13

L’Ossuaire

THERE’S A REASON it became known, even before it ended, as the World War. Yes, it started out as the Great War, and some still call it that. But for many, “great” just didn’t do the thing justice. Other wars had been broad in scope; this one was ubiquitous. There was action in Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda; Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Anatolia; Polynesia, Samoa, Guam, New Guinea; East Prussia, Galicia, Transylvania, Latvia. Naval battles were fought off the coasts of China, India, Chile, Denmark. Men shot at each other on the veldt, in the jungle, across the desert, atop mountains; killed and died in the snow-covered Italian Alps, mosquito-infested African swamps, ice-encrusted Siberian harbors, and the clear blue waters of the Red Sea. It really did scar the entire planet.

But if you know anything at all about the World War, you know that one country in the world, more than any other, was consumed by it.

Battles—epic, heroic, iconic battles—were fought in Belgium, Russia, Turkey, Italy. But France—France was a battle. And it never let up for a single day in more than four years. Elsewhere, sections of cities or towns may have been badly damaged, a village largely destroyed; in certain parts of France, just about every settlement was entirely destroyed. Some would eventually be rebuilt where they had stood, others on a different spot not too far away. But many—often within a matter of hours—simply ceased to exist, forever.

In much of the country, the landscape remains altered even now. In some areas, just about every patch of woods is riddled with trenches; narrow but deep, twisting sharply this way or that every ten yards or so (to prevent enfilading fire should the enemy make it into your trench), dappled with leaves and pocked with branches and roots, you might take them for dry creek beds but for the fact that they intersect, at fairly regular intervals, with other narrow, deep, jagged depressions. Near Verdun I walked through a section of forest—just one of many in that part of the country—where the grassy floor undulates so much that there doesn’t remain even a square yard of flat ground: shell holes. Here and there you will find massive craters, some the size of a large amphitheater. Desperate to break the stalemate, both sides took to tunneling beneath No Man’s Land, carving out large chambers under the enemy’s trenchworks, packing them with explosives, scurrying out and then, at a predetermined hour, detonating them. Someone thought to film one such event, the detonation of forty thousand pounds of ammonal (a particularly nasty explosive) by the British Royal Engineers’ 252nd Tunneling Company at Hawthorn Ridge, near the village of Beaumont-Hamel, at precisely 7:20 a.m. on July 1, 1916. It was the start of the Battle of the Somme, but the footage—somehow more terrifying for being silent—makes it look more like the end of the world. The blast left a crater 80 feet deep, 450 feet long, and 300 feet wide. Eight minutes later, the Royal Engineers set off another mine, this one packed with forty-eight thousand pounds of ammonal, south of the village of La Boisselle. That hole, now known as the Lochnagar Mine, is even larger; it has been preserved as it was, and is a tourist attraction today. When I visited I saw a couple of men parked nearby in tiny trailers, selling World War I artifacts.

After a few such blasts everyone, out of necessity, became very good at listening in and detecting each other’s tunneling efforts. Thereafter, they usually knew when and where the other side ceased digging, giving them plenty of inadvertent warning to evacuate the targeted area. These colossal explosions, then, spectacular and fearsome though they appeared, did not claim all that many lives. Still, neither side stopped tunneling.

The average World War I soldier spent an awful lot of time below the surface of the earth. There were those trenches, to begin with—fire trenches up front, support trenches in the rear (not too far in the rear, though—maybe two or three hundred yards at the most), and the communications trenches that ran in between the two. No one knows how many miles of them were dug in France between 1914 and 1918; many thousands, at the least. The typical fire trench was about twelve feet deep when freshly dug; rain, water seepage, and bombardment filled them in pretty quickly, though, and they required almost constant maintenance. Then there were dugouts, earthen basements (minus a house) where men who were lucky enough to have access to them might seek shelter during a bombardment or, if they were off the front line, sleep a bit. Dugouts were scarcely more habitable than trenches. Both were always wet (the water table in much of France was rarely very deep), riddled with rats and cooties. You had to be pretty tired, or frightened, to spend much time in a dugout; at least in a trench you could look up at the sky. The British and French carved their dugouts about a dozen or so feet beneath the surface. The Germans often burrowed two or three stories for theirs, even outfitting them with concrete stairways.

The Germans seemed to have a special affinity for subterranean life. In some areas, like the hills of the Argonne Forest and the heights above the Meuse River, they built large underground hospitals and convalescent wards, linked and supplied by an impressive network of tunnels. Both sides took shelter for months at a time in the old mines that lined the Chemin des Dames, but the Germans actually electrified theirs; you can still see the wiring in them today. If you walk around certain areas, you quickly come to understand that the Germans brought to the war a distinct technological edge. They ran electrical lines through just about every place they went, and laid countless miles of narrow-gauge railroad track, too. Most of it is still out there; the track, at least, has aged quite well. So have their trenches, many of which were fortified with concrete—no mistaking any of them for a dry creek bed. The French, on the other hand, were not allowed to build concrete trenchworks; concrete implies permanence, and the French were always supposed to be pushing forward, attacking until they had driven the invader from their country. To use concrete, the high command believed, would be bad for morale. The poilus—slang for French infantrymen (poilu literally translates as “hairy one”)—crouching in those dirt trenches might have disagreed.

The Germans, though, were not only concerned with pushing forward, but with holding what they had already taken. So they trucked in lots and lots of concrete and used it to build lots and lots of supply cellars and sewer systems, pillboxes and bunkers, dugouts and trenches, a great many of which are still there, more or less. In the Argonne, where he was commanding the German 5th Army, Kronprinz Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s oldest son, built himself a bunker that looked like a posh chateau, complete with marble fireplaces. It remains there, set into a slope in the forest, and still projects hints of its former elegance, even though souvenir-hunters long ago carried off the last of the marble.

