3

The American Sector

J. LAURENCE MOFFITT IS directly responsible for the fact that you are holding this book in your hands. Not that he had anything to do with your choosing this title over, say, something by Jane Austen or Louis L’Amour; but were it not for J. Laurence Moffitt, I’m pretty sure this book wouldn’t exist.

Let me explain. I first met Mr. Moffitt at his home in Orleans, Massachusetts, right at the elbow of Cape Cod, on July 20, 2003. It was the day after my conversation with Anthony Pierro. But that word, “conversation,” is, to be frank, a term that masks the problem that left me terribly discouraged afterward. Yes, I asked Mr. Pierro questions, and he answered them. But it was not a conversation of the type you and I might have if we found ourselves in the same place and were inclined to talk to each other. It was, rather, a bit like a complex game of pinball: There were times when a question would hit a bumper and get a response, or land in a hole and get a big response; but more often it would just fall, freely, striking and setting off nothing but a look of mild bemusement. When this happened I always tried to bat it up again and get different results, but again, more often than not, it would just fall, and eventually I wouldn’t be able to bat it up anymore and I’d just have to move on to the next ball. If I asked the right question, something that would spark in Anthony Pierro the memory of a favorite anecdote—and I received a lot of guidance from Rick Pierro in this regard—then I would get to hear it. But there wasn’t a lot of telling done beyond those favorite old anecdotes. Perhaps the most frustrating part of it was the fact that there were, apparently, some very interesting old stories that Anthony Pierro had forgotten completely, like the one Rick tried to get him to tell me about the time he went back on the chow line for seconds and another soldier, angered by this for some reason, called him a greedy Wop, and a brawl ensued. I would have liked to have heard that one.

In any event, as much as I had enjoyed meeting and talking with Anthony Pierro—and as grateful as I was that a 107-year-old man who knew nothing about me would take a couple of hours out of his life to talk with me in the first place—I left his house that day with grave doubts about this endeavor I had undertaken. Was I just kidding myself in thinking that I could really converse with World War I veterans, and they with me, and come away with something real and true?

Those doubts lasted exactly one day. They evaporated a few minutes into my first conversation with J. Laurence Moffitt. He had just told me that he had been born in the small northeastern Connecticut town of Lebanon, when I asked him if he had gone to high school there, too. Here is his response:

I went to high school from Lebanon. That high school was in Willimantic, which was about two miles from home. And then, I was directed to an insurance company in Hartford for a position and accepted. And I spent my life in insurance. I was hired by two companies, one then another. And I went to World War I. I graduated from high school in 1914. I went in the Army in 1917, in April of 1917, just before war was declared. And I was in the Army for two years; eighteen months in France, in the first division to go to France. The division was the 26th Division, made up of the National Guard of the six New England states. There are four infantry regiments in a division, and artillery batteries, with which I am not acquainted. And the 101st Infantry Regiment was made up of the Massachusetts National Guard. The 102nd was made up of the Connecticut National Guard; that’s where I was, in the 102nd Infantry. The 103rd Infantry Regiment was from Maine, and the 104th from New Hampshire and Vermont, and artillery mostly from Rhode Island.

And we were, in Connecticut we were assembled at New Haven. All the different National Guard companies of Connecticut were assembled in New Haven, in 1917, July. And from there we went—it was so early in the war there were no transports. We went to—my company, and I don’t know how many others—went by train, the CV, Central Vermont, to Montreal, and then embarked there and sailed down the St. Lawrence to Halifax, where we joined several other National Guard companies that were ready to go across, and went across to Liverpool. A nine-day trip, it was. And then across the Channel to France, and then across France to a certain area, Landeville, and the regiment trained for four months there. And in February we were sent to the front. At that time the Allies, Britain and France and Belgium and others, they were, had been in the war since 1914. And we joined them in 1917, and went to the front in February of 1918.

So, the first sector was, the Allies at that time were defending themselves against the attacks of Germany. And we were just in defensive action. I was in the Headquarters [Company] of the infantry regiment, and on the staff of the colonel, along with others. I had the rank of a corporal. And I escaped the front line, trench warfare, but I was subject to constant artillery fire. I spent my twenty-first birthday in the front line, March sixth of 1918. And I went out on patrol with a patrol group that night. And we spent two months in that sector, which was the Chemin des Dames. . . .

Well, that was our first sector. Two months later we were moved to another sector, the Toul Sector. And then came Château-Thierry in the summer of 1918, and then the closing war at Saint-Mihiel and Verdun, and the war was over, as you know, on November eleventh of 1918. . . . And President Wilson paid our company a visit while we were there. And talked to us, and that might have . . . I, I don’t remember . . . don’t recall now just when that was, or what the occasion was. But it was maybe a holiday.

Mr. Moffitt was 106 years old at the time; he was talking about things that had happened eighty-five years earlier. And not only did he remember these things precisely—he offered up, unsolicited, details like the composition of various regiments of the 26th Division, and the name of the railroad that carried him to Montreal.

And he was just getting started.

J. Laurence Moffitt: He was the first veteran I found off the French List. He was actually listed in the phone book. This proved encouraging, though not quite exciting; lots of people remain in the phone book long after they have died. But when I dialed the number and a woman—I would soon learn she was his daughter, Janet—answered the phone and I asked her my now-refined “Is he still living?” she actually answered, “Yes. Would you like to speak with him?”

I said I would, and there was silence for what seemed like a very long time, though in fact it was probably just a minute or two. And then another voice came on the line and said: “Hello.” It wasn’t frail; it didn’t quaver. But it came wrapped in an accent I had never heard before, one that had all but vanished before I’d been born. Though he now lived in Orleans, Massachusetts, this man was a true Connecticut Yankee, a relic of a time when Connecticut was a state of farms, not tony suburbs and enormous Indian casinos.

We met just a couple of weeks after that. Like most of Cape Cod, Orleans had long since metamorphosed from an old fishing village to an expensive summer destination, a place of large second homes. J. Laurence Moffitt had retired there after decades working in insurance, traveling throughout Connecticut and taking the train into Manhattan. His was a small house, set back in some woods; it didn’t get much light. There was only one armchair in the living room on the day I visited, and it was offered to me. I, in turn, offered it back to him, and took for myself the only other seat in the house: his wheelchair. We sat like that for two hours—and, when I returned to see him a few months later, did it again. He was a small man, and thin; on that first day he wore a baggy yellow short-sleeved golf shirt with a button-down pocket, and very large eyeglasses. Exuberant tufts of white hair sprang out from all over his head, a bit more thinly in the middle of it, but still there nonetheless. He spoke very slowly—not that the words came out of his mouth haltingly, but he was prone to taking frequent pauses, sometimes several per sentence, during which, more often than not, he hummed softly. I liked him immediately.

“I was born in Lebanon, Connecticut,” he told me at the beginning of our conversation that first day. “In a small town in which my grandfather Moffitt had retired from his manufacturing business in Providence in eighteen hundred and sixty-nine. My father was then nine years old. And across the road, a little bit away from ours, was another farm by the name of Cod, and that was my mother’s family. And my father married the daughter of the Cods.”

“And what day were you born?” I asked him.

“March sixth,” he replied.

“And the year?”

“Eighteen ninety-seven.” He must have sensed how odd that number struck me, sitting there in 2003, because at one point, he said: “You know, you hear about long-time memory and short-time memory. My long-time memory is good. I can remember names from back when I was in high school, and where I worked and who I visited; and I can’t remember what happened last week, maybe, or last year. Your short memory, at my age, gets weak. But my long-time memory is good. Yes, I can remember lots of things.”

Toward the end of that day, after the strangeness had worn off, he conceded that perhaps he had fared better than many. “A lot of people do not retain their memory or their mind as they age,” he stated. “As you see, I have no problem in this. And my mind seems to be clear, and I keep up with things and world news.

“And I read the paper,” he added, matter-of-factly.

