Back to the Front Read online

  Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander-in-chief in 1918, although no fan of the awkward Goliath that was the American army, called the Tennessean’s act “the greatest single feat of arms accomplished in this war.” York is reported to have remarked, “It weren’t no trouble nohow for me to hit them big army targets. They were so much bigger than turkeys’ heads.” The story of this Hun-killing hick had so charmed Americans that when the time came to convince the country to go to war again, the Alvin York saga exploit was dusted off and given an anti-isolationist edge. Gary Cooper played the title role in the 1941 film, Sergeant York. Its bellicist tone matched the mood of the time. The Howard Hawks film won the Academy Award for best actor, an ironic turnaround from ten years earlier when All Quiet on the Western Front had won the top honor.

  In the autumn of 1918, however, the WASP Whittlesey and the cracker York came to symbolize the American offensive in the Argonne. Recriminations would come later, once hindsight practitioners took a close look at John Joseph Pershing, the man who brought the Americans to slaughter. Crushed by the death of his wife and three daughters in a fire in 1915, Pershing was reputed to be a dour taskmaster, mistrustful of his European counterparts and mule-headed in repeating their mistakes* Commended for keeping the American troops away from the profligate French and British commanders clamoring for more men, Pershing nonetheless threw many American lives away by organizing overam-bitious offensives with untrained troops and sending men walking into machine-gun fire. Whatever the verdict of history, the millions of doughboys clinched the victory on the Western Front, a bald fact that French and British histories continue to begrudge their junior partner. Even when totting up casualties, these European history books always underline that more American soldiers died of influenza than in battle. I’ve even done it just now, and I have no ax to grind.

  Feeling sufficiently dry and warm to brave the rest of the Argonne, I take the road out of Vienne-le-Chateau to La Harazee. Two young women on my way out of town look at me as if I were the Antichrist. I really should buy a hairbrush.

  Soon I am once again alone, on a snail-smothered pathway that fords a tiny stream, skirts a trout pond, and crosses a couple of marshy meadows. At La Harazee a couple of moss-covered manor farmhouses stand in a clearing with a chapel and a large French military cemetery. I consult my map and take the track leading from the cemetery into the woods. The darkness closes around me.

  The muddy path is, in fact, the parapet of an old Great War trench. The earthwork of the ditch’s lip has been shored up over the years, so that any walker through this stretch of the woods is, in fact, “over the top.” The parapet path eventually becomes a logging road, until that in turn narrows into waterlogged tire tracks. Finally I head into the thicket beside the road, where the ground seems marginally drier. Two hours of bushwhacking ensues as I struggle crosscountry. Fortunately the sun has come out overhead, giving the foliage a friendly speckled look that helps allay my natural tendency to panic. I have read too many war books about men getting sucked into the mud, or being blown up by old shells. I don’t like being lost in the Argonne.

  I eventually emerge into a clearing. Scarcely thirty yards away from me is a small stela in honor of the 150 R.I. {Régiment dlnfanterie) and a French tricolor fluttering on a flagstaff, proof that my wandering has kept me near the Front. The rest of the huge clearing, which is perhaps half a mile wide and about two long, contains nothing. The trees have been cut and hauled away. The brush has been burned in smudge fires—a few large piles of sticks smolder in the distance. This is the heart of the Bois de la Gruerie, the scene of horrendous French losses in 1915. My map shows the emplacement of the monument, but also hiking trails and logging roads that are nowhere to be seen. I venture into the vast openness, peering at the forest edge for the sign of a break, or a path. Two deer lazily walk out of the woods and pay me no heed. I steady my compass, look at the map, then at the deer, then back at the compass—and decide to go to the right. Ahead of me now is a stand of pines, looking dark and impenetrable even in the hot afternoon sunshine. Once past the first screen of undergrowth, I am relieved by what I see on the forest floor. The trenches once again, heading east. If there is no path or road, then I shall follow the scars of the Front. They once led all the way to Switzerland; for my purposes, I just want them to get me out of the woods.

