16

The Last Night of the War

IN THE YEARS AFTER the war ended, Americans built a whole lot of monuments in France. There’s that enormous column on Montfaucon, to commemorate the Meuse-Argonne; a beautiful marble rotunda atop Montsec, for Saint-Mihiel; a massive double colonnade situated on a hill looming over Château-Thierry. All of Belleau Wood is, in essence, a monument. There’s the huge Temple Memorial in Château-Thierry, and the little fountain that the 102nd Regiment installed at Seicheprey, and hundreds of others that fall somewhere between the two in both size and location. Former battle sites are littered with markers installed years later to commemorate some position held at some point by this division or that; near Limey, I came across a little concrete obelisk commemorating the 5th Division, dated September 12, 1918, to which had later been affixed a bronze plaque, dated September 1944, for . . . the 5th Division. I wish I could have been there to see those GI Joes stumble upon a monument to their doughboy predecessors. I suspect it happened often, especially to the men of the 5th Division; so many of their markers are scattered about that one American guide told me: “The saying goes that the 5th put up a monument every time they stopped to take a piss.”

About forty miles northeast of that obelisk I found what is, in my opinion, the most poignant monument of that war, maybe the most poignant monument I’ve ever seen anywhere. I say I “found” it, rather than “came across” or “stumbled upon” it, because in fact I went out searching for it, and had to look very hard. To see it for yourself, you must first find the tiny and unceremoniously named Ville-devant-Chaumont—literally, the village in front of Chaumont—which rests in a pleasant green dale. If you see someone walking about, ask them for directions; you may have to ask several people before you find one who knows of the thing you’re looking for. If they do—and if they know, for sure, where exactly it is—you’ll be directed to a hard-to-spot road, narrow and overgrown as a cow path, that snakes up a rounded hill. It will probably occur to you at some point that the villager who gave you the directions is having a laugh at your expense; it doesn’t seem like the kind of road that leads anywhere at all, much less to something you’d want to see. But stick with it, and eventually you’ll arrive at a place where the hill levels off. To the right is a beautiful vista of farmland so lush it seems impossible that a war was ever fought here. I assure you, one was. Just look to your left.

Planted upright in a small sandpit is a stone, a rough-hewn tablet just a few feet tall. Standing behind it is a modest white flagpole. The American flag—at least on the day I visited—was tattered all along the far edge, and looked like something had taken a couple of bites out of it, besides. In the fall of 1918, this area, only ten miles or so north of Verdun, was the far-right flank of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. There were two American divisions assigned to it in early November: the 26th, the Yankee Division; and the 79th, the Liberty Division, composed of draftees from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

The 79th was credited with taking the eastern half of Montfaucon on September 27, the second day of the battle. By the end of October, having seen some of the offensive’s worst fighting, they were moved to this section of the battleground, deemed to be quieter. It may well have been, but it wasn’t by any means quiet. In what turned out to be the final days of the war, the 79th managed to wrest a number of French villages from the Germans, including, in the early hours of November 11, Ville-devant-Chaumont. Later that morning, some soldiers from one of the Liberty Division’s regiments—the 313th, known as “Baltimore’s Own”—were crouched atop this hill outside town, facing stiff German resistance. “The Boche fire was very heavy, and no sooner had the troops come into view than a barrage was put down,” writes Henry C. Thorn Jr., in the regiment’s history, published in 1920. “The soft, marshy ground was all that saved the Battalion from appalling casualties, as the shells sunk very deep upon impact. . . . The bursts seemed to throw mud, water and iron straight up into the air.” Then, Thorn writes, at 10:44 a.m., a runner from headquarters arrived, bearing “orders to cease firing at 11:00 a.m. French time, hold the lines at the spot, and neither advance nor give way to the rear. The Armistice had been signed and fighting was to stop.” The men hugged the earth; sixteen minutes to go.

Among them was a twenty-three-year-old private named Henry Nicholas Gunther. Photographs of the time show Gunther to be a handsome, mustachioed gent with thick, dark hair and a wry grin, a man you can easily picture hoisting an enormous stein of pilsner in a Baltimore beer garden. Like much of that city, and most of his neighborhood, he was of German descent; all four of his grandparents were immigrants. In 1917, he was drafted, left behind a good bookkeeping job at the National Bank of Baltimore and a fiancée named Olga, and headed off for Camp Meade, about twenty miles south. The following July, he sailed for France on the Leviathan, the same ship that later brought Howard Ramsey and Henry Roy Tucker to France, and that later yet brought Eugene Lee home. The Leviathan, you might recall, had started life as the German ocean liner Vaterland.

By the time he shipped out, Gunther had been made his company’s supply sergeant, a position of considerable responsibility that would seem to indicate he was a dedicated and capable soldier. Nevertheless, when he got to France, he did something pretty stupid: In a letter to a friend back home in Baltimore who had yet to be conscripted, Gunther advised the man to stay out of the service for as long as he could, as conditions in the Army were very bad. Gunther must have known that all soldiers’ letters passed through censors’ hands before they were delivered; he should have figured that such a written sentiment would attract unwanted attention, especially given the author’s Germanic surname. That letter cost Sergeant Gunther his stripes—all of them.

He took it very badly. According to an interview that Ernest Powell, Private Gunther’s platoon sergeant—and, before the war, his close friend—gave to the Baltimore Sun in 1969, Gunther was humiliated by the incident; once a gregarious fellow, he became sullen and withdrew into himself. Eventually, though, he started stepping forward, volunteering for dangerous missions and assignments. At one point, he was wounded badly enough that he could have been sent back home, or at least away from the front; but he refused, insisted on returning to the 313th. He seemed determined to redeem himself in the eyes of his comrades, and the United States Army. That, though, would take time. And, as he’d just learned, the war was about to end—and with it, his best chance at redemption. Perhaps that explains what Private Gunther did that morning, atop that hill outside Ville-devant-Chaumont. The little monument that sits there now tells the story in French, German, and English. The English text, translated by Christina Holstein from Pierre Lenhard’s original French, elaborates:

Emerging from a bank of fog, Private Gunther and his friend, Sergeant Powell, found themselves confronted by two German machine gun squads manning a road block. The Germans watched in disbelief as the Americans came forward. Powell and Gunther threw themselves to the ground, as the bullets cracked overhead. The Armistice was imminent and the Germans ceased firing, believing that the Americans would have the good sense to stop. Their sacrifice would not change the war.

Indeed, no one fighting in those last few hours of the war could have known how little their potential sacrifice would have meant; according to the terms of the armistice, which had been signed almost six hours earlier, all German troops would have to evacuate France entirely—including Alsace and Lorraine—within fourteen days. In other words, where the lines ended up being drawn at 11:00 a.m. meant exactly nothing.

Even all these years later, historians still wonder why so many men fought so hard in those last few hours—to the point where hundreds of them died, within sight of the war’s end. It is without a doubt one of the most tragic and mystifying elements of a cataclysm that was almost unthinkably tragic and mystifying. I certainly don’t have an explanation to offer.

Instead, I offer you George Briant.

I found him, too, off the French List, which seems appropriate because he was, he would tell you, French himself. By way of Louisiana. Whether his ancestors arrived there directly from France, or from Aca- dia or somewhere else, is unclear; all he could tell me was that they were “local people—local French people, you know.” They hailed from St. Martinville, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country (and site of the legendary Evangeline Oak), but he was born more than a hundred miles to the east, in the city of New Orleans, the fifth of nine children; the others were Ferdinand, Hamilton, Rose, Lassaline, Gabriel, Walter, Pearl, and Ruby. Lassaline was named for his paternal grandfather, Paul Louis Lassaline Briant, who had served in the 22nd Louisiana during the Civil War. If you think Paul Louis Lassaline Briant is one cool monicker, his next-door neighbor in St. Martinville in 1870 was named Oneziphore Delahoussaye.

