by Gay Talese
They rode the train through the night, which was the safest time to be traveling by rail now that German bomber pilots were playing a greater role in the war; and at daybreak their train pulled into the Gare de l’Est. It was a dark and drizzling Saturday in mid-March. Even before the train had stopped completely, three military policemen had hopped aboard to locate the courier sergeants, to examine their credentials, and then to escort them to a restaurant near the main hall of the terminal, where a representative of the Italian military attaché awaited them for breakfast.
The representative was a young blue-eyed lieutenant who spoke Italian with a Florentine accent. After a peremptory greeting from his chair, and a snap of his fingers toward a waiter, the lieutenant told the sergeants to sit down and order something to eat without delay, for he had very little time to spend with them.
The waiter took the breakfast order, and the lieutenant lit a cigarette without offering one to the sergeants; he stared at them momentarily through the rising smoke, and gradually his attention drifted toward Graziani. The sergeant was a big, jowly, broad-shouldered man who towered over Antonio; in civilian life he had worked as a stevedore in his hometown of Brindisi, a seaport on the Adriatic along the heel of the Italian boot. On the outer sides of Graziani’s wrists, partially visible below the cuffs of his undersized jacket and trench coat, were tattooed a pair of mermaids, one of whom was exposed nearly to the level of her breasts. The lieutenant edged forward, as if to get a closer look, but then, with a slight flaring of his nostrils, he leaned back in his chair. Graziani reeked of garlic.
During the previous day, before joining Antonio at the motor pool, Graziani had been treated to extra helpings of lamb stew, afloat with garlic cloves, by a mess sergeant he knew. Antonio had been subjected to Graziani’s garlicky stench through the entire night on the train, smelling it even through the visored cap that he wore over his face in an unsuccessful attempt to sleep through the spicy draft of Graziani’s snoring.
“Now then,” the lieutenant said, leaning back farther to reach under the table for his briefcase, “the parcel I’m about to give you men must be on the desk of the commandant at Bois de la Ville before noon tomorrow, is that understood?” As the sergeants nodded, the lieutenant removed from his briefcase a thin, wax-sealed cardboard box, similar in size to a box a customer might carry out of a store after purchasing a pair of gloves or a wallet. Undecided on who should carry it, the lieutenant looked first at the big smelly stevedore, then at the perky slim-shouldered tailor, then back to the stevedore.
“Here,” the lieutenant said to Graziani, “guard this with your life.”
Graziani put it at once into an inner pocket of his trench coat, next to his holstered pistol. The lieutenant then gave them a document to sign, making them equally responsible for the safekeeping and delivery of the parcel.
“You both will spend the entire day in this building,” the lieutenant continued. “And you will be out of here on the first train leaving after dark.” He took the document they had signed, examined their signatures, and tucked it back into the briefcase. “Under no circumstances,” the lieutenant went on, “will either of you leave the building, even briefly. There will be no sightseeing in Paris today.” Saying this, he looked pointedly at Antonio, as if reading his mind.
Conceited, very sure of himself, Antonio later wrote of the lieutenant in his diary. A typical Florentine. Before Antonio reached for his cigarettes, he was careful to ask the lieutenant if it was permissible for him to smoke, even though the lieutenant had just lit up another of his own. The lieutenant signaled his approval with a careless wave of his hand and, turning toward the passing waiter, called out to complain about the delay in their breakfast. The waiter soon appeared with coffee, rolls, and three cheese omelets. It was the lieutenant who had ordered the omelets—the sergeants had asked only for coffee—but in his earlier haste with the waiter the lieutenant had mistakenly ordered eggs all around, and the sergeants had preferred not to correct him. Now as the lieutenant took his fork to his omelet, Graziani did likewise—but Antonio, who was allergic to eggs, slowly doubled his omelet over on his plate with his fork and began to pack it down, making it look smaller.