The Germans’ technological edge extended to their weaponry. They invented the flamethrower. Their Mauser rifles were superior to the French Army’s Lebels. Their barbed wire was thicker, with more barbs. Their wire cutters could easily cut through British wire, but not vice versa. Their Luger was better than any pistol a French officer might carry; their machine guns were better than those the French had. Their artillery fired 77-millimeter shells, while the French guns fired 75-millimeter shells; this meant the Germans could fire captured French shells back at the French, while the French couldn’t cram German shells into their own guns. You can’t help but get the sense that Germany really should have won that war.

And yet it didn’t. The French did. But it was France, not Germany, that was largely destroyed in the process.

France certainly didn’t volunteer to host a war that would drag on for four years and, in doing so, lay much of the place to waste. The strange thing is that Germany didn’t plan on it, either. Actually, its grand war plan promised the conquest and capitulation of France in just a matter of weeks. Ironically, it was only because the French managed to thwart that plan that so much of their country was destroyed.

The roots of the First World War went back four decades, to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The French started that one, but it didn’t end well for them: In just six weeks, the Prussians killed or captured a huge chunk of France’s army, including Emperor Napoleon III. Paris fell after a four-month siege. France, which had prided itself on having the finest military in the world, was humiliated. The Prussians held a grand victory parade in Paris, occupied much of the country until the French paid them five billion francs in reparations, and annexed part of the French province of Lorraine and almost all of the province of Alsace, France’s industrial heartland and the source of almost all of its iron ore. France, devastated and demoralized, seethed to strike back at the hated Boche.

Germany knew it, too, and gave a lot of thought to preparing for the next war. At first, the Germans were expecting just another one-on-one fight, and had no reason to worry things might go differently for them the second time around. But Kaiser Wilhelm II, prickly fellow that he was, managed to alienate once-friendly Russia and Great Britain, both of whom then entered into alliances with France. Uh-oh: Russia bordered Germany to the east and had the largest army in the world; Britain ruled the seas. Alarmed, the Kaiser asked the chief of the Imperial German General Staff, Count Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, to work up a plan that would enable Germany to fight a war on two fronts simultaneously and win both. The result became known as the Schlieffen Plan, one of the most storied strategies in modern military history.

The Germans believed that the French, faced with overwhelming military opposition, would fold quickly, as they had in the last war, and that the real war would be fought in the east, against the “Russian Steamroller,” 150 divisions strong. An army that large in a country that vast, though, would take time to mobilize, so Schlieffen’s plan was to send 90 percent of Germany’s troops—including reserves—into France immediately following a declaration of war, not only across their shared frontier but also through the neutral countries that sat in between them elsewhere—namely, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Sure, violating Benelux neutrality wasn’t very nice, but doing so would enable a huge German force to sweep into France along a very wide front (Schlieffen famously called for “the last man on the right [to] brush the Channel with his sleeve”) and, swinging around like a scythe, encircle the French Army and precipitate a general surrender, just as they had thirty-five years earlier. Schlieffen determined that French military surrender would be achieved in six weeks, whereupon the bulk of German troops would be shipped east, in time to confront the steamroller. The diplomats would have plenty of time to step in and smooth things over with the Benelux countries after that.

Count Schlieffen retired in 1906, shortly after submitting his plan, which proved unfortunate for Germany, because the count’s successor, Helmuth von Moltke—nephew and namesake of the great hero of the Franco-Prussian War—started to tinker with the established order, as successors are inclined to do. He moved troops around, even sending some of them to the eastern frontier, weakening the offensive army in the west; he also scrapped plans to pass through Holland and Luxembourg, opening up the potential for bottlenecks in the assault. Many historians believe Moltke’s revisions doomed the Schlieffen Plan to failure. It certainly didn’t help matters that Belgian resistance proved tougher than expected, throwing off Germany’s timetable. Moltke, trying to recover, made several more alterations to the original plan, all of which weakened it; while heading for Paris, he swerved off to envelop retreating French armies, and in doing so exposed his right flank (a year earlier, a dying Count Schlieffen had uttered, as his last words, “Remember to keep the right flank strong!”), a mistake the French and, now, the British, rushed to exploit. (In a famous episode, some ten thousand French reserve troops were shuttled from Paris to the front in taxicabs.) To everyone’s astonishment, they stopped the Germans at what would become known as the First Battle of the Marne. And so, six weeks after the start of their great offensive, the Germans found themselves not accepting a complete French surrender, as Schlieffen had envisioned, but retreating and digging the first trenches of the war. The lines they all established at that point would scarcely move over the next four years.

The news from the Eastern Front was much better. It turned out that the men chosen to drive the Russian Steamroller, the czar’s top generals, were incompetent, a fact that effectively neutralized their great numerical superiority. The Germans trounced them regularly—an early defeat, at Tannenberg in August, 1914, was so spectacular that after the battle was lost the commanding Russian general, Alexander Samsonov, skulked off into the woods and shot himself—and, though Russia would stay in the war until March, 1918, the Germans never had to worry about them too terribly much after those first few weeks. Instead, they focused on France, where the war ground on, month after month, year after year, never advancing much in either direction but quite deadly for all present nonetheless.

And also terribly destructive for France. When I visited Reuben Law in Carson City, Nevada, in 2004—he was the truck driver and mechanic who had barely survived a bout with influenza while sailing to France in the fall of 1918—I found in his photo album a snapshot of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, taken at the precise moment when a German shell struck it: medieval construction meets modern firepower. I don’t know how he came upon it, but Reims, which dates back to Roman times, unhappily found itself near the front lines during the war, and well within range of enemy howitzers. The Germans did not spare it. Whether or not they took aim specifically at the cathedral—where French kings had traveled for centuries to be coronated—they hit it an awful lot, doing so much damage that it took twenty years to restore the edifice afterward. To this day, perhaps two-thirds of its windows are clear; the stained glass they once housed will never be replaced.