J. Laurence Moffitt: He never used his first name, Jesse. Years later, rooting around in old census records, I learned that he had been named for his paternal grandfather. The elder Jesse Moffitt had been born in Connecticut in 1828, and by 1850 was married—his wife, Maria, was a couple of years older—and living in Cumberland, Rhode Island, working as a hired hand on a farm owned by an elderly widow named Parmelia Peck. (Don’t you just love those old names?) The 1870 census counts him twice—once in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he is listed as being a machinist; and once in Lebanon, Connecticut, where he is noted as a farmer, with a net worth of $10,000. His farm, the record shows, was worth $6,000; Parmelia Peck’s had only been valued at $1,000. In just two decades, Jesse Moffitt had done quite well for himself, had achieved the American Dream, thanks, no doubt, to New England thriftiness, a lot of elbow grease, and perhaps a few other nineteenth-century values that we now think of as timeworn clichés and yet miss terribly.

By 1900, Jesse’s son Edward was living and farming in the land of the Cods. He and his wife, Nellie, had four children, the youngest of whom, a three-year-old boy, had been named for Edward’s father. One hundred and three years later, that little boy, Jesse—though from now on we’ll call him Laurence, as he preferred—told me that his earliest memory was “being out in our yard and seeing my grandfather Moffitt, with a long white beard, in the yard of the barn, across the road from our house.” The old man still lived and farmed there, next door to his son’s in-laws, the Cods. Except they weren’t; as I also discovered while searching through those census records, they were, in fact, the “Cards.” This was Laurence Moffitt’s old Connecticut accent. Good luck finding anyone there who still speaks that way.

Jesse Moffitt may have set himself up as a gentleman farmer in 1869, but his grandson and namesake grew up on a working farm, and he didn’t much care for it. “What kind of farm was it?” I asked him in July, 2003.

“Milk and vegetables,” he said. “Dairy. We had about fifteen cows. And then there was, always, vegetables, carrots and onions and turnips that my father harvested and took into Willimantic and sold. And the milk was in cans and picked up daily by some organization . . . and of course we had our own milk.”

“Did you work on the farm when you were a boy?”

“I did, exactly, and hated it. I hoed and weeded rows of carrots and onions, turnips . . . it was no fun being on your knees all day long and pulling weeds.”

He liked school much better—because it wasn’t the farm, and because, despite the fact that it was almost as rural and remote as the farm, he managed to see there a bit more of the world, the new. “In the country,” he recalled, “one-room country schoolhouse, whenever there was a car heard coming, kids were allowed to run to the window and watch the car go by.”

As he said, he went into Willimantic, a town of some size (at least compared to Lebanon), for high school; then, after graduation in 1914, off to Hartford, where he worked in insurance. He was still there in early 1917, and might never have left were it not for a growing sense that his country was about to be drawn into the war that was tearing through much of the rest of the world.

Eighty-six years later, he explained: “Germany had continued to sink ships, and including the Lusitania, which was a British ship. . . . And on it, there were two hundred Americans on it. And our president, President Woodrow Wilson, registered his complaint to the Kaiser, to Germany. And he got some response, but the sinking of ships by submarines continued through 1916 and ’17, so much so that the National Guard troops were what was called ‘called out.’ And obviously there was news of what Germany had been doing to us, and aroused the Americans. So the National Guard, the National Guard of Connecticut, and of other states, were called out. And when they were is when I joined the National Guard. Now I left my job in the insurance company and went and joined the National Guard. And then we were formed into a division, and Connecticut was the 102nd Infantry. From all of the companies, the National Guard companies in Connecticut, were formed into the 102nd Infantry.”

“So you joined up because you knew that America was going to go to war,” I said, “and they needed soldiers?”

“Yes, that’s right,” he replied. “And when I went home and told my mother I joined the Army, after she got over the shock, she said ‘Well, I’m thankful you didn’t join the Navy.’ Because at that time it looked like it was to be a naval war. Well, she was wrong.”

There were actually 139 Americans on the Lusitania, 128 of whom went down with the ship on May 7, 1915. Not quite 200, but plenty; and despite certain mitigating circumstances—that Germany had warned Americans against booking passage on the ship, had gone so far as to take out ads in American newspapers warning that they might well sink it, that “travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain and her allies do so at their own risk” because, Germany rightfully suspected, passenger ships like the Lusitania were sometimes being used, secretly and against the laws of war, to ferry arms and ammunition through U-boat-infested waters—Americans were outraged. Many called for war with Germany.

Many others, though, called for restraint—most importantly among them, President Wilson. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” he said. “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” Instead, working through diplomatic channels, he secured promises that Germany would ease up on its campaign of submarine warfare.

Which it did, for more than a year; some historians have argued that doing so cost it the war. By early 1917, the Allied blockade, unchecked by German U-boats, had brought Germany close to starvation. Desperate, the country’s leaders concluded they had no choice but to do what they could to curtail the Allies’ advantage. So if American merchant ships, sailing under flags of neutrality, were going to continue supplying the Allies with the food and arms Germany no longer had access to, Germany decided it would have to start sinking those ships, even though they knew it could mean war with America.

Which it did, especially once British intelligence shared with Washington a cable it had intercepted from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, intended for Germany’s ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, instructing the latter to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for Mexico to enter the war on Germany’s side, in exchange for the return to Mexico of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona once victory was secured. That note—now remembered, with great notoriety, as the Zimmermann Telegram—was a response to the growing understanding that Germany and America would soon be at war with one another. So was Laurence Moffitt’s enlistment, right around his twentieth birthday, in the Connecticut National Guard. Two months later, war having been declared, the Connecticut National Guard was nationalized and converted to the 102nd Infantry Regiment of the 26th Division, the “Yankee Division.” Mr. Moffitt was then a private. “Or as we used to call it,” he told me, “a ‘buck private.’”

The Yankee Division, or “YD” as it was known by those who served in it, arrived in France on October 9, 1917. With them was one Frank P. Sibley, a reporter for the Boston Globe. When the division was mobilized, the Globe, the largest daily newspaper in New England, hit upon the idea of sending a reporter along just to cover its actions. Sibley had gone to the Mexican border with Massachusetts National Guard troops the previous year, and he was, you might say, a real booster. So eager was he to go overseas with the division that when the War Department denied him accreditation—the Globe’s request was apparently so novel that no one in Washington knew what to make of it—Sibley went anyway, without any credentials at all. “My mission,” he writes in his 1919 memoir, With the Yankee Division in France, was “to keep the families at home informed of the experiences of their boys in France. The Boston Globe was thoroughly protected by news services, by special correspondents, and by every obtainable agent, as to the progress of the war as a whole. I was to write only what was happening to the New England boys.” It’s safe to say that Sibley actually considered himself one of the troops, referring to them, unfailingly, as “we” rather than “they.” He even claimed credit for coining the name “Yankee Division.”

And he advocated for the YD tirelessly. He surely felt they needed it; according to Sibley, the YD was probably the most embattled, underappreciated, and maligned outfit in all of the American Expeditionary Forces. “The Twenty-Sixth . . . did not stand well with the American higher command,” Sibley writes. For example, when the YD was pulled out of the Chemin des Dames Sector in March, 1918, he says, “Misgivings were heavy upon us . . . because of what we were sure was mismanagement of us and prejudice against us.”

Suspect as that sentiment sounds today, Sibley may actually have had it right. And this is where the story gets a bit strange.

There were a lot of big egos in the AEF, and the big ego at the top of the YD—General Clarence Ransom Edwards—didn’t get along with some of the Army’s other big egos, including the biggest of them all, General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing. Edwards was fifty-eight years old when America entered the war, a West Point graduate and career soldier who had served in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection; his last posting had been as commander of all American troops in the Panama Canal Zone. When Wilson declared war on Germany, Edwards was hastily recalled to the States, promoted to major general, and put in charge of the nascent 26th Division.

