9

Hell, We Just Got Here

THIS NEXT STORY IS ABOUT—well, I’ll let you decide that for yourself. I’ll just say up front that it’s a bit . . . uh . . . you know what? I’ll let you decide that, too.

It begins around Veterans Day, 2003, when I came across an article in a small newspaper from a town in upstate New York, near Albany. The reporter profiled, in brief, a few local World War II veterans, then lamented that there were no longer any World War I veterans left in town, and that the only one in the area—which term, thankfully, he defined loosely—was one Eugene Lee, of Syracuse. He didn’t say much else about Mr. Lee, except that he was “no longer able to give interviews.”

Well. I won’t say I took this as a challenge, exactly, but I certainly wasn’t going to just accept such a statement until I checked it out for myself. I called the reporter, who reiterated the statement, telling me its source was one Jim Casey, whom he said was Eugene Lee’s close friend and sort-of gatekeeper. He gave me Mr. Casey’s phone number and wished me luck.

Jim Casey was a Marine Corps veteran (he had served in the late 1950s) who had sought out Mr. Lee some years earlier, having learned of his existence. Mr. Lee hadn’t any children; his closest relative, a niece, lived out West. So Mr. Casey befriended him, looked after him, visited him regularly. He told me that Mr. Lee could still hear and speak well enough, but that his memory was dicey—some days it was fair, some days much less so—and that he was prone to getting frustrated when it wasn’t working all that well. I said I understood, and that I would be willing to take a chance, drive up to Syracuse, and see what might happen. He said he’d check with Mr. Lee, then called me back a day or two later and told me to come on up at my convenience.

I made the trip on December 2, 2003, and met Jim Casey the next morning in a waiting room at Community General Hospital in Syracuse, where Mr. Lee lived in a long-term-care wing. Jim was a broad-shouldered, burly man with an easy smile and a handshake that was all business. After chatting for a few minutes he led me to Mr. Lee’s room: whitewashed and institutional, but filled with pictures and mementos. Hanging on one wall was a collage of photos from his 104th birthday party, which saw him surrounded by Marines in white gloves and dress blues, a splendid-looking group. That same day, he had been presented with a diploma from Liverpool High School in Liverpool, New York, from which he had dropped out in the spring of 1917 in order to join the Marine Corps. That diploma, eight months old now, rested atop a nightstand. Next to all the photos in the room—most of them eighty, ninety, a hundred years old, relatives, friends, a young man who bore a striking resemblance to his father—it looked jarringly white.

William Eugene Lee was a slender man; it would be hard for me to say just how tall he was, because I never saw him standing up. Throughout our conversation he sat in a wheelchair, wearing a brown plaid flannel shirt and, on his ears, a pair of fuzzy headphones, which were attached to some kind of hearing aid that looked like an old Sony Walkman. His hair was decidedly thinner than in those old photographs, and entirely white, but it was there. His speech was extremely halting; he was given to very long pauses, twenty or thirty seconds or more, sometimes two or three to a sentence. His discharge papers recorded his height as sixty-seven and a half inches, his eyes blue, his character excellent.

He was born on March 24, 1899, he told me, in the small town of Salina, New York, which is now a suburb of Syracuse. His parents were named Margaret and Norman; his father, he recalled, “worked for the Mohegan Company, as a meat cutter.”

“That’s a store chain,” Jim explained.

“Did he get to bring home meat from the job?” I asked.

“We would always eat good,” Mr. Lee said. He grew up in between a brother, Otis, and a sister named Nell.

“How did you come to join the Marines?”

“They was my favorite, from when I was a kid.” His childhood was a time of great glory for the United States Marine Corps, storming beaches in the Caribbean and Latin America, putting down insurrections that somehow threatened American interests (often, purely commercial interests); he would have read about them, or at least heard about them, often. He joined, he said, as soon as he was old enough. His papers show he was inducted at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on April 27, 1917, just three weeks after America entered the war; his actual enlistment probably took place in Syracuse a week or two before that.

In Philadelphia, the Marines assigned him to the 51st Company of the 5th Regiment. After only six weeks of training—much of it spent “on a rifle range there”—the 5th Marines boarded the USS Henderson and sailed off for France; it was June 14, 1917. General Pershing had himself arrived in France just days earlier. “We was thirteen days going across, I know that,” he said. “They had a lot of ships”—that is, destroyers, subchasers—“following us, so nothing happened until we got across.” He vividly remembered two things about the crossing. The first was that “they was giving the fellows a shot in the arm. I can remember it so well that there was one guy, he was watching, he thought they was giving him a big needle, and he jumped around. They took him out of the line, and put him back, back farther.” He laughed at that one. The other: “After we landed in Saint-Nazaire [France], we was onboard ship, they paid us fifteen dollars for payday . . . seems to me they paid us in gold. And one of the guys leaned over the ship, he had it in his pocket, and it slipped out. He lost that.” I laughed at that one.