Reims and its cathedral are, of course, just one example among an innumerable litany, but for many they came to symbolize the country’s losses. Owen Johnson, an American writer who traveled through war-torn France before the United States entered the conflict, writes, in his 1916 book The Spirit of France: “Nothing has sown more bitterness in the French mind than this incomprehensible destruction of the treasured monuments of the past. A thousand men dying under the barbarism of asphyxiating gases are nothing to burning Rheims . . . for what is being destroyed there is France itself.” Perhaps those thousand men and their families might have felt otherwise, but what happened to Reims—what the Germans did to Reims—was truly outrageous. “No photographs can adequately visualize what has been wrought,” Johnson says of it.

That remains true to this day of France and that war, even though Notre-Dame de Reims looks much better now than it did in 1915. The earth is constantly regurgitating the detritus of that war. One morning, in a small, freshly plowed field outside Romagne, I found five identical bullets sitting atop the loose brown soil. Later, I brought them into a gun shop in Augusta, Maine, to see if I could learn anything about them. The owner picked up one of the bullets—a bit shorter than the first segment of my thumb, with a very sharp point—examined it for a minute or two, and smiled. “It’s a 7- or 8-millimeter,” he told me. “German. Probably from a Mauser 98. It wouldn’t make a big hole, but it was designed to go through you and the person behind you and the person behind him.” The Mauser Gewehr 98 was the primary, and by far the most popular, rifle among German infantry units in the First World War.

In addition to those bullets, I found several five-cartridge clips—known as stripper clips—in that field, as well as a button from a Bavarian uniform, and a piece of a comb. Oh: and an unexploded shell. It was reddish-brown and almost as large as my foot; like the rest, it was just sitting atop the soil, as if it had all been dropped there that morning. My guide told me, politely but firmly, not to kick it or attempt to pick it up. Even now, a few people are killed or maimed every year by World War I shells. They are prized as souvenirs; the French often take them home to display atop the mantelpiece. Sadly, my guide, Jean-Paul de Vries, called the sighting in to the police instead. He knew better, and besides, he already had a garage full of souvenirs.

M. de Vries is a slight, dark-haired, and energetic fellow who spends a tremendous amount of his time exploring the terrain of the old Meuse-Argonne battlefield, whether accompanied by a fellow World War I buff or alone. (Among other notable traits, he possesses an alarming sangfroid when it comes to the status of his fuel-tank gauge.) There’s a great deal of that terrain—the offensive ranged over a fair chunk of Lorraine—and though he seems to know just about all of it as well as most people know their favorite corner of their own backyard, he is always out exploring and inspecting this area or that because he knows it is, all of it, perpetually changing. In just a few hours he had us zigzagging through a network of French trenches, still around eight feet deep; scurrying up a hill to inspect several shallower American trenches, just deep enough, he told me, for doughboys to gain some cover while kneeling and firing at the Germans (some of the action was moving so quickly at that point that there was no time to dig deeper trenchworks); ducking into part of a German waterworks; poking around the cement entrance to a large German dugout; examining, mixed in a patch of ivy, a great tangle of barbed wire (probably German); and stumbling upon artifacts almost everywhere, like a cluster of three rusted conical shell-caps—again, probably German. At one point he led me to a patch of woods where the forest floor seemed tiered, like a grand staircase in which each step was a quarter the size of a football gridiron. Well before the Americans came through during the last great battle of the war, he explained, this had been the site of a German rest camp, where soldiers might be furloughed for a couple of weeks to relax, visit baths, get medical attention if they needed it, eat well, drink well, and enjoy the company of willing French ladies, of whom, he assured me, there was no shortage. The Germans occupied this area for four full years; they weren’t the only ones who just assumed they’d stay forever. Compliant French girls were welcome to share the Germans’ gastronomical bounty (as evidenced by an empty wine bottle we found nearby) and, of course, their Papiermarken, which were then accepted as currency throughout the area.

M. de Vries described this enormous furlough camp so vividly—gesturing about, “this was all beds, and that was a spa, over here a tavern,” etc.—that I actually started to see some of it, faintly. He could see it all in detail, it seemed, and occasionally I found myself wondering if he had, somehow, actually been here when the operation was still in full swing. At one point, spotting an old tree that had just been felled during a storm, M. de Vries darted over to it and gestured excitedly for me to follow. Beckoning me to the thicket of gnarled old roots, he pointed: There, resting in the tangles, were bullets. A lot of them. The roots, he explained, drew them up out of the soil along with the water, then held onto them until the old trees fell and offered their buried treasure up to the world. We picked them out and he gave them all to me, along with that wine bottle and everything else we’d found that day. He had no room for any of it; his garage, in Romagne, was, as I said, already full of things he’d been finding for decades.

I call it a garage because it had a vehicle door in front and sat in the midst of a village, but inside it was much more like a barn with a large loft. Whatever it once was, it is now full of locally found bayonets, rifles, grenade launchers; trench knives, “persuaders,” entrenching tools; helmets, gas masks, wristwatches; mess kits, eating utensils, pots, pans, jugs; horseshoes, saddles, harnesses, ammunition crates, wicker shell carriers; Bibles and religious statuettes; enough bottles to supply several bars and pharmacies; and many, many photographs—wallet- and wall-sized, framed and loose—of men in uniform. On one wall hangs an old propaganda poster featuring a huge photograph of a kindly German soldier feeding a little girl who sits on his knee; the caption reads: “An infantryman shares his lunch with a hungry French child, recorded on October 22, 1914 in Romagne.” The title, up top, is simply: “A German ‘Barbarian.’” The text is German; who was this poster meant for?

Walking through the building—which you have to do carefully, as stuff is strewn everywhere and the passages are narrow and serpentine—you find yourself asking some variation of the question “who was all this meant for?” over and over again. You can’t help but wonder: Why did so many men carry so much stuff to the battlefield with them?

It’s a museum, now, like Gilles Lagin’s near Belleau Wood: haphazard and compelling, wondrous and sad. M. de Vries accepts donations but does not charge admission. Everything he has here was offered up to him, for free, by the earth. Experts say France’s World War I battlefields will continue to regurgitate artifacts of that war for another two or three centuries.