Edwards had a reputation for being sharp-tongued, which may account for his unpopularity. He was also, apparently, pretty full of himself, which probably didn’t help. In his memoirs, Major General William Lassiter, who also served in France and later became commander of all American troops in the Hawaiian Department, called Edwards “the most egocentric person I have ever known. He thought so much and talked so much about himself that his job always became a secondary consideration. . . . He spent his time criticizing all and sundry in the hierarchy above him and making his men feel they were not being given a fair share.”

Whether Laurence Moffitt, the last surviving member of the YD from World War I, felt this way, I do not know; he certainly never hinted at it. He was, to be sure, extremely proud of the association—for many years after the war, he even had a special license plate on his car, YD29—and, while most of that is probably the pride any soldier feels for his unit, I suspect that some small part of it may be due to a special distinction the YD held during that war, one for which General Edwards was entirely responsible.

Edwards, you see, decided that he wanted his 26th to be the first full division to serve in France. Trouble was, there were three full Regular Army divisions—the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd—with seniority over his, and Edwards, likely not helped by his reputation, couldn’t seem to secure the orders that would realize his ambition. So, in September, 1917, Edwards just shipped the entire 26th Division, some twenty-five thousand men in all, to France anyway.

Without orders.

The Army was not impressed. The French, however, were. Everyone seems to agree that the YD and the people of France fell in love with each other quickly. As the first full US Army division in France, they were a symbol of hope as much as anything else. By the time the YD arrived in France that fall, the French had endured more than three years of fighting on their own soil—thirty-eight months of unstanched hemorrhaging, of dead sons and husbands, of blasted houses and farms, of destroyed villages, of colossal battles, some of them the greatest in history. Yet despite it all, in three years the battle lines had scarcely moved. The Germans had snatched up a fair chunk of France back in August and September of 1914, the first two months of the war, and had managed to hold it ever since. It wasn’t easy, or cheap; the French, under orders to attack constantly, did just that. In the process, they managed to kill many Germans, and to lose just as many of their own. The war was an extremely deadly stalemate. The French, exhausted, depopulated, living in occupied ruins, nevertheless retained their anger and their pride. They swore they would never surrender to the hated Boche. But how could they prevail?

Then, in the spring of 1917, the news: Millions of Americans would be coming soon. Or eventually, anyway. It took months for them to even start showing up; for many French men and women, the soldiers of the YD were the first physical indication that yes, this really was going to happen, that the war might just end someday. “The vast majority [of French] . . . welcomed the Americans as saviors. They looked on our men as crusaders, who had left their homes to fight for an ideal, as the force which was destined to cause the triumph of right and justice,” writes Emerson Gifford Taylor in New England in France, the definitive history of the YD in World War I, first published in 1920. Taylor, as it happened, was Laurence Moffitt’s captain. “A Yale man,” as Mr. Moffitt recalled. “A good man.” One time, he told me, “I was on what we called kitchen duty, and the only phone in the regiment, our company phone, was on a post in the kitchen. And a call came in for Captain Taylor. . . . So I stepped out of the tent and I yelled to Captain Taylor, ‘Telephone!’ And he very kindly says, ‘You don’t yell to a captain, to an officer. You come up and salute and you give your message.’”

Captain Taylor had already made a name for himself as a writer of Victorian grippers like A Daughter of Dale and The Upper Hand. Yet if he had a weakness for purple prose, he didn’t overstate the level of hospitality with which the YD were greeted almost everywhere they went in France. Laurence Moffitt told me he often visited French homes when he was Over There. “They had you for dinner?” I asked him.

“That’s right, they did,” he replied. “They were quite cordial to us.”

“The women-folk liked the Yankees well,” Taylor writes in New England in France. “How about the girls?” I asked his corporal—he hadn’t stayed a buck private for long—eight decades later.

“A buddy of mine dated a couple of French girls,” Corporal Moffitt told me. “And I kept in touch with one of them . . . and she wrote beautiful love letters to me . . . and I kept it up by letter for a while after I came home.” Until, that is, he met the woman who would eventually become his wife of seventy-five years; then, he said, “I basically discontinued it.”

The YD spent their first four months abroad training under the French, and, apparently, learning a great deal. “The Yankees had the sense to appreciate the French officers who formed their mission,” Sibley asserts. “And it was largely because the Division was capable of learning from them that their fine record was made.” Taylor, for his part, credits “the generally rapid and satisfactory progress of the troops” to “the tireless and intelligent assistance of the French.” By the first week of February, 1918, they were deemed combat-ready, and put into action in the Chemin des Dames Sector. Among the many French soldiers serving there at around this time was an artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus. Yes, that Alfred Dreyfus. Of L’Affaire.

Chemin des Dames was a line in the northern Champagne region that had been the site of brutal fighting for several years; in the spring of 1917, when America was just entering the war, the French Army took so many casualties there (due, in large part, to the ineptitude of then commander in chief Robert Nivelle) that it was beset by large-scale mutinies afterward. By February, 1918, though, it was relatively quiet, with both sides mostly taking shelter in underground bunkers and quarries. (The Germans had occupied their defensive positions there for so long that they had actually electrified their bunkers; you can still see their wiring today.) The YD stayed at Chemin des Dames for about six weeks, scratching out impressive graffiti (also still visible) on the subterranean walls; then they were shipped to the Toul Sector, another “safe” area, to further their education. And it was there, in the town of Seicheprey, that they—and by extension, the AEF—had their first major encounter with the German Army.

In a clearing in the woods not far from Seicheprey, in the region of Lorraine in northeastern France, you will find a section of German trench, complete with concrete walls and steps and iron handgrips. These are common in this part of the country, but this particular section is so well preserved that at some point in recent years someone thought to put up a kiosk commemorating the fighting that took place in and around it. Toward the bottom of that kiosk you can see an old greenish photograph; it looks very familiar: long rows of doughboys in puttees and tin hats, sitting cross-legged, kneeling, standing. It seems just like any number of official platoon or company portraits, those stretched-out panoramic shots you sometimes find in attics, their elongated frames caked in dust. Look closely at this particular photograph, though, and its strangeness starts to reveal itself. It’s a bit grainy, for one thing; the photographer probably wasn’t a professional. The soldiers aren’t in camp or the field, but sitting and standing in front of some sort of quasi-official-looking edifice. And none of them—not a single one—is smiling. Many are looking down at the ground; a few are even hiding their faces. Those faces that are clearly visible can fairly be described as hangdog.

Their stay in the Toul Sector had started inauspiciously. They had arrived at the end of March, wet and exhausted, to find the place quite literally a mess. They were replacing American troops of the 1st Division commanded by Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president. “He was found to be a pleasant, congenial fellow,” recalled Captain Daniel W. Strickland in his account, Connecticut Fights: The Story of the 102nd Regiment, published in 1930. “When the relieving officers came upon him he was busily writing at a make-shift desk in his dugout, with water up to his ankles, and he reached up occasionally either to scratch his back or tear a hunk from a loaf of stale bread.” As much of a treat as this encounter may have seemed, TR Jr. wasn’t quite ready to move his troops out yet, meaning that the men of the 102nd could not rest, but rather “must then rot in the decay of ancient, vermin-infested billets and shelters that had not been cleaned for years” for a while longer. “The sector,” Strickland explains, “had become known as ‘the American Sector’ or the ‘Toul Sector,’ and had achieved much notoriety because of being the first sector held entirely by United States troops.”

Seeing the words “American Sector” on a battle map must have given the AEF no small measure of pride, but the men of the Yankee Division no doubt would have rather been elsewhere just then. Strickland sets the scene:

When the Americans took over this sector one of the outstanding features was its run-down condition. Winter was just over; the rainy season was in progress. . . . The low country in which lay the forward positions was full of marshes and tiny streams. . . . Long stretches of trench contained water one or two feet deep, over soft mud, into which a man would sink nearly to the waist. . . . Thousands of yards of telephone wire were fastened to the trench walls—all unused—the evident principle having been that it was simpler to string new wire than to repair the old. . . . Often wounded had to be carried over the top. . . . In many places it was impossible to proceed for any great distance in a trench without climbing onto the parapet and walking there. . . . No latrine system was established, so that all trenches were polluted.