But the day of my visit was not a good one for Eugene Lee’s memory. He began to get frustrated with himself only a few minutes into our conversation, started interjecting the phrase “How the hell was it?” into just about every answer. He still had a fair amount to say, but not nearly as much, I could tell, as he wanted to. So while he was able to impart some information to me, I had to fill in a fair number of gaps after we spoke, and in doing so I came upon a part of the story, a big part, that he didn’t even know about, that didn’t even happen until much later, years after he died.

“On the back of a truck,” Eugene Lee recalled, eighty-six years after the fact, “we went to this little town, and—how the hell?—we stayed in this little town, and we done some training there.” This would have been the early summer of 1917, shortly after the 5th Marines arrived in France. After a while there, “they put us in the trench up there at Verdun, I think it was.” He said “Ver-DOON,” offering me a brief glimpse of an archaic pronunciation (or mispronunciation) that was once, I imagine, quite common. “We didn’t do anything, just . . . I don’t know how long we was in them up there, them big trenches they had. And the next thing—the next thing, I guess, was they took us up . . . they moved us over there by truck. Then we started up the road and we met—there was one Frenchman coming back. He was all alone, but he come, he said: ‘Beaucoup Boche.’”

Beaucoup Boche: A lot of Germans.

Now: If you should find yourself at an Oktoberfest one day with an enormous beer stein in your hand, swaying to the deep and soothing tones of an oompah band, do not—please—address your fellow revelers as “Boche.” It is not a polite term. I don’t think Germans back then cared for it any more than they did “Kraut,” or “Heinie,” or “Blockhead,” or “Jerry,” or “Fritz.” If you’re wondering, the word is actually a shortened version of Alboche, which is itself a combination of Allemand, the French word for “German,” and caboche, slang for both “cabbage” (aka “kraut”) and “blockhead.” It was the favored French term for Germans, and the French hated the Germans back then. Deeply. The Germans, after all, had invaded their country twice in less than half a century, tore the place up, and appropriated lots of land and riddled it with concrete trenches and bunkers and gun emplacements to keep the French from taking it back.

Whatever bad things the Germans of World War I may have done, though—and they weren’t exactly humanitarians who invaded neutral Belgium to better spread a message of tolerance and love—it’s important to remember that they did not build death camps. They weren’t the Gestapo, the SD, the SS, or the Einsatzgruppen. Maybe I draw this distinction because I know that in the east—Russia, Poland, the Baltics—the German Army of World War I actually served, for a while, as liberators of the indigenous Jewish population, who had been dealing for centuries with dehumanizing anti-Semitic statutes and murderous state-sponsored pogroms; maybe it’s because every account I’ve ever read of the legendary Christmas Truce of 1914 has the Germans courageously initiating it. Maybe it’s the stories that Arthur Guy Empey and Frank P. Sibley tell about Saxons deliberately firing over their enemies’ heads. Maybe it’s all of these things. One thing I can say for sure, though, is that my attitudes on the subject have been shaped, in part, by something Eugene Lee told me that day.

At exactly 11:00 a.m. on the morning of November 11, 1918, somewhere in the Meuse-Argonne sector, he recalled, a German soldier “come out waving a white flag, and he started walking down, and our officer went out to meet him. When they got there, all of a sudden, all the German soldiers come running down, and our fellows—well, we got up, and they got mixed up talking to—some could speak our language, and a lot of our fellows could speak German, so we had a great time changing, trying to talk. And they showed us pictures of their family, you know, and we had a great time to celebrate . . . swapping souvenirs.”

A couple of weeks later, “after the armistice,” he explained, “we had to follow the Germans back.” That is to say, the 5th Marines were part of the Army of Occupation, which was established by the terms of the armistice; they were stationed in the German Rhineland. “We had to follow them back, and in a little town, we stopped for Thanksgiving, and had our Thanksgiving dinner there. It’s a little, little place. I forget the name of the place.”

“Where did you stay when you were in Germany?” I asked him. “Did you stay in somebody’s house?”

“Yes, lived right in the house,” he replied. “There was so many men to a house. There was two in our house. We each had separate rooms, bedrooms, beds to sleep in.”

“Do you remember the name of the German family that you stayed with?”

“Yes, I did. I did, but I’ve forgot. It was something like Horteig.”

“Did you go hunting when you were in Germany?” Jim Casey had told me that Mr. Lee had hunted back home before he’d enlisted.

“Yeah, we could hunt,” he said. “The only thing was we wasn’t supposed to shoot was deer. But they had wild boar, anything else you wanted to shoot.”

“So what did you shoot?”

