Back Over There Page 2
She just gazed straight ahead. I drove on. Slowly.
“Slow,” she repeated. “Slow. Slow.” I went slower. Things lingered on the underside of my car that really didn’t need to be there. They brushed. Scraped. Loudly. “Slow,” she said. I wasn’t sure how much more slowly I could go and still manage to ascend the grade. But I eased up on the gas, to the point where I was barely touching it.
There were turns, and mud, and tires spinning in place, and more discomfiting sounds emanating from under the car. “Slow,” she said, at regular intervals. “Slow.” Ten minutes passed. Twenty. At thirty I started to get pretty anxious. Her gaze remained set.
Then, about forty minutes into the slowest drive I had ever undertaken, just after we’d topped a small rise, she lifted her gaze toward the top of the windshield. “There,” she said, and smiled, almost imperceptibly. I pulled up to it, and we got out of the car. It was just as I remembered: a stone marker, unassuming, maybe three feet high, with a whitewashed flagpole planted behind it. In the years since my last visit, someone had installed a bench a few feet away. This spot, atop a ridge, looks out over a magnificent pastel valley. I think it’s the nicest vista in the entire country. You can see why someone might want to sit on that bench for a while and take it in.
But she didn’t sit. Perhaps she thought that might be disrespectful. This, after all, was the precise spot where Private Henry Nicholas Gunther of Baltimore, 23 years old, became the very last man killed in World War I, shot through the head at 10:59 a.m. on November 11, 1918, less than one minute before the whole bloody affair ended.
I don’t know if she knew Gunther’s name. For sure she didn’t know mine at that point, nor I hers. We wouldn’t even get around to introducing ourselves until later, when it was almost dark and I dropped her off at her house in Romagne-sous-les-Côtes. “I am Richard Rubin,” I would say. “And I am Madame George,” she would reply. Like the Van Morrison song.
But in that moment up on that ridge, we didn’t say a word about our names, or much of anything else. We just gazed at the monument.
“There,” she said, nodding. “There.”
Chapter One
Like Traveling Back in Time
Look down.
Those somewhat camouflaged but nevertheless out-of-place objects you see resting atop the freshly plowed furrows of a roadside farm, or lying on the forest floor, partially obscured by the fallen leaves? That’s the Great War. Those are the things millions of men—French, German, British, Italian, Australian, Senegalese, Indochinese, Canadian, Moroccan, Russian, Scottish, Guyanese, Indian, Irish, Malagasy, New Zealander, American—brought with them to the front. Things they brought to keep themselves clothed, and fed, and sheltered in some semblance of comfort. Things they brought in a hopeless attempt to stay clean. Things they brought to distract themselves from boredom, or pain, or fear, or to dull the boredom or pain or fear should distraction prove impossible. Things they brought to remind them of home, and of the people they left behind. And, more than all the rest put together: things they brought to kill each other.
From the summer of 1914 to the autumn of 1918, men, heavily armed and in uniform, came to this place—then, as now, quiet, pastoral—to do just that. Thousands, at first; then, quickly, hundreds of thousands; and by the end, millions. They stayed awhile—a few days here, a few years there—and did what they were sent to do. Now they are all, one way or another, long gone. But the stuff they brought with them by the packload, the truckload, the trainload—the evidence of their presence here, of their very existence, a century after they went away—remains. The earth spins and draws it in; the earth spins and pushes it out. And you come along one day and—if you’re looking down—find it just sitting there, right out in the open, as if it had been dropped there that very morning, and not 36,500 mornings ago.
* * *
I confess: to spending more time looking down than looking up when I’m in certain places Over There. I also confess to doing so, sometimes, when I’m not in certain places Over There. It’s a habit that, once formed, can be hard to break.