The garage—or barn, or whatever—that houses Jean-Paul de Vries’s museum looks like it has been there since the time of the Bourbons. All of Romagne does. Drive through little villages in that part of Lorraine, and you’ll see they all look that way—old, quaint, untouched by the passage of hundreds of years.

It’s all a lie.

None of the buildings predate the war. Whatever had been there before the fall of 1918 was destroyed by November 11 of that year. In the case of Romagne, I have the postcards to prove it.

What the French did here, typically, was rebuild villages so that they looked pretty much the way they had before German, French, and American shells reduced them to rubble, with only certain subtle improvements—cement lintels over windows, iron braces along mortar walls. I’m not sure whether they did this out of reverence for what had been destroyed, or simple necessity; there wasn’t a lot of money to spread around for rebuilding, especially when Germany fell behind on its reparations payments, as happened often during its period of postwar hyperinflation. Fortunately, the French got a bit of help from their transoceanic allies, who apparently didn’t consider their debt to Lafayette fully squared when the guns stopped firing. Americans, it turned out, had a proprietary feeling toward the places they’d liberated (and sometimes helped destroy in the process), and so the 37th Division constructed a new hospital in the village of Montfaucon-d’Argonne; the Yankee Division rebuilt the church at Belleau; the 315th Infantry Regiment put up a public bathhouse in Varennes; and so on, hundreds of times over. All of it was paid for by the units’ veterans’ organizations, which included soldiers, wives, parents, and neighbors back home. Sometimes, they’d send a delegation back to France for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Perhaps the grandest such project was the Temple Memorial, a church built in Château-Thierry in the 1920s that features, as its centerpiece, a large stained-glass window depicting General Pershing arriving in France and being greeted by the Marquis de Lafayette. Parents of slain doughboys donated to build the place; so did institutions that lost members or alumni. Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania, gave a pew; Mercersburg Academy, also in Pennsylvania, donated the church bell. An association of military chaplains built the altar in honor of their colleagues who did not survive the war. And Edith Carow Roosevelt, wife of the former president, donated a large Bible in memory of their youngest son, Quentin.

Everyone seems to agree that Quentin was the family’s favorite; TR, who worked hard to maintain his image as a tough guy, nevertheless doted on his youngest, calling him “Quentyquee” and “Quinikins.” Smart and witty, cheeky and mischievous, young Quentin pummeled unsuspecting Secret Service agents with snowballs from the roof of the White House (history is mum about whether or not they fired back) and dispensed irreverent quips to reporters. TR’s other sons all served in the infantry—Theodore Jr. and Archie with the 1st Division, Kermit in the British Army—but Quentin dropped out of Harvard to join the new Army Air Service. (Daughter Ethel Roosevelt Derby also served in France, as a nurse.) For the most part, only wellborn young men became aviators in that war, largely because there were only a few dozen training aircraft in the entire country in 1917, and money tended to buy access to those kinds of things. Quentin was quite myopic; he never should have been allowed to fly. But he was. It is said that he memorized the eye chart in order to pass muster, but I seriously doubt anyone would have turned away President Roosevelt’s youngest son no matter how poorly he did on the test. On July 14, 1918—Bastille Day—Quentin’s plane was shot down near the village of Chamery, not far from Reims; he was dead before he hit the ground, two German machine-gun bullets in his head. The official story is that Quentin’s squadron had engaged a German squadron and he had been downed during a dogfight. Another version, though, holds that after a tussle, both sides, having lost no one, turned and headed back toward their lines—but that Quentin, nearsighted as he was, accidentally followed the Germans, who turned on him when they realized his mistake. They buried him with full military honors where he fell; the spot is still marked today.

His father, who had fiercely advocated for America’s entry into the war as early as 1914—and was so disgusted with President Wilson’s refusal to fall in line that he actively campaigned for Wilson’s opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, in 1916—was devastated. He himself would be dead within six months, snatched in his sleep by a coronary thrombosis; the family called it a broken heart, which, if you think about it, it kind of is. They built a monument to Quentin right in the middle of Chamery, a big, wide fountain bearing an epigram from Lieutenant Roosevelt’s father, one of the least equivocal declarations I’ve ever encountered:

ONLY THOSE ARE FIT TO LIVE WHO ARE NOT AFRAID TO DIE.

Lots of famous people served in that war. Some were already famous beforehand, like Quentin and his brothers—one of whom, Archie, was badly wounded in both World War I and World War II. (He was forty-nine years old the second time around.) Alfred Joyce Kilmer, who went by his middle name professionally, had already made a name for himself as a journalist, critic, and poet; he is best remembered today for a bit of verse that begins

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

and perhaps for the rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike that bears his name. Kilmer was thirty-one years old and serving as a sergeant with New York’s famed “Fighting 69th” Infantry Regiment (under Major William J. Donovan, who would go on to found the OSS, the precursor to the CIA) when a German sniper killed him at the Second Battle of the Marne on July 30, 1918. With his education—he was a graduate of Columbia—and prominence, he could easily have been commissioned an officer, but he chose instead to enlist as a private. Even before he set sail for France, he had contracted with a publisher to write a wartime memoir, to be titled “Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth.” Sometimes I wonder how it would have measured up against Over the Top.

New York sent quite a few men of celebrity to France, including thirty-eight-year-old Christy Mathewson, the New York Giants’ star pitcher who was so clean-cut and admired that his nickname was the “Christian Gentleman”—and, at the other end of the scale of renown, forty-two-year-old Monk Eastman, a legendary Manhattan gangster and opium addict. (The story goes that when Eastman stripped for his induction physical, the army doctor, stunned by Monk’s collection of bullet and knife scars, asked him what war he’d gotten them in. “Oh,” he replied, “a lot of little wars around New York.”) Eastman, serving (under an assumed name) with the 27th Infantry Division (composed of New York National Guard units and volunteers), is said to have performed heroically, bringing in wounded comrades under fire and single-handedly wiping out a German machine-gun nest; Mathewson, assigned to the Army’s new Chemical Warfare Service, was accidentally gassed during a training exercise. He never recovered, dying seven years later at the age of forty-five. Monk Eastman also died at forty-five, gunned down on a Manhattan street just a year after being honorably discharged from the Army.