“I shot a deer up there.” He laughed, and I did. “I left it there and went back down and got a friend of mine. We brought it back down, and this, where I lived, the old man, he come out and took the deer. Let’s see, they invited us—the fellow with me—they invited us down for a dinner when they had the deer. We went down and had venison dinner, and we had the one meal after that. We didn’t go down [more often] because they didn’t get too much to eat, you know.”

“Where did the German families get their food?”

“The government allowed them so much each week, I guess.”

“The American government?”

“Yeah. Those German people, they were nice people, they were . . . At first we used to have to carry a weapon with us all the time. It wasn’t long after that we didn’t have to carry any weapons. The German people were good people, and we got to know them.”

“They were very friendly to the Americans?”

“They was, when we got to know them. They used to—before, you used to have to wash some underwear, when we was in France, we used to walk out in the stream and wash them and hammer them. Well, [in Germany] I had some dirty underwear, I was going to wash it, and when I came back, the German woman there, she had it all washed and clean for me. And I give her five francs. And Jesus, that was a lot of money to them.” He looked down at his hands.

“Were you surprised at how nice the German people were?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “No, because I knew a lot of German people where I lived, in Liverpool.”

“Did you hear a lot of bad things about the Germans during the war?”

“Oh, yes. I heard a lot of bad things. Something about, they threw some of them in the furnace.”

Later, Jim explained to me that Mr. Lee must have been confused by my question, confused in particular about which war I was referring to; that he was thinking I’d meant the Second World War, and that “furnace” meant “crematoria.” This was after the interview had ended, after I had packed up my equipment and thanked Mr. Lee and left his room and the long-term-care wing; he was asleep by then, I figured, or maybe having lunch. Whatever the case, I didn’t feel I could go back there and ask him the question that Jim Casey’s revelation had raised in my mind, which was this: Having heard, many years later, about the furnaces, how did you square that image with your fond memories of the German people from your time in the Army of Occupation?

I’m glad Jim Casey didn’t tell me what he did until we were well away from Eugene Lee’s room. I’m glad he didn’t do so because, if he had explained the “furnace” reference to me while I was still there, I would have asked Mr. Lee that question, would have done so reflexively. Because I would have wanted to know. Very much. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, until I had watched him wrestle with words and memory for a bit—something he did even after much simpler, more straightforward questions—that it’s a ridiculous question to pose to a 104-year-old man. I was thirty-six at the time, and I couldn’t have answered it.

I still can’t.

Back to Beaucoup Boche.

“So we was going up the road,” Private Eugene Lee recalled eighty-five years and six months hence, “and we met the French people walking back, all the old people.” It’s a scene that was recounted by someone else who was with the 5th Marines that day—William Edward Campbell, writing fifteen years later as William March, telling the story as Private Jesse Bogan of Company K:

We came to a long hill shaped like a semi-circle and dug in against the protected side. Below us the Germans were shelling Marigny, a small town. We could see people running out of the houses, making funny gestures, and down the narrow streets, until they joined the line that filled the highway. Then we dug in on the off side of the hill and waited.

It was late May and the whole countryside was green and beautiful. Below us, in the valley, fruit trees were in bloom, pink, white and red, running across the valley in strips of color, and spotting the side of the hill. Then a haze settled over the valley, and gradually it got dark.

The Germans had quit shelling the town. It lay demolished below us. Lieutenant Bartlestone came up: “All right, men! Get your things together. We’re going in the wood when it gets dark.” Then he spoke to Sergeant Dunning: “The orders are to stop the Germans and not let them advance an inch farther. . . .”

“Well, anyway,” said Alex Marro, after the lieutenant had gone, “that’s simple and to the point.”

“What’s the name of this place?” asked Art Crenshaw.

“I don’t know,” said Sergeant Dunning. “What difference does that make?”

“I asked a Frenchman on the road,” said Allan Methot, “and he said it was called Belleau Wood.”

“Come on! Come on!” said Sergeant Dunning. “Get your equipment together, and quit chewing the fat!”

Belleau Wood. It’s hard to explain just what those words mean to a United States Marine. What “Valley Forge” meant to a former Continental soldier, perhaps. Except that now Valley Forge has been appropriated by all Americans; few who aren’t World War I buffs have even heard of Belleau Wood. Every single Marine has, though, and that little two-word phrase is as important to them as just about any other they know. USMC Commandant General James F. Amos told me that Belleau Wood “was the birth of the modern Marine Corps.”

You might recall Captain Emerson G. Taylor’s description, in New England in France, of Belleau Wood: “Shapeless fragments of what once were men hung in the jagged branches of the trees, blown there by shells.” There’s a good chance that at least some of those fragments had once been Marines. By the time Captain Taylor arrived on the scene, they could have been up there for nearly a month; no wonder he, and the rest of the 102nd Infantry, “came to move and talk as when they know that ghosts are watching them.” To the living and already edgy, those woods—blasted to shards and reeking of decomposing corpses—must have seemed haunted.