I found all of this information in census records, where I also discovered that, in 1900, Paul Louis Lassaline Briant’s son, James Philippe Briant, lived at 1434 North Roman Street, in New Orleans; his neighbors, two doors down at number 1438, were a black family, which fact alone made that block one of the more integrated in the South at that time. The man of the house at number 1438, a Mr. Homer Plessy, was the Rosa Parks of his era. In 1892, he boarded a train in New Orleans, sat in a whites-only first-class car, and promptly summoned a conductor and informed the man that he was, in fact, what the law in Louisiana then called “colored,” or possessed of mixed-race ancestry. The conductor must have been surprised; Plessy, who was what was then known as an “octoroon”—that is, he was one-eighth black by ancestry—was quite light-skinned, and certainly capable of passing for white. But he chose to challenge the law instead, got himself arrested for it, and took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it did not fare well. That’s right: James Philippe Briant’s neighbor on North Roman Street was the Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson.

The 1900 census lists Homer Plessy’s occupation as “day laborer”; James Briant’s is “dry goods (clerk).” His son told me later—104 years later—that the dry goods store was in fact D. H. Holmes, a legendary (and now, sadly, defunct) emporium on Canal Street in New Orleans. That son, George Leon Briant, was born in that city on March 3, 1901. A few months later, another child named Louis Armstrong would be born in New Orleans. Though they grew up in very different parts of the city, their childhoods did bear certain similarities, none of them fe- licitous. Louis Armstrong, for instance, was abandoned by his father at a very young age; his mother—just a teenager when she’d had him—was unable to care for him, and he was shuttled around between various relatives. I don’t know what, exactly, happened to George Briant’s family when he was a child, but I got the impression that it was more than just one thing. “My schooling was very limited,” he explained, “because I was—so many deaths in the family, the disruptions in the family affairs. Everything is tipsy-topsy. Nobody knew where—you go your way, I go my way, do the best I can do, that was it. Most of us had to bring ourselves up, to a certain extent.” He even spent time in an orphanage, he told me. His tone was steady, but the words came out haltingly; part of that was just the way he spoke, but I got the distinct sense that there was something inside him that I hadn’t perceived in any of the other veterans I’d interviewed.

George Briant seemed sad.

A little housekeeping:

Mr. Briant pronounced his last name “BRY-ant.” I visited with him at the nursing home in which he was then living, which was in Hammond, Louisiana, about an hour north of New Orleans. We talked in an empty common room; he was seated in a wheelchair throughout. He looked to be a slight man in large wire-rim eyeglasses, with perfectly white hair, thinner on top, crowning a somewhat oblong head. He wore a tan jacket over a gray shirt and trousers, and an abbot-sized crucifix that hung down well below his sternum on a long leather thong.

George and his wife had had but one child, a son named George Hamilton Briant, born in 1923. George H. had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, earning the rank of captain, and afterward went to work as a stunt flier for the movies; word is he was a dashing fellow. Around 1947 or 1948, he was killed on the set during some sort of accident—I’ve seen it described as a parachute jump, though it may have been a plane crash.

In 1921, a friend of George’s introduced him to eighteen-year-old Germaine Thibodeaux at her cousin’s house in St. Martinville; the friend was dating one of Germaine’s sisters. When George asked her out, though, Germaine informed him that she was already engaged to another fellow. Nevertheless, as they liked to tell the story, it was love at first sight, and Germaine quickly broke off the other engagement. She and George were married four months later, on July 20, 1921.

They were still married when I visited, on September 18, 2004—eighty-three years later. He was then 103 years old; she was 101. I don’t know what she was like at eighteen, but at 101, Germaine Thibodeaux Briant was a handful. I was told as much even before I made the trip. “I’m going to have to distract her while someone brings Papa to you,” their goddaughter, Irma, advised me on the phone. “She doesn’t like to let him out of her sight.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I find it helps to have someone else present when I’m doing an interview. I want her to be there.”

“No, you don’t,” Irma replied. “Trust me.”

She was right. Germaine Briant was jealous of any attention that wasn’t directed entirely toward her. She insisted on answering just about every question I posed to her husband (Irma’s attempt to keep her godmother away during the interview had failed), and doing so in a voice that was, petite and aged though she was, much louder than his. Her Cajun accent, too, was much thicker even than his. It all made for one of the more difficult interview experiences I’ve ever had, and one of the most memorable; if George Briant hadn’t been so determined to share his story with me despite all the distractions—and if his story hadn’t been what it was—I might have just given up, gone to New Orleans, and gotten drunk instead.

But enough of my trauma; back to his.

“Where were you living when you joined the Army?” I asked him.

He laughed, smiled broadly; I got the impression that he’d had to move around quite a bit in those days. “Let’s see,” he said. “Where was I then?”

“Mrs. Garcia’s house!” Germaine Briant called out, pronouncing it “GAW-shuss.”

He didn’t even seem to notice she’d said a word; eighty-three years is a long time in which to learn how to tune someone out. “I think I was living with my mother and my sister—”

“And an old lady,” his wife interjected. Irma whispered to her to be quiet.

“—and her husband, at the time I joined the Army. I think I was fifteen years old when I joined the Army.” Actually, he was sixteen, and looked it; the recruiters turned him away, several times, before he made such a pest of himself that they finally just let him enlist. “The guy says, ‘What are we going to do with him?’ And the [other] guy says, ‘Take him!’” he recalled with a laugh.

I asked him: “Did you have to lie about your age to get into the Army?”

“Yes, I did,” he declared.

“How old did you tell them you were?”

He laughed again. “I had to tell them I was about seventeen, I think,” he said. “They found out afterwards, but they cast me over, let me pass over because I was anxious to join.” I cannot explain why the Army did this, except that I doubt “the Army” did anything at all; it seems to me that recruiters were given a great deal of individual discretion when it came to enlistment. “And I was in the war from then on,” he told me.

“Did you tell your parents when you joined the Army?” I asked him.

“My parents weren’t alive,” he said. “My parents were dead.”

I asked him why he’d joined up. “To become a man,” his wife declared; he, though, just chuckled at the question, and considered it for a moment.

“The conversation,” he said finally, “was generally on warfare at that time, you see. This one was going to join, that family was going to join—in other words, families were being separated right and left. Young people—young people wanted to join because of youth, age. They all wanted to know what warfare was. So did I. And I sure learned too much about it.”

I asked him where he had gone to enlist. He said he couldn’t quite remember; “I think he told me Jackson Square!” Mrs. Briant announced.

He turned and asked me: “Why does a person, fifteen years of age, want to go to war? You tell me.”

“For adventure?” I offered.

He laughed. “I was anxious to join the war,” he told me. “I wanted to go to war. Of course, I only knew about the war what I’d heard, you see. You know what I’m saying? And what I could visualize. But after I was in it, I learned a hell of a lot more.”

“You said you wanted to be a man,” Germaine Briant called out. “You told me.”

“I was tickled to the death that they let me [enlist],” he recalled with a smile at one point; but then, suddenly, he grew serious. “But let me tell you, it was no fun,” he said, leaning forward as his voice softened a bit and started to waiver. “War is hell, it’s real hell. It’s nothing to joke with, nothing to laugh with. You might think it’s a journey, having fun or something.” He shook his head. “There’s no fun in war. War is do or die. It’s you or me. And who can pull the trigger faster.”

And with that, he fell back into his wheelchair.

“How did you choose the artillery?” I asked him.

His response was one I’d heard before. “First, I wanted to be a rider,” he said. “I wanted to be a horse rider; I wanted to join the cavalry. So I went to join the 18th United States Cavalry. And if I remember right, they sidetracked me because of my age, you see. They put me into some smaller department. I wound up in the 18th United States Cavalry, and I learned how to ride horses.” He chuckled. “And I mean, you had to learn. Yeah. They’d take you rough—through woods, like a roughrider. They’d turn your horse loose with you, and your horse followed the leader, that’s all. He’d pay no attention to you at all.” He laughed. “One after the other. I liked it. I never tried to get out of it. That’s what I wanted.”

“So how did you get into the artillery?” I repeated.

“Well, at the time, they had no use for riders, you see. So the Army organized . . . the 76th Field Artillery. They organized that organization, and I was in that, see? And I was in that until the war ended . . . At my age, everything was wild,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Name and assignment, I didn’t care. Put me in here, put me there—made no difference what it was, make sure I was in the Army . . . I was at the height of my glory then.”

