The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  At Cheppy, where there is now a Missouri Memorial, the 35th Division, assisted by Colonel George S. Patton’s 304th Tank Brigade (Patton was wounded here), smashed through the Hindenburg Line. Varennes, where in 1791 Louis XVI and his family were captured in their coach, fell to the Americans by about 2 p.m., with the help of infantry, Renault tanks, and the 28th National Guard Division, known as the Pennsylvanians.

  Hence the Pennsylvania Monument, a courtyardlike structure of white stone and concrete with a dark bell on an eagle-cornered plinth. Its motto runs: THE RIGHT IS MORE PRECIOUS THAN PEACE. It’s a very pretty monument. Had I fought in the 28th, or wished to show appreciation for its men, I would doubtless be pleased. As it is, my preference on war memorials is this: Give me an honest graveyard anytime. Or give me that foul, barbed-wire-toothed hole in the ground, Vauquois. I don’t want any sentiments.

  11

  At the beginning of the war, taking and holding territory up to the Meuse River involved “the toughest fighting” faced by Germany’s northern armies. Now defending that ground against the advancing Allies, Ludendorff tried to return the favor. On September 27–28 he reinforced the sector with artillery and 20 new divisions. (Meanwhile he and Hindenburg informed the kaiser that it was most definitely time for an armistice.)

  In 2018 a car carried me smoothly across the Meuse, which from the bridge appeared as flat and reflective as a pond. Time, work, and capital had smoothed out this place—twice. Doubtless there were relics to find not far off the road. American losses here had been horrendous, inciting brutal adaptations. For example, it cost “several thousand casualties” for one division to reduce Côte Dame Marie, “a central strongpoint of the Kriemhilde Stellung.” And so we read of “squirrel squads” a hundred yards behind the first wave, to shoot snipers in the trees; of soldiers who bayoneted each German corpse to make sure it wasn’t faking death.

  The historian Edward Lengel describes what happened when a certain Major General Morton sent the 116th Regiment against “the worst death trap east of the Meuse,” meeting German machine guns, artillery, and the new Fokker strafing planes: the heavy casualties “seemed to indicate that a change of tactics was in order, but Morton could think of only three solutions—more artillery, more men, and greater drive.”

  Pershing, his drive temporarily stalled, resumed the attack on October 4, fighting “hard.” On October 29, the enemy withdrew finally to the west bank of the Meuse—yet another victory for all time. (Hitler’s troops would return exactly there in 1940.)

  All told, 1.2 million American soldiers suffered 122,000 casualties from the beginning of the offensive to the armistice. For me, at least, this detail casts a certain chill on the following sententious words from a book about the offensive: “Midwestern farm boys had become men. Men had become soldiers. And soldiers had become comrades.” Well, they were all comrades here, for a fact. Had their war actually ended all wars, their deaths would have felt less futile to me.

  But let’s be cheerful: Back when the War would surely end all wars, the Allies broke through at Salonika, finally defeating the Bulgarians, and the Italians penetrated the Austrian lines.

  On October 26, Ludendorff, who wished to fight on, discovered that his resignation had been accepted. On October 30 the kaiser, laying the groundwork for a narrative about a leftist-Jewish plot, said: “I would not dream of abandoning the throne because of a few hundred Jews and a thousand workers.” He now got an even nastier shock than Ludendorff, being forced to flee that crude, cramped old wooden crown with its ribs like the remnant of a dissected onion and the squat cross on top. He lived in the Netherlands until his death in 1941—just long enough to enjoy a German honor guard posted outside his moated residence.

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  On November 1, the Germans fell back to their final position on the Hindenburg Line. On November 6, the Allies finally reduced Sedan, and sometime that month the Americans liberated Verdun!

  And so finally came the armistice: November 11, 1918.

  The event certainly deserves a celebratory citation. Here it is, courtesy of Corporal Harold Pierce, 28th Division, Second Army: “It seems so foolish to keep up the killing till the last minute. But the killing the artillery does is so impersonal and miles away. He [sic] cannot see the tortured, horrible looks of the slaughtered or feel the remorse the doughboy feels when he sees a man he has shot.”