  Back and forth, zigzagging across the land, the trenches lead on like a terrier straining at the leash. I stay above the ditches this time, for water has collected in their hollows and the poilus’ duckboards have rotted into the earth generations ago. There is no panic now, just an odd sense of a journey shared. Whatever else the trenches represented—the futility of war, the failure of a civilization, the birth of the modern—for me they have become a companion, often glimpsed on this long hike from the shores of the North Sea. This realization embarrasses as much as enlightens, because the trenches should be more a mark of shame than a sign of fellowship. The silent ghosts I carry with me should suffice for company.

  The afternoon wears on in idle daydream until finally a landmark is reached. At a place where the trenches cross a dirt road an elderly man in a white golf shirt and shorts appears from behind a bush, like Death on holiday. When I hail him to ask for directions, he skulks away behind a blind of greenery and soon I hear some muttering in a language I cannot identify. Expecting to come across some tabloid horror, I advance cautiously around the bush and catch one last glimpse of him vanishing into a bunker with what looks like his twin brother. My appearance must have frightened them. I look at my map and realize that I have reached another Abri du Kronprinz (Crown Prince’s Dugout), the name given on my map to a fortified complex near the edge of the forest. Having no wish to play hide-and-seek with the timorous old fellows, I backtrack onto the dirt road and walk the last few hundred yards out onto a highway. A sign greets me—“Mushroom Collecting Strictly Regulated”—showing that rule-crazy, Jacobin French civilization cannot be far away.

  The road describes a gentle arc and soon I am out of the woods and into the copper light of early evening. A wheatfield lies in the foreground, the pimples of Vauquois and Montfaucon stand on the horizon. In the middle distance is the town of Varennes-en-Argonne, my destination for the evening. I quicken my pace, passing the large monument south of town that commemorates the doughboys of Pennsylvania who fought near here. A glimpse at my notebook tells me that George Patton and Harry Truman also saw action around this lovely little town on the River Aire. Varennes’s biggest claim to fame, however, lies not in the Great War but in the French Revolution. A plaque on its eighteenth-century clock tower tells the story, for it was at this building, on June 22, 1791, that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their children were arrested as they tried to flee France. The king had been on his way to rally monarchical Europe to crush the fledgling revolution. When news of this treachery got back to Paris, support for the deposed Bourbons evaporated. It was a courageous republican innkeeper in Ste. Menehould who had recognized the family and outdistanced the king’s carriage through the Argonne to organize the fateful arrest in Varennes. This small act in a far-flung provincial village, the tourist brochure in my hotel room tells me, changed the course of History.

  I sink down at the writing table and look out the window. Young boys are fishing with long poles outstretched over the Aire, a needlelike steeple rises from a mansarded church, the aperitif hour has commingled boule players and pastis drinkers on the village square. This is France as it should be, a postcard of present-day peace and turmoil past. I have stumbled across a Frenchman’s dream for his own country, the one exploited by salesmen and politicians, the picture of a douce France made up of simple village life on a gentle summer night. The nightmare, Verdun, lies a dozen miles to the east.

  2. Montfaucon

  Basket case: an armless and legless casualty

  Cat stabber: a bayonet

  Cognac-eyed: drunk

  Dishy billy: déshabillé (undressed)

  Frog’s paradis
e: Paris

  Jenny’s pa: je ne sais pas (I don’t know)

  Pants rabbits: lice

  Sandbag Mary Ann: ca ne fait rien (it doesn’t matter)

  Soldier’s supper: anything nonexistent

  Suicide ditch: front-line trench

  Toot and scramble: tout ensemble (all together)

  Zeppelins in a cloud: sausage in mashed potatoes

  The inventiveness of the doughboys’ slang can still tickle the cornball in me. Their fractured French lived on in grade-school humor, especially in English-Canadian classrooms where the study of French became the temporary anchor for a drifting sense of national identity. When we apprentice wags at recess exchanged “mercy bucket,” “silver plate,” and the like, we did so in ignorance of the long pedigree of putting the French language through the wringer, a tradition that the Great War amplified and brought momentarily to Middle America. Similarly, when we used such words as “scrounge,” “wangle,” “lousy,” and “chat” (to chat meant to delouse), we would never have guessed their origin in a distant war. At age eleven, I was told by a doctor that I had contracted “trench mouth.” My mother, mortified, ordered me to tell no one of my affliction. The link between the blisters in the lining of my cheeks and the infantryman of the Great War would have hardly occurred to me.