By now he was quite animated—smiling, laughing, gesturing. “Yeah, it was the same outfit,” he recalled. “It was the same thing, but they changed the name, that’s all. In other words, instead of training with horses, we trained with guns . . . but it didn’t make no difference, as long as I was in the war. I was satisfied that I was fighting, and doing what I was supposed to do. And that was it. I had the young persons’ ideas, you know, and the ability to do what the young persons do. And that was all I wanted to do. I didn’t care if it was the artillery, the cavalry, or what. So between the cavalry and the artillery, I became a soldier.” He laughed again, and I began to notice that his laugh almost always arrived in the company of a singular smile, wide and thin and light, like a melon rind. He had started off our discussion by warning me that “quite possibly, I’ve forgotten much of it,” then adding: “It’s not a good thing to remember.” But now it seemed that remembering it was reviving him; he was becoming more and more energized the deeper he bored into that old reserve, which I suspect he hadn’t approached in a very long time. Compared to the other veterans I’d interviewed, George Briant seemed to have an entirely different vocabulary at his disposal. He was able to speak not only of what he’d done, but how it all had made him feel. Alone among the rest, he stood out for being human in a way that most of us can actually relate to much more than we can to the stoicism that characterized almost all of his remaining contemporaries: He was emotional.

And, as it turned out, he was just getting started.

The day after its official designation as an artillery unit, the 76th FA was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division. Although the 3rd was one of a handful of Regular Army units that had existed before the war, it didn’t get to France until April of 1918, ten months after elements of the 1st and 2nd started showing up Over There, and six months after the Yankee Division arrived in full. Still, the men of the 3rd Division were early American guests to the party, and first rushed into action to stop the Germans at Château-Thierry a few days before Belleau Wood got under way. They never really got a break after that, either. According to E. B. Garey, O. O. Ellis, and R. V. D. Magoffin, the excessively initialed authors of 1920’s American Guide Book to France and Its Battlefields, “The history of this division is unique. It had no service in a quiet sector. It learned how to fight by fighting.”

I haven’t said very much about what went on in France in the summer of 1918, the time between Belleau Wood and Saint-Mihiel. The truth is, that summer is often overlooked in histories of the war. But it saw the last of Germany’s five great pushes that are now collectively re- membered as the Spring Offensive of 1918; in effect, it was the last time the German Army would go on the attack in that war. It was Germany’s last hope for the great gamble it had undertaken back in March, after finally knocking Russia out of the war and shifting a half-million seasoned German troops to France, its last attempt to break through the lines, take Paris, and decisively defeat France, Britain, and the United States before millions of fresh American doughboys could get into the fight. Had the Spring Offensive succeeded, it might have done just that. Instead, many historians believe, the failure of this final push, in the summer of 1918, mortally wounded the German Army—and Germany itself. Yes, Bill Lake and lots of others who were there believed the war was won that fall at the Meuse-Argonne; but many of those who take a long view of the war, who have the distance and perspective to do so, believe the Meuse-Argonne merely ended the war, and that it was, in truth, lost after weeks of vicious combat at the place where, nearly four years earlier, it began in earnest: the Marne River. Even some who didn’t have the benefits of distance and perspective believed as much: As the authors of the aforementioned Guide Book wrote just two years afterward, “During these battles the German Army had not lost its morale and the fighting was even more bitter than during the Argonne-Meuse Battle.” And that’s pretty bitter.

The stakes could hardly have been higher. When they launched that last push, right around midnight on July 14, 1918, the Germans were only about forty miles from Paris. Panic once again flared up, terror that the hated Boche were about to storm into the French capital and do God-only-knows-what when they got there. And some believe they might have made it had it not been for George Briant’s 3rd Division. So many felt that way at the time that, after the battle, after the Germans had been turned back and the panic began to subside, people started calling the 3rd the “Rock of the Marne.” They still do. The division itself adopted the nickname the “Marne Division.” It, too, still stands.

They earned these titles by holding steady in the face of a terrible attack on that first day. The Germans started off with a massive bombardment, high explosives and gas, that killed or incapacitated thousands. (One report I’ve read says that hundreds of American soldiers were blinded by gas that morning.) Then they sent forty divisions rushing forward into the French lines on either side of Reims. They were ef- fectively stopped east of the city by superb French defenses, but to the west—the side closer to Paris—they enjoyed great initial successes, crossing the river where they’d been halted four years earlier. Veterans later reported watching from atop the opposite banks as the Germans flung themselves at that river with tireless determination, using whatever they had handy—rafts, pontoons, wooden beams—to help them across. When the enemy blew up their new bridges, put up in a hurry under fire that morning, the Germans hastily rebuilt them, perhaps in the same spot, perhaps a few hundred yards up- or downstream. Accounts of the fighting that morning are among the most chilling I’ve ever read. The French and Americans (and there were some Italian troops present, too) brought an awful rain of shells and machine-gun fire down upon the Germans; still, they kept coming. The only way to stop them, it seemed, would be to kill them all.

And that, more or less, is what the 3rd Division did at the western edge of the line, just east of Château-Thierry—so close to Paris that many people now commute from one to the other every day—on July 15, 1918, and on into July 16. Two other American divisions, the 28th (“Keystone”) and 42nd (“Rainbow”) were elsewhere in the line that day, but they’d only just been moved there in anticipation of the attack; the 3rd had been holding its ground ever since they’d taken it six weeks earlier, before Belleau Wood. It had been a fairly quiet six weeks, until then; they lost more men on that one morning than they had since they’d first arrived at the front. But they held the line. The Germans did not successfully cross the Marne in their sector. Many of those Germans never crossed any body of water—or stretch of ground—again. By the next day, according to the division’s commander, Major General Joseph T. Dickman, “there were no Germans in the foreground of the Third Division except the dead.” A lot of dead.

On that first day of the battle that is now known as the Second Marne, the 3rd stopped the Germans at the western edge of the latter’s line. By the third day, the Germans had been stopped everywhere. On the fourth day, the French and Americans launched a counteroffensive, their first of the year. From that point until the armistice, the Germans would be on the defensive; but while many now view that battle as the beginning of the end, the Germans were far from beaten at that point. They fought ferociously. The battles that followed that summer would claim Joyce Kilmer, the journalist and poet and would-be author of “Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth”; and Quentin Roosevelt, aviator and favorite son of the former president; and Major George Rau, of Hartford, Connecticut, hero of Seicheprey; and thousands of other Americans.

And Private George Briant—Battery B, 76th Field Artillery, 3rd Division—would come very close to joining their ranks one afternoon in late July, just outside a pretty little farming village in Picardy named Le Charmel.

Field artillery regiments were assigned to specific infantry divisions, but since infantry and artillery can’t really be commingled—artillery units need a lot of space, and you wouldn’t want to be entrenched near them even if you could be, for any number of good reasons (“We had to be at least three miles behind the lines,” George Briant explained)—artillery’s location and movements are much more difficult for historians to pin down. Often, they were dispatched to some third point, distant from both the enemy and their own infantry; and sometimes they were loaned out to support other divisions—even other armies. I only know that the story I want to tell you happened near Le Charmel because I happened to find a remarkable little book.

It’s called Roll of Honor of the Seventy-Sixth US Field Artillery. Small and thin, with a dark red cover that is plain but for the title embossed upon it in simple gold letters, it looks at first glance like a children’s reader. It doesn’t much resemble any of the other regimental or divisional histories I’ve ever seen from that war. There are no pictures, or illustrations of any kind; no sentimentality, no nostalgia, no ribbing or swagger. More than twenty of the book’s seventy-four pages are occupied by a roster of every last man who served in the 76th FA, from Colonel E. St. J. Greble Jr. to Private William B. Zolinski of Battery F. Thirty-six are given over to a list of every citation recommended for any soldier in the regiment, including nine Distinguished Service Crosses and more than a hundred Distinguished Service Medals. Each is accompanied by a detailed description of the action or actions for which the citation was considered appropriate, like this one, for Second Lieutenant Henry W. Clark of Battery F:

Near Chateau-Thierry during the Second Battle of the Marne he maintained an exposed observation post throughout the most intense series of enemy bombardments. His steel helmet was partially torn from his head by a large shell fragment but he refused to quit his post until his operator was severely wounded. Finding himself unable to accomplish communications of any kind with his battery he saved his comrade from bleeding to death by carrying him through intense fire to a dressing station.