  The Harvest

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  What brought about the happy victory? Shall we be reductionist? We could thank General Haig for attrition, or say “hurrah” to the Americans, or praise Marshal Foch’s unifying command, or speak of technical developments, organizational learning, accidents. We all center the world around our own preoccupations. Lawrence of Arabia for his part asserted that “when Damascus fell, the Eastern War—probably the whole war—drew to an end.” My own taste is drawn to Weapons and Tactics’ particular simplification: “In 1918 tanks won a great war.”

  What then did the Great War accomplish? At least 8.5 million belligerents died, not to mention a mere 12 million or 13 million civilians. Some optimist somewhere must have pointed out that it kept the population down. The survivors had their own difficulties. In the words of All Quiet on the Western Front, “The war has ruined us for everything.”

  Am I too cynical about this war? In October 1918, a Croatian insurrectionist cried out: “The people rise in order to deliver freedom with their blood and over the whole world Wilson’s principles enjoy victory.” An independent Czechoslovakia came into being that same month; soon after, a free Poland. But in these nations, and likewise in the “new Romania swollen with ex-Hungarian territory,” one-third of the people were deemed ethnically “other.” (One result: continuing hatreds and atrocities.)

  A hundred years later, Croatia had flickered through bygone Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia had split; Poland, Hungary, and Romania had gone in and out of bondage, altered shape, and begun to swell with right-wing nationalisms. I see no guarantee of stability in their respective futures; in their pasts I cannot avoid seeing the Great War’s heirs, Hitler and Stalin.

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  The victors did everything possible to prevent German rearmament. They did not stop there. Churchill, acknowledging that “the mortal need was Security at all costs and by all methods,” still called certain terms of the Treaty of Versailles “malignant and silly . . . Nothing was reaped except ill-will.”

  It is human nature to demand vengeance for the killings of one’s own, and the provocations of Germany’s ruthlessness approached intolerability. The British diplomat Harold Nicholson reminds us that shortly after commencing peace negotiations with President Wilson, the Germans torpedoed the Irish mail boat Leinster, drowning more than 450 civilians. “This eleventh hour atrocity was fresh in people’s minds,” writes Nicholson. A month after the armistice, prominent British newspapers were calling for the kaiser’s execution. Yet whatever its causes and excuses, the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, was not diplomacy’s finest hour. “The historian, with every justification, will come to the conclusion that we were very stupid men,” Nicholson remarks. “I think we were.”

  Possibly worst of all was the treaty’s infamous Article 231, the so-called War Guilt Clause, which made Germany accept all the blame. As late as 2001, Gary Sheffield insisted, “The German leadership wanted hegemony in Europe, and was prepared to go to war to achieve it.” And so the War Guilt Clause “was, therefore, fundamentally correct.” Whether or not that was so (what about Austria-Hungary?), it was certainly impolitic. For his part, Hitler in his speeches hammered away at the treaty and the traitorous Germans who had agreed to it. “You felt like dashing your head against the wall in despair over such people! They did not want to understand that Versailles was a shame and a disgrace.” (Well, he sure straightened them out.)

  Guderian, plausibly believing the Treaty of Versailles as being “conceived in a spirit of hate,” was one of those who illicitly defied it. Lacking the opportunity to peer inside a tank before 1928,
he made do with ersatz, drilling for the next war with tractors. “With this machine we essayed our tank company tactics,” he wrote in his magnum opus, Achtung-Panzer!

  He was on the spot in May 1940, urging Hitler to rush armored tank divisions back across the Meuse ahead of infantry and artillery. Over ground that had so recently sucked down the blood of General Pershing’s soldiers drove the new “lightning war”—the Blitzkrieg. As in Schlieffen’s day, the watchword was haste. There was so much to do: liquidate hostages and Jews in Poland, prepare to invade England, then turn against the gullible Russian ally.