This is a side of that war you rarely hear about: the mess. Sure, there was the mess of getting shot by machine-gun bullets, of having your arm or leg or head blown off by an artillery shell, of having your intestines snagged on barbed wire or your lungs broken down and spit up after exposure to poison gas. But when you think of World War I, you don’t think of sinking up to your waist in a gumbo of mud and human filth and, for good measure, old telephone wire. Somehow, I imagine troops in such a spot would find that last ingredient particularly galling. What a tease.

Up to that point, the Americans hadn’t had much of a war. They had fired a few shots at the Germans, and the Germans had fired a few back. A handful had been killed; a few captured. But for the most part, American soldiers spent their first year of the war training and observing, both at a safe-enough reserve.

This was more than simply good luck. The French and British, delighted and relieved that America was finally getting into this thing, would have liked nothing more than to use the promised millions of fresh American troops the way they had used the Canadians and the Australians and New Zealanders, the Indochinese and Senegalese: to draw German fire away from them, to give them a break, some relief. A cynic might liken that type of assignment to being used as cannon fodder—Newfoundlanders, for instance, whose only regiment suffered 90 percent casualties during the first half hour of the Battle of the Somme. General Pershing, knowing that tale and so many others, refused to allow American units to be split up and deployed piecemeal under British or French command. This didn’t make Pershing terribly popular with the French and British high commands; they—especially the British—put a tremendous amount of pressure on him to change his mind. But Pershing held firm, and the British and French decided they’d rather give the Americans their own sectors than have them sit out the fight any longer. At this point—the early spring of 1918—there still weren’t all that many Americans in France; better to find out what they were capable of before the bulk of them showed up.

So here they were, the Yankee Division, having shipped across without orders, the first American division to arrive in full, taking over the newly rechristened American Sector. In addition to the mess, they had to deal with other nuisances no Americans had faced to date in France, like a German Army that was quite close by and eager to terrify, humiliate, and demoralize them. The Germans had been entrenched in their positions since 1914; they held, for the most part, the better ground, and took shelter in trenches and bunkers that were made of concrete, not dirt. (They had much better drainage and latrine systems, too.) They had built a large yet efficient network of infirmaries, hospitals, and rest camps, all of it electrified, connected by tunnels and supplied by narrow-gauge railroad. On the other hand, the French, who’d been trying to take the territory back since 1914, refused to build anything permanent, for philosophical reasons: Constructing concrete trenches, not to mention hospitals, implied that it might take you a while to recover what you’d lost. This was considered to be bad for morale—worse, apparently, than crumbling trenches and greatly delayed medical care. The new troops had to adjust to this prevailing mindset, and their surroundings, very quickly; they were facing an enemy with much more experience and much greater knowledge of the area, an enemy who was better rested than they were and eager to attack before the YD could get established there.

And attack the enemy did, almost immediately. On April 1 they began a withering artillery barrage; for more than two weeks they fired H.E. and gas shells at the Americans day and night. They jabbed at the American lines at Bois Brulé and Apremont. They ambushed American patrols, bombarded American field kitchens when they knew meals were being prepared, and even hijacked an American supply wagon, shooting all the mules and a couple of soldiers, carrying off the rations and a wounded American sergeant, and leaving that day’s mail delivery scattered in the mud. “Much is said about men who face the enemy in hand to hand conflict,” Strickland writes, “but too little is recorded of those men on the escort and ammunition wagon who with black snake whip in one hand, reins in the other, with a smothering gas mask on, with foot on the brake and without lights of any kind save the glare of shell and battery guns, lashed their teams through the teeth of the barrage, or drum fire to bring grub, hot coffee, and grenades to their dependant comrades up forward.” No one in this “safe” sector was ever really safe.

Not even in camp. “An irritating feature of the sector,” Strickland writes with measured understatement, “was the constant belief that enemy spies were moving freely among the troops.” Everyone, it seemed, had a story about someone—a French officer or American soldier, always from a nearby unit, close but not so close as to be familiar—who showed up asking questions about which units were in the area, what their strength was, who was in charge, the state of fortifications, and anything else they could find out. Often, no one considered the matter suspicious until after they had left, although just enough spies did get caught to foment a certain level of paranoia. “Germans had put on American uniforms and mingled freely with our men at mess and in the rear areas,” Strickland explains; the source of this knowledge was captured German soldiers. “Some of our men captured were called by name and nickname by the Bosche. They then knew that, posing as telephone men and runners from other units, the Germans had been able to pass freely and gather any information they chose. . . . On one occasion two strangers, one uniformed as a colonel and the other as a major, passed up and down the front line trenches for an entire forenoon unchallenged, the troops believing them to be inspecting officers until an American officer, noticing that the colonel’s eagles were pinned on upside down, reported the pair to regimental headquarters and they were apprehended and passed back to higher authority for examination. No one ever learned what became of the case.”

Men became wary about talking even to one another. Clearly, something big was in the works.

“Midnight of the nineteenth–twentieth of April was as clear and quiet a night as one could ask for on the Toul front,” Strickland writes. “One of those clear, dreamy moonlight nights when the war seemed far away.” When someone writes something like that, you know it won’t last:

Then at 3:16 o’clock all hell was let loose! Just as the mist and fog had begun to settle along the bottom lands the Boche tore out with his barrage, the most terrific the 102nd had yet faced. A belt of artillery fire was laid on the front line fire trenches to annihilate the defenders there. Another belt cut off the front lines from support, while the trenches occupied by support platoons were pounded so unmercifully that almost every man was killed or wounded. Another band of fire swept the lateral road along Beaumont Ridge to prevent regimental or division reserve from coming to the assistance of Seicheprey. Still other bands of enemy fire were directed between the front line units to prevent communication. . . . It was a wonderfully planned piece of artillery work by the Germans . . . which made it impossible for troops or even messengers to pass through alive.

The men of the 102nd—under the command of Colonel John Henry “Machine Gun” Parker, so nicknamed because, as Taylor put it, he “had achieved a wide distinction as an exponent of advanced ideas on the tactical employment” of that weapon—were isolated and boxed in at Seicheprey; the only way out was straight forward, into the German lines. But that gap was quickly filled by a dense column of German troops, at the head of which were a frenzy of the dreaded Stosstruppen, German storm troopers, hundreds of them. The literal translation of Stosstruppen is “shock troops,” and that was their job: to charge without warning (unless you consider a massive artillery barrage a warning) into an enemy area, shrieking and throwing grenades everywhere and firing off rifles when they weren’t throwing grenades, their objective being to shock and disorient the entrenched enemy, thus softening them up for the much larger force of infantry following close behind. On this particular morning, they charged in before dawn after more than an hour of H.E. and gas shells raining down from above, many of them armed with flamethrowers. The Americans had never seen Stosstruppen or flamethrowers before; it’s safe to say the Germans achieved their initial objective—to stun the doughboys of the 102nd. It was bedlam, shrieking chaotic death with guttural accents. And it was everywhere.

Strickland:

Through the mist and fog overhead droned a black enemy plane, almost touching the house-tops, with absolute precision signaling the enemy artillery the location of each little group of defenders.

Sibley:

Almost immediately all telephone wires were cut by the artillery fire; the radio station at Seicheprey was knocked out, and trench shelters all over the front were caved in. Batteries and support positions were thoroughly gassed, besides being shelled.

Strickland:

Screams and screeches that made the blood run cold came from the throats of half drunken Germans as they hurled their deadly “potato masher” grenades at every American that appeared.

Sibley:

After the first rush, the entire fight at Seicheprey was a matter of small group combats. Nowhere did more than a platoon fight in one body, and in most places there were not more than twenty men in a bunch.

Strickland:

From the right of the town came screams and groans of agony as the Boche poured a stream of liquid fire into a “pill box” of 102nd machine gunners. Boxes of high explosive set off at dugout doors and alongside shelters brought down tons of mortar and debris on helpless doughboys.