  TODAY I’VE TAKEN it easy and made a small detour northward from Varennes to pay a visit to the American hill of the Argonne. Here at Montfaucon a pseudoclassical American memorial overlooks the battlefield of the 1918 offensive and, in the distance to the southeast, that of the 1916 Franco-German slaughter at Verdun. The memorial column, a 180foot-tall Goliath of stern republican virtue, shows by its very size that the war loomed large on the American horizon. The Doric column, made of Italian granite, is the largest U.S. war memorial in Europe.

  As I sit on the lawn munching a sandwich and staring up at the memorial, it occurs to me that Montfaucon may also stand as a testament to a change in mentality. Two and a half million Americans came to France in 1917 and 1918, and some of them liked what they saw—at least those who ventured away from the Front. “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm,” went the song, “after they’ve seen Paree?” In some ways the Great War was the Grand Tour gone haywire, the harbinger of American Express and backpackers like myself. In 1918, while those on the home front in America were girding their souls for Prohibition and the struggle against sin, the people in the lands near the Western Front were getting ready to celebrate the passing of the plague of war. Without the Great War, it is doubtful whether Jazz Age Paris would have attracted the heavenly homeless, those artists and writers whose cafe antics in the 1920s have kept generations of tourists glued to overpriced seats in Mont-parnasse ever since. Without the war, the French capital might not have attracted young and talented Americans long after it had been eclipsed by other places as a center of creativity. Without the war, France might not have existed as a place, much less a destination, in the worldview of ordinary Americans. The erotic charge of France, the notion of it as the homeland of transgression, the sheer irresponsibility it implied — all were received ideas reinforced and disseminated by the passage of millions of young men who happened to get in on the tail end of a war.

  What was true for all American soldiers was especially so for African-American men in uniform. The discriminatory practices of the U.S. army during the war scandalized many Europeans. According to white army orthodoxy, the black doughboy divisions, 200,000 soldiers in all, were thought suitable only for menial jobs behind the Front. Even an American daredevil black ace flying with the French was grounded for the duration of the war when, in 1917, his squadron of volunteer airmen was switched from French to American command. In the Breton city of St. Malo, an American army general lodged an official complaint with French authorities when he had to deal with a local administrator who was a black man from the West Indies. These and other similar incidents of individual and institutional racism multiplied as formerly segregated Americans rubbed elbows in France.

  It was mainly through the intervention of the French that African-Americans saw combat. Black units were transferred to French command, thereby sparing white American units from having to go to war alongside them. The Germans, true to the itinerary that would make them within a generation the most noxiously racist nation to have ever lived, protested over having to fight black American troops on the Front. The Kaiser’s propagandists accused the French of sinking to new depths of uncivilized behavior—a rather breathtaking claim to make after three and a half years of abominably uncivilized warfare. The color distinction did not bother the French, or the African-Americans for that matter. Thanks to the Great War, an unlikely alliance was struck up between black America and France that continued for generations. Memoirs speak of black doughboys’ delight in being treated as equals in the streets of Paris, of French villagers in the Vosges “walking the dog” when the all-black army band of Jimmy Europe played its jazzy, syncopated repertoire, and of a whole spate of incidents in which French restaurant owners sided with black American patrons when white American customers insisted that their countrymen leave or go eat in the kitchen.

  The Montfaucon memorial speaks of this unofficial, unexpected offshoot of the Great War, this link between the Harlem Renaissance and the Western Front, even if it speaks very softly now, and fewer and fewer people sit at its base to listen. Although the American forces were most conspicuously not “toot and scramble” {tout ensemble) on the Western Front, this old, unvisited column on a French hill can make one think otherwise. I decide that I’m becoming sentimental, so I head back to Varennes and the Front of 1916.

