations that offered the best opportunities for attack, as had been true from the first days of the war—which was why the Allies had been constantly on the defensive. And when the Allies had risked taking the offensive, as the British had in the summer of 1916 at the battle of the Somme, the high cost in lives had been shocking.
Of the first sixty thousand British troops to charge out of their trenches on the first day of that attack, almost every one was killed by German machine-gunners and artillerymen who zeroed in from key vantage points; and as the British casualty figures climbed in the months ahead, the British commanders—hoping to compensate for their losses by staging a dramatic turnabout—prematurely introduced to the Germans a new weapon that had not yet been manufactured in sufficient numbers, or tested enough in combat, to affect the situation decisively.
This large, heavy weapon had been designed and produced with such haste and secrecy in England that, even as several examples were placed under canvas coverings and loaded onto freight trains to be shipped to the front, the British military had overlooked giving them a name—although the conspicuously draped objects could hardly escape the notice of anyone who might see the trains moving through the countryside. Finally, in an attempt to allay people’s curiosity and still guard the secrecy of the weapon from enemy spies, the military spread the word that these were actually “water carriers” en route to British soldiers in the Sinai Desert—and thus the weapon came to be called a “tank.”
The tank did indeed surprise the first German soldiers who saw it in action at the Somme, watching with wonderment and alarm as dozens of the monstrous oval steel vehicles with exploding cannons rolled toward them on caterpillar tracks that scaled bunkers and cut through barbed wire, grinding onward as bullets ricocheted off their thick armor. In one case, three hundred petrified Germans surrendered to a single tank. But soon the German commanders were able to maneuver their units out of the path of the clumsy, slow-moving craft (top speed: not quite four miles per hour), a number of which also broke down because of mechanical failure or the unskilled handling by inexperienced crewmen.
And so the battle of the Somme, like nearly all other confrontations in this war, settled down to be a struggle between men in the mud, infantrymen versus infantrymen—a test of individual will, nerve, and hostility generated for the purpose, as one historian phrased it, of “mutual destruction.” The British gained territory of little strategic value around the river, while more than 400,000 of its men were killed, injured, or taken prisoner. The French units who fought alongside the British suffered more than 200,000 losses, while the German number was estimated at 600,000.
Still, their losses in 1916 at the Somme and also at Verdun did not affect the Germans’ fighting morale in the year ahead, especially as troops from the eastern front began to bolster the western ranks; and when Antonio arrived in France in 1918, the Germans seemed to dominate not only on land, but on the sea and in the air as well. German pilots were now penetrating the Allied aerial defenses, and on January 30, 1918, they bombed Paris, killing forty-five civilians and injuring one hundred. German submarines were sinking Allied military supplies and causing acute food shortages on the British home front, where there was already much anguish and political unrest about the rising death tolls and the necessity of sending more troops to the Continent—while at the same time the government in London recognized the need to retain an adequate number of troops at home to deal with a possible Irish rebellion.
There was bickering between French and British government officials over how much frontline territory each nation was committed to defending, and in what amount and where troops should be deployed. Britain’s senior military officers naturally were most interested in protecting those vital areas of the northwest, from Picardy through Flanders, that backed into the English Channel, which was the source of their soldiers’ supplies—and which might, in desperation, provide their routes of escape. French officers, while dismissing none of the importance that the British attached to defending the Channel, were nonetheless most concerned about defending the roads leading into their capital city.
From the French military interpreters with whom Antonio associated at Verdun—most of them university-educated enlisted men who gossiped like tailors in a workroom—he learned that there were also disagreements between French and American commanders. While there were four United States divisions now training in France, and many more on the way, General Pershing did not consider any of them ready for combat yet; and when a division was ready, he did not want it, or any portion of it, to fight under French or British leadership. Pershing was perhaps worried that America’s late arrivals to the war might be subjected to the most dangerous duty if they were placed under French or British command, but in public he acknowledged nothing of the sort. From his headquarters at Chaumont he explained simply that he wanted each American division to fight as a unit, to remain under its appointed officers, and not to be separated into smaller sections and sent out to be used at the discretion of other officers.
In March, Allied reconnaissance reports and other sources (including recently captured POWs who had been induced into talking) indicated more than ever the probability of a major German attack before the end of the month. In anticipation of this, new groups of Diaz’s promised Italian soldiers (whose officers were instructed to serve loyally under French and German superiors) were rushed into France from Turin. Many trainloads traveled through Lyon and Dijon northward to Verdun, while many others tu
rned westward south of Verdun toward Paris, or headed northwest toward Picardy and Flanders.