Six weeks earlier, and for centuries before that, they were the private hunting grounds of a landed French family, a fine place to stalk deer and wild boar. But war is often like a roulette wheel, with battlegrounds being chosen by chance rather than strategy. In the case of Belleau Wood, that wheel started spinning a few months earlier and a few hundred miles to the east. On March 3, 1918, Germany and Russia—the latter in the charge of Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviki—signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending their part of the war, allowing the Bolsheviki to devote their attentions entirely to putting down the various anti-Bolshevik uprisings, which are now remembered collectively as the Russian Civil War. But the treaty also allowed the Germans to move nearly all the forces they had on their Eastern Front—most historians say the number was thirty-three divisions, roughly five hundred thousand troops—to the Western Front, which gave them, at long last, numerical superiority over the Allies. For the time being, that is. They believed, as did everyone else, that four million fresh American troops would be arriving in France sooner or later; as they saw it, their only chance to win the war would be to do so before the bulk of those American troops could get there. So the Germans, who had been fighting a largely defensive war since the fall of 1914, mounted a massive offensive—known to history as the Spring Offensive—just a few weeks after the treaty was signed, in the hopes that it might punch through the French and British lines.

It did. So successfully, in fact, that the Germans dramatically overachieved their objectives every day. This might sound like a good thing; it was not. Have you ever gone to break down a door with your shoulder, only to discover, at the point of contact, that the aforementioned door wasn’t even latched? Probably not, but I have, and I can tell you that when the resistance you’ve prepared for isn’t there to meet you, you lunge ahead clumsily, and more often than not end up face-down on the floor. That, in essence, is what happened to Germany during their successful-beyond-their-greatest-hopes Spring Offensive of 1918. For one thing, they soon found themselves far ahead of their own supply lines, which can only move so fast. Worse still, they had advanced so quickly that they hadn’t had time to determine an objective beyond simply advancing; soon, they found themselves deep in enemy territory with no idea where to go next. Their offensive floundered, nowhere more colorfully than the town of Albert, where, stunned by the sight of stores full of food and wine—they’d been out of reach of their supply lines for days, and German stores had been all but empty for years—they stopped marching and instead ate and drank themselves into a collective stupor.

By this time, though, France was in a panic. The Germans were now within forty miles of Paris, the closest they had gotten to the French capital since the summer of 1914. Thousands of civilians fled the city, clogging the roads. The French government made plans to relocate to Versailles. The Allied high command feared the worst; among themselves, they agreed they were now confronting the gravest threat of the war. The French and, even more so, the British had been trying for months to force Pershing to throw his men into battle—berating him, belittling him, and when that didn’t work, going through diplomatic channels in an attempt to have him replaced. Pershing, though, had held firm; his men weren’t ready, he said, weren’t fully trained. He would not let the British and French use the Americans as they had the Canadians and Australians, the Senegalese and Moroccans. America had entered the war on its own terms; it would fight under its own command, when it was up to the task.

Now the Allies amplified their pleas, told him just how dire the situation was. And Pershing, moved—probably more by the French, who treated him with greater respect than the British did—committed two Regular Army divisions, the 2nd and the 3rd, to the fight: fifty thousand men, nearly all of whom, it seemed, were terribly excited to finally have their chance to get into the action. Numerous contemporary accounts have them marching to the front with chests swelled and chins thrust out, laughing and joking even as retreating French troops scurried by, warning them to follow suit. If there ever really were a time and place where the scene portrayed in the song “The Americans Come!” actually played out, this was probably it.

Slowly, the Allies started pushing back, though it wasn’t easy, as the Germans had taken care during their offensive to set up defensive positions at various points along the way. So when the 2nd and 3rd Divisions—the 2nd Division at that point comprised two Army regiments, the 9th and the 23rd, and two regiments of Marines, the 5th and 6th—managed to beat back the Germans at Château-Thierry, less than fifty miles northeast of Paris, the Germans fell back into their nearest fortified position, only a few miles away: Belleau Wood. And there the roulette wheel stopped.

Of course, it was the Germans who stopped there, and that wasn’t a matter of chance; the woods offered them an excellent defensive position. You only have to walk through a dense forest to understand why it’s not a good place to launch an attack on an entrenched and experienced enemy. Perhaps that’s why the French didn’t want to go in there themselves, why they asked the Americans to do it, instead. Some historians argue that America should never have undertaken that battle, that they should have known how costly it would be to fight in such conditions, that there were plenty of examples from the previous four years to warn them off. But the Americans were still new to the war and, I would guess, invigorated by the fighting at Château-Thierry, and by news of the 1st Division’s success at Cantigny a few days before that; they followed the Germans up to Belleau Wood, dug in, and withstood German attempts to break out. Again, French soldiers urged the Americans to retreat. The Americans would not. Their attitude was famously summed up by one Captain Lloyd Williams of the 5th Marines, who said: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!”