Sibley:

The combat group in the extreme left of the Sibille trench was captured intact. A young officer, in charge of this group, put his men into the trench shelters when the bombardment began. The Germans came so suddenly that they caught the platoon napping.

Strickland:

Chunks of stone and mortar, picks and shovels, clubbed rifles, were being used for weapons, while here and there grey clad forms rolled over and over in the death-lock with khaki.

Sibley:

The next group to the right fought until every man was either killed, wounded or captured. . . . Captain Locke of Company M . . . fought straight on, even after he was summoned to surrender. He managed to get three revolver clips of cartridge home, one after the other, in the faces of the Boches before they dared rush him; he was reloading for the fourth time when they closed in and killed him.

Strickland:

Carl Jacobs, the mess sergeant of Company “D”, and his kitchen police . . . fought off the crew of the liquid fire gun with cleavers and butcher knives.

Sibley:

The crew of the kitchen were all dead or wounded; they had fought to a finish with the Germans, even when so surprised that one man fought with a cleaver. He did good work with the weapon, splitting a German right down through the head to the very shoulders.

Strickland:

The sector ammunition dump was afire so that cartridges, trench mortar shells, rockets and other combustibles were exploding in every direction.

Sibley:

Private Parker L. Polson of the 101st Signal Corps . . . was at the wireless station of the 102nd Infantry, and the aerials kept getting themselves shot away. Three times Polson climbed up into the tree which supported them, thirty feet up in the shower of flying fragments of steel, to repair the aerials. It should be remembered that Fritz paid constant and particular attention with his artillery to this wireless station, whose position and importance he knew very well.

Strickland:

Men were dying for lack of surgical attention, because the entire medical platoon had been killed or captured save one man, John R. Cannon. Several runners were killed in attempting to get more information back to Colonel Parker.

Sibley:

[Colonel Parker came across] two men of the 102nd Machine Gun Battalion, dead across their gun. . . . They had sold out dearly; there was a ring of dead Germans in front of them, scattered in the gully. At the end, they had evidently been killed in hand-to-hand fighting. In front of one of them lay two dead Germans, in front of the other three.

Strickland:

Both [companies] “C” and “D” had received orders that in case of attack . . . there was to be no falling back. And there had been no falling back. The men of Connecticut held the line until annihilated! There they were, dead—in windrows almost, out in front of the fire trenches that which by reason of the mud made poor places from which to fight. The heavy shock had been met by those that survived the awful shelling and grenading, and they accounted for themselves as men do who know that there is to be no retreat.

Taylor:

In Remieres Wood . . . were found two men of a machine-gun crew, killed—one with his finger on the trigger, the other with a feed strip in his hand, all ammunition exhausted, but with a heap of dead Germans in front of them, stopped by the two in their attempt to rush the gun. . . . In other centers combat groups were killed, fighting to the last man, at their posts. Surrounded, there was many a lad who, summoned to surrender, fought with clubbed and broken rifle, and when overpowered, still struggled with his captors—as was told by the Germans themselves months later. For every prisoner taken, the enemy paid in good measure.

His leadership of the 102nd on that day earned Machine Gun Parker a Distinguished Service Cross, a decoration second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor. Even so, after Seicheprey, the Yankee Division was criticized—for giving up ground, no matter how briefly (“By 6 a.m.,” Sibley writes, “the enemy was entirely out of Seicheprey, having stayed less than forty minutes”), and for failing to follow up with a strong counterattack (generally blamed on the dithering of one officer, the ironically named Major Gallant, who afterward, Sibley reports, was promptly “arrested and tried by court-martial for disobedience of orders, and the Division never saw him again”). But mostly, they were criticized for their losses: not for the two hundred or so men who were killed, or the six hundred or so who were wounded, but for that third category. “The Germans said they considered our men crazy because when surrounded and outnumbered they refused to surrender and continued fighting, regardless of odds, until physically overpowered or killed,” Sibley relates with pride. And if you peruse the accounts, you can’t help but notice that the Germans went to an awful lot of trouble to overpower and capture Americans when it would have been much easier just to kill them. If the Germans didn’t achieve their primary objective of taking and holding Seicheprey, they did manage to achieve another type of victory: They captured 150 fresh doughboys, most of them from Connecticut.

Later that morning they marched their new trophies to the nearby town of Thiaucourt, lined them up in rows, and took the photograph that today graces that kiosk in the French woods, above the caption: Les prisonniers américains du 20 avril photographiés dans Thiaucourt. The American prisoners of April 20, photographed in Thiaucourt. It was a public relations coup. This is how we dealt with the first of your soldiers, the Germans were saying. Bring on the rest.

In fact, the men of the 102nd had acquitted themselves very well: Surprised and overwhelmed by veteran German troops with superior numbers, weapons, and experience, the troops from Connecticut nevertheless fought them off, killing quite a few (in one case, with a meat cleaver) in the process; most reports echo Sibley’s sentiments when he says, “In its essence, the result of Seicheprey was this: the enemy came over prepared to stay and didn’t succeed in doing so. His losses were heavier than ours. So . . . at least we had the best of it.”

And yet: those prisoners. People just couldn’t get over that. Even the men of the 102nd who fought off the Stosstruppen and Infanteristen, beat them back with rifle butts and cobblestones and meat cleavers—even they came to view Seicheprey through that lens. Eighty-five years later, this is all the very last survivor of that battle—during which the German shock troops penetrated so far, so fast that there was even frantic fighting at the regiment’s headquarters—could bring himself to say about it:

“Seicheprey. That was our first battle. In April of 1918. The Germans came over at us, captured quite a few, and took the city, where some of our troops were. And then, after, we turned and took the city back.”

That’s it.

“As I told my mother, she had reason to worry all the time about her son,” Corporal Moffitt explained to me in his living room on Cape Cod. “I worried only when I was in danger, and I wasn’t in danger most of the time. I was perfectly safe in the dugouts or in trenches. The people at home had reason to worry—they didn’t know when I was safe and when I wasn’t safe.”

J. Laurence Moffitt: Nothing was a big deal to him. I asked him at one point what it was like to remember things that had happened almost a century earlier; he said his memories of 1918 were no different to him than my memories of 1993 were to me. “They’re mine, they’re yours,” he said. “I’m not impressed or affected by it.” A lot of people made a fuss over the fact that he was 106 years old, but he wasn’t one of them. “My wife and I never gave any thought to age at all,” he said; his wife, Flo, had died at ninety-seven, two weeks shy of their seventy-sixth wedding anniversary. “I don’t care anything about age. It doesn’t give me a thought. I just live, and age is never in my mind. I don’t know why people make so much of age.” His granddaughter, he told me, had recently complained to him that she was feeling old; she’d just turned forty-eight.

It wouldn’t have occurred to her grandfather to complain on his forty-eighth birthday, or any birthday. “I take things as they are, and I don’t let problems bother me. I never have problems,” he told me when I asked him for the secret of his longevity. Several months later, when I visited him again and asked him if it had been difficult for him to adjust to civilian life after the war, he replied, “Nothing has ever been hard for me. I just live.”

The war, though, couldn’t have been easy for him. Being in HQ Company did not spare him, or anyone, what the rest of the regiment was enduring. Everyone took their turns in the front-line trenches, and, as at Seicheprey, the fighting often came right up to HQ; after artillery and machine guns, it was the enemy’s top target. And in all their time in France—more than a year, between their arrival and the armistice—the YD spent only one month away from the front lines. They were moved around a lot, shuttling back and forth in boxcars between sectors. “There’d be maybe twenty-five or thirty, maybe more, in a single car,” Laurence Moffitt told me. “No chairs, no anything, except the floor.”

“Was that an uncomfortable way to travel?” I asked him.

“Well,” he replied, “everything was uncomfortable, obviously . . . you’re sitting on the ground or the floor. And you didn’t mind the discomfort. You took it as part of the job. Yep.”

