Back Over There Read online

  Back Over There

  One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends and Ghosts to Count

  Richard Rubin

  St. Martin’s Press

  New York

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  To memory,

  and those who keep it

  And to M.A.L.,

  one tough little

  Courtesy of National Park Service, Cultural Resource GIS Facility

  Over there,

  over there,

  Send the word, send the word,

  over there,

  That the Yanks are coming,

  the Yanks are coming,

  The drums rum-tumming ev’ry where.

  So prepare,

  say a pray’r,

  Send the word, send the word,

  to beware,

  We’ll be over,

  we’re coming over,

  And we won’t come back

  till it’s over over there.

  —George M. Cohan, “Over There,” 1917

  Prologue

  Follow Me

  France.

  I was lost.

  Really lost.

  Now, I’d been lost before. Many times. In just about every way one can be. And yet, while lost is, in my experience, a state with infinite permutations, none is quite as profound as creeping forward slowly in a rental car through a labyrinth of narrow and overgrown tractor trails lined with tall grass and weeds, deep in a country where you don’t speak the language very well, which last fact doesn’t really matter anyway because you haven’t seen another human being in a half hour, and haven’t had a cell signal for even longer than that.

  Yes, that’s a First World Problem; but you’re not supposed to be able to get lost in the First World anymore, what with excellent signage and detailed road maps and GPS. And so, because you’ve become so dependent upon these conveniences, you’re really in bad shape when, one by one, they fail you. The place you’re trying to find—I’ll just drop the pretense and change that to the place I was trying to find—wasn’t on a road, at least not a real one. It certainly wasn’t on a map. And if it had coordinates, which I am told everyplace does, I had no idea what they were. I doubted anyone had ever even written them down.

  Worse yet was the fact that I’d already been to this place I was now trying to find, and had gotten there all by myself. Only a few years earlier. Five years, to be precise, in 2009. Under ordinary circumstances I might start wondering what this said about my state of mental fitness. But I didn’t have time for that right then, because I was really . . . well, you know.

  In my defense: I had only been there once, and five years is a fairly long time to remember directions to a place in the middle of nowhere and thousands of miles away from home. And this place wasn’t in, say, Oregon or Alberta. It was in the other direction, across an ocean, in France. In northern France. Northeastern France. A part of northeastern France called Lorraine.

  Poor Lorraine: Outside of France, it’s scarcely regarded as its own entity. People pair it with the neighboring region of Alsace as inextricably as they pair Q with U. Never mind that they’re thoroughly distinct in culture, landscape, even language; never mind that Lorraine is almost three times the size of Alsace, with a half-million more residents. Among the French, Lorraine’s natives say, they are regarded as paysans. Peasants. Hicks. They will tell you this with pride. I’m not sure why, frankly. I suspect it may be that they like being underestimated.

  The Germans certainly underestimated Lorraine. If you know anything at all about the place, you know that the Germans annexed it, along with Alsace, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Except they didn’t, really. Germany did annex almost all of Alsace back then, but they only took about a quarter of Lorraine, which was all they wanted of it. The part of it where I was lost—the Germans didn’t take that. If they had, the roads here would probably be better today. By the time they did take this part, in 1914, they were too busy trying to take the rest of France to undertake a major infrastructure project like building new roads. There would be plenty of time for that after France surrendered. But here again, the Germans underestimated Lorraine, because while they took it fairly easily in 1914, it cost them hundreds of thousands of lives over the next few years to hold it. By 1918, they finally seemed to appreciate the place, clinging to it bitterly, desperately, killing and dying in great numbers for every trench, every yard of blasted soil. It was their last line of defense.

  They never did get around to improving the roads, though. Perhaps they were as vexed as I was by the French system of naming their towns and villages. It’s not enough, in many cases, to give a place a simple one-word name: You have to modify it, it seems, with some sort of explanation of where it is. Dun-sur-Meuse: Dun on the Meuse, a river. Gesnes-en-Argonne: Gesnes in the Argonne, a forest. Saint-Benoît-en-Woëvre: Saint Benoît on the Woëvre, a plain. Braye-en-Laonnois: Braye in the vicinity of Laon, a city. Nanteuil-la-Fosse: Nanteuil the pit, because it’s near a large chalk mine. (I’m not sure how the locals feel about that name.) This, of course, enables the French to re-use town names again and again, sometimes without even putting much distance between them. Romagne-sous-les-Côtes, or Romagne below the hills, is only about forty minutes or so from Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, Romagne below Montfaucon, or Mount Falcon. Both were ancient Roman sites, and wanted to acknowledge this distinction in the most direct way possible; with a little elaboration, no one had to flip a coin to see who got to use Romagne and who had to go look for another name. And you can see why locals might want to commemorate the Romans: Among other things, they built good roads. Some are still among the better ones in the area.