Instead, they decided to go on the attack.

Now, years of trench warfare had taught the French, British, and Germans the value of softening up your enemy with a heavy-artillery barrage before you launched an attack against them; but General Pershing, who didn’t much care for trench warfare, also didn’t much care for tactical artillery, at least not at this point in the war. Neither did an old friend of his, James Harbord, who had initially gone to France as Pershing’s chief of staff. By June, 1918, Harbord had been promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of the Marine brigade that comprised the 5th and 6th Regiments. So the Americans launched their initial attack upon entrenched German defenses without the benefit of a prolonged artillery barrage beforehand. Not a good idea.

This would be the morning of June 6, 1918, twenty-six years to the day before Americans would launch another attack against fortified and skilled German defenders elsewhere on French soil (or, as it were in 1944, French sand). In order to get to the woods, and the Germans therein, the Americans had to cross a large, open wheat field. “They started us in waves towards the Belleau Woods,” Private Eugene Lee recalled eighty-five years later. “In four waves—we’d go along and jump the first wave as they go so far, then the next wave, they kept doing that till we reached the woods up there . . . You’d go so far, and you’d keep firing along there, into the woods until the next wave come along . . . We kept going so far, and then you’d lie down, and the next wave would come in back of them, jump each one until they got to the edge of the woods. And then they got in the woods, fighting.”

That day, and that field, are now iconic elements of USMC lore. First Sergeant Dan Daly, a forty-four-year-old native of Long Island who had been in the Corps for nearly twenty years and had already won two Congressional Medals of Honor—two!—is said to have rallied his squad in the open field that day by calling out: “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?” That quote—or a toned-down version of it, anyway—was recorded by Floyd Gibbons, a dashing reporter for the Chicago Tribune who hurried up from Paris to be with the Marines that day. As he approached the field, a colonel urged him to turn back, warning him it was “damn hot up there.” Gibbons ignored his advice and started across a field “covered with a young crop of oats between ten and fifteen inches high.” When he was halfway across, a German machine gun opened fire; Gibbons, unarmed, flattened himself against the earth and started crawling forward. He didn’t make it very far. One bullet shot through his left bicep; a second nicked his left shoulder. And then a third tore into his left eye, exiting through his forehead. “Just how does it feel to be shot on the field of battle?” Gibbons wrote in his memoir, “And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight,” published by Doran later that year. “I always wanted to know.” He found out that day, three times over. His judgment: No big deal. “It seemed hard for me to believe at the time, but . . . I was experiencing not any more pain than I had experienced once when I dropped a lighted cigarette on the back of my hand.”

In all, the Marines sustained nearly eleven hundred casualties on June 6, making it the deadliest day in the Corps’s history to that point. “I never saw men charge to their death with finer spirit,” Gibbons would recall in “And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight,” but still: to their death. Things didn’t get much better once they made it into the woods, either. The good news for the Marines was that, if you must fight in a dense forest, it’s best to do so with sharpshooters, of whom the Corps had many; “The deadliest weapon in the world is a Marine and his rifle!” General Pershing boasted after the battle. The bad news was that the enemy had plenty of them, too. The Americans did manage to wrest Belleau Wood from the Germans, but then the Germans, famous for counterattacking, did just that, and wrested the forest back. Then the Americans counter-counterattacked, and the Germans counter-counter-counterattacked, and before the Americans could claim victory—on June 26, with a report that stated, simply, “Woods now US Marine Corps entirely”—the forest had changed hands a dozen times. It took the Americans—Army and Marines—twenty days to take it and hold it. The price was 9,777 casualties, of whom 1,811 were killed in action. Among them was Captain Williams, whose refusal to retreat was already famous by the time he was killed on June 12.

Another casualty that day was one Private Eugene Lee, shot through the left wrist. “I was lucky,” he told me. “It didn’t hit the bone.”

“A bullet hit your wrist but didn’t break it?” I asked, not even sure how such a thing might be possible.

“No,” he said. “That’s why I was lucky all the while.”

Despite his injury, Private Lee helped evacuate more seriously wounded Marines. “I helped get them back where they could take care of them, get them to an ambulance,” he recalled. It was an act that won him the military’s third-highest decoration. “The Silver Star,” he said. “I don’t know why they give it to me.”

“I think they gave it to you for bravery under fire,” I told him, “and for helping carry other wounded soldiers out even though you were wounded yourself.”

“Well,” he replied, “you didn’t think about that.”