After the Toul Sector they were shipped to Château-Thierry, just ninety kilometers from Paris, where, among other feats, they liberated the town of Belleau. The battle of Belleau Wood is remembered as a triumph for the Marines, and it was, but the YD fought in the immediate area just weeks later, and it wasn’t a safe—or pleasant—place for anyone. “Apart from the hourly peril of the place, with its constant visitations from shell-fire, gas, and machine-gun bursts, the woods themselves were full of horror,” Taylor writes. “Shapeless fragments of what once were men hung in the jagged branches of the trees, blown there by shells. . . . A grisly odor of death hung heavy in the summer air . . . and men there came to move and talk as when they know that ghosts are watching them.”

If the Germans made things particularly hard for the YD in the summer of 1918, it was because they knew what was at stake. At that point, there were still not very many American divisions in France, and the Germans had taken a big risk, overstretching themselves in a grand offensive that they hoped would end the war before the Americans could arrive in force. The risk didn’t pay off; ultimately, the Germans failed to destroy the fledgling AEF. Many historians credit that failure with mortally wounding the German war machine, starting a decline that would culminate four months later. But if the Germans didn’t manage to kill off the American Army at that point, they did nevertheless kill off quite a few American soldiers, and wounded many more so badly that they had to be sent back to America, perhaps never to recover. By his own account, Laurence Moffitt had a number of close calls. “I was very lucky,” he said, typically. “I was hit once by shrapnel, not severely.” He said it had occurred around Château-Thierry.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Well, I was hit in the leg, in the hip. It wasn’t severely. It hit my leg, and it dropped, the shrapnel dropped to the ground and I reached down and picked it up and it was very hot. So I dropped it, and waited for it to cool, then picked it up. But I have it, still have it . . . a piece of shrapnel about that long.” He held a thumb and forefinger about two inches apart; it didn’t look like much, until you imagined a jagged, red-hot piece of iron that size tearing through your bowels or chest or head. So much of it fell on Lorraine that it still pops up today every time a field there is plowed. In just minutes one morning, strolling casually, I found enough of it in a field outside Seicheprey to fill a large grocery bag, including some pieces that were a foot or longer.

“Did you come under artillery fire often?” I asked him.

“All the time,” he replied. “We lived under it.”

“What was that like?”

“Well, after a while you disregarded it. You didn’t worry about it. You felt, If I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t. And you just paid no attention to it, the shells dropping about you. You couldn’t worry about it all the time.”

Coming from another man, a younger man, I would have taken this statement as merely bravado. But I could tell that Laurence Moffitt was speaking what was, to him, merely the plain truth. As I said, nothing was a big deal to him; that, I suspect, is part of the reason he made it to 106.

“Did you ever come under gas attack?” I asked him.

“All the time,” he replied. “There was gas in all the shells, practically. And yes, I was severely gassed several times, but I never went to medical for it. I just lost my voice and eventually it would come back.”

Although it was responsible for far fewer deaths than bullets, bombs, or bayonets (though probably more than meat cleavers), poison gas is remembered today as the weapon of World War I, primarily because of the horrible things even a little of it could do to you: blind you, cover your skin with blisters and sores, break down your lungs in a hurry, bleed you out internally, drown you in your own bodily fluids. “So you were very lucky?” I asked.

“Yes, I was,” he replied. “Very.”

Still, it wasn’t as if he’d been unprepared. “We were trained to put on the gas masks,” he explained. “As I remember, six seconds was the time it would take you to put on the gas mask. And when the shells started coming over, you would use those six seconds to get the gas mask on. And after a while, you didn’t bother to put the gas mask on. You smelled the gas”—it smelled, he said, like mustard—“and if it wasn’t severe, you didn’t bother to put your gas mask on. And we lived with that.”

Only, a lot of men in Corporal Moffitt’s regiment didn’t live. Throughout the summer of 1918 and on into the fall, the Yankee Division, including the 102nd Regiment, went from fight to fight to fight. As at Seicheprey, they acquitted themselves very well; and, as at Seicheprey, some of them died in the process. Major George Rau of Hartford, who had commanded the defense of Seicheprey and been highly decorated for it afterward, was killed by a German shell three months later, near Château-Thierry; during that same week, July 18–25, Sibley claims the YD, in a counteroffensive against the Germans, “lost 4,108 men in killed, wounded, gassed and missing.” According to Strickland, “About 9,000 officers and men passed through the ranks of the [102nd] regiment during the war”; of those, official records indicate, 476 were killed in battle, 1,765 were wounded, and 1,909 were gassed—a total of 4,150, nearly half the regiment.

Laurence Moffitt would have known those figures better than just about anyone in the 102nd; his job, he told me, was “personnel of the regiment . . . I was in charge of service records of the twelve companies in the regiment . . . about two hundred men each.” Regimental HQ “was just a short distance in back of the front lines,” he explained. “Maybe a hundred yards, more or less.” The Germans always had HQ in their sights; and, as I mentioned earlier, everyone who served there had to take their turn in the front-line trenches, too. The first time I interviewed Laurence Moffitt, he played down the danger he faced in France; but when I returned a few months later and asked him again, he conceded: “I was in danger always when going from one dugout to another, or one trench to another. The trenches were all open space, and they were always a dangerous place to be.” Then there were the “German airplanes flying up our regiment, dropping bombs. That’s right. Some of those bombs included gas, as well as artillery bombs. . . . That was a constant and regular occurrence.” But the greatest threat came from big German guns lobbing artillery shells—like the one that had hurled that piece of shrapnel against his leg, if not through it.

“Were you caught in a lot of artillery barrages?” I asked.

“I’d say not a lot,” he replied, of course. “But the artillery fired regularly at the different positions.”

“How,” I asked him a bit later, “did you cope with it?”

“You just lived with it,” he said. “It was a dangerous situation and you figured if you got killed, you wouldn’t know it. Other people would know it, but you wouldn’t. So you just lived like in any dangerous situation. You just ignore the danger.”

During that first interview, I asked Mr. Moffitt if he’d seen anyone killed in action. He said no, he hadn’t, but said it in a way that made me wonder if he really hadn’t, or if he just didn’t want to think about it too hard, to summon up a memory he had long since put away. After interviewing a dozen or so other veterans, and then talking to him again about the danger he and the rest of the YD were in from day to day, I decided to ask him again. “Did you see anyone get wounded or killed in battle?”

“Yes, plenty,” he said, just like that. “Some young fellow along while I was going . . .” His voice trailed off for a moment. “It’s hard for me to remember where I was, where we went and why. . . . My company commander knew why. Us small units only did what they were told.”

“But you were telling me about a fellow you saw get killed.”

“Yes. His face was all blown off. I leaned down over him to tell him that his gas mask was off. Then I saw that his face was mutilated, and so I just left him for the fellows whose job it was to take care of the wounded.”

I asked him if he’d seen anybody else get wounded or killed. “I saw fellows who were wounded frequently, yes . . . by shell fire, the three-inch, 75-millimeter shells the Germans kept sending over. You were always exposed to those, that artillery. And the Germans sent it over for a purpose.”

I asked him if that fellow he had seen that day was the only fatality he personally witnessed. “Probably the only one that I leaned over in the war and looked at,” he said.

“Did you see him fall?”

“No,” he said. “He was back in the ditch on the ground. And I leaned over him to tell him his gas mask was off, and I saw his face was all mutilated.”

If he hadn’t remembered it before, he certainly did now; and I felt bad for asking him again. This man before me, this small, very old man still dressed up from his Veterans Day parade in a salmon blazer and deep blue tie and wearing his helmet, his actual helmet with its scarcely faded little square painting of the Connecticut Charter Oak, the symbol of the 102nd, this man who said that nothing was ever hard for him, who didn’t mind the mud or the boxcars or army food—this man had once seen something truly horrific. And no doubt much more than once.

Exactly eighty-five years earlier to the day, something remarkable—perhaps the most remarkable thing in J. Laurence Moffitt’s very long life—happened. This, again, is how he described it, simply: “All firing stopped. Complete silence. There wasn’t a sound at eleven o’clock. And we were able to go out of our dugouts and trenches without our helmets or gas masks, which was the first time we had been able to do that since we first went to the front.” He added that, most likely, he “yelled and rejoiced that the war was over.”