At Verdun, Antonio, who technically was assigned to an Italian fighting unit elsewhere within the French Fifth Army, was kept on full-time duty as an interpreter for the Italian officers of the incoming troops, the first three thousand of whom were greeted at the rail depot outside the town by a French military band that played the “Hymn of Garibaldi” and by villagers who handed out bottles of local wine and monk-made cognac that they were eager to bestow on friendly forces rather than risk leaving behind for the Germans. The Italians were then taken by truck to Bois de la Ville, just south of Verdun, where on the following day they would begin relieving French infantry units who had not had a furlough in more than a year, and who now, with the rumors of a new German attack, wasted no time in vacating the area.
The French soldiers who remained were extremely cordial to the Italians, and each morning at Bois de la Ville trucks delivered fresh bread and pastry, cheese, meat, coffee, and cigarettes. The troops from both countries became better acquainted after a few weeks of trench duty; they began to understand a bit of each other’s language, and many engaged in card games during their off-duty hours—the Italians playing for money, the French playing for the Italians’ boots, which were better made than the French ones: more durable, less porous, of softer leather, more comfortable during long marches. The Italians who lost at cards either exchanged their boots with the Frenchmen or procured extra pairs in appropriate sizes from Italian supply sergeants, who cooperated if adequately compensated in lire or francs. The superiority of Italian bootmakers, which in future decades would be acknowledged worldwide, was recognized early by French soldiers.
Daily at midmorning, Antonio rode in a staff car with an Italian major and captain from Bois de la Ville to the Verdun headquarters of an elderly and stout French colonel who had been lured out of retirement by the war, and whose father (shown in a small sepia photograph on the colonel’s desk) had been a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Father and son had the same type of moustache, a walrus with the ends twisted up into points. While the Italians tended to be clean-shaven, most of the French officers grew moustaches, a high percentage of them styled in imitation of Marshal Foch’s, which was a bushier walrus than the Verdun colonel’s, and not so pointed on the ends. Officers serving prolonged duty on freezing days outdoors usually had tiny icicles dangling from their moustaches.
The colonel’s office was located far underground, and was reached by a wooden staircase that descended nearly forty feet below a line of trenches. It was a spacious office, about thirty by thirty feet, with a twelve-foot-high timber ceiling and a boarded floor; enclosed within mud-plaster walls, it was brightened by electric light, and it was furnished with antiques and other pieces that soldiers had picked from out of the rubble of private homes and public buildings shelled during the last battle in the area, two years before. The colonel’s desk was a refectory table from a monastery; and his high-backed wooden armchair, which was missing one arm, retained part of the brass plate of a noble family’s escutcheon. In front of the colonel’s desk were four mismatched rustic chairs for his guests, and in one corner of the room was a sturdy chest-high table with shelves that held bottles of liqueur below and a gramophone above. Hanging from the wall behind the desk were maps of the eastern sectors of France within a hundred-fifty-mile radius of Verdun, with different-colored pins in the maps marking the locale of Allied and German strongholds. On the colonel’s desk, in addition to the photograph of his father, his wife, and his daughter, and a postcard-sized flag of the French Republic, were stacks of cablegrams, military documents, a silver bowl filled with pipes, and two black telephones.
Accustomed as Antonio was to the small, putrid, rat-infested trenches and dugouts of the Italian front, he could marvel at the colonel’s agreeable and generous use of space so deeply burrowed in the dirt—space that not only accommodated the colonel’s office, but extended on both sides of it to several other rooms reached by a network of tunnels. There was a weapons room, a clothing-supply room, a laundry room with caldrons and a fireplace for boiling water. There was a kitchen with pots and pans hanging on the walls, and a bathroom with toilets. There were rooms with cots, complete with blankets, sheets, and pillows—these were bedrooms for the duty officers who worked around the clock overseeing the twelve hundred riflemen and machine-gunners who took turns manning the trenches above, which were reached by ladders.