Walk around the Meuse-Argonne and you also hear a lot about people who were not yet famous when they served there: Captain Harry Truman of the 129th Field Artillery’s Battery D, who had also memorized the eye chart in order to enlist, and who once corralled his men, scattering in the face of a German attack, by unleashing upon them a wave of profanity the likes of which they had never heard; Colonel George S. Patton, who commanded the 1st Provisional Tank Brigade, and whose life was once saved by his orderly, Private First Class Joe Angelo; Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, of the 42nd Infantry Division (the Rainbow Division), who eschewed military uniform regulations, preferring to lead his men into battle wearing a cardigan sweater and carrying a riding crop, and who was gassed twice and once taken prisoner by another American division, which mistook him for a German general; and Colonel George C. Marshall, a favorite of General Pershing’s, who played a major role in planning the offensive.

And one more name. Standing at the edge of a large field outside Romagne, Jean-Paul de Vries pointed out a lonely farmhouse several hundred yards away; in 1914, he told me, as the Germans were first taking the area, a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant named Erwin Rommel stopped with his men at this farmhouse to eat and drink and rest a bit. Moving on, he came across some German infantrymen who had become separated from their units, and then some more, and they all fell in under his command, until he was leading a band of some 270 men. When he finally caught up with his colonel, the man did not commend Rommel, but rather excoriated him for having so many men under his command; he was, after all, a lowly lieutenant. “To my intense regret, an older officer was given command of this outfit,” Rommel wrote in a memoir twenty-three years later. The colonel sent Rommel away, and went back to doing whatever it is colonels do. I wonder if that long-forgotten senior officer ever shared that story with his grandchildren.

Rommel would return to France a quarter century after that first visit; Patton would be back, too, while Marshall oversaw the whole operation from Washington. World War II was also fought in this area, but you’d have to look pretty hard to see any evidence of that. It’s as if the First World War has consumed all of the local memory. The military cemeteries are all World War I cemeteries; the military monuments are all World War I monuments. When people here speak of battles, they are World War I battles. “The War” is the first war, not the other one. Lorraine bled out during the First World War, and never really recouped its strength. Even so, that war is a tremendous source of pride there—there, and throughout France.

After the armistice, the French government allotted funds for every town and village and hamlet in the country to construct a monument. In all of France, I am told, only five settlements—five—failed to do so. In many places—like, say, the village of Richecourt in the old Toul Sector, which was occupied by the Germans for four years and completely demolished—the World War I monument is the only thing of note: a giant, old-style Cross of Lorraine bedecked with flags and laurels, in front of which, on a stone, sits a poilu, his rifle, bayonet, and helmet all resting on the rock beside him, his head thrown back onto his left shoulder, eyes gazing skyward; I think he’s supposed to be dead. The monument bears only about a dozen names—a great ratio of splendor to fallen.

Occasionally, in these towns, you’ll find that someone, a generation later, updated their monument to add a new name to the roll of the dead—victime, as the appendix in Seicheprey reads, de la barbarie Nazie. In Dun-sur-Meuse, one of the larger towns in the old Meuse-Argonne Sector, someone added two Second World War victimes—a Celine Thierion, and Les Familles Salomon. I don’t know about Mme. Thierion, but I have a pretty good idea of what happened to the latter. More often, though, you’ll see nothing at all; it’s as if the Second World War didn’t even occur. Which, in a sense, it didn’t: The Battle of France, which began with Germany’s invasion on May 10, 1940, ended just six weeks later with France’s surrender—an even more spectacular, and humiliating, defeat than the one the Germans had dealt them in 1871.

A drive through Lorraine, though, will certainly lead you to question the stereotype that the French cannot fight. Should you take that trip in the right company, you will hear stories; a retired French soldier named Patrick Simons gestured to a vast field just outside the town of Flirey (pronounced “Flea-Ray”) and told me that after a battle there in the fall of 1914, you could walk from one end of the field to the other, a mile or more, treading upon the body of a dead French soldier at every step. This was the early war, before trenches, when things moved quickly and surprise carried the day. The Germans had attacked so swiftly on September 19 that a mother and two of her children, who had unsuspectingly left their farm that morning to do some shopping in the nearby village of Limey (“Lee-May”), were trapped there when the Germans stormed through, and could not reunite with the rest of their family for four years.

Quite a few villages in this part of France, like Montfaucon-d’Argonne (where the 37th Infantry Division built that hospital) and Flirey—to name two that I just happen to know about—were rebuilt after the war in a different location, their original sites having been destroyed or contaminated beyond reclamation. Quite a few more were completely demolished during the war and never rebuilt. What Lorraine seems to have gotten in exchange for all those lost villages are cemeteries, a lot of them. You can’t drive very far in any direction without passing some field or park or walled-in yard full of war dead. America took great care with its cemeteries; General Pershing, even before he became chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, took a significant personal interest in them. They are among the most perfect public green spaces you will ever see. The fourteen thousand or so markers at Meuse-Argonne, the largest American cemetery in Europe, are precisely spaced and aligned. Even the angles at which the grass is cut are beautiful. After the armistice some twenty-three thousand Americans were buried in this one cemetery, but in the 1920s a campaign was launched—by the funeral industry, I am told—that used fear and guilt to persuade many Americans to repatriate their loved ones’ remains to the United States, at government expense. Many of them now repose in small, obscure cemeteries, unvisited by relatives who have forgotten about them, or moved away, or both.