  The day I got really lost was a Sunday in June. I set out late that afternoon from Verdun for Ville-devant-Chaumont, which translates as the village before Chaumont (not, if you think about it, a big improvement over Nanteuil the pit). And there’s even less to the place than its name suggests—a handful of houses and garages for farm equipment, that’s it. But it was, as I remembered, the place to pick up a certain tractor road that would lead me to the place I was looking for. Now, it’s true that I am essentially an urban creature, having been born in New York and lived most of my life there and in other cities, but when I say tractor road, I do not mean a dirt road that is more or less the same as a regular road but for the fact that it is not paved. I mean a road that is really only meant for a tractor, or some other piece of self-propelled and extremely sturdy farm equipment. These are not roads that were built, or even laid out; they’re more like trails, paths formed by farmers who had to get their machinery someplace where there were no roads. What we’re talking about here is two parallel dirt ruts, not much wider than a single passenger ca
r, surrounded on either side by brambles, grain, or very tall grass. The dirt ruts have potholes in them, and a lot of rocks, too, most large, many partially buried and fixed in place, some quite sharp. In between the ruts there is grass, often tall, almost always hiding more large rocks. Not a place you would take a car you cared anything about, which includes rental cars, especially if you’re not quite sure what the extra insurance you think you took out at the rental car place actually covers. I drove on many more of these tractor roads than I should have, but in Lorraine—along most of the Great War’s Western Front, really, but especially in Lorraine—much of what you want to see, if you want to see where things actually happened in that war, can only be accessed by such . . . well, let’s just call them thoroughfares.

  Tractor roads don’t have names, much less signs. Actually, in rural northern France, in my experience, even paved roads with names often don’t have street signs, unless you’re in a good-sized town or larger. Sometimes you see street signs on the walls of peoples’ houses, but that seems a voluntary thing. (Street names typically do show up on your GPS, if you have the right maps installed, but since there are no signs to check them against, using your GPS can actually get you into more trouble, although if you’re like me you will at least enjoy hearing that disembodied voice mispronounce everything atrociously.) In short, I was dependent upon my ability to ask people for directions.

  Now, at this point I should tell you: I don’t speak French very well. My accent is OK, at least compared with most Americans I know who attempt to speak French, but my vocabulary has a habit of deserting me in time of need. I had studied the language back in college and had gotten pretty good at it, but for twenty years after graduation I had absolutely no occasion to use it, and speaking a foreign language is not like riding a bicycle. It improved a lot when I went over in 2009, but my ability to decipher what was being said to me, and to interpret written French, far outpaced my ability to speak it without hesitation, which turns out to be the one skill you need most if you find yourself in a place like Ville-devant-Chaumont and have to get directions to a spot far off any paved road. There are a lot of stereotypes about the French that are not all that true, but three of them are: They really do eat very well; they really do kiss you on both cheeks when saying hello and good-bye; and they really don’t speak any English. That last one is not as true in places like Paris that get a lot of Anglophone tourists. But Ville-devant-Chaumont is not Paris. I may be the only Anglophone tourist who’s been there since 1918.

  At some point, I’d devised an extremely useful gambit for getting by: I started every conversation—and, for that matter, every question, request and utterance, more or less—the same way: Forgive me, but I don’t speak French. Of course, the fact that I said this in French generated a bit of a paradox, but if anyone noticed, they didn’t let on. The French, it turns out, don’t care how poor your French is. They care only that you are trying. Speak it as badly as you like; just parlez.

  “Parlez-vous Anglais?” was, in fact, my original opening line, until I came to understand that I was never going to hear “Why, yes!” in reply. The typical response I got was a pained expression and a head shake; sometimes they would ask, tentatively, “Vous êtes Anglais?” When I would answer “Non, je suis Américain,” their demeanor changed entirely. Invariably, they would break into a smile and try their best to help me—in French, but still. If my experience is any indication, it seems the French don’t much care for the English, but they sure love Americans. It’s very gratifying, particularly when you find yourself in a small, remote northern French village, lost and at their mercy.

  So when people in Ville-devant-Chaumont told me they had no idea what this thing was that I was looking for, much less where, they were at least very polite about it, even gracious. At one point I came upon a family reunion, and when the person I approached for directions had no idea what I was talking about, he immediately fetched another person, and on and on, until I had exhausted the entire clan. They all smiled apologetically as they shook their heads, though, and invited me to join them for supper. I did—recall true stereotype #1—then got back into my car and drove up and down the village’s few dusty, underpopulated streets until I spotted a tractor road at the end of one. I thought it looked familiar, maybe.

