Back Over There Read online

  “Here,” Jean-Paul said, handing me another piece. And another. Soon I had more than I could carry. Shrapnel is by far the most common World War I artifact to find in a field. It’s also one of the least interesting to behold. Like snowflakes, every piece is unique; but unlike snowflakes, no piece of shrapnel can be called beautiful. I’ve never found one that resembles a star, or Oklahoma, or Abraham Lincoln, or anything else. It becomes monotonous once you’re used to it.

  “Ah!” he cried out, and I ran over, careful to follow his example and step over the furrows. Jean-Paul lives by a code: Always get the farmer’s permission (sooner or later); never do anything that might harm his crops; never dig. And never, ever dig with a metal detector. It is illegal on public land; and though you can do it on private land—again, with the owner’s permission—you should not. It is dishonorable.

  He held out his hand. “This is German,” he said, and gave me a cartridge, metal, a bit wider than a cigarette butt and maybe twice as long. A few minutes later, he handed me a button, Bavarian; and a few after that, a piece of a comb, provenance unknown.

  We walked on, silently, a few rows apart. My eyes moved at a different pace than my legs; the latter ranged forward steadily, but the former would train on a spot for a moment, then jump to another spot and repeat. At one point, after staring at a patch of ground for a few seconds, I realized I was looking at a bracket—a “stripper clip,” as it was known—of five cartridges and, spread out a few inches in front of them, sharp points in an arc from eleven o’clock to one, five perfect bullets.

  “Ah!” I said. Jean-Paul ran over; I pointed. “Ah!” he agreed. “Nice one!” I picked them up and dropped them into my pocket. They were, I discovered later, also German.

  Walking back out of the field, I kept my eyes trained on the earth and spotted, near the edge, what looked like a rusty old soda can with a conical cap, the whole thing less than half the size of my foot. Like the shrapnel and the bullets, it was just sitting there, atop the dirt, as if someone had placed it there the night before: a shell. I stopped short.

  “Uhhh . . . ,” I said, and raised my hand. Jean-Paul bounced over, looked down for an instant, patted my back, and smiled at me as if he were my father and I had just landed my first striper. “Yes,” he said. “I think that’s a nice one.”

  I got the sense, from that simple gesture, that we had crossed a line from guide and tourist to mentor and protégé. I was, oddly, a little moved by it, which, in conjunction with the jet lag I was still experiencing, might have led me to read too much into “that’s a nice one”; or maybe—more likely—I didn’t read at all. Or think. What I did do was bend over to pick it up. Fortunately for me, Jean-Paul, who is much smaller than I am, somehow found the strength to physically restrain me. “No, no, no no no,” he cooed, a father explaining to his son that his first striper must now be released. “We don’t take those.” He told me I should shoot a few pictures of it; while I did so, he reached into his sack and pulled out a can of fluorescent orange spray paint. When I was done, he coated the whole thing.

  “Is that for the bomb squad?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “For the farmer. The police won’t come out for one shell. You have to have a bunch. Like twenty.” Without such limits, they would spend all their time fetching stray World War I ordnance. It is said, not in jest, that the number of shells fired in the First World War that didn’t explode is greater than the total number of shells fired in the Second World War. They literally turn up every day.

  We spent the rest of the day looking at all kinds of fascinating sites in the field: bunkers and trenches, battlegrounds and rest camps. I found bottles—a lot of bottles—and barbed wire in the woods; picked bullets out of the roots of a fallen tree. Jean-Paul was exceedingly knowledgeable—could tell you at first glance exactly what something was, to whom (generally speaking) it had belonged, and when, most likely, it had first hit the ground—and endlessly patient, cheerfully answering more questions (some of which, I suspect, must have sounded pretty stupid) than he probably got from an entire posse of normal tourists. At the end of the day, he insisted I keep everything we had found and picked up, including a few fired bullets and uniform buttons that I’m sure he would have liked to have in his museum. And he absolutely refused to take any money from me for his time, even though I knew, from things he had said here and there, that this was how he really earned his living, and that all his other visitors—who did pay him—got much shorter excursions. He never said why he treated me differently, and I never asked. But I think, perhaps, he may have seen a bit of himself in me: He went out and found the objects of that war; I’d gone out and found the people.

  For years afterward, when I reflected about that day, what I thought about most was not Jean-Paul’s kindness and generosity, or the bullets fixed in the roots of that tree; it was that field outside Romagne, and what I’d found there that morning, and what I’d had to leave, dangerous though I knew it was. Sometimes I would show a picture of it when giving talks about World War I, speak of it wistfully: the one that got away.

  At one of these events, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a cluster of men in their fifties sat in the front row, talking. I eavesdropped a little before the program started and quickly determined that they knew much more about the war than I did; always a sign I would be learning something soon. And sure enough, when a photo I had taken of the little shell was projected onto the screen behind me, one of them—he wore a plaid flannel shirt and had a bushy salt-and-pepper beard—raised his hand.

  “You see those rings?” he said, pointing to two copper bands encircling its midsection. “That shell had gas in it.”