The French, who had a great many more bodies to bury, did not have the luxury of building vast, wonderfully landscaped cemeteries; theirs tend to be flat, plain affairs, studded with thin, tan concrete crosses. (The markers at the American cemeteries are all plump white marble.) There are quite a lot of them; the largest, with some sixteen thousand marked graves, is at a place called Douaumont. Before and during the war, Douaumont was the site of the biggest and most strategically important of the nineteen French forts that protected the city of Verdun, which, in the wake of the defeat of 1871, came to be seen by the French as an essential bulwark against future German invasions. Whether it really was or not is a question that military historians have debated for decades; what’s indisputable is that Verdun was tremendously important to the French people, even if that importance was, in fact, no more than symbolic. Its fall would have damaged French morale immeasurably. Even so, France’s high command came to understand, early in the war, that Verdun’s defenses, once believed impregnable, could not withstand an indefinite German assault and bombardment. In 1915 the French started to transfer Verdun’s armaments elsewhere, and even to plan the demolition of that ring of nineteen forts.

The Germans, with their superb network of spies, discovered what the French were up to and decided to launch a massive attack on Verdun, reasoning that French public opinion would never stand for the loss of—much less the abandonment of—Verdun. The Germans, you see, knew that the old city wasn’t all that valuable in and of itself; their objective, as they put it, was to use Verdun not to achieve a strategic victory, but to force the French to defend it at all costs and thus, in the parlance of the day, “bleed them white.” And the French obliged them by taking the bait, especially after, on February 25, 1916—only the fifth day of the battle—a small German raiding party snuck into the impregnable Fort Douaumont and, without firing a single shot, captured it from the even smaller French defending party. Well, then: All of France now rose up under the cry “They shall not pass!” They threw everything they had into defending Verdun, shuttling men and materiel around the clock along a slender forty-five-mile road that would become known as La Voie Sacrée—The Sacred Way.

The battle lasted nearly ten months. In that time, each side dropped more than twenty million shells on the other; it is believed that 70 percent of the casualties at Verdun—more than 700,000, in all—were caused by artillery. The Germans very nearly did bleed the French white, killing more than 160,000 of them. But 140,000 of their own were killed in the process. The French retook Douaumont, at a very high cost, after eight months; in the end, they held Verdun. Whether, strategically, it was worth all that—to either side—is another matter for debate. To the French, though, the fact of having saved Verdun—and the memory of all they had to do to save it—were of immeasurable value to their morale. Even today, to many French, Verdun is World War I.

Just knowing that much, you could be forgiven for looking at that enormous graveyard at Douaumont and wondering: Is that it? But of course, if you were there, you’d know that it isn’t, because the whole thing—all sixteen thousand or so graves—rests in the shadow of what is commonly known in that part of the continent as L’Ossuaire. The French claim that the bones of 130,000 men repose in the underbelly of the massive Douaumont Ossuary, and I’m certainly not going to challenge them on it. The only other ossuary I am familiar with, at Arlington National Cemetery, is said to hold the bones of 2,111 Civil War dead. That one—they call it a “vault” at Arlington—is about the size of a large delivery van. What they have at Douaumont is, well, not like that, or like anything else you’ve ever seen, for that matter. To my eyes it resembles a giant stone submarine, 137 meters long, with a 46-meter-high periscope rising up in the center. The periscope is a tower; you can climb to the top and look out over the cemetery and the battlefield beyond it. The hull is a cloister, with an area for religious services—a Catholic Mass was being held there when I visited—and alcoves containing the bodies of unknown soldiers, arranged geographically according to where on the vast battlefield they were recovered. Just about every little block of stone in the place is inscribed with the names of those who went missing at Verdun during those ten months in 1916. It makes quite an impression.

But that’s not why this ossuary is here. The real reason for its existence is mostly out of sight, kept below the place’s stone floors: the skeletal remains of those 130,000 men, French and German, recovered from the battlefield after the war. If you walk around the outside of the building, you will see, embedded at around the height of your shin, little windows that peer into the chambers where the bones are kept. Press your face against the glass and you’ll discern seas of them: femurs behind one window, ribs behind another. In one chamber I saw nothing but skulls; one, very close to my own face at that moment, had a large hole in it, above the eye sockets. I don’t know who came up with the figure of 130,000, or how they did so, but having looked into some of those windows it sounds conservative to me. No one knows how many men are still out there, unrecovered as of yet; some estimates put the number at around 100,000. When remains turn up—and they still do—they, too, are taken to Douaumont.

L’Ossuaire is the only place I know of in France where French and German soldiers’ remains commingle, or even rest in the same general vicinity. There are, though, a whole lot of German military cemeteries from World War I in France; in certain areas, they are a more common sight even than French cemeteries. The ones I saw were, without exception, lovely spaces, quiet and green, sometimes hosting among the tombstones a number of large old trees, the kind that lend a natural dignity to everything around them.

Some of the cemeteries contain a few small monuments dedicated to this or that fallen soldier (Hier ruht in Gott unser Kamerad) during the earlier part of the war by his surviving comrades—many of whom, I imagine, died themselves just a year or two later, when there were no longer enough of the living remaining to pay for such personalized memorials, and no room for them in any event. Most of the rest now lie under a simple black cross shared with three other Soldaten gefallen. Some German war cemeteries also contain large cement slabs marking mass graves; one I saw, in the cemetery at Consenvoye, near Verdun, bears a cold metal plaque stating that it contains the bodies of 2,537 German soldiers. Of those, 933 are unknowns; the names of the rest are listed, along with their service title and date of death, on other cold metal plaques, a long line of them. Resting on one on the day I stopped by, held in place by four stones, was a vellum sheath, inside which had been placed a greenish old photograph of a German infantryman: rifle in hand, Pickelhaube on head, trim mustache above upper lip. He looked off to the left, away from a bit of prose that some other German, nearly a century later, composed and printed on the page next to him. It read, in perfect twenty-first-century typeface:

In Sacred Memory

Prayers in honor of the respected departed

Jakob Berger

Baker’s son from Endorf

Sergeant in a Bavarian foot artillery regiment

Knight of the Iron Cross

Who died heroically for the Fatherland

Far from home and his loved ones

On the 22nd of May 1916

On the heights near Verdun

In the 25th year of his life . . .