Both the Army and the Marines fought at Belleau Wood, yet the battle is today remembered solely as a triumph for the Marine Corps. Responsibility for that fact resides with Floyd Gibbons. General Pershing had instituted a strict prohibition against naming specific units, or even branches of the military, in association with any particular action or location; he didn’t want the enemy to have any intelligence about which units were where. But Gibbons, in writing up his coverage of that day’s fighting—three bullet holes, one eye, and all—mentioned that Marines had been in the fight, and the military’s censors, reckoning that Gibbons was dying, decided to leave intact what they figured to be his final dispatch, as a tribute. Of course, Gibbons did not end up dying, at least not until 1939, but since no one else had been allowed to mention any Army units, the public celebrated Belleau Wood as a victory for the USMC, and the USMC alone. By the time the histories started being published, it was too late. The concrete had set in America’s national consciousness.

This didn’t help relations between the Army and the Marine Corps, which had never been all that good to begin with; the matter of who deserved credit for Belleau Wood, which General Pershing afterward called “the most considerable engagement American troops had ever had with a foreign enemy,” generated no small measure of ill will between the two. Ninety years later, I spoke with several historians who felt very strongly that the Army had been denied its due. One of them even asserted that Belleau Wood was the reason that Marines were kept out of the European Theater in World War II.

The French, though, see no controversy. Their feelings about Belleau Wood are summed up by the fact that, immediately after the battle, they renamed the forest—what was left of it, anyway—the Bois de la Brigade de Marine. And they’re crazy about the place; over the decades, they’ve picked it dry, stripping away everything in sight and, with the help of metal detectors, most of what wasn’t in sight. The French government long ago banned the use of metal detectors in such circumstances, but ardent collectors still use them anyway. Sometime around the turn of the new century, one even dug up, in the woods near the village of Lucy-le-Bocage, an old American mess-kit cover with the original owner’s name scratched into the side: WILLIAM E. LEE. 51 CO. US. Delighted, he did some research and was astonished to learn that William E. Lee was still alive and living in Syracuse, New York, though no longer going by his first name.

Private Lee had presumably dropped it—the canteen, not the first name—in those woods on June 12, 1918, when a German bullet drilled through his wrist. And though he considered himself lucky that it hadn’t shattered his bone, the wound was still serious enough to land him in a hospital for four months. He didn’t seem to mind; for one thing, no one was shooting at him there. He even got to play some baseball. Back home, he’d played third base, but at the hospital, he explained, “they got me pitching.”

“Were you good?” I asked him.

“I didn’t have a lot of stuff on the ball,” he said, “but I had good control. I could throw where I wanted to throw.”

“Did you ever bean anybody?”

He laughed. “Yeah . . . one time . . . they had a second lieutenant playing with them, and I hit him on purpose.”

In the hospital, he met another wounded Marine, a fellow named Joe Winook; at least it sounded to me that day like “Winook”—I didn’t ask him for a precise spelling. “He was from the 6th Regiment,” Private Lee, of the 5th Regiment, recalled; they met not while playing ball, but while throwing dice. “He got in a crap game, and he won so much . . .”

“What’d you do with it?”

“Oh, we traveled.” They went to Paris, a good place to spend money, and became fast friends. Eighty-five years later, it was clear that Eugene Lee still thought about his old pal Joe Winook from time to time; he mentioned him often during our visit, spoke of their time at the hospital and in Paris, their return to the front once they’d healed.

It seemed to me that Eugene Lee was a man who didn’t mind revisiting the past on a regular basis. His walls, as I mentioned, were covered with old photographs—pictures of friends and relatives, of girls peering through old tennis rackets, and one of himself, alone and in uniform, labeled: “April 1917, Philadelphia.” The picture that commandeered my gaze, though, didn’t have any people in it at all; it was of a massive airship, broken and resting atop a stand of young trees: a zeppelin. “It’d only landed just a little way, a couple of miles from where we were,” he explained. “Crashed. Next morning, they marched the whole company over to that zeppelin there. And I got a piece of it. I tore [it] off, and I got it somewhere in a bunch of things I got.” This particular zeppelin, the LZ-49 (aka L49, or LZ-96—who understands these things?), was returning to Germany from England, where it had dropped more than two tons of bombs, when, on October 20, 1917, French planes shot it down near the town of Bourbonne-les-Bains, in the region of Lorraine. The German crew escaped unharmed, but soon found themselves nearly surrounded by angry Frenchmen; it’s hard to crash-land a zeppelin without attracting attention to yourself. The crew was supposed to set the airship on fire, but decided they’d better just flee, instead. And so the Allies captured their first intact zeppelin. They inspected it thoroughly, took copious notes; zeppelins had been terrorizing civilian populations in England and France for three years. After the war, the US Navy patterned its first rigid airship, the USS Shenandoah, after the LZ-49.

Seeing my fascination with the picture of the zeppelin, Jim Casey dug out a photo of that recently unearthed mess kit, the one marked “William E. Lee,” and told me about it. And here’s where things start to get hinky.