The book opens with a memorandum from Colonel Greble, titled “Recommendations for Distinguished Service,” that begins: “In compliance with Memorandum Headquarters 4th Army Corps dated Dec. 18th, 1918, there are submitted herewith lists of names of officers and men of this organization whom the Commanding Officer has seen fit to specially recommend to higher authority for their continuous, meritorious, and distinguished service in action. . . . It is to be greatly regretted that every member who has helped compose a regiment, which has been able to perform the services which this regiment has rendered, does not receive from the Government some fitting recognition worthy of those services.”

Colonel Greble goes on, in the next couple of pages, to furnish a skeletal accounting of the 76th’s history, concluding: “The regiment continued its fighting constantly with practically no rest during its entire operations nor a chance to re-equip or rehabilitate. It cheerfully and willingly at all times underwent its privations and suffered its hardships doing its duty as it saw it.” It really does read like a memo; perhaps it was conceived as a service document instead of a regimental history. Before it was published, though, probably in early 1919 (the frontispiece records that the book was printed by Lithographie von Deinhard & Co., Coblenz, Germany), some anonymous soul undertook to add and compose a short section titled “Brief Narrative of the engagements in the Great European Conflict participated in by the 76th Field Artillery.”

According to the “Brief Narrative,” the 76th first went into position on the night of July 5–6, 1918; the following afternoon, “Battery ‘D’ sent the first message from the Regiment to the Boche.” Still, their initial ten days at the front were pretty quiet—until, the narrative declares, “On the night of July 14th–15th the Germans launched their grand offensive from Rheims to Soissons that was to prove their Gettysburg. The heaviest pressure came just to our right in the now famous bend of the Marne at Jaulgonne. At 11:50 p.m. on that night the following message was received at Regimental Headquarters: ‘Enemy crossing at Gland, fire your general OCP [offensive counter preparation—that is, a barrage you lay down on the enemy before he attacks you, to dissuade him or at least render him less effective] until further orders.’ We fired it without a moment’s intermission until about noon the next day. For the remainder of that night the whole sky was lit by the flashes of the guns, as though there was some tremendous fire extending for miles.” Compare that to what Mr. Briant told me when I asked him if he remembered how he’d felt that first night he went into battle.

He laughed, and leaned forward. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “the first battle is something you never forget in your life, you see? Everything is Ssssh!” He raised a finger to his lips. “Ssssh! No noise. No noise.” He dropped his voice to a loud stage whisper for a moment, looked around and gestured with his hand here and there, as if addressing men standing all around him. “‘Quiet! No noise. Quiet.’ And you worried all the time, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ But if you only knew what was going on”—he broke into a chuckle—“you were dying. So we finally caught on, the reason we were being shushed down was because our life was at stake, you see?”

I nodded.

He leaned in closer. “The enemy had secret posts out in the fields, you see,” he said, extending a hand and sweeping it across a pasture only he could see. “And they knew every move we was making. And every time we moved the troops another mile, a half a mile, they knew all about it. They knew more than we did, because we didn’t know we were going to be moved. But they knew in advance we were going to move, and they were waiting for us, you see.” He punctuated that thought with a deep nod. “Our officials should have known there were going to be secret listening posts out in the fields and everywhere, taking messages all the time,” he asserted. “And that’s one of the reasons we got shot up. Because the enemy knew what we were doing all the time, better than we did. We were standing in an open field, and then they were sitting there waiting for us.”

I thought he was speaking metaphorically. “They were tough, the Germans,” I said.

“Yeah. Between the boom-boom-boom-boom,” he continued, stretching out his hands to mimic the motion of firing a machine gun, “and they was always up there dropping those bombs, we didn’t know which way to run.”

“Were you scared the first time you went into battle?” I asked him.

He was silent for a beat. “Yeah,” he said soberly, then shook his head. “It’s a funny feeling. There was a thrill, you understand?” he explained, raising both hands. “You knew you were in real action then, you see. They wasn’t saying, ‘We’re going to train you,’ or nothing.” He raised his hands again, pointing both forefingers to form rifle barrels. “You’re going to take those guns and you’re going to fight for your life. Man to man, him or you. So we grew to be adult persons at that age of fifteen years old. In other words, it was do or die.” He shook his head. “And even though we were kids, it was do or die. And me, I got my share.”

None of the other veterans I interviewed, before or after, had ever gotten near a word like “thrill” when describing combat. They all must have understood, on some level, that such a composite of terror and excitement is an awfully heavy thing to carry with you throughout a life, and that you’d better find a way to set it down and move on without it if you wanted yours to be a long one.

But not George Briant. He had borne an awful lot of pain in his life, not just during the war but throughout what sounded like a wretched childhood—and then he lost his only child, his son, his namesake, at a terribly young age. Any one of those is the kind of thing you might never get over; all three together could kill you. But they didn’t kill George Briant; in fact, by all accounts he led a happy, fulfilled, godly life. He never had much money—eventually, after passing through several other jobs, he set up shop as a sign painter—and spent most of his retirement living in a trailer. But I read, in one of his obituaries, that he and Germaine were in the habit of plucking old toys out of the trash, repairing and restoring them, and then giving them to needy children.

A crushed man doesn’t do that sort of thing.

So I wonder if, maybe, George Briant managed to do something that seemingly no one else I’d met had—that perhaps like them he had, a ways back, set down his load, but that he had also, somehow, always kept track of where he’d left it, always knew where it was so that he could, if the occasion should call for it, run back and fetch it.

And now, having picked it back up, he never put it down, at least not that afternoon. That potent cocktail, terror and excitement—once he sipped from it again, for the first time in who knows how many years, the taste stayed with him. “But I’ll tell you, that’s a thrill,” he said at one point, using for a second time that word I’d never heard anyone else utter in this context, “that’s a thrill you should never want. Because your life is at stake every instant. I mean, every instant! You know which[ever] way you turn, you’re going to get shot at. But we didn’t realize that at the time, you understand? You’re in the war, and you never was in war before. And first thing you know, you’re being shot at from all directions.” He laughed.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said once, after a long pause. “There’s two things about warfare. You want to be there, but you don’t want to be there. But you’ve got to be in both places, and you can’t do it. So you try to”—he moved his hand around from point to point, mimicking with his pinched fingers the dance one might do in trying to avoid incoming fire—“and you keep trying. But of course, you wind up in the graveyard.”

It was a point he kept returning to, this uneasy marriage of two extreme emotional states; it seemed terribly important to him that I understand. At first I thought it was the fear he wanted me to comprehend, but the more he revisited the subject, the more I started to wonder if in fact he was more concerned that I grasp just how exciting he’d found it all. The 76th had spent the second half of July on the offensive, chasing the Germans across the Aisne-Marne Sector. They moved often, almost always under cover of darkness. “Jumping from place to place,” Mr. Briant recalled. “You’re moving as fast—I mean, you’re here now, and three hours later, you get all packed up and be ready to leave. They don’t tell you where you’re leaving for, but be ready to leave in three hours. So you get all the equipment together, pack it all up, and in three hours you’re standing out there in the open field, like that, waiting, waiting. If they [the Germans] ever come down and see you there, they’re going to half-kill all of you.” He shook his head. “It’s something you can’t explain, it’s something—you’re in a warfare that you were never in before. In other words, you’re not a war man, you know what I’m saying? You’re just a soldier. And here you are, in the World War I. All of a sudden, overnight, you’re in World War I. ‘Pack up, pack up and get your things.’ Twelve o’clock at night. No sound. No noise. Everything’s quiet.” He raised a hand to his ear, then waved it in front of him. “Most mysterious things you ever seen in the war. You never see that, you never see a thousand men standing out there, all the packed-up guns and everything, waiting up there. Shhhhhh! Shhh! Three, four hours, standing there, waiting there. Then you get to line and march.” He silently swept an arm around, like a pinwheel: Hurry up! “A thousand men moving, and the enemy don’t know it. He don’t know it because he don’t hear a sound. He got sound equipment all over there, he hears everything, you see. But being it’s so quiet—we kept the sound down, you see. And it saved many of our lives. We’d have got killed by the animals. And everything is mysterious. Everything is Shhhhhh! No sound. You know they’ve got a thousand men out there with guns and everything, all the equipment, cannons and everything that they’re ready to fire. There’s a thousand men out there waiting—you don’t hear nothing. You don’t hear a sound. All of a sudden a guy comes in, he says”—he paused, slowly swung his arm across his chest twice: Move along!—“‘Go, march, march, march,’ until you get to three miles within that front line there, you see? Then you unload, pack up, dig in. Get your guns in position to fire, get that other stuff—you don’t hear a sound. A thousand men digging holes, preparing for war, and you don’t hear a sound. Everything mysterious. Every move you make is mysterious. And that’s what makes it so thrilling to young people. The movements—you never see the movements. You’re in the movements, and you don’t know it. All quiet, no sound. Don’t you dare light a light, a cigarette, because they could have shot at you.” He laughed, took a drink from a water cup he’d been holding in his left hand. I hadn’t noticed it there until that moment.