While I’m confessing, I confess to waking up in the morning with delight at the sight of a cloudy sky, because it’s easier to spot old rusted metal objects resting atop the soil if there isn’t direct sunlight on them. To waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of rain hitting the roof, and smiling as I wonder what the water will have brought to the surface come morning. To feeling a tingle of excitement at the sight of a cornfield, not because I love corn more than I should, but because I know that it’s easier to spot foreign objects among the budding corn than it is, say, in a field of wheat, or oats, or other dense plants that obscure the soil. I confess to examining minutely bottles I found among the barbed wire—green and brown, glass and clay—trying to determine what they had once held; to studying intently a German Army–issued spoon I spotted one morning sitting atop a freshly plowed mound of dirt, trying to conjure the man who had once carried it—what he looked like, what he wore, what he ate with it. What caused him to drop it.
And I am hardly unique. There are people—I’ve met some—who spend their every vacation roaming around the Argonne, in Lorraine, hunting for artifacts of the Great War. There are people—I know some—who up and moved there for the same reason. The Argonne, I should note, is a place of great natural beauty, but it is also a poor place, all forest and farmland; if you’re not already retired, and don’t have the type of job you can do from anywhere, you’re going to have a hard time of it. Moving there just because you’re a World War I buff who’s developed a taste for artifact-hunting is, in a lot of ways, asking for trouble.
Fortunately, this is not the kind of trouble that just overtakes a person one day. You have to go looking for it. And you have to be mentored. I was mentored by Jean-Paul de Vries; he was mentored, in his childhood, by a French veteran of their Vietnamese war named Fleck who frequently drove down to the Argonne from Lille, hundreds of kilometers away, on a motor scooter, and drove back every time with an extra hundred pounds of stuff strapped to its sides. “It’s an addiction,” Jean-Paul told me once, and that’s about as good an explanation as I could ever hope to receive, or to offer: It just hooks you. Perhaps Fleck had gotten hooked by a World War II veteran, who had gotten hooked by a World War I veteran, coming back to search for things he and his comrades had dropped under fire in 1918.
It’s hard to imagine, though, that even someone who fought here could have known these fields as well as Jean-Paul does. He started coming here in the 1970s, from the Netherlands. Though he was born and raised in Eindhoven, his parents are both French; they came here as a family every summer—to go camping. To this day, most visitors to the Argonne come not for its history but because it is unspoiled. This is, admittedly, a pretty strange thing to say about a place that from 1914 to 1918 was a vast battlefield where hundreds of thousands of men died. But walk one of the trails through the woods here and you will almost certainly encounter couples or families who are utterly oblivious to the trenches and shell holes that lie just feet from the narrow path you’re all following.
They come from all over France, and also from Belgium, and Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, none of which are too far away. And from Germany, which isn’t, either. It was closer still between 1871 and 1914 when, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the victorious Prussians took a big chunk of Lorraine, along with almost all of Alsace, and annexed it into the newly created nation of Germany. The Argonne didn’t happen to be in that chunk, but that didn’t keep the Germans from sending over spies afterward, military cartographers, to survey it all, figure out where and how to build an impenetrable last line of defense there. They drew up meticulous topographical maps, studied them intently for years before the first shots were fired in August 1914. They made more maps after they took the Argonne that same summer. And more. And more, and more again, for four years, every time something
significant changed, and sometimes when nothing really had. A lot of maps. And they didn’t bother burning them after the armistice; a century later, people still pore over them. Some of these people have never been to the Argonne, or even to France. Still, they know this vast, unknowable battlefield as well as anyone.
Almost anyone.
* * *
One hot, sunny morning in June of 2009, I pushed open the door of a garage-like edifice in the village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, looking for some shade and a little human contact. I had just walked over from the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, a few hundred yards away. In the last forty-seven days of World War I, 26,277 Americans were killed fighting in the vicinity, in what is now known as the Meuse-Argonne Offensive; it remains, to this day, the deadliest battle in American history. More than fourteen thousand of them are buried in Romagne, spread out over 130 acres in what is the largest American cemetery in Europe.