  3. Varennes-en-Argonne to Verdun

  At eight in the morning I have the town to myself. My route leads along the riverbank, then up a long and gradual slope to the east. The walk is enlivened by a few inevitable dogs, a foggy dew, and a head emptied of all thought. At the crest of the rise I turn around and see a little postcard of Varennes below me, wrapped in the wreaths of morning mist and backed by the black hills of the Argonne. I bid goodbye to pigs’ feet and antiroyalist snitches, then resume my walk eastward into the enveloping greenness of the Meuse highlands.

  Green everywhere. Lime green on the grassy swards, gunmetal green in the dark woods, pale green in the pastures. Hills and buttes stick up at random, small ravines and ridges succeed each other as if in a hurry. Each field is a microcosm, a miniature of the larger landscape. Warped by war, the parcels of fenced-off farmland present humps and hollows, creases and folds to bewilder the eye accustomed to the ordered, tailored fields to be found elsewhere in France. Land such as this should be photographed, written about, but not guarded against trespassers.

  A farmer by the roadside turns into a generous giver of directions, his French sounding as if he has a beach ball permanently lodged in his mouth. If you think this land is bad, he tells me without uttering a consonant, wait till you get to Vauquois. There, things really begin to look strange. He’s right—for once, a local oddity lives up to its billing. The wooded hill of Vauquois was the westernmost point of the vast Verdun battlefield, and from a distance it does look the part of guardhouse. At the foot of the prominence, I peer up under the foliage like a mischievous little boy craning to get a view up a skirt. I see Paris, I see France, I see Vauquois’s underpants. It is not an edifying sight. The hillside resembles a slice of Gruyere cheese or a pox-ridden thigh, with gaping holes gouged out of its slopes, the ugly work of mines set off during a vicious fight for the summit in 1914 and 1915.

  I pass Avocourt, a huddle of barnlike houses standing in a muddy hollow. A field near the middle of town seems to sprout old concrete pillboxes more successfully than it does rows of corn. The deafening drone of military helicopters overhead renders the next stretch of road, which leads to the Frontline village of Esnes, even more unpleasant than it need be. Aerial maneuvers must be occurring in this proving ground of French military honor. The roadway skirts a slope that leads upward to the summit of Côte
304 (Hill 304), a famous site of the 1916 battle. I head crosscountry in the hope of getting away from the copters and back into the woods.

  My path turns into a snarl of brush and weeds after scarcely two hundred yards. On either side of it stand multistranded barbed-wire fences. There is no way else to advance but to squirm belly-first under the lowest rung of rusted wire. Once past the barrier I continue up a sloping pasture, which in turn ends abruptly in another nasty fence. Beyond it, beckoning the hiker, is a wide-waled path leading through a field of weeds to the woods farther uphill. To get there I have to crawl once again under the barbed wire and encounter for the first time the problem of a strategically placed meadow muffin. The cows of Lorraine, I soon learn with dismay, have conspired with the farmers to thwart the harmless pastime of long-distance hiking. Any stretch of fence admitting of easy access is rendered impassable by bovine carpet bombing. Only those parts of a fence sporting a prickly wreath of thornbushes are left free for the traveler; the rest is a festival of dung. Naming a cheese “The Laughing Cow” no longer seems so far-fetched. I head for a thorn bush and start weeding.

  THE TRAIL BEYOND the fence leads directly into an enormous pine grove. I am now in what remains of the Zone Rouge, the swath of devastation that the French government designated as being dangerous for resettlement after the war. The physical destruction of the guerre de quatorze in France was appalling: 319,269 houses obliterated; 313,675 houses seriously damaged; 1,699 villages annihilated; 707 villages three-quarters destroyed; 1,656 villages half-destroyed; 20,603 factories leveled; 31,650 miles of road wrecked; 4,875 bridges blown; 4,297,800 acres of farmland and 2,060,000 acres of uncultivated land poisoned, dug up, shelled, mined, befouled, littered, and stained with a toxic, soupy mix of decaying corpses and rotting horse flesh. It was said that a cut in the Zone Rouge would fester faster than elsewhere in France, that children should always be kept away from the place, that crops would never grow there again.