Reviewing the tape years later, I hear his wife, Germaine, interjecting comments here and there, though at the time he’d just talked over her, and I, transfixed by his story, hadn’t perceived she’d said a word. Now, though, as he took a pause, she seized her opportunity. “I’ve lived his life, over and over, what he told me,” she cried out. “Years ago. Every bit of it is true. How he went through all that, only by the grace of God, all without being mentally ill, I don’t know. And the best husband in the whole world! To the people! To one another! A wonderful marriage!”

She was shouting; but none of it seemed to register with him. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he finally said to me. “You dead, and you don’t know it. All of a sudden you’re marching, you’re marching, you’re marching. And soon you slow down, it slows down, it slows down. And you hear the Shhhhhh!” He turned his head here and there, hushing ghosts in every direction: “Shhhhhh! Shhhhhh! Why so quiet? You better be quiet till you know what’s buried there, you know what’s hidden over here, see. They got listening posts all over. They know just where you at. They hear you talking. And they don’t want to shoot because they don’t want to expose their position. They could kill us all at any time, see, but they want to know more about us, what we after, see?” He was even more animated now; he leaned forward, his eyes wide, looking into mine.

“That’s enough, Papa!” his wife called out.

“There’s action and danger,” he continued, unheeding. “There’s a thrill attached to it.”

“The nerves!” Germaine said.

“What’s thrilling about it—you know you’re going to die!” he concluded, but his hands kept moving after his lips fell silent; he was in the thrall of that thrill even yet.

And that thrill—it was not, as Winston Churchill once described it, the thrill of being shot at to no effect. The war, you see, had very nearly claimed George Briant’s life. He wasn’t waxing philosophical when he told me that he had sure learned too much about war, nor poetic when he recalled: “We were standing in an open field, and then they were sitting there waiting for us.” He really had; he really was. And they were, really.

It happened on July 28, 1918, two weeks after the Germans launched their last great offensive, ten days after it had faltered and the French and Americans launched their own. There had been quite a lot of fighting in and around the village of Le Charmel by then; the French and Americans would take part of it, then lose it to a German counterattack, then repeat the process again and again. “Le Charmel was probably reported captured as many times as any town in France,” the Roll of Honor’s “Brief Narrative” reports. On July 27, it seemed the Germans had finally been chased off for good. The narrative continues:

Le Charmel . . . had been before the war a quiet little farming town snuggled down under the hills with the inevitable Chateau on a small hill across the valley. It was quite a strong point for the Boche and was held by many Machine Guns. The regiment moved on July 27th, the day it was captured, the batteries taking position along a hedge near the Roncheres road.

I know two versions of what happened there the next day. “On the morning of July 28th the 1st Battalion limbered up and moved to the road preparatory to changing position,” the narrative reports, “then received orders to return and fire a barrage.” As George Briant remembered it, though, his battery—Battery B—was ordered to move in daylight; and then, already dangerously exposed, they—well, they got stuck in traffic. “We were changing positions,” he recalled. “We were going to take a French position, you see, and they were supposed to have moved. But when we got there, they had never moved. They left us out in the open.” Literally: Battery B was stuck standing in an open field, the sun high overhead, illuminating them, as if an artillery battery surrounded only by grass and hay needed further illumination. They could do nothing but stand there and wait, wondering which would reach them first—orders that they could finally move, or something very bad.

And then they heard it: something very bad.

The “Brief Narrative” is almost cavalier about what happened next. “It was while we were in this position that we made our first real acquaintance with the Boche ’planes,” it records, and you can’t help but marvel, nearly a century later, that aircraft were still so new at that point that “planes” required an apostrophe up front to remind you that it was short for “aeroplanes.” Planes themselves were also still objects of marvel for many; but for the men of Battery B on July 28, 1918, they were just objects of terror, moving unfettered overhead as you were trapped down on earth, as free to kill you as were those unseen Ger- man soldiers hiding just off the road in the dark of night. Unlike those soldiers, though, the planes didn’t hold their fire; they already knew where the Americans were headed. “As ‘B’ Battery was going in a plane came quietly sailing over and let go four bombs that got 28 horses and 34 men,” the narrative explains.

“They couldn’t help it,” George Briant told me. “They were flying over; they saw us out in the field. And when they saw us out in the field, they were all ready with the bombs. All they had to do was drop their bombs.”

“However,” the “Brief Narrative” continues, undaunted, “everyone stuck to his post, including many of the wounded; put the battery in position and fired the barrage. It was excellent work and the ‘B’ Battery officers deserve great credit, particularly Lieut. Hopkins, who, though severely wounded, took command and stuck to his post until the battery was in position.” Sounds like a happy ending, or sort of. But then, the very next sentence: “Encouraged by this success several other ’planes came over bombing during the day and dropped many bombs.” The unnamed author then closes his tale with a true masterpiece of understatement: “It was a bad day.”

I’ll say; George Briant did say. “They got about, I don’t know, I think about seventy-five Americans,” he said. “Me, I was all shot up. My teeth were shot out. I got shot in the eyes. I was shot in the shoulders. I was shot—I think seven, seven shrapnel wounds from that one attack.”

“How many bombs did they drop on you?” I asked.

“I tell you,” he said, “we weren’t counting.” He started taking an assessment again: “I got my teeth knocked out. I got some—I got poked a hole in my shoulder about the size of a dollar . . . where else?”

His wife couldn’t stand it. “That’s a real, real man!” she called out.

“I forgot,” he continued, as calm as she was agitated. “I was walking around with blood running all over me—my face, my shoulders . . . they picked me up and took me to the hospital.” But he didn’t forget, not at all; rather, he returned to it time and again. “I had seven holes in me,” he repeated at one point. “Biggest one was the size of a silver dollar, right in here.” He touched his right shoulder. “Then I had one over the eye”—he raised a hand to his left eye—“how I didn’t lose my eyesight, I don’t know. It was a miracle. Right inside the eye, right alongside the eyeball, without damaging the eyeball. It was a miracle.” Later, he said that he’d been hit in one of his hips, too.

I have stood on a road just outside Le Charmel and looked out over that field where Battery B’s bad day played out. I found the spot with the help of Jeffrey Aarnio, superintendent of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, where some six thousand of the doughboys killed during that last German offensive and the subsequent Allied counteroffensive, including Joyce Kilmer and men from Battery B, are buried. Though he had never heard the story of Battery B, Mr. Aarnio knew the area well; Le Charmel is still a quiet little farming village, a pretty spot with narrow old streets that wind around buildings and up hills. The field is like something out of a Van Gogh painting, the kind of place you might stroll through lazily, hoping to get lost in thought and the scent of tall grass.

On July 28, 1918, young men, Americans, died in that field. George Briant, seventeen years old, was not one of them. Red-hot shrapnel tore through a shoulder, a hip, an eye socket of his that day; it knocked his teeth out. But it did not kill him. “They picked us up,” he explained, “brought us over to the hospital, and they dressed the wounds. Then they put us right back in the war again.” He laughed, perhaps because he knew quite well it wasn’t like that at all; he spent three months in the hospital, and even after that, the Army was inclined to just ship him home. He pleaded with them to send him back to the 76th, instead. “I said, ‘I didn’t come here to go home, I came here to see what the war was like.’” The Army, though, wasn’t convinced by that line of reasoning. They still wanted to send him back to Louisiana.