You may not know all that much about the First World War; you may not know that it generated current notions of ethnic and national identity throughout the world, and borders that still hold in Europe and Asia and the Middle East, and the civil rights movement in the United States, and the acceptance of gender equality throughout the Western world, and long-standing agricultural policies that determine what foods you can buy and how much you pay for them, and almost all of modern medicine, and pretty much every means of modern transportation, and the environmental movement: You may not know, in other words, that it generated the very world in which we—all of us—now live. But if you know nothing else about the First World War, you know that it generated a lot of cemeteries. There are six American World War I cemeteries in France, hundreds of French ones, and more German ones than French and American combined. Each country designed, built and continues to maintain its own. French cemeteries, large or small, are austere, treeless, razor-straight row upon row of concrete crosses, tablets and minarets baking in the sun, the grass in between them most likely brown, if it is even there at all. German cemeteries, large or small, are almost always green, with lots of big old trees casting shade and verdant light everywhere, and invariably surrounded by a low brick wall with a wrought-iron gate in the front, all of which makes them feel surprisingly gemütlich, welcoming and cozy, like the lawn of an old country inn. The gatepost of each is even fitted with a drawer containing a guest register. French cemeteries are supposed to have them, too, but in my experience, they’re rarely there.
As for the American cemeteries: Having been built under the watchful eye of General John Joseph Pershing, erstwhile commander of the American Expeditionary Forces—a man who was known to be, to put it mildly, rather particular—they are, without exception, so perfectly beautiful that they can be intimidating. And Meuse-Argonne is the most perfect, and intimidating, of all. Perhaps that scares people off. I had the place entirely to myself that morning; spent several hours walking on meticulously trimmed emerald grass among long rows of plump white marble Latin crosses and Stars of David, and never spotted anyone else doing the same thing. It was a lonesome way to start the day.
And then I strolled into town and pushed open that door.
The sign outside it read “Romagne 14–18,” which sounded like something I should see. In any event, there had to be another human being there; I hadn’t seen any on the walk over, either. Like most villages in the Argonne, Romagne is very small, and smaller now than it used to be. I have seen photos of it from the first decade of the twentieth century, when it was also a little village, but one that at least had restaurants, cafés, groceries, a hotel. Nowadays it scarcely has pedestrians. The sign, though, indicated something was going on inside this building. I figured it to be a museum; it turned out to be more like a portal that could take you back almost a century. With a café.
Like much of small-town France, Jean-Paul de Vries’s place kept odd hours in those days, and I was lucky he was there. Actually, I was lucky I was there. I hadn’t wanted to come here; had tried to tell myself I didn’t need to go to France. Six years earlier, I had set out to find and interview a few living American veterans of the First World War, which at that point had been over for eighty-five years. I had expected at the start to find three or four, at most, but ended up finding a few dozen, aged 101 to 113, and getting so much good material that I had undertaken to write a history of the United States and World War I based on their stories. Now the interviews were finished, and so was the research, all of which was done either from home or in American libraries and archives. I knew all about the places where the men I’d interviewed had dodged death, sometimes narrowly; where they had watched their buddies kill, and die. But I had never seen them. I had made a point of conducting every interview face-to-face because I believed that observing these men and women as they told their stories was almost as important as listening to what they said. And I knew that merely hearing and reading about these places, rather than going to see them for myself, would be the equivalent of interviewing these oldest veterans over the telephone rather than in person. But I didn’t want to go. The truth is, I’m not a very good traveler. I like being at home—I like my bed, my shower, my DVR. And I had done a lot of traveling for this book already. The urge to stay put was powerful. But my sense that I didn’t have the whole story, and that the rest of it lay Over There, just would not go away and leave me in peace. I managed to patch together a modest travel stake, flew to France, and met Jean-Paul on my second day there.