  I don’t think about it the same way anymore.

  A year or so later, a friend of mine, a retired army officer with expertise in ordnance, looked at the photo and told me it was a 37-millimeter shell. American. The smallest piece of artillery that soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces (or AEF) employed, sort of a portable cannon. There’s a famous photo of two doughboys lying prone on the ground, surrounded by shattered trees, firing one. I told him what the man in New Hampshire had told me.

  “He’s absolutely right,” my friend said. “You didn’t touch it, of course.”

  I started to say of course not, then decided I might as well tell him the real story; he shook his head and laughed. “Jean-Paul may have saved your neck,” he said. “Those things are seriously unstable, much more so than the 75 millimeter, or the 77, or the big howitzers. And unlike the big ones, there’s no way to defuse them. It’s much more dangerous now than when it was fired.”

  Five years after that first encounter, in a field outside the village of Épinonville, not far from Romagne, I found dozens of cartridges, a handful of bullets, insulators, keys, pieces of a German 77-millimeter shell and a short-range mortar known as a Minenwerfer, a complete German bayonet, the scabbard of a German sword, tins, bottles, a horse shoe, a mule shoe, and, sitting right next to each other, two 37-millimeter shells. I took a few large steps back—careful of the corn—and called out for Jean-Paul and his spray can.

  * * *

  That was in June 2014. Jean-Paul had been the first person I’d contacted when planning my return to France; I was surprised, and delighted, that he remembered me and actually seemed excited to go out and do it again. He asked me what I was most interested in seeing, then methodically set about making a plan. We hadn’t just happened to drive by that field one morning; Jean-Paul had studied maps and chosen it deliberately. He knew that I had a particular interest in the AEF’s 91st Division, having interviewed, a decade earlier, the division’s last surviving veteran, 107-year-old William J. Lake of Yakima, Washington. (The 91st, composed of draftees from the Pacific Northwest, was known as the Wild West Division; it had taken very heavy casualties during the first stage of the battle.) And he knew that the 91st had been there in late September 1918, du
ring the opening days of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Those 37-millimeter shells, now a fluorescent orange, were theirs. Ours.

  And they provided an interesting coda to Bill Lake’s story, which occupies a chapter of that book, the one that had brought me to France in 2009. Five years later, I would add a photo of those two shells to the slideshow that often accompanied the talks I gave. By then, there were plenty of other such photos in the presentation. When I’d first starting giving talks on the subject of America and World War I, I’d focused solely on the veterans themselves, the men and women I’d interviewed eighty-five years or more after the armistice. Then one day, as a lark, I included a photo of that first shell, the one Jean-Paul had fortunately dissuaded me from picking up. People started asking questions about what it was like Over There now, so I started adding more photos from that 2009 trip: the little village where J. Laurence Moffitt had first encountered the enemy; the woods where Eugene Lee had been shot through the wrist during a last-ditch effort to keep the Germans from marching on Paris; the field where George Briant had been trapped when German planes flew overhead and dropped bombs on him, knocking out his teeth, tearing a hole in his hip, nearly ripping out an eye; the forest where Bill Lake had been sitting and talking with a friend when a sniper killed the man. And others, quite a few of them.

  I had thought the photos would help answer peoples’ questions about what First World War sites in France were like, but as it happened they only raised more questions: Are these things really still out there? How is that possible? People, it seemed, couldn’t quite grasp it. And I couldn’t quite grasp why not. I had been there, after all; it made perfect sense to me. Then, one evening, a woman raised her hand. “We went to Gettysburg a couple of summers ago,” she said. “Have you been? Is it like that?”

  I had to stifle a laugh—not because her question itself was funny, but because visiting Gettysburg and exploring the Argonne are such different experiences that it’s easy to forget they are both battlefields. I have, I told her. And no, it is not. Gettysburg—and this is true of any American Revolutionary or Civil War battlefield I have ever visited—does not look like a place where history was made, much less in such dramatic fashion. It looks, rather, like a lovely park: landscaped, manicured, and thoroughly littered with monuments. When you stand on Cemetery Ridge, you know that one of the most famous assaults in military history, Pickett’s Charge, happened there, but only because you’ve read about it—in books, or on the kiosks that are only slightly less ubiquitous than the monuments. It’s not as if you could actually see anything, at least not with your eyes open. And you certainly aren’t going to stumble upon anything you’d have to spray-paint orange. Strolling around Gettysburg is like watching a documentary on television; hiking around the Argonne is like traveling back in time. It is hard, when you are Over There, to regard the First World War as history.

  But I was back Over Here, now, surrounded by people with questions, fellow countrymen who—well-meaning and even well-informed as they are—know almost nothing about that war; who regard it, and all of history, as past. Dead. I could not reconcile the dichotomy; could not make sense of how the same event could be past here and present there, dead here and alive there. The conflict’s centennial observances, which started as soon as 2014 did, only heightened my cognitive dissonance: The war was being talked about all the time now, which made it feel ever more present; and yet, the constant references to the centennial—reminders that this all happened a hundred years ago—made it feel ever more remote. The two competing notions had dug trenches in my brain and were waging war across the No Man’s Land of my gray matter. Only one thing, I knew, might be able to bring them together and force an armistice.