“Let me tell you here,” he said, eighty-six years later. “I really rethought that conversation many times. Because many times I thought to myself I should have went back. I should have gave up.”

But he didn’t. Instead, he offered another argument. “I said, ‘I never saw the beginning of the war, and I want to see how the war ends.’”

That one worked. He was discharged from the hospital on October 20, 1918, and was back with Battery B within the week. And he saw how the war ended.

For the rest of his long life, though, he wished he hadn’t.

While George Briant was in the hospital recuperating from his wounds, Germany’s were festering. One by one, its allies, worn down by relentless assaults that culminated in grave military defeats, signed separate armistices with the Allies: Bulgaria, on September 29, 1918; the Ottoman Empire, on October 30; and, worst of all, Austria and Hungary, on November 3. It was the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had, arguably, started the war four years earlier, and then dragged Germany into it. At the end, there was no empire, and no Austria-Hungary; in the face of its final humiliating defeat, at Vittorio in northeastern Italy, the whole thing had split apart, Czechs and Slavs and Magyars going their own ways. Austria and Hungary sued for peace separately from one another. Germany remained, alone.

It wasn’t so much that Germany had relied on its former allies for their military prowess, but they had been invaluable for their resources, especially oil and food. Without them, Britain’s naval blockade would have smothered Germany years earlier. As it was, Germans were starving; they didn’t have their own Herbert Hoover working tirelessly to supply them with wheat. Chronically hungry people are disinclined to just go along quietly, especially when that hunger is accompanied by the news that the war effort for which you are doing without is slowly failing. Such news started reaching the German people in the fall of 1918. The streets quickly filled with grumbling. In an example of what would later come to be termed “blowback,” the revolution that Germany had fomented in Russia started to seep back across its own eastern borders. At the same time, General Erich Ludendorff, one of Germany’s two top military commanders, was slowly being undone by bad news from the front. On September 28, 1918, Ludendorff suffered a breakdown; one account I read has him collapsing to the floor during a meeting, literally foaming at the mouth. That night, frantic, he convinced Germany’s other top military commander, Paul von Hindenburg, that Germany must try to effect a truce immediately. Ludendorff then brought his case to the Kaiser, warning also that President Wilson, from whom the Germans expected they’d get the best terms, would not even begin to negotiate with Germany until that country put into place a more democratic system of government. The Kaiser, with great reluctance, signed an order replacing his government with one more closely resembling a parliamentary system, to be headed by his cousin, the relatively liberal Prince Maximilian von Baden. Ludendorff—who would, after the war, become an early supporter of Hitler’s—later changed his mind, deciding to continue prosecuting the war with great vigor. He later changed his mind about Hitler, too.

In both cases, he was too late. The turmoil in Germany never abated; and as news from the front became worse, the calls for revolution at home grew louder and more insistent. Morale within the Army plummeted, too, and desertions climbed. German sailors, ordered to take the fleet out to sea for one great last battle, mutinied instead. Prince Max, as he was known, wanted the war ended immediately; he reached out to President Wilson, careful not to divulge how weak Germany’s position was. Privately, the Germans’ most hopeful scenario was that they would withdraw to pre–August 1914 lines, and from there negotiate terms from a position, if not exactly of strength, then at least not of desperation, either. Germany couldn’t claim to be victorious, but it could claim to still be undefeated.

Poor Prince Max. How do you even start a conversation like that? I’m not saying we want to stop this war—why should we want to do something like that, with everything going so well for us?—but let’s say, just for fun, that we did . . . ? Caught between German pitchforks and French bayonets, he did his best, but no one was particularly eager to work with him. If the French or British had detected a hint of weakness, they would have borne down mercilessly; they’d been in this thing for four years, and had lost more men than they cared to count. And President Wilson, well, he was high-minded enough in word, but when it came to actually talking peace—a real, immediate cease-fire—he dithered, waivered, changed old terms, added new ones. Finally, he grew cold, told the Germans he was seriously considering demanding something like unconditional surrender, and implied that they’d better just go talk to the French directly. They did.

The French received the German negotiating party less than graciously. They didn’t see them as coming to negotiate a truce, but rather a surrender. Prince Max assembled an armistice-negotiation party devoid of high-profile German military figures, and headed by a civilian, a forty-three-year-old politician and member of the Catholic Centre Party named Matthias Erzberger. A former schoolteacher, Erzberger had initially supported the war, but in the past year or so had grown sour on it, and had since been speaking out loudly in favor of peace; Prince Max calculated that the French would be more likely to deal respectfully and fairly with such a man than with, say, von Hindenburg. He was wrong. The French delegation, headed by Supreme Allied Commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch, regarded the prince’s gesture only as a sign of weakness, and Erzberger as a sapling easily trampled.

The German delegation was to meet its French counterparts at a spot in the Compiègne Forest. When its motorcade crossed into French territory, on the evening of November 7, its appearance touched off rumors of an armistice—not negotiations, but an actual, already-existing truce—that raced to the coast and appeared, as fact, in American newspapers the next day. The Germans were not warmly welcomed; the French didn’t do that thing where they spread their arms wide and then kiss you on both cheeks. Rather, Foch wordlessly looked over their credentials and then said: “What is the purpose of your visit? What do you want of me?” Erzberger, flustered, replied that they had come to receive the Allies’ proposals for arriving at an armistice, the implication being that Germany had its own proposals, and the final terms would be a compromise of the two. Foch, though, had no interest in compromise. “I have no proposals to make,” he spat, adding that he was perfectly satisfied to continue the fighting. The Germans were speechless. Finally, another member of their party humbly asked Foch for his conditions for an armistice. “I have no conditions to give you,” Foch replied, haughtily, then added: “Do you wish for an armistice? If so, say so—formally.” He intended to humiliate the Germans, make them grovel. With Germany on the brink of collapse into anarchy—as far as its negotiators knew, it might already have collapsed while they were en route to Compiègne—they were in no position to deny him that, or pretty much anything.

Foch’s terms were severe; he recognized the strength of his bargaining position, and the desperation of Germany’s. He also wanted to make sure that Germany was rendered so weak that it would not be in a position to fight again at the end of whatever armistice period was agreed to, and so impotent that it would be in no position to resist any terms that might come out during future peace-treaty talks. He demanded that Germany immediately evacuate all occupied territo- ries—including Alsace and Lorraine, which it had annexed nearly a half century earlier; that all Allied prisoners of war immediately be liberated and returned to their units, despite the fact that no German POWs would be liberated immediately; and the surrender of specific numbers of materiel—guns, aeroplanes, ships, etc.—including all U-boats. And they reserved the right to issue further demands in the future, including reparations. Oh, and the Kaiser had to go. The French gave these terms to the German delegation at around eleven o’clock on the morning of November 8, with a deadline of seventy-two hours hence. Erzberger asked that a cease-fire take effect immediately, to spare soldiers’ lives while he secured approval for the terms. Foch refused. He intended to press the Germans as hard as possible until they gave him every last thing he asked for; never mind that many of the lives that might have been spared in those last seventy-two hours were French. And British. And American.

The Kaiser abdicated the next day and fled to the Netherlands; good thing Germany hadn’t invaded it, too, as the original Schlieffen Plan had called for. The German government considered the terms, but there was little to discuss, beyond the fact that in some cases Germany did not actually possess as many of this or that as the Allies demanded they surrender. On the night of November 10, they radioed their delegation in Compiègne, authorizing them to sign the agreement; it was signed, in a railroad car, shortly after five the following morning. Erzberger, who hadn’t wanted to be a part of the delegation at all and had been thoroughly demeaned during the “negotiations,” attempted, at the last moment, to salvage some dignity for himself and his country with a brief statement written for the occasion: “The German people, which held off a world of enemies for fifty months, will preserve their liberty and unity despite every kind of violence. A nation of seventy million people suffers, but it does not die.” Foch, refusing to grant Erzberger or any other German even the slightest comfort, merely replied, “Très bien,” the 1918 French equivalent of “Whatever.” The Germans filed out, wordlessly; no one shook hands. Three years later, a right-wing German terrorist death squad assassinated Erzberger for his role in the affair. They literally shot the messenger.