In the movies or a feel-good newspaper story, the fellow who had dug up that artifact, having discovered that its original owner was, incredibly, still living eighty or so years later—that fellow would magnanimously return his find to the aforementioned original owner, who would pass it on to his overjoyed children, or maybe the Smithsonian. In real life, however, the treasure-hunter, realizing that this astonishing historical quirk made his find all the more valuable, put it up on eBay, instead. Jim didn’t know what happened to it after that, but he recommended that, if I ever got to France, I should look up a fellow named Gilles Lagin. He might know something about it.

Five and a half years later, I did look up Gilles Lagin. A swarthy man built like a shipping crate, Gilles lives in the nigh-unpronounceable town of Marigny-en-Orxois, near Belleau Wood, and grew up hearing tales of the battle fought there nearly half a century before he was born. He also grew up digging for artifacts there, even before the ban on metal detectors; over the decades he found a great many, enough for a little museum, which he established in the upper floor of an old barn next door to his house. He graciously received me there and showed me around.

It’s not exactly what you think of when you hear the words “French museum.” Gilles’s place is actually quite small, just a few rooms, and extremely cluttered. Much of his collection is still in boxes, labeled “1995” and the like, waiting to be organized. Most of it is covered in rust—a lot of rust. Some is arrayed in crannies under eaves, so that you really have to bend over to view it. All of that said, the man has just about everything you can imagine, American and German: helmets, bombs, artillery, gun carriages, grenade launchers, rifles, machine guns, pistols, bayonets, trench knives, gas masks, uniforms, cartridge belts, bandoliers, flags, banners, canteens, mess kits, first-aid kits, cigarette cases, keys, whistles, insignia; and not just one of each, but dozens. He has at least a platoon’s worth of identification disks.

The front room—the only one that doesn’t look like a hoarder’s garage sale—features mannequins in uniform and glass cases filled with carefully labeled objects. All of it, fascinating and even oddly beautiful as it is, though, is upstaged by two very large objects that at first glance seem out of place there. One is a segment of tree husk, stretching from floor to ceiling, in the middle of which is a hole large enough, if not quite wide enough, to stick your head through; that, Gilles explained, came off a tree that was hit by a shell that did not explode. Next to it stands an actual tree—or at least a five-foot-tall chunk of one. Carved into its trunk are the words “USMC, 5th Marines, July 17th, 1918,” surrounding a rough approximation of the Corps’s symbol, an eagle perched atop a globe and anchor. A placard tacked to the top of the trunk reads:

   Tree from Villers Cotterets forest, it was

carved by a Marine from the 5th regiment

   /2nd Division, on July 17, 1918 after they

moved from Belleau Wood area to Soissons,

      they debussed in the big forest in the

  afternoon of July 17, 1918 and some of them

  found the time to carve trees before to move

  to the jump line, the same day by night, and

by the way, to keep the remembrance forever.

I asked Gilles how he had managed to secure this particular artifact. He just smiled and said it wasn’t easy. He added that it was particularly popular with former Marines, quite a few of whom, he told me, had visited him over the years. One had even made him an honorary member of the Corps. I noticed he was wearing a USMC T-shirt that day—not for my benefit, I believe, but because he owned a lot of them.

I inquired about Eugene Lee’s mess kit. Gilles said he’d tried to acquire it for his museum, but had been outbid by someone else. He thought he knew who the winner was, he added, but declined to furnish a name; for whatever reason, collectors of this ilk often seem kind of shadowy, not the sort of folk whose names you might drop casually. They don’t much like each other, either.

The next day, I was in Belleau. It’s a very small village, without any shops to speak of, though it does have a little museum dedicated to local history, and particularly to the First World War. I was told I needed to see this museum, and I was glad to get into it, since, like much of small-town France, it keeps odd hours, and not many of them; but by the time I did, I’d been in the area for several days, and there wasn’t much in it that I hadn’t seen before. I did, however, notice that many of the military artifacts therein were marked as being on loan from one Georges Bailly. I asked the curator for M. Bailly’s phone number; the French being not nearly as obsessed with privacy as Americans are, she gave it to me right away. (I may or may not have flirted with her a bit, first. Hey—it was France.) M. Bailly sounded a bit cagey at first, but when I dropped the name Eugene Lee, he invited me over.