  That thing was a place.

  And so, though I was still quite attached to my bed and my DVR, I went back to France. Twice. In the past, I had visited Moffitt’s village, Lee’s woods, Briant’s field, Lake’s forest, and many other sites connected to the men I had interviewed in order to put myself in those spaces and try to imagine what had happened there; now I intended to linger much longer, look much closer, search for traces of what those men I had interviewed—and the two million others who served with them, as well as the millions more who’d fought alongside or against them—had left behind. In the past, I had followed the narratives of people I had actually known. Now I would follow the trail of two million I hadn’t, through fields and forests, across ridges and rivers, from the doughboys’ first encounter with the Germans to the last minute of the war, from the German frontier to the outskirts of Paris, the Vosges Mountains to the hills of Champagne, a chalky ridge in Picardy to a sodden plain in Lorraine; and from the Marne River to the Argonne Forest, where a cute little pair of antique shells, plowed up that very morning, could still sear your lungs and blow your legs off. Those were history, too. And they certainly weren’t dead.

  * * *

  The battle lines along the Western Front ran almost five hundred miles, from the English Channel in the northwest to the Swiss border in the southeast. German troops manned the entire length of the easterly side of that line; French troops manned the entire length of the westerly side, supported, in various sectors at various times, by units—a lot of units—of the British and American armies, as well as colonial troops, commonwealth troops, Italians, Russians, Czecho-Slovaks, and other nationalities. The war lasted four years, three months and two weeks, encompassing innumerable offensives, battles, skirmishes, raids, incidents and episodes that occurred along that five-hundred-mile line. No one I have ever met, in France or elsewhere, can even grasp it all, much less master it.

  I have, however, been fortunate enough, through either referrals or serendipity, to have met and spent time with people who have mastered some piece of the map that played an important role in the saga of the American Expeditionary Forces—a sector, or a cluster of communities, or the site of a single encounter. The one thing they all have in common is that their focus, their area of expertise, is relatively narrow. They can be quite proprietary about their turf; some have been known to feud openly with other experts who operate within their fiefdom. At the same time, though, they do not stray; do not, curious as it seems, have much or even any interest in the fascinating things that happened outside their zone. And they do not know, even by reputation, experts from other zones. None ever referred me to any other.

  The Argonne is so vast and varied, and saw so much action over so long a stretch of time, that the fiefdoms within it are small—typically a few villages, sometimes just one. Only one man can claim the whole thing as his zone. And he goes through a lot of orange spray paint.

  Jean-Paul and I left that field outside Épinonville that morning in June 2014, crossed the road, and hiked a bit to another one, much larger than the last. He had determined that this was the meadow where Private Lake’s beloved captain, 31-year-old Elijah W. Worsham, had been killed by a German sniper on the evening of September 29, 1918. It slopes down toward the village of Gesnes-en-Argonne, where Captain Worsham was heading; you can clearly make out its church steeple in the distance. Captain Worsham commanded the machine-gun company of the 362nd Infantry Regiment—Montana men—which had just liberated Gesnes after forty-eight months of German occupation. He’d been killed at dusk; we were there on a bright morning. Still, I felt, for a moment, as if I could see it happening, right where I stood.

  After that we returned to Romagne and had lunch at Jean-Paul’s café. The café helps subsidize the museum; most afternoons he is tied to it, and also to the museum, which sometimes gets groups of European tourists or French schoolchildren who have just visited the cemetery. Knowing I’d be exploring on my own for the rest of the day, I asked him for suggestions of what I might see, then remembered something he had showed me the last time I visited, five years earlier. “How do I find that house Rommel stopped at?” I asked. That’s Erwin Rommel: the Desert Fox. Widely considered Germany’s best, and certainly most iconic, W
orld War II general. One morning in June 2009, as we were looking at something else, Jean-Paul had pointed across a field at an old farmhouse in the distance. “You see that?” he’d said. “In 1914, when Rommel was just a young lieutenant, he stopped at that house.” And that was it. But back home, I’d dug up an old copy of Rommel’s 1937 book, Infantry Attacks, and found the future Desert Fox’s recollection of the visit:

  I looked about for shelter for the night . . . In one of the houses we saw a light shining through the closed shutters. We went inside, and found a dozen women and girls who seemed frightened at our appearance. In French I asked for food and a place to sleep for myself and my men. Both were provided, and soon we were sound asleep on clean mattresses.

  “I knew an old woman who was one of the girls who was in that house,” Jean-Paul told me afterward. “Her account was . . . different.” For one thing, she said, Rommel hadn’t exactly asked; for another, when he left the next morning, he took much of their pantry with him, and a few chickens, besides. He was a 22-year-old junior officer, supremely confident and eager to prove himself to everyone, from senior German commanders to young French girls. He did, then did it again in the next war. It’s hard to picture the History Channel without him.