As the others ate quietly, Antonio sipped his coffee, picked at a roll, smoked, and looked around the restaurant. The other tables were occupied mostly by moustachioed French officers wearing horizon-blue uniforms. In the doorway stood a trio of Italian military policemen, dressed in gray-green uniforms with Carabiniere emblems on their sleeves. Pistols hung from their waists, billy clubs were in hand, their feet were shod in highly polished, highly negotiable boots.
Beyond the door of the restaurant Antonio could see crowds of people making their way to the exit, and he fervently wished he were among them. Just a fifteen-minute walk down the Champs-Élysées would satisfy his craving for civility after his lengthy military tour with the likes of Graziani and this insolent lieutenant. Antonio had not expected this courier mission to be a pleasure trip, but he also had not expected to be trapped in the terminal all day with Graziani.
When the lieutenant had finished eating, and looked across the table with nothing to say, Antonio broke the silence by asking about the wartime morale of the Parisians and living conditions in the capital. For some reason, perhaps because he had just had a flashing fantasy of himself riding to work on an AB bus, he posed his questions in French. But it was also possible, as he himself later conceded in his diary, that he had switched to French in an unconscious, though deeply felt, desire to prick the pride of this inflated lieutenant—who, if he spoke French at all, which Antonio doubted, would surely speak it badly. In any case, Antonio would have the pleasurable option of watching this Florentine expose his ignorance of the language.
As it turned out, the lieutenant spoke French perfectly. He shifted into it automatically, and in this language he was even more disagreeable than he had been in Italian.
“My God, Sergeant, are you so unaware of what’s going on in Paris?” he exclaimed, with the convincing inflections of a petulant Frenchman. “There’s panic in the streets, bombing raids almost every day! Just two days ago, one hundred civilians were killed, and many more injured! Which is why I’ve ordered you to remain in the terminal all day, and to go directly to the shelter on the lower level if you hear the air-raid siren. I want you both to stay alive at least until you’ve delivered my parcel to Bois de la Ville.”
Antonio and Graziani remained silent as the agitated lieutenant, looking at his watch, stood and announced that he was late for his next appointment. With a nod, but without saying good-bye, he turned from the table. Antonio watched him nod again as he passed the military policemen near the door. Antonio suspected, rightly, that the lieutenant had stuck Graziani and him with the breakfast check.
It was a long and tedious day in the terminal. Everywhere the sergeants went, policemen followed. When they took a seat on a bench, policemen sat on a bench opposite them, talking quietly among themselves, looking idly around the big hall, but never letting the sergeants out of their sight. Antonio felt sure that if he or Graziani should initiate a conversation with anyone in the station, it would arouse the suspicions of their guardians and the latter would somehow intrude. So Antonio spent the hours browsing through the French journals and magazines he had purchased at the newsstand. Graziani was next to him, sometimes glancing over his shoulder at the headlines and pictures, and occasionally making inane comments, but mostly sitting silently with his thick arms and fishtailed wrists folded across his chest, feeling his gun and the parcel he guarded. Graziani now smelled not only of garlic, but also of the ellipses of raw onion that had covered his omelet.
Having heard the lieutenant’s somber description of wartime Paris, which Antonio accepted with the understanding that Italians usually liked to make things sound worse than they really were, he was pleased to get from the newspapers a sense that the French people were undaunted by the war, that Paris was still the city of light and revelry. Whil
e the newspapers did admit that bombs had been landing, and in one instance had come close to hitting a crowded theater, it was pointed out that the audience had refused to leave, choosing to remain in their seats and sing along with the orchestra that played the “Marseillaise.” Flipping through the pages of one newspaper, Antonio noticed among the advertisements of department stores, retail shops, and ladies’ boutiques an ad placed by Damien’s chief competitor, Kriegck & Company, a men’s shop located at No. 23 Rue Royale. The management at Kriegck was announcing that the firm’s tailoring talents were now expanding into military attire, and offered the finest fabric and cut in French, British, and American officers’ uniforms. Antonio could not imagine that this would please Monsieur Damien.