And then there was a poem about the Iron Cross, which I won’t even try to translate. It was maudlin and overwrought, but my! I could not look away for a long time. I stopped by just about every German cemetery I passed in France—and I passed a good number of them—but never saw anything else like this. I was, as always, completely alone in the place, and yet I only realized that fact when I came upon this little homemade memorial to one of the 11,148 German soldiers buried at Consenvoye. To many in Germany—and in France, and plenty of other countries, too—it sometimes feels as if the dead of that war are not long gone. Their absence is experienced yet, even though they would have been dead by now anyway; even though they are, in truth, so long gone that probably no one survives who carries any living memory of them.

Neat and orderly as these German cemeteries are, they are not uniform. Some contain personal monuments, and some mass graves. Some contain fewer than a thousand bodies, others more than ten thousand. In some the crosses are thin and iron, while in others they are fat and stone. One thing they all have in common, though, is a scattering of other markers, always stone, shaped like one of the tablets containing the Ten Commandments. These are the Jewish war dead.

Their discovery surprised me so much that even now, years later, I’m not quite sure what to say about them. It saddens me that I even feel that I must say something; surely, the men themselves saw nothing unusual or ironic in their military service, nothing tragic about it but the risk of death that attached itself to them no more or less than to their fellow soldiers who did not happen to be Jews. They served in every Korps, in every branch of service, enlisted men and officers, Kanonieren and Musketieren and Grenadieren and Infanteristen, doctors and stretcher-bearers, career soldiers and reservists and volunteers for the war. None of that is what surprised me, continues to surprise me; Jews had been in Germany since Roman times, were well integrated and even assimilated into the population at large, enjoyed many more civil rights than did their coreligionists in Russia, say, and certain other parts of Europe.

No, it’s not the presence of the bodies that surprises me. It’s the presence of the markers. Because the Germans came back a generation later, and stayed another four years, this time as instruments of the Third Reich; and wherever else they went in Europe in those years, they made a point of tearing up Jewish cemeteries, defiling them, carting off the stones and using them to pave roads and line sewers. Their objective was to degrade the Jewish people as a whole, to confiscate their humanity and obliterate their dignity and, ultimately, to erase even their memory. And yet, though they had four years to do so, they never touched those Jewish markers in their own military cemeteries, never tried to destroy this evidence that Jews were a part of Germany, too, and just as willing, and able, to die for their country as anyone else. I have no explanation to offer you.

But what’s all this about Lorraine? What’s all this about Verdun? What about the Somme? What about Flanders Fields, Where Poppies Grow? Where are the men going over the top wearing kilts and kicking soccer balls? Where are the bagpipes? Where are those guys who wrote poetry in the trenches?

They were all a part of the war; but they were not the war. Not even in France. The Somme offensive, while enormous and deadly, was actually launched as a diversion to relieve German pressure on Verdun. And yes, quite a lot of blood fertilized the ground in Flanders—but certainly not more than was spilled in Lorraine, where poppies did not grow.

If this comes as a surprise, it is probably because the image of World War I in the American consciousness has been shaped, for the most part, by sources that are not American; or, for that matter, French, or German. The most influential sources of information about that war in America—the greatest fashioners of World War I imagery in American minds—have been British. Americans wrote an awful lot about that war while they were in it, but for whatever reason, once it ended, they mostly stopped writing about it. The British, though, never did. If anything, they wrote much more about it afterward than they had while it was going on. The French and the Germans wrote a lot about it, too—but not in English. And so, when it came to America’s memory and understanding of that war, the British pretty much had the field to themselves. And, understandably, British historians tended to focus on places like Flanders and the Somme, where Tommies fought and died.

In doing so, though, they often engendered, by implication, the false impression that not much went on in places like Verdun and the Argonne, and that what did wasn’t terribly important to the war. And when they did choose to mention the AEF at all, they typically wrote that America arrived in France too late and too slowly and utterly unprepared for war; that American officers were poorly trained, incompetent, incapable of command; that American soldiers were cocky, unruly, lacked skills and discipline; and that America’s contribution to that war—beyond selling materiel to the Allies, which it did not for any altruistic purpose but simply to make money, a great big pile of it—was negligible. Britain, you see, bore a bit of a grudge against America, because, unlike Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa—which were all British dominions at the time, and had no choice in the matter—the United States did not enter the war when Britain did, in 1914;and once it did enter, in 1917, its supreme commander refused to break up his divisions and have his doughboys fight in smaller units under British commanders, having seen already what the British did with their dominion troops. Those grievances wrought an anti-American bias that infected British histories of that war for decades—some would say it still does—and, by extension, the Americans who read them, including, tragically, the parents and widows and fatherless children of some of the 117,000 or so doughboys who never came home.

I’m not going to tell you that America “won” that war. But neither did Britain, nor France. Britain’s naval blockade of Germany, and France’s refusal to stop fighting and surrender, were both essential to breaking the German war machine in 1918; but so was the threat of four million fresh American soldiers charging onto the battlefield. From the time America entered the war, in April, 1917, Germany knew time was short. In the spring and summer of 1918, having dispatched the Russians at last, the Germans threw everything they had into a few great offensives on the Western Front, gambling on winning the war before a handful of Americans turned into a horde. But the thing about gambles is: They don’t always pay off. Those offensives ultimately failed—due, in no small part, to that “handful” of Americans—and, come fall, left the Germans in a precarious position. At which point there were enough Americans in France to capitalize on that precarious state and, along with the rest of the Allies, actually win the war.

Sadly, America has forgotten that. Instead, decades of British histories and voices have convinced Americans, for the most part, that they got into it too late, that they arrived just in time for the war’s end but didn’t do very much to bring it about. And that, I believe, is why America has all but forgotten World War I.

You know, though, who hasn’t forgotten that America played an essential role in winning that war?

The French.

If you don’t believe me, just go to Saint-Mihiel.