We connected right away. I’m sure some of that, at least, was due to the fact that he spoke English, which I had already discovered was a rarity in small-town France, though I hadn’t yet worked out my strategic Pardonnez-moi, mais je ne parle pas Français introduction. (Going forward, you can safely assume that, unless specified otherwise, any conversation related here was originally uttered in French—my side of it in pretty bad French.) About my age, slight and dark-haired and gregarious, he spoke quickly and voluminously, his voice infused with a singsong quality that was probably a product of his Dutch accent. He alternated sentences, telling me in the first about whatever item we were looking at (“That’s a carrying case for a shell, German, 155 millimeters. Very big.”), in the next about his childhood visits to the area, his excursions with Fleck, and his first museum, which he’d set up in his bedroom when he was nine or ten years old. The more stuff he’d found, he told me, the more he’d craved finding still more. To that end, he moved here in 1997 and started roving on his own, pretty much every day. In the early years he didn’t have a car, and couldn’t roam much further than a few miles; couldn’t keep anything he found unless he could carry it back on his own. There was plenty that he could: cartridges; bullets; shrapnel. Buttons. Identification discs. Bottles. Canteens. Mess tins. Electric insulators. Keys. When he finally got a car, he just started gathering more of it. Helmets. Wagon wheels. Bayonets. Barbed wire. Rifles. Ammunition crates. Trench knives. Boots. Shell carriers. Everywhere. “If you’re not finding anything,” he told me once, “that means you’re blind.” He found lots of shells, too, but knew enough not to touch them. And he found a great many things that, while not explosive, could not be extracted, much less hauled. He noted their location; visits them often.
At some point, having found so much stuff, Jean-Paul decided to open that museum. He always accepted donations, but never charged admission. It didn’t seem right; everything he had in the place had been offered up to him, free of charge, by the earth. It was as if the planet, having safeguarded all this history on its own for nearly a century, saw him rooting around and decided it could really use the help. It’s hard, when you’re walking through a field and just stumble upon, say, a hundred-year-old German spoon—sitting right there on the surface, where anyone could see it—not to feel like you have been chosen by the soil to help carry all that memory. It is a collaboration, and a compelling one. Experience it yourself enough times and you can start to understand how some people might uproot their lives for its sake.
That first morning, though, I was simply overwhelmed. “You really just . . . found all this stuff?” I asked him.
He chuckled; I could tell he got that question often. “And a lot more,” he said.
“Just sitting there? Out in the open?”
He nodded.
“What else is out there?”
He started to say something, then paused for a moment. “Why don’t you just come back tomorrow morning,” he said, instead, “and I’ll show you.”
* * *
We left early the next day and drove around for hours, visiting all kinds of fascinating sites in the field: bunkers and trenches, battlegrounds and rest camps, German, French, American. But before any of it, when we were scarcely outside the village limits of Romagne, we passed an open field. He glanced at it quickly, pondered for a second, then jerked the steering wheel left and swerved across the oncoming lane and onto the side of the road. (No one was coming; you don’t pass many cars in the Argonne.) “I know the man who owns this,” he said, gesturing at the field. “This is the first time he’s plowed in years. Let’s take a look.” He bounced out of the car and into the field, walking stick in hand—an actual stick, almost as tall as he is, no doubt found on the forest floor somewhere. Jean-Paul is perpetually hunched over from ankylosing spondylitis, a congenital condition that turns the cartilage in his spine to bone. It doesn’t slow him down.
“Ah,” he said after a few moments, and bent over. “Here.” He stood up again and handed me a piece of shrapnel. To the untrained eye it looks very much like the clumps of dirt that surround it; see enough of it, though, and you start to notice that the hues are a bit different, the browns just a little deeper, the reds a touch shinier. When in doubt, pick it up: Its heft gives it away. Shrapnel is iron. Packed deliberately into shells, it sprayed everywhere when they exploded. Shrapnel was never used to clear terrain, to open up a gap in some vegetation and give you a better view of something. Its sole purpose was to kill. Hold a piece in your hand, even a small piece, and you can tell how effective it would have been. It’s heavy. And jagged. It was also, when it sprayed everywhere, red hot. I learned that from a veteran, a 106-year-old man named J. Laurence Moffitt who recalled, eighty-five years later, a two-inch piece hitting his leg one day during the Second Battle of the Marne and miraculously bouncing off. When he went to pick it up, it burned his fingers. After it cooled down, he pocketed it as a souvenir. Still had it when we met.