As Antonio sat reading on the bench, and sometimes got up to stroll around with his escort in tow, he saw many American officers and enlisted men arriving at the terminal, along with the military personnel of other Allied nations. Some lined up at the information booth, or along the platform, or at the Red Cross canteen at the far end of the hall, where snacks and nonalcoholic beverages were offered free of charge. The Americans were as a rule taller and bigger than the other servicemen, and had larger ears. Antonio had yet to meet an American. He had met a few English customers at Damien’s, but never an American, and he understood hardly a word of English. Still, he was curious to hear Americans speak, and he was about to wander over toward the Red Cross canteen, when suddenly he heard thunderous sounds—and Graziani jumped up from the bench yelling, “Bombs! Bombs!”
The military policemen leaped across the aisle and grabbed both sergeants by the arms, just as the sirens sounded, and hundreds of people began to run in all directions. There was another explosion, heavier than before. Blowing their whistles, waving their billy clubs in the air, the policemen elbowed their way through the thick crowds, and soon they had led Antonio and Graziani down the steps into the presumably safer area below. Dozens of civilians and servicemen were already gathered in the lower lobby, shouting in different languages, facing one another in confusion, staring up at the ceiling as if expecting it to come crashing down at any moment. Finally a station attendant with a megaphone announced that the enemy planes had passed. Soon the sirens subsided, and most people in the crowd of two thousand proceeded up the ramps and staircases toward the main hall.
Antonio and Graziani, however, were detained below by two of the three policemen. The third had gone up to telephone the attaché’s office. He returned an hour later, at three-thirty, to say there had been no changes in the sergeants’ plans; they would leave as scheduled on the first of the eastbound trains. It was not expected that the planes would return, since the enemy was not known to stage two raids during a single day. The Germans should also be satisfied with the havoc they had caused already on this day. They had hit a munitions and grenade factory at Le Courneuve, in the northern sector of Paris, the policeman said; but the full circumstances of the attack would not be known to Antonio and Graziani until later in the week, after they had delivered the parcel to Bois de la Ville and had returned to trench duty at Verdun.
The explosions, which had been heard forty miles from the factory, and which had destroyed hundreds of doors and windows, roofs and telegraph poles within a one-mile radius of the target area, had killed or wounded more than six hundred people.
Although the Allied commanders were not yet aware of it, the destruction of the munitions factory, early on that Saturday afternoon, March 14, was the opening salvo of the Kaiser’s big spring offensive aimed at winning the war during the late summer of 1918.
Now equipped with long-range guns that could fire projectiles more than seventy miles, the Germans pounded Paris at will; and a massive German breakthrough northeast of Paris later in March forced the Allies to transfer troops from all parts of the country to block the roads, rail lines, and river crossings leading toward the French capital. No longer could the United States’ commander in chief in France, General Pershing, insist in good conscience that his divisions fight as a unit only under American supervision. As thousands of newly arrived Americans began their training in France, thousands of combat-ready Americans were released by Pershing to be used as Marshal Foch saw fit. Soon Americans were serving under British generals in Picardy and Flanders, and under French generals along the Marne River near Paris, and seventy miles northeast near Reims, and farther east in the Argonne Forest and at Verdun, where Antonio was stationed.
During this time at Verdun, Antonio became acquainted with several Americans, one of them a French-speaking infantry captain from Niagara Falls, New York, who, after touring the elaborate underground retreat of the French colonel, hailed it as a “bon secteur.” But he didn’t stay long, Antonio wrote in his diary in early May 1918. He and the U.S. Second Division were pulled out of Verdun one night and rushed toward Gisors, thirty-five miles northwest of Paris. The Germans are expected to attack there very soon. Every day we hear rumors of a new German attack.