In September, 1914, just weeks after the war began, the Germans launched an offensive in Lorraine that is now known as the Battle of Flirey. It proved to be a tremendously successful endeavor for them. Not so much for the French, who left all those bodies strewn about that vast open stretch of farmland, so many that you could walk from one end to the other without touching the ground; but for the Germans? Tremendous. Not only did they kill all those poilus, but they seized some two hundred square miles of French territory—and not just any two hundred square miles. For one thing, they contained Montsec, strategic high ground that commanded the entire area; more important, though, they jutted into French lines, creating what became known as the Saint-Mihiel Salient. (“Salient” is a cartographical term for a bulge in a line that protrudes into neighboring territory like a hernia. If you want to see a good example of a salient on a map, look up Browns Valley, Minnesota.) The Saint-Mihiel Salient bedeviled the French; it cut off the main route connecting Nancy, a major French supply center, with Verdun and Paris. Over the course of four years, the French tried repeatedly to drive the Germans back and reduce the salient, but they never could. The Germans held those heights, and had fortified their position heavily. They did like their concrete.

Four years later, after a summer of brutal fighting that started at Belleau Wood and trudged through Château-Thierry, and the Marne, and Soissons, and the Oise-Aisne—throughout which American troops, though under American commanders at the divisional level, ultimately served under French high command—Pershing, bristling at what he and many others perceived as a number of misuses of American troops by the French that resulted in heavy American casualties, decided that the AEF had earned the right, and now had enough troops in country, to fight in cohesive and independent American armies, composed entirely of American divisions and under entirely American command. Having spent much of the past several months eliminating large German salients at Amiens and the Marne, Pershing set his sights on the last one left: Saint-Mihiel. From there, he intended to push on across the German border and capture Metz, which the Germans had seized from France in 1870 and annexed. The French said: Godspeed. They would even lend him artillery, aeroplanes, tanks, and French colonial troops to support him.

But then, just days before the Americans were to launch their first independent offensive, France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Commander of all the Allied armies on the Western Front, changed his mind. Now he said he wanted to split the force Pershing had assembled for the offensive—fourteen American divisions in all, collectively the American First Army—into three pieces, two of which he would pull from the offensive and assign to a new one he was planning elsewhere. Pershing refused; instead, he offered this compromise: The First Army would remain intact and launch its offensive on the Saint-Mihiel Salient as planned; once the salient was eliminated, instead of pushing on to Metz, they would hustle up in time for the launch of Foch’s new offensive, at a place called the Meuse-Argonne.

Despite their elaborate intelligence network, the Germans knew nothing of this; conversely, the Allies did not know that, in one of those marvelous coincidences of history, General Erich Ludendorff issued orders on September 8—four days before Pershing’s offensive was to commence—for the German Army to begin withdrawing from the salient in order to strengthen their fallback defensive position, the Hindenburg Line. That’s the thing about salients: While they vex your enemy, they require a lot of men to hold, since you’re surrounded on three sides. And so, on September 11, the Germans started what they reckoned to be the long, slow process of packing up and moving on out. The very next day, more than two hundred thousand American troops, joined by nearly fifty thousand French and French colonials, attacked them on three sides at once.

It started at 1:00 a.m., with a four-hour artillery barrage; at 5:00 a.m., supported now by another barrage that rolled forward ahead of them—and by nearly fifteen hundred aeroplanes, the largest air assault in the entire war (and, to that point, history)—a quarter million Allied troops, all under American command, poured into No Man’s Land. It was muddy ground—it had been raining steadily for days—but the troops moved quickly, surpassing their objectives in many cases. (One exception to this was the Yankee Division, which, attacking from the west, met particularly fierce German resistance.) Many of them must have been surprised at how well it all went.

Not nearly as surprised as the Germans, though; Ludendorff, it is said, was rendered inarticulate upon receiving the news. On the morning of the second day, American troops attacking from two sides linked up, enveloping those German troops who remained. By evening, every objective for the offensive had been achieved. The Americans and French had completely eliminated the Saint-Mihiel Salient in less than forty-eight hours—capturing, in the process, some fifteen thousand prisoners and 450 big guns. It was one of the shorter battles of the war.

Pershing had planned the offensive meticulously; without that, it would almost certainly have lasted much longer, perhaps even come out some other way. But in war, well-laid plans that come off almost without a hitch still exact a price. Even with those meticulous plans—and that added bit of luck that had the Germans inaugurating a withdrawal almost simultaneously—that price was 7,000 American casualties; 4,153 of them are buried in the St.-Mihiel American Cemetery, just outside the town of Thiaucourt.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Thiaucourt was where the Germans had marched some two hundred American prisoners from the 102nd Infantry Regiment, mostly Connecticut men whom they had captured when they’d stormed Seicheprey nearly five months earlier. The Germans hadn’t held Seicheprey for more than a few hours; they’d held Thiaucourt for almost exactly four years, having taken it, along with two hundred square miles’ worth of other towns and villages, during the Battle of Flirey. The Americans liberated all of those places on September 12, 1918. To this day, no one in any of them needs to have the significance of that date explained to them. The town of Essey, liberated by the 42nd Division—under the command of Douglas MacArthur (who, against orders, wanted so badly to go on and capture Metz that Pershing took pains to restrain him)—even renamed its main thoroughfare Rue du 12 Septembre.

You probably wouldn’t know that, though, unless you traveled to Essey and saw it for yourself. You probably wouldn’t know that in Flirey, after the war, they took the government’s allotment and built two monuments—one to the French soldiers, local and otherwise, who perished in the war; the other to the Americans who fought in the region. You probably wouldn’t know that in Thiaucourt, they used their allotment to build just a single stone pedestal, upon which stands a life-sized statue of two soldiers shaking hands: a poilu, holding a rifle; and a doughboy, carrying the Stars and Stripes. You probably wouldn’t know that, though America has largely forgotten what Americans did Over There—what a difference it made in the war and how much it meant to France—the French haven’t.

And you certainly wouldn’t understand, without seeing the place for yourself, just what a hell the heights above the Meuse River and the depths of the Argonne Forest were for four years. And how, though it could hardly have seemed possible to the French and Americans coming off their exultant victory down at Saint-Mihiel—and to the Germans, still stunned from their defeat—things were about to get much worse there.