  The First World War would be done over. The French were stunned. The Parisian filmmaker Ludovic Cantais, who had three great-uncles die in the First World War and a grandfather who lost an eye fighting it but gained a lifelong alcohol problem, told me: “The Second World War, it was not even like a war for the French—it was so quick.” What he said next was particularly thought-provoking, because I had read so much about the allegedly self-deluded “appeasement” of Hitler by the Western democracies in 1938–1939. Hindsight’s prophets loved to point out that resisting Hitler early could have saved lives and treasure.

  Cantais said, “The First World War traumatized people so much. That was why they absolutely did not want to go to fight Hitler; they were so traumatized. The generation of 1914 was decimated, so they did not want to go. The conditions in the trenches were really sordid. There were rats, disease, fear. These young men, who had just started their own families, they came back crazy because of these crazy conditions they had lived in.”

  On June 22, 1940, Hitler, having taken France in six weeks behind Guderian’s Panzer tank divisions and strafing aircraft, forced the French to sign a humiliating armistice in Marshal Foch’s old railroad carriage, the very same one in which the armistice of 1918 had been signed, right there in the bucolic Compiègne Forest.

  It may well be that no war is ever over. My French interviewees expressed horror when I asked when the next war with Germany might occur. But our species’ abominable record suggests that sometime in the next 800 or even 200 years (if human beings persist on this earth so long) there will be another one, at which time the iron ghosts of the trenches will come shrieking back.

  JASON WILSON

  “The Greatest”

  from The Washington Post Magazine

  It’s just after dark in Vancouver’s downtown financial district, on a chilly autumn evening, and I’m gazing up at the twisting, triangular, neo-futurist Trump International Hotel & Tower, rising 63 stories and 616 feet into the air. If you’re impressed by tall things, the Trump tower is pretty tall. But then I glance across West Georgia Street, at the Living Shangri-La tower, rising 62 stories but standing 659 feet tall. Which means that the Living Shangri-La is the tallest building here. For someone like Donald Trump who is obsessed with superlatives, it must be tough to have your name emblazoned on the second-tallest building in Vancouver.

  From where I stand, the Trump International Hotel & Tower is not particularly welcoming. It’s 7:30 p.m., but I see very few lights on the higher floors, and I wonder who lives in the darkened condominiums in the upper parts of the tower. Below the condos, the hotel occupies the first 15 floors. All over the outside of the property, there are large white bloblike sculptures, as if a giant sneezed.

  I’m paying nearly $300 per night to stay in one of the 147 five-star hotel rooms in the tower. When I arrived to check in, I gawked at the two Lamborghini Diablos parked in front of the hotel entrance. After I got to my room, I tried on the robe embroidered with TRUMP, along with the Trump-branded shower cap, in my marble-tiled bathroom. At the Trump Champagne Lounge, I ate a “delectable playful bite”—a trio of not-all-that-delectable toothpicked sliders—and ended up only ordering a cheap by-the-glass sparkling wine, since bottles on the Trump Champagne Lounge’s list range from $150 to $1,350. Throughout the lounge, which is interspersed with pillars that look like huge, gold-plated Jenga stacks, everyone else seemed to be speaking Chinese.

  Earlier, I had a swim in the strange indoor pool that, late at night, transforms into a Vegas-style nightclub called Drai’s; I draped a towel on an upholstered lounge banquette. Later, I was given very professional, very invigorating massage treatment at The Spa by Ivanka Trump™ (which “personifies her lifestyle, embarking on every endeavor with energy and passion, but always taking the time to pause, heal and recharge”). At the spa, a woman with an Eastern European accent asked me about my “intention” for today’s treatment. “Calm, restore, or energize?” she asked.

  “Energize?” I answered.

  The notion of my “intention” had, frankly, been nagging at me. Not just at The Spa by Ivanka Trump™, but existentially. Over the past six weeks, I’d been traveling to Trump vacation properties around the world. I’d been to the Trump golf resort near Aberdeen, Scotland, to Trump Winery in Virginia, to the Trump hotel and tower in Panama City, and now here in Vancouver. Before that tour, over the summer, I’d visited the former Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.