Officially, the armistice was signed at 5:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918; for some reason, though, the cease-fire was set to occur six hours hence, at 11:00 a.m., the original seventy-two-hour deadline. I don’t know why this was done, except, perhaps, for symmetry. That symmetry carved out for the First World War the singular distinction of terminating at a precise moment, one that everyone knows, even if they know nothing else about the conflict. It also carved out an additional six hours of fighting, six hours in which hundreds of men died. Of course, that pales compared to the thousands—German, British, Australian, Canadian, Italian, African, American, and French—who died in the last seventy-two hours of the war, thousands who would have been spared had Foch been moved by Erzberger’s fervent plea to cease firing immediately while he procured Germany’s approval of the Allies’ severe terms.

But he hadn’t been.

“You said you wanted to see what the war was like,” I said to George Briant that afternoon in September, 2004. “But by the time you got to the hospital, you’d already seen what the war was like, hadn’t you?”

He laughed. “I saw all of it!” he said. “North, south, all directions.”

“So why did you want to go back to the front after that?”

“I don’t know—it’s just in you. It’s something that’s in you. You have no fear. You’re facing the guns, you know it. Young as you are, you know you can get killed. So there you are. I went back again. The guy that passes you to go back home, he says, ‘Look, I ain’t supposed to pass you. You’re supposed to go back home. . . .’” But he knew young Briant would find some way or other to get back to the front; so he passed him. “And when I went back, many a day I realized that I was a fool to go back. Because I risked my head so many times it was pitiful.”

He had missed the latter part of the Aisne-Marne, and all of Saint-Mihiel, but the Meuse-Argonne—where the 76th was when he caught up with them—was a place where one could easily risk one’s head. The 76th had already helped take Montfaucon, and afterward set up its command post on the slope’s north face, which act earned it special attention from the Germans. According to the Roll of Honor’s “Brief Narrative,” around the time George Briant returned, Battery B and the rest of the regiment’s 1st Battalion were set up just east of the village of Cunel, where Bill Lake’s Wild West Division had also spent time, and where Moses Hardy’s Bearcats would very soon. Battery B and the rest of the 1st Battalion were there primarily to support infantry attacks on nearby German strongholds, villages like Bantheville and Aincreville and Clery-le-Grand and Clery-le-Petit, and a troublesome stretch of woods called the Bois de Babimont. From there they would move northeast to help infantry cross the Meuse River at Dun-sur-Meuse (literally, “Dun on the Meuse”), the town where, twenty-seven years later, finally liberated from a very different breed of Germans, someone would think to append the civilian Familles Salomon to the local World War I monument.

The fighting was hard; the Germans weren’t giving away anything at that point. Perhaps they sensed the end was near; perhaps they feared that they didn’t have anything left to go home to, or at least not anything they would recognize. Or perhaps they were just keeping their heads down, hoping that if they fought really hard, their dedication might pay off somehow. Whatever the reason, every one of those villages and scraps of forest had to be wrested from tightly clenched German hands and then held firm, with tightly clenched American hands, in the face of the inevitable counterattack. So did the patches of ground the batteries had to seize, and hold, so that those villages and scraps of forest could be taken to begin with. The Germans threw everything they had at the Americans: high explosives, shrapnel, gas, bullets, grenades, sharpened steel. “Everybody’s shooting at you,” George Briant recalled, with another of those thank-God-that’s-done laughs. “I got gassed—let’s see—maybe once or twice,” he said. It made him feel weak, “like there’s something wrong with you,” but that wasn’t the worst. The worst was the relentless onslaught of H.E. shells. “It’s ‘kill, kill, kill, kill,’” he said. “The dog kills the cat, the cat kills the dog.”

“Let’s go, Papa!” his wife called out; I don’t know if he willfully ignored her or just didn’t hear, but he laughed at the lethal absurdity that is war. One time, he told me, during a bombardment, he made for “a clump of bushes about fifty feet [around] . . . I figured I’d go behind it. The shrapnel flying through there, the trees would stop it, you see?”

I’d come across a similar tale before. In the book Company K, a lieutenant orders a sergeant to take some men and head out to “an isolated clump of trees. ‘That grove should be a good place for a squad of machine gunners, if the Germans should attack.’”

“I wouldn’t do that, Lieutenant,” the sergeant, a career Army man, cautions. “That clump stands out like a sore thumb. The Germans are sure to figure we’ll put men there, and shell the hell out of it—I been expecting that all morning.”

“I’m sorry,” the officer replies, “but I think you understand my orders.”

The sergeant takes the squad out; the Germans shell them for twenty minutes. The lieutenant hurries out there afterward, finds the sergeant “lying across a fallen tree, his body ripped from belly to chin.” All the men but one are dead; the lone survivor “stood upright looking down at his hand, from which the fingers had been shot away.” Before the war, he had been a concert pianist.

Fifteen years before those words were written, Private George Briant, caught in a German barrage, spotted a clump of bushes that promised shelter. “So I went to hide there,” he recalled. “And it wasn’t long before they notified me to get the hell out of there, because it was under shell fire. It was under gas flare.” Gas: in this case, not to poison you, but to illuminate you in the darkness. “In other words, the enemy knew we were going to be hiding there, see? And it was your life if you didn’t go.”

“I’ve had enough!” his wife called out; but he was smiling. It seemed to me that, pregnant with emotions and sensations as these memories of his were, he wasn’t doing too badly with them. Indeed, the cues—occasional smiles, laughter, the urgency in his tone—led me to believe that it was in fact doing him good to air these things out. It didn’t occur to me that these questions of mine might take him someplace he really shouldn’t go. So I asked him a few more, and he answered them, just fine; and then I asked: “Do you remember the last night of the war? The last day of the war?”

“Yeah,” he replied, his voice seeming to drop an octave or two. “It was a funny thing. The night before, you understand?”

He took a pause, appeared to be struggling to remember, or at least to convey the memory adequately. It didn’t help that Germaine Briant was shouting: “That’s enough!” I leaned forward, straining to hear what her husband was trying to say. He appeared to be doing the same thing. Irma and Mrs. Briant were now squabbling in the background; Irma told her godmother that if she didn’t quiet down, she’d wheel her out of there. “You’re not going to take me back, ’cause I’ll come right back!” Germaine spat.

Her husband closed his eyes for a moment. “I have to remember this right, now,” he said. “The night before . . . the night before, it was us that . . . us . . . we fired—we knew the war was going to end, you understand?”

“That’s enough!” his wife repeated, ever louder. Just a few minutes earlier, she’d let loose a loud, histrionic sigh, to indicate that she was terribly bored; now, apparently, she’d reached her limit.

“So we suddenly—they had the artillery shells laying on the ground, so they could shoot them back at us,” he explained. “We shot all the shells, all the ammunition, shot it at them that night. So we shot at them—”

“That’s enough on Papa’s mind!” Mrs. Briant shrieked.

He turned, looked at her for a second or two, then turned back to me. “We shot all our ammunition at them that night. And during that night, they shot what they had at us. In other words, instead of moving it, we emptied it at each other. I’ll always—there was more men unnecessarily killed—I’ll always remember that, as long as I live.”

Germaine started to sputter. “Papa’s mind!” she cried.

“Why?” he asked. “Why kill the last man? What did you gain by killing the last man?”

“You knew the war was ending,” I said.

He nodded, gravely. “Yeah. But that’s what they did.” He dropped his head. His lips pursed, bitterly. He turned away, looked down for an instant; but then, suddenly, his head snapped back up. He looked at me—and smiled. “What’s she want?” he asked me, laughing.

“Shut up, already!” his wife moaned. I turned the camera off for a moment, swapped out the tape. Mrs. Briant moved closer to her husband and threw an arm in front of him.

“So you were telling me about the last night of the war,” I said to Mr. Briant, the camera rolling again. “That you emptied all your shells, and they emptied all their shells . . .”