Unlike Gilles Lagin, Georges Bailly did not have a museum in his house, or anywhere else; he was just a collector—and, he later acknowledged, a dealer. (In case you’re wondering, his last name is pronounced “by-EE.” And yes, I did ask him how things were at the Bedford Falls Savings and Loan; he had no idea what I was talking about.) A sharp, silver-haired man who looked more like a dealer of art than militaria, he stored his collection mostly in one very large room on the second floor of his house. Everything in it looked almost as good as new—not a trace of rust anywhere, at least not as far as I could see. He had as many Pickelhauben—those German spiked helmets—as Gilles Lagin had identification disks. Every one was different, too, each bearing subtle distinctions indicating rank, branch of service, state of origin, and so on. When I asked if I could take pictures, he looked suspicious, then anxious, and said non. I imagine he worried about thieves. His greatest concern, though, was moths; he’d recently routed an infestation, but not before it damaged some of his old uniforms, which otherwise looked pristine on their mannequins. It was a sad thing to see.

Throughout the room, he had sealed plastic tubs and small metal filing cabinets. From time to time he would open one up and show me a drawer or a tub filled with insignia, or identification disks, or other such artifacts, sorted and stored like with like. He tracked everything—many thousands of artifacts—on an extensive set of file cards; each individual item had a corresponding card. As much as he had, he knew exactly where all of it was.

I asked him about Eugene Lee’s mess-kit cover. Yes, he said, he knew all about it. Someone else had it; he heard they’d dug it up with a metal detector. Who had it? A shrug.

So, he asked me, did you really meet Eugene Lee? By this time, Mr. Lee had been gone for more than five years; he’d died on March 25, 2004, less than four months after I’d met him.

Yes, I said, I did.

“Do you know the name Joseph Winook?” he asked. I said I did, that Mr. Lee had talked a lot about his old friend. But how do you know about him, M. Bailly? He just smiled and pulled out a small box filled with index cards, flipped through until he found the one he was looking for, withdrew it, then opened a drawer filled with eating utensils and rooted around in it for a few minutes. Finally he pulled out a fork, looked it over for a few seconds, then gingerly passed it to me. It was dark with oxidation, but I could still read clearly the engravings on its handle:

117654

WNUK

The index card read, in part: “WNUK, Joseph F. Fork. Found 5 November, 1993.” M. Bailly was an excellent researcher; using nothing more than a fork bearing a serial number and one name, he was able to determine its owner’s date and place of enlistment (Philadelphia, April 27, 1917), the date he probably dropped it (wounded June 11, 1918), the term of his hospitalization, the fact that he’d been awarded a Silver Star, and much more. I, on the other hand, have never been able to find out anything about the man. But at least now I know how to spell his name.

Eventually, both William E. Lee and Joe Wnuk returned to the front. By then they were serving together in the 51st Company of the 5th Regiment; I don’t know if Joe had requested such a transfer so he and William could serve together, or if it had just worked out that way. They were sent east, to Lorraine, just in time for the great Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the last great battle of the war. The Argonne—another forest. A very dangerous place to be. They were glad to be fighting together.

“Where was Joe from, do you remember?” I asked Mr. Lee.

“He was from Pennsylvania. I was going to stop to his house after I was discharged,” he said.

“Did you get to do that?”

“No. No, I never did. He was killed the last night.”

The last night: of the war. November 10, 1918. Twelve, maybe fifteen hours to go until the armistice. “During the night, as we crossed the river . . .”—the Meuse River—“. . . once in a while, they’d throw a shell over, it’d land in the river in back of us. It’s one of them that killed Joe,” he said. “The very last night.”

Tell me, what words can possibly do justice to the notion of a young man, freshly healed and back to fighting strength, being killed anonymously from a mile away by a lone piece of German artillery on the last night of the war? My mind, limited as it is, doesn’t know what to do with that, with the notion that, by the time the sun set next, the war would be over, yet somehow Joseph Wnuk wouldn’t be there to see it. I don’t know how to feel about the fact that, seventy-five years after his death, a scavenger dug the man’s fork up out of the earth, the ground where he might have died but didn’t, and now a collector, a man with no connection at all to Joseph Wnuk of Pennsylvania, keeps that fork in a drawer with scores of other forks and spoons and knives.

Do I even have the right to feel anything at all about a story told to me in the last months of his life by a man who survived Belleau Wood and the Argonne Forest, hunted deer and fed his hosts in occupied Germany, sailed home on the USS Leviathan (which, before it was seized by the United States in 1917, had been the SS Vaterland), marched in parades in Philadelphia and New York and Washington, returned to Syracuse, married his sweetheart, started going by his middle name, passed nearly half a century working as a traveling foreman for the Syracuse Lighting and Niagara Mohawk power companies, passed another forty years in retirement, and still carried with him, through all of it, through every month of those eighty-five years, the memory of that friend and of his death on the last night of the war? The pain, the grief, the indignation or cynicism or bitterness or relief or whatever—that all belongs to William Eugene Lee.

“You wrote a letter to his—Joe’s—mother after he was killed?” I asked him that day in Syracuse in December, 2003.

“Yes, I did,” he said.

“What did you tell her?”

“I told them how he was a great friend, and I was going to stop there.”

But he never could bring himself to make that trip.