I have a large old poster of that scene—a solitary doughboy standing next to a trench, helmet in hand, gas mask hanging from around his neck, eyes turned skyward; his expression is a mixture of awe and relief. The poster is an advertisement for the YD Fund, which offered support to soldiers making the difficult transition to life back home after all they’d seen and done Over There.

Which was quite a bit: After a long summer at Belleau and Château-Thierry and Oise-Aisne, they were sent back east to the Toul Sector, where they played a critical role in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, a two-day affair that quickly turned into a rout of the Germans and set the stage for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the last great battle of the war. The YD was assigned to a sector on the right flank, near Verdun.

And then, four weeks into that huge campaign, the high command decided they’d finally had enough of General Clarence Edwards. On October 22, 1918, they yanked him from the Yankee Division and sent him back to Boston. The pretext was that he had allowed his men to fraternize with the enemy.

Shocked? Don’t be. There was plenty of precedent. Unlike their French allies, the British and American soldiers didn’t particularly hate the Germans; in some cases, quite the opposite. “We regarded them very highly,” Laurence Moffitt told me. “They were very well-trained, very strict, very rigid, very straight. And their movements were all very orderly. Even outside of our organization, organized activities, even alone, individually they maintained a high degree of dignity.”

“Was there mutual respect between the Allied soldiers and the German soldiers?” I asked him.

“To some extent, yes,” he replied. “Exactly that.”

In many cases, it went beyond simply mutual respect; long before America entered the war, quite a few British and German units adopted unofficial policies of “live and let live” toward one another, wherein they wouldn’t try very hard to kill each other. Often, it meant nothing more than a tacit agreement that you wouldn’t shell each other during mess, target each other’s supply trains, and so on; but there are tales of one side warning the other when a barrage was about to begin, even going so far as letting them know where they might seek shelter. The most famous episode is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when British and German troops decided spontaneously to celebrate the holiday together, sharing food, drink, and tobacco from home, and even hosting international soccer matches.

Sibley reports that the incident that ultimately cost General Edwards his job occurred on October 20, 1918, when a unit of Saxons called out across a hundred yards of No Man’s Land and asked that a couple of Americans come over to their trench. They did, and were promptly surrounded by several dozen eager (and unarmed) Germans. Their spokesman said: “We want you to stop shooting at us . . . we are not barbarians, and we don’t want to kill unnecessarily. . . . We don’t want to kill Americans. We have had plenty of chances to shoot you in the last few days, and haven’t done it. When we have been ordered to fire by our officers, we have fired high, purposely.”

According to Sibley, the Americans replied that the only ways the Saxons could avoid being fired upon were to surrender or retreat. The Saxons countered that they could do neither. The Americans went back to their trench and reported the conversation to their superiors; it went up the line until it was decided, as Sibley puts it, “to put down a heavy concentration of artillery fire on that spot next day—which was done. As the reporting officer put it, being of a literary turn, ‘the concentration was placed on certain German soldiers who had expressed a desire to meet some of our men as individuals for the purpose of discussing a possible cessation of hostilities.’” So much for live and let live.

Two days later, General Edwards was relieved of his command. The episode of “fraternization” cited as cause was most likely a pretext; a better-liked man would probably have received only a mild reprimand, if that, for something that was not at all uncommon at the time. I don’t know if Edwards was really that obnoxious, or if he was just another outspoken general who had made some poor choices in his alliances. Historians have made strong cases on both sides of the question; I’ve even heard it suggested that the Army’s top brass, many of whom were southerners, wouldn’t have cottoned to anyone leading a self-proclaimed Yankee Division. Deserved or not, though, Edwards’s unpopularity stigmatized his men.

Laurence Moffitt never expressed any bitterness to me about the way his division was treated. But then, he wouldn’t have; I doubt he’d ever felt it. It wasn’t in him to do so. He did let on that he was a little disappointed about not going home immediately after the armistice. “With the war ending in November, we foolishly were sure we would be home by Christmas,” he recalled. “We forgot there were two million other troops over there. We didn’t leave for home until the last part of March in 1919.”

But a strange thing happened to the beleaguered, maligned YD in their last few months in France: Somehow it was decided that they should, at last, be recognized and honored for their service. So now, instead of being criticized as sloppy and inconsistent, they were lauded as determined, effective, brave. They were even chosen, from among all the American divisions in France, to be reviewed by President Wilson on Christmas Day, 1918. “We were quite impressed to be able to see our president, and quite honored that he came to our regiment,” Corporal Moffitt recalled. But even here, there were, shall we say, issues. “The whole regiment was lined up along the side of the road. And we were stationed there at twelve o’clock, at noon, and he didn’t show until four o’clock in the afternoon. And we were four hours waiting for him to come and inspect us. But he came, and then we had lunch. But it was not until after he came that we had lunch.” By which time, I imagine, they were pretty hungry. And cold.

“Did he talk to you?” I asked.

“Not to me,” he said, “but one of the fellows in my company, he was right near him. And he [President Wilson] asked him how conditions were. And the fellow, as usual, said ‘lousy.’ And he got reprimanded for that.”

I couldn’t tell, from Mr. Moffitt’s tone, whether or not he approved of the man’s response, but he certainly didn’t agree with him. “Actually, they were not lousy,” he asserted. “For the Army they were pretty good. . . . Some had better care in the Army than they ever got at home, and better food. Because it’s surprising how good the food was. Even beef stew. That was the standard meal, beef stew.” And, he added: “Always enough. Never without it. Right.” Perhaps this is another key to living to 106: no complaints, not even about army food.

Life got a lot easier after the armistice. And better. “The girls were very hungry for male companions, because the youths were killed off pretty much in France,” Corporal Moffitt recalled, and left it at that. The rest of the time, “we just hung around. There were regular military exercises, and there would be hiking trips day after day, just for the troops to do something, you know . . . entertainment had to be planned. . . . And there were games of baseball and boxing, and probably other sports. . . . And I got a leave . . . I guess a ten-day . . . and I went down with other troops, down to a nice mountain resort area for a week, Aix-les-Bains. Do you know French? It’s a bath, as you know.”

Nevertheless, he and the rest of the Yankee Division were eager to get home, which they did in April, 1919—one of the first divisions to be repatriated. “Had a big parade in Boston,” he told me. “And then more parades in Connecticut for our Connecticut regiment. And everything was veterans.” And then, to hear him tell it, life started right back up again. At least, his did; he was one of the fortunate ones in that regard. And he knew it. “As I said, I started working at an insurance company when I was right out of high school. And the company took us all back. They held our positions; they filled them with girls, mostly. But they took us all back. In my case, I had a job waiting for me when I came back. That was not true with everyone who was in World War I, unfortunately. So, I was hired by another company for certain reasons, and then . . . in 1921, I was hired by a New York [insurance] group, Crum and Forster. . . . I was hired by that company to represent them in Connecticut, out of Hartford, which I did for forty-two years. . . . It so happens I went to work for that company the year I was married.” His new wife had been one of the girls hired to replace him and his coworkers during the war.

He had a good life, rising high in the company, traveling frequently to New York, where he belonged to two clubs, the kind of places that men like him—insurance men, New England Yankees, veterans—joined. In the late 1940s, he was elected president of the Connecticut Field Club, a state insurance organization. He was happily married, had four children and nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, all of whom adored him; his wife, Flo, had been a woman of “real class, not real sexy, but real class. Everybody admired her, loved her, loved to talk with her.” His job, he said, had been “very comfortable, no problem, no stress, never, never any pressure. It was just, develop a business to work with agents, helping agents, solving problems.” He retired at sixty-six, moved to Cape Cod, had another third of a century with his wife, and still belonged to several weekly clubs until his hearing grew so faint that he could no longer participate fully in their talks. He never disliked anything, it seems, except farm work.