“Yeah,” he said. “We went out to see what damage was done on the outside, because we were hiding in the woods, you see? And we got to the edge of the woods to see what happened. And we got out there, walked along the edge of the woods, and there were dead Americans that took shelter at the edge of the woods.” He’d stumbled over the word “Americans,” made himself repeat it. “And that was exactly where the enemy was shooting at, you see? They knew they were going to hide there.” His wife tried to protest, but he wouldn’t stop now. “There were more American soldiers killed there than at one time during the war, because they hid in—they hid in the wrong place, you see? And the enemy knew they were going to hang there. And at twelve o’clock at night, the enemy opened fire, you see?” He swept an arm in front of him. “And all the edge of those woods there, they fired. And there was American soldiers hiding all up in those woods there.” He shook his head. “It was a sad affair, when I went along there and saw these men laying there, dying—six, seven, eight at that time. And I—I cried for their parents. That was sad.”

And he cried—again, now, eighty-six years hence, in that common room in Hammond, Louisiana. He turned away, narrowed his eyes and tensed his lips—and sobbed. “The last day of the war!” he gasped. “They sacrificed their life!”

“You think it’s good for him, this?” his wife asked their goddaughter. “Now see what’s coming on!”

“Papa,” Irma said, “if it’s upsetting you, we will quit, OK?”

He looked at her, and wept, rubbed an ancient hand on his ancient scalp and fell back into his chair. “It was too sad,” he uttered over his wife’s protests, and leaned forward again, looked at me, shook his head in grief; it was almost more than I could bear. “The last—the last night of the war. Such—these fine, big healthy men—had to lose their lives!” He cried so that his body shook, and fell back again, deflated.

“That’s the real stuff!” Germaine shouted. “You’re coming up with the real stuff. Y’all shouldn’t do that. That’s a mortal sin!”

I asked him if any of his friends had been among the dead; he didn’t seem to hear me. “That’s so sad,” he said. “It’s too sad.” He sat up again, still weeping, and looked right into my eyes. “On the edge of the woods, figuring they were safe—and they sacrificed their lives without knowing it . . . I had nothing to do.”

And then George Briant stopped weeping as suddenly as he’d started. “I had nothing to do,” he said, and that was it. He was done crying. His voice reverted to normal; so did his expression. You couldn’t tell he’d been sobbing just a few seconds earlier; in fact, his mood was better than it had been all afternoon. “At eleven o’clock exactly, everything stopped dead,” he said. “No more fire. It was all over.”

“And what did you do at eleven o’clock?”

“Nothing.” He laughed. “We had nothing to do.” It was the opposite of what he’d meant when, just a minute or so earlier, he’d said, “I had nothing to do,” by which he’d meant: There was nothing I could do for them. Now: “We had nothing to do”—nothing more needed to be done. “You put the guns and cannons in a safe place in case, you never know if it would start again, you see,” he said. “But after eleven o’clock it was all over . . . Yeah, everything looked funny.” He smiled. “You looked like you was in a new land. You couldn’t believe that everything is quiet. You just didn’t believe you were there. It was a different place. Everything is so different during war . . .”

“All the sorrow is unnecessary!” Germaine Briant declared.

He said: “It’s so funny to walk out in the open. I mean, it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real, you’re out there walking in the open, and nobody’s shooting at you. You couldn’t believe that! But that’s what happened. Eleven o’clock. Eleven o’clock, the last shot was fired, the last man was killed.”

And most accounts I’ve read, or heard personally, are pretty much like that. There was firing; then, suddenly, there was none. In many of those accounts, at 11:01 a.m., doughboys and German soldiers poured into No Man’s Land and celebrated with the men who had been their enemies exactly one minute earlier—shaking hands, dancing, sharing pictures, exchanging souvenirs. Even Eugene Lee, who had lost his best friend just hours earlier to a German shell—even he recalled doing so.

But George Briant did not. For one thing, his battery, like most artillery, was not within sight of German soldiers. “We celebrated by walking around,” he told me; but that was it. They could have gone in search of German troops with whom they might rejoice, but as far as he was concerned, at least, “we were still enemies.”

I started to ask him about his experience in the Army of Occupation, but by then Germaine Briant seemed to be edging close to hysteria. When I asked her husband about the German prisoners he saw, his wife squawked at their goddaughter: “You tell him he better quit before I have a . . . a . . . a suit on his hands!”

This made her husband laugh. “I’ll tell you later,” he said to me.

Irma wheeled her godmother out of the room, over Mrs. Briant’s loud protests. “I’m sorry it broke up like this,” Mr. Briant said, as soon as she was gone. “You lost the interview.”

I assured him that everything was fine, and that there was certainly no need for an apology; but I couldn’t seem to convince him of that. “I’m sorry it happened this way,” he said. “But Mama—Mama’s a very upset woman . . . and I’m sorry for her, and I’m sorry for all of us. In her condition, she can’t help it . . . I hope you can forgive her.”

“There’s nothing to forgive her for,” I said. But now he was preoccupied, unable to think about German prisoners and the Army of Occupation. Afterward, when I wheeled him back to their room, I saw that she was just fine. Actually, it was as if she had forgotten the entire episode; sweet as pecan pie, she asked me where I was from, how I liked it down here in Lew Z. Anne. At one point she tried to get me to promise her I would become a Catholic. “How do you know I’m not one already?” I asked her. It worked; she changed the subject, prattled on about this or that, asking me more questions but not really pausing to wait for an answer. At some point I looked at her husband; he just sat there, oblivious to the conversation. But he was smiling. All he needed was to be near her. Perhaps, at times, that was all he could take; but it was enough for him, after all he had endured in his long life. Four months later, she passed away. It was a Friday. He died the following Monday.

Before all that, though, back in the common room, I was just about to turn off the video camera when he started answering another question, one I hadn’t asked. “Most people,” he said, “most people hate our enemies—either side. You know what I’m saying? I hate you because you hate me . . . You killed my father-in-law, and I killed yours, see? So we’re mad at each other and want to kill each other. But it’s the wrong thing to do, and we’ve got to look at it as warfare, and not as a grudge in life for the rest of our lives. We must try to be friends, and help each other. German or Frenchman, it makes no difference. We all suffered.” His voice started to break. “We suffered in war together. I suffered. You suffered. And I know very well you suffer because you hurt someone, your enemy. And I suffer because I hurt my enemy. And enemies . . . that’s bred into war. We teach each other to hate each other, when we’re living; and we try to outdo the other, unbeknownst to the other fellow. We try to overcome these things as we live along life’s pathway.”

At the time, I thought he was talking to me; but watching him on that tape now, years later, I wonder if he wasn’t really speaking to his ancient enemies, the airmen who’d dropped bombs on him, the artillerymen who had killed his comrades on the last night of the war. I think it was a dialogue he’d been carrying on in his head for many years—and I wonder if that may have been what enabled him, at some point, to negotiate an armistice with his memories, the two of them moving through the decades together without wearing each other down. Private Briant did not hate. He understood.

I don’t think Private Gunther, in those last minutes of the war, hated. But I don’t think he understood, either. That takes time; and, as he had just been informed, he was all but out of time, time to redeem himself—if not to others, like his former friend Sergeant Powell, hugging the ground next to him, then at least to his parents back home, and his fiancée, Olga, and maybe even to himself. How he must have despaired at that moment.

And then—well, I’ll let the monument tell it:

Suddenly, Gunther got up and ran at the enemy. Sergeant Powell ordered him to stop. The German gunners signaled to him to go back but Gunther kept advancing. One of them fired a five-round burst. Gunther was struck in the left temple and died instantly. It was 10:59 a.m. One minute later, the Armistice took effect and silence descended on the front. . . .

General Pershing’s Order of the Day recorded Henry Nicholas Gunther as the last American soldier to die in the First World War. He was posthumously promoted to Sergeant and received the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1923, Gunther’s body was returned to Baltimore and buried in Section W of the Holy Redeemer Cemetery.

Yes: It worked. Henry Gunther got his stripes back, and a DSC to boot. No one cares to remember that the last man killed in World War I—an American from the Liberty Division—was a suicide.