  As tractor paths go, this one appeared to be relatively civilized, by which I mean that I didn’t have to jerk the steering wheel of my Renault Scénic sharply every few feet to avoid something scary. That changed, though, about ten minutes into the journey, when the trail took a hard turn and suddenly the ruts got a lot rougher, the grass in between them taller. Coincidentally, it was right around this spot, about a half mile up from where I’d started, that I came to the conclusion that I was on the wrong tractor road. Later, it would occur to me that I hadn’t chosen merely the wrong farm road but also the wrong farming village from which to set out, confusing Ville-devant-Chaumont with the next town over, Chaumont-devant-Damvillers.

  So I was on the wrong road, though I couldn’t do anything about it but keep driving, as there was no way, on a path scarcely wider than my car, that I could turn around. The only thing was to keep moving forward—ever more slowly, as the trail was getting rougher—and hope that I came out somewhere before I ran out of gas or damaged the car to the point where it wouldn’t run anymore. About ten minutes later I came to the top of a ridge and a ninety-degree left turn. A few minutes after that, I came to a fork, sort of, where one trail led straight ahead, the other sharply to the right. There didn’t seem to be any reason to choose one over the other, so I pulled a one-euro coin from my pocket, flipped it, realized there was nothing resembling a head on either side, and decided I might as well go right. I did well: A few minutes later, I spotted the tip of a steeple. It had never occurred to me, before that day, why churches had them; but I can’t recall, at any time in my life, being much happier at the sight of anything than I was at that steeple. Soon the trail started a very gradual descent. Another ten minutes or so and I emerged onto a genuine paved road in an unknown village. I looked at a map later and calculated that I had traveled about two miles in forty minutes.

  One of the nice things about France is that you almost always know where you are, because every city, town, village and hamlet has the same sign at its limits, a white rectangle with a red perimeter and the town’s name in black letters; when you leave, you pass an identical sign with a red diagonal through the place’s name. They only put these, though, on real roads, so if you should happen to emerge from a tractor trail into the middle of town—well, you’re on your own. So I drove slowly through the streets, looking for someone to ask. But I didn’t see a soul. Strange—it was a pleasant evening, warm but not hot, clear sky only just beginning to dim. People should have been sitting outside. Maybe they were all somewhere else? And then I rounded a bend in the road and saw a little stone house with an attached barn and a sign over the front door that bore the logo of Karlsbrau beer and a name: L’Authentique.

  I parked on the other side of the road and was crossing the street toward the tavern when the door opened and a man in his fifties wearing a tan belted jacket came out. “Forgive me,” I said, “but I don’t speak French. I try to find . . . ,” I continued, and did my best to describe it. He stood there patiently, waited until I was finished, then smiled regretfully and shook his head. Soon another man, younger and wearing what appeared to be a flannel shirt, walked out of the pub; then a couple, and then another couple, and then another man. Each responded the same way. Two or three of them seemed to hesitate for a beat before getting into their cars—or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part—but they all drove off, and I was left alone, standing in the middle of the street, loath to give up but starting to come to the understanding that I was going to have to very soon. The place looked empty.

  Then a woman stepped out the door and negotiated the bar’s front stoop. She looked to be in her late sixties, maybe five feet tal
l with short gray hair and eyeglasses, black pants, and a black shirt with some sparkles on it. I hesitated: The street was otherwise deserted, and I didn’t want to frighten her. It had been a long, hot day, full of hiking and bushwhacking, and I’m sure I looked pretty haggard and dirty at that point, and quite possibly still smelled of grilled meat from the family reunion. But this little woman, I figured, was probably my last chance, so as she stepped into the road to cross, and didn’t seem to hesitate at the sight of me, I approached her, slowly. At first she, too, shook her head, but then she looked down at the ground for a moment, then looked back at me, her eyes now open wide, her expression determined. “Come,” she said in French. “Follow me.”

  She got into her car, which was parked a couple of houses up from mine, and drove off, slowly. I got in my car and followed. Shortly we passed a sign indicating that we were leaving Azannes-et-Soumazannes (so that’s where I was) and ten or fifteen minutes later passed another telling me I was entering Romagne-sous-les-Côtes. We wound through a few streets, and then she pulled up outside a small house—they were all small—set back from the road a bit, parked, and without a word of explanation scurried inside. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, but trying to follow a little old French lady into her darkened house on a Sunday evening seemed like the kind of venture that could end with me locked in a quaint little jail cell, so instead I just waited in the car. After a few minutes she emerged from her house—she was dressed the same, but had changed from dressier shoes into a pair of black sneakers—strode purposefully up to my car, opened the passenger door, got in, sat down, closed the door, fastened her seat belt, pointed ahead, and said: “Straight.”

  So I went straight. A few moments later, she said: “Left.” I went left. Then right, then right again, and a few more turns, until we arrived at the base of yet another farm road. This one didn’t look at all familiar. “Now,” she said, “slow.” I hesitated for a moment; the grass in between its two dirt ruts rose higher than my car’s hood. The ruts didn’t look too good, either. I turned to her, hoping for—honestly, I don’t know what, except maybe for some indication of her resolve that this was really the only way.