Maybe it’s true: Nothing ever was hard for him. Even the war. Especially the war. After our first visit, I actually came away with the impression that it was—or at least that he believed it was—the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“Was your service in the Army a very important part of your life?” I asked him at one point.

“Yes,” he said without hesitating. “Most important, all my life. That’s right.” And long after it had ended, it remained a major component of his social life. “Our original company . . . had annual meetings. Then our regiment, the 102nd Infantry, would have its regular meetings, monthly meetings. And . . . the 26th Division . . . would have its annual meetings, and some in between. And our Army veterans’ service unified us for many, many years . . .” There was the American Legion, too. And those YD license plates. “Any car you saw with a YD on it, you knew was owned and operated by a member of your division. And you would give him a toot, and he would give you a toot.” The division was reactivated in 1941, sent to Europe, fought at the Bulge, drove on into France and Germany, and helped capture Hitler’s hometown of Linz, Austria, before the war ended. And yet today, few people who aren’t military buffs or historians know anything at all about the Yankee Division. And when I met its last surviving World War I veteran, the division didn’t know about him, either.

But what luck for me that I found him. And that I found him as early as I did. As I’ve said, without him this book wouldn’t exist—not just because I probably would have become too discouraged to seek out a third and fourth and fifth veteran, but because, without Laurence Moffitt, I might never have encountered the Yankee Division; and without them, well, I’m not sure I would have come to understand fully just what this war was to Americans.

The YD’s crucible, Seicheprey, is very quiet now. Like almost every other village in the area, it was completely destroyed; unlike some, it was rebuilt afterward, just where it had stood before, and looks, I would guess, very much like it did in 1914. But I sense there is much less to it these days; like their American counterparts, French small towns have been shriveling up for a long time now. I suspect the process actually started that day in the spring of 1918; that some people, maybe quite a number, never bothered to return to their destroyed houses and shops and farms, never even tried to rebuild. I visited Seicheprey on a sunny, warm June afternoon, yet I never spotted a single resident walking about there; as far as I could see, there were no shops or commercial establishments for them to walk to. The houses are modest, and appear much older than they are. The church is pretty but small. The village’s Great War memorial is small, too, smaller than most I saw in France; but it is very well kept, with bright gold leaf still filling the engraved names of the local war dead, eleven of them in all. Underneath the list, someone had attached a slab of slate with a small, chipped photograph of a handsome man: A la memoire de Jean Paul Fourriere, victime de la barbarie Nazie, mort pour la France about six weeks before D-day, a reminder that the Germans successfully took the Toul Sector, and the rest of the country, the next time around. On a separate side of the memorial’s base, a generation earlier, another family had mounted a bright porcelain slab, bordered in more gold leaf, a grainy (but not chipped) photograph and likenesses of his medals: A la memoire de mon Papa regretté Lucien Petit, mort pour la France 11 Septemb. 1914. The long war had been barely a month old then.

In the same little green space you’ll find a small fountain that has not been maintained nearly so well. Water hasn’t flowed from its spout for a long time; its bronze plaque has grown dark and discolored. You have to get very close in order to read it:

TO THE COMMUNE OF SEICHEPREY

TO COMMEMORATE THE SERVICE

OF THE 102D INFANTRY, 26TH DIVISION,

A REGIMENT OF THE AMERICAN ARMY

RECRUITED FROM THE CITIZENS OF CONNECTICUT

DEFENDERS OF SEICHEPREY APRIL 20, 1918.

IN THE FIRM BELIEF THAT THE FRIENDSHIP

OF FRENCHMEN AND AMERICANS SEALED

IN THIS PLACE IN BATTLE SHALL SERVE

THE CAUSE OF PEACE AMONG ALL NATIONS

THIS MEMORIAL IS PRESENTED BY THE

MEN AND WOMEN OF CONNECTICUT

1923

Of all the places they fought and died—Belleau, Château-Thierry, Oise-Aisne, Saint-Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne—this is the place the soldiers of the 102nd, and the widows and parents they’d left behind in Connecticut, chose to store on the highest shelf of their memory. Just as I wouldn’t have fully understood the war without them, it seems they wouldn’t have fully understood it without Seicheprey.

About ninety minutes into my first visit with Laurence Moffitt, his daughter, Janet, who had been here and there in the house up until that point, sometimes listening in, more often not, told me she had to leave to go pick up her granddaughter. Suddenly, I was filled with an irrational but potent sense of dread: What if her father should die while she was gone? The man was 106 years old, after all; he looked fine, but who knows? So, although we were then nearing the end of the interview, I decided to stay until she returned. Mr. Moffitt seemed tired, but, in keeping with his stoicism, he didn’t let on; and when we finished talking about the war, we talked about everything else: his career, his marriage, his life. He told me he’d voted for the first time in 1920, for Warren G. Harding, and had voted in every election, national and local, since. He was a Republican; his father had been a Democrat. He said he participated in every parade they had in Orleans—Memorial Day, July Fourth, Veterans Day, whatever. “I’ve never missed an Armistice Day parade,” he said, “and I don’t expect to miss this one.”

“Do you march?” I asked.

“No, I ride,” he replied, without making me feel stupid for asking. “In fact,” he added, “the World War II veterans no longer march. They ride in a car.” He rode in Janet’s Japanese sedan; for the occasion, they slapped a magnetic sign reading WORLD WAR I VETERAN on the door. No one ever oohed or aahed.

On the occasion of his 104th birthday, he’d received a letter from President George W. Bush, congratulating him. It did not mention his service. He kept it in a scrapbook, which he invited me to flip through; there was also in there a letter from a prominent gerontologist, thanking Mr. Moffitt for agreeing to leave his body to science.

He showed me his Légion d’Honneur; it was a beautiful, colorful medal, and came with a large certificate signed by President Chirac. He’d had it mounted in a simple frame, from which a very large, jagged piece of glass—almost half the entire thing—had since broken out. It sat on the floor, leaning up against a piece of furniture.

We talked about his family, his siblings, his parents and grandparents. After he reiterated that he made a point of keeping up with the news and world affairs, I asked him if he’d ever been on the Internet. “No, and I don’t know what the Internet is,” he stated. “And maybe you can tell me. How do I get on the Internet? Do I have to join?”

“You have to have a computer,” I told him.

“Well, I have a computer,” he replied.

“You don’t have to join,” I explained. “It’s just that you have to—you have to subscribe. It’s like a service.”

“Oh.”

“And you pay a certain amount of money every month, ten dollars or twenty dollars, and you connect through the telephone line, go through your computer, and then you can connect with millions of different, what they call websites, all over the world. Information, and news, and music, and everything you can imagine. Pictures. It’s—I think you would like it very much.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I have plenty to do,” he said, finally. “Do I need it?”

“No,” I told him. “You don’t.”

He said he couldn’t remember what his grandfather had manufactured. I asked if he had fought in the Civil War. “No,” he said. “We had nobody in the Civil War. I don’t know why. Lots of my ancestors were in the Revolutionary War.”

“How do you feel,” I asked him, “about being the last World War I veteran that many people will meet?”

“Actually, you don’t feel any of those things,” he replied. “The last this, the first this. Actually, you don’t give it a thought any more than you live every day.”

A few months later, I returned to Orleans to watch him ride in that parade and interview him a second time. When we were done talking, he and Janet told me they had a tradition of going out to lunch on Veterans Day, and invited me to join them. I considered for a moment, thought about the traffic I might hit on the way home, and demurred. They seemed disappointed; I said I would come back again sometime soon, maybe in the spring. Why not?

Somehow, the fear that had gripped me a few months earlier, when Janet Moffitt had left to go pick up her granddaughter, had since left me entirely. It didn’t occur to me that her father might not still be around come spring.

He wasn’t. He died on February 7, 2004, a month shy of his 107th birthday. Had some trouble with his heart, went into the hospital and never emerged. He was a corporal in HQ Company, the keeper of the roll for the 102nd Infantry Regiment of the 26th Division of the United States Army. The rest of the regiment—and the division—having moved on, he closed the register and did, too.