  I wasn’t traveling as an investigative reporter or a salacious Michael Wolff type. As a food and travel writer, my role as a contributor to the Washington Post has always been a minor, lighter-weight one. I’m someone who roves around and writes about craft beverages or artisan cheese or cigar culture or Spanish tapas or Scandinavian culinary movements—someone you’d turn to for a cocktail recipe or a bar recommendation, not political commentary. But at this point, Trump has been written about in every other genre of journalism: political, entertainment, financial, fashion, sports. Why not look at Trump, promiser of luxury experiences, through the eyes of a travel writer? My plan was to sleep in the various Trump hotels, experience the Trump amenities, wear the Trump robe and shower cap, eat in the Trump restaurants, drink in the Trump bars—no differently than when I anonymously visit and review any other establishment in the course of a travel or food article. Given the state of things, this might have been naive, but that’s what I ended up doing.

  On my second night in Vancouver—my final stop on this journey—I’m planning to eat at Mott 32, the “luxury Chinese” spot on the ground floor of the Trump hotel. Just as I’m about to walk back inside for dinner, a black SUV drives past with its passenger window lowered. A young woman leans out, waving two middle fingers and screaming at the top of her lungs: “F— you, Trump! F— you! F— you! F— you, Trump!” It’s like the primal shriek of a banshee. I am one of only two people standing outside the entrance, so it feels like much of her hate is being directed at me. Since I am a paying customer here, perhaps that’s her point.

  After the SUV cruises on, the street is quiet again. A Trump employee standing nearby shrugs and opens the lobby door for me. His body language is similar to that of the bartender I chatted with at the Trump Champagne Lounge earlier, who grimaced when the name “Donald Trump” was uttered. “The property is actually owned by TA Global,” the bartender said, making clear that the Trump brand is licensed. “It’s like a franchise.”

  The $360 million hotel and condominium development was, in fact, funded by 38-year-old Joo Kim Tiah, whose family presides over the Malaysia-based financial and real estate empire TA Global. It’s not clear exactly how much Tiah pays in fees to the Trump Organization. When the tower opened in February 2017, it was the first new Trump property since he assumed the presidency and announced he was stepping aside from day-to-day control to let his sons run the Trump Organization. Eric, Donald Jr., and even Tiffany joined Tiah at the ribbon cutting, along with a group of protesters singing “O Canada” and carrying signs reading DUMP TRUMP outside amid the white blobs.

  Who was not in attendance was the mayor of Vancouver and other prominent officials. “Trump’s name and brand have no more place on Vancouver’s skyline than his ignorant ideas have in the modern world,” Mayor Gregor Robertson wrote in a letter to Tiah. A city council member, Kerry Jang, called the tower “a beacon of intolerance” and said it had “bad karma.”

  At
Mott 32, the dining room is completely full and I’m seated at the bar. Mott 32 is the North American outpost of a famous Hong Kong restaurant, which has another location forthcoming in Bangkok. A critic for the Globe and Mail newspaper called it “the most noteworthy restaurant to open in Vancouver for many years.” The Filipino bartender explains that the majority of the clientele in Mott 32 speaks Mandarin and is wealthy. Scanning the full dining room, I can believe it. At the table in front of me, a waiter carves the $95 Peking duck for a Chinese family, with several children playing on their iPads. That Peking duck is not even close to the most expensive dish on the menu: A whole suckling pig costs $495; braised whole dried fish maw, in abalone sauce, is listed at $580. (Canadian dollars, but still.) I order a few of the more affordable small dishes from the “Evening Dim Sum” menu: an unexceptional duck spring roll, some hot-and-sour Shanghai-style soup dumplings, which are surprisingly tasty, and a black truffle siu mai with Ibérico pork and a soft quail egg, served at room temperature, that is just too ambitious to be anything but disappointing. The bartender makes a little joke when he serves the siu mai: “Be careful about the egg inside. It’s a soft yolk and you don’t want it all over your shirt.”

  I tell the bartender about the screaming protester who’d driven by outside, and he looks pained. “Ah, politics,” he says with a sigh. “I have friends that tell me, ‘Well, we can’t visit you now because you work at that place.’” He adds, somberly: “This property is owned by TA Global, not Trump.”