By mid-June, Antonio himself was transferred out of Verdun, temporarily relieved from his headquarters role as an interpreter and reassigned once more to an Italian fighting unit linked to the French Fifth Army. Ever since I went on that courier mission with Graziani, I suspected that my pleasant job as an interpreter would soon come to an end, Antonio wrote. Whenever I think things are going well I know bad things are ahead of me. Graziani was sent out with an infantry battalion two days after he’d delivered that little parcel to General Albricci’s adjutant. Then a week later General Albricci and his entire staff left here for Reims to be under the French command of Gouraud. That was a month ago. Lots of other Italian officers and men were shifted recently near Épernay. Lots of shifting going on. Convoys of trucks packed with troops leave Verdun and head east, toward Paris, or they veer off into the Argonne Forest, where I’m headed.…
A month later he wrote: I’m still in the forest, and it gets hotter by the hour. My unit is an infantry brigade in zone 115 assigned to road-building jobs at night, and fortifying the defenses during the day. The Germans are to the north and east of us, blasting the roads that our convoys use, and every night we’re out there patching things up in the moonlight. Yesterday our trucks brought in a few thousand American infantrymen, and the hot July weather doesn’t agree with them—they’re still outfitted in heavy woolen uniforms with choker collars, and as they march past us we can see them sweating right through the heavy material. They wave at us but few of them smile. They must envy the lighter uniforms we and the French wear. They probably didn’t think they’d be called into action until the winter.…
More than a million Americans were serving in France by midsummer of 1918, and their battered allies were soon resuscitated by the transfusion of fresh blood; indeed, before the end of July—partly because of the errors of the German high command, and partly because of the American presence—there was a definite shift in the momentum of the war. The serious mistake made by the German commanders was in procrastinating after their spring breakthrough, and then pushing ahead in places that overextended their fighting forces beyond their supply and counterdefensive capabilities. Meanwhile the Allies—the French, British, Italian, Belgians, Canadians, Australians, and others—began to fight with more vigor and more conviction that they could win. This uplift in morale did not go unnoticed by the German officers in the field, but it was perhaps articulated best by the German chancellor, Count Georg von Hertling, who noted after the armistice: “At the beginning of July 1918, I was convinced, I confess, that [by] the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals.… We expected grave events in Paris for the end of July. That was on the 15th [of July]. On the 18th, even the most optimistic among us understood that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.”
During these days, Marshal Foch changed to an offensive strategy. At last he had enough manpower to act more aggressively, and he also benefitted from the deterioration of German morale. In early July a number of German POWs w
ho had been captured very recently, and who were very weary of the long war and wanted it to end at any cost, revealed the location where, on July 15, at precisely twelve ten a.m., more than sixteen hundred German batteries would attack French troops in the Champagne region east of Paris. As a result, the French were able to key in on the enemy stations and obliterate them before the Germans could begin their bombardments; the French shelled German gunners, munitions supplies, communications systems, and the German storm troopers standing ready for the scheduled dawn raid.
In addition to the declining German spirit, it was apparent to the Allies that the prisoners they were now taking were much younger than those captured in previous months; the German army—whose years of aggression on two fronts had killed off a high percentage of its most committed soldiers—was now forced to fill its ranks with servicemen who were unwilling or unworthy to serve its objectives. And before summer’s end in 1918, the Allies had won back nearly all the land they had lost in the spring.
Most German units were now outnumbered, outgunned, and often adrift in fields and forests searching for food and shelter while being pursued on all sides by men of hostile nations. A Moroccan division, flanked by American regiments, attacked the Germans south of Reims. A Scottish division joined American and French forces east of Paris to help thwart a last-ditch German attempt at counterattacking along the southern bank of the Marne. And Italian units from Verdun who had been shifted in late summer from the Argonne to the Marne also fought effectively against the Germans. Antonio was among the Italians dispatched here, and his assignment—to help coordinate the delivery of munitions to rows of machine-gunners positioned along the river—afforded him a view of enemy transport boats, each carrying twenty soldiers, being riddled and capsized. The German soldiers who survived the flying bullets swam through the water, along with several horses that had jumped from punctured pontoon bridges now sinking under the weight of German motor vehicles and other equipment. With the German opposition nullified, the Allies continued their drive to the northeast, led by advanced guards of Americans who crossed the Marne on footbridges kept afloat by large empty gasoline tins.