The trenches were also commodious, many of them split-level. On the upper level, standing on timber platforms supported by vertical beams, were gunmen on the alert, leaning behind sandbags, presumably facing the direction of the unseen enemy. Relaxing below them were off-duty soldiers, sitting on boxes or barrels around wooden-crate tables playing cards or talking, or curled up in their sleeping bags along the front edge of the wall between the beams and the extended ladders leading up to the platforms. Here and there, cut into the stone-pitted walls, were recesses for wood-burning stoves and nooks for storing food, medical supplies, rain gear, blankets, barrels of water, and boxes of mosquito netting. There was something all-seasonal, almost permanent, about these trenches and the colonel’s subterranean development below. The French forces had been stymied for so long at Verdun that they apparently had decided to make the best of it and domesticate the dirt, as if this hollowness might well represent their final resting place. The old fortress a mile away was no longer a source of protection. It had been obsolete since the end of the Franco-Prussian War, and now it was abandoned altogether as a conspicuous and vulnerable target for heavy enemy artillery. So the French now wait for the Germans in this big excavation, and in many other excavations like this one all across the defense lines of Verdun, Antonio wrote in his diary. I’m always amazed when I walk down all those steps and see the colonel and his staff directing the war from within that maze of rooms and tunnels. But I guess it’s not surprising that a place like this would be built in the nation that built the Paris Métro.
28.
Early in March 1918, Antonio was sent with a French and an Italian captain twenty miles west of Verdun into the Argonne Forest to expedite the arrival of the latest trainload of Italians. Nearly two thousand infantrymen would join six thousand French reservists at a camouflaged base near a point where the enemy was soon expected to advance. This was outside the forest along a road that led west into the cathedral city of Reims. It was in the Argonne that two of Garibaldi’s grandsons, Bruno and Costante, had been killed while serving with a legion of red-shirted Italian volunteers supporting France before Italy entered the war. Now in 1918, as the Italian infantrymen lined up in a clearing for the first day’s inspection, the French major in command welcomed them in a speech that paid homage to the two young men, and also to General Garibaldi as symbolic of the strengthened Franco-Italian alliance.
While Antonio stood nearby to do the interpreting, the major urged the assembled Italians to enhance this relationship further in the battles ahead; then he asked for a moment of silence in memory of the Italians who had already died in the war. At the close of the ceremony, a French band played the “Hymn of Garibaldi.” Antonio had never heard it played in all his years in southern Italy, but now on the French front he had heard it twice already. Garibaldi was clearly something of a hero in this country, most likely for supporting France on the battlefield in 1870 during its war lost to Prussia. Victor Hugo had in fact remarked, with more admiration than accuracy, that Garibaldi was the only general in the French army not defeated in that war.
After a week in the Argonne Forest, Antonio and another Italian sergeant named Graziani were assigned to an important courier mission in Paris; the senior Italian military attaché there had a new set of directives to be circulated to the various Italian units in the field, and Antonio and Graziani were ordered to take a train to Paris’s Gare de l’Est to receive the documents that pertained to the Italians in the Verdun area, and then to deliver them to the Italian comma
nding officer at Bois de la Ville.
Although this would be a fast trip, Antonio was nonetheless excited at the prospect of returning to Paris, where he had not been since his abrupt departure in August 1914. And his nostalgia became focused in a specific way when, while waiting at the motor pool, he saw a long row of brightly colored Paris buses parked in the woods. These buses had apparently been used during the recent emergency to accelerate the transfer of extra French troops into the Argonne, much as Paris taxicabs had been a means of rushing reinforcements toward the Marne River to help repel the first German attack of the war. But now these neglected buses, unsuited to render further military service within the forest’s rocky and often roadless terrain, were waiting out the war under the trees, and they created for Antonio an odd but gladdening remembrance of Paris in peacetime—especially when he noticed above the windshield of one bus a sign bearing the letters “AB.”
He used to take an AB bus each morning to work. He would board it before eight at the Place de la Contrescarpe, near his Latin Quarter apartment, cross the Seine, and then get off and walk to the Rue Royale and Damien’s tailor shop. As Antonio continued to stare at the bus in the woods he imagined it moving along festive boulevards, past familiar buildings and landmarks, past cafés with soapy wet sidewalks and aproned men pushing brooms, past top-hatted carriage drivers and businessmen in motorcars and people walking dogs, past couples holding hands and strolling through a spring morning scented with the fragrance of flower shops, bakeries, blossoming gardens and parks, past schoolchildren standing on corners waiting to cross the street, past white-gloved gendarmes who, with upraised hands and waving arms, orchestrated the movement and flow of each new day. Antonio was so absorbed in his reverie that it took a weighty tap on the shoulder from Graziani to turn him around and alert him to the fact that their driver, in a mud-splattered camouflaged truck, was waiting to take them to the rail depot.