by David Laskin
After nearly four years of war, Shalom Tvi and Beyle did not expect much from their new rulers. The Germans were better than chaos and banditry—but they were occupiers, not angels, and they could be just as ruthless as the Russians when they were crossed. There were stories of German soldiers jeering at the Jewish townswomen whom they had forced to scrub a market square on hands and knees; and Germans giving Jewish laborers soup crawling with worms. “Jews are living here in considerable numbers: a cancerous wound of this land,” one German officer reported after taking charge of his district in the Ober Ost. Another officer declared that Jews were loathsome “because of the ineradicable filth which they spread about themselves.” A good German was better than a Russian, Shalom Tvi concluded, but a bad German was worse than anything. The German high command had had almost four years to impose Deutsche Arbeit—German Work—on the Ober Ost; by the time they took Rakov, they had their Germanizing policies down to a science. They restored order, but they also took all the best food, grain, and livestock and sent it off to Germany. “We ate what the [German] soldiers threw away, including potato peels from the military kitchen,” one boy wrote.
Shalom Tvi could not help noticing that Rakov’s German occupiers were hungry and ragged too. These were not the grinning, singing, strapping youths who had marched off to war in the summer of 1914—but an exhausted army of the very old and very young. Shalom Tvi had seen four occupying forces come and go in quick succession in the year since his father’s death. The Germans were tolerable as long as they lasted, but frankly, he was dubious that they would last long.
—
Shalom Tvi and Beyle’s youngest daughter, Sonia, was eight years old when the Germans entered Rakov. She retained no memory of the foreign soldiers marching into town, the new flags and posters, the punctilious officers, her parents’ cautious relief. What she did later remember from this time was being punished for setting foot in a church.
Sonia was a born adventurer, confident and curious; when her heart was set, she did what she wanted—even if it got her into trouble. One day late in the war, Sonia noticed crowds of people in their finest clothes converging on the Catholic church, just a stone’s throw from their house. Sonia slipped out the gate and followed the people up the lane. When she reached the church, she saw there was a wedding. One of the teachers at the Polish Catholic seminary was marrying a seventeen-year-old girl from a wealthy gentile home, and the celebration was large, noisy, and colorful. As the guests in their finery climbed the steps and disappeared into the big double doors beneath the pointed brick arches, Sonia decided she had to follow them. It was beautiful inside the church—far more beautiful and mysterious than Rakov’s cozy wooden shul. The ceilings were so high she had to crane her neck to see to the top, and there were paintings framed in gold wherever she looked—paintings of beautiful women and a sad suffering man. “It was so quiet there,” Sonia remembered, “with not even the sound of a fly buzzing around. The walls were covered with many different pictures of Jesus, the crucifixion, the resurrection, his mother Mary, and more. This was the first time I had ever entered a church.” But not all the images were lovely. Sonia noticed a knot of guests gathered in the shadow at the back. She crept over to see what they were doing—no one paid any attention to her, she was so small and quiet. “I saw that they were all spitting onto a certain place, and when I looked closer I saw the figure of an old Jewish man with a big nose, dressed in a red cape, labeled ‘The Traitor Judas Iscariot Who Betrayed Jesus.’”
Sonia fled from the church and ran home. She couldn’t help blurting out what she had done and seen to her parents. Her father was furious. “He said that it was forbidden to Jews to set foot in a church. I had to swear a neider [vow] of 40 days of silence.”
Forty days of silence—when the child felt like howling at the top of her lungs. But this was the vow that Jews in Europe had always imposed on one another: when you wanted to scream, keep your head down and your mouth shut; don’t look; don’t fight back; hide.
Sonia could not understand what she had done wrong. “It was simply that it was very interesting to me to see inside,” she said. Wasn’t it punishment enough to discover that in their church the Christian neighbors secretly spat upon the dirty Jew? She wondered if they spat on the gates of her own house while their backs were turned. She couldn’t fathom this hidden hatred. It didn’t seem right that their churches had domes and steeples and stained glass and pictures framed in gold while everything Jewish was so shabby and sad. Even the Christian cemetery was a gardenful of flowers, while the Jewish cemetery where her grandfather was buried struck Sonia as a place of “total destruction, poverty, and the feeling of exile—that’s what I felt.” Sonia was once walking through the Christian cemetery when her eyes fell on an inscription in Russian—I’m already home, you’ll come to visit soon. She wondered what it could possibly mean. The Christians had a home right here on earth—why did they need another? In Rakov’s Jewish cemetery, the cemetery of exile, trees grew but not a single flower bloomed. When her father went there to pray for her grandfather’s soul, he stood outside the rusted fence like a beggar. Why couldn’t a Jew have sweetness and beauty too?
—
At the end of March 1918, around the same time that Rakov was absorbed into the Ober Ost, the Germans launched a massive push aimed at decisively ending the stalemate along the Western Front. The Americans had still barely gotten their noses bloodied in the war: now that the spring offensive had put the Germans within striking distance of Paris, the time was at hand for the Americans to show what they were worth. The First Division was chosen to mount the counterattack, and on April 6, 1918, Sonia’s first cousin Hyman boarded one of the hated “40 hommes, 8 chevaux” train cars and headed up to the front line in Picardy. On the train ride across northern France, Hyman saw smooth round hills just greening up in the first flush of spring and blackened stumps of villages that had been shelled to oblivion. He saw women and children, sometimes waving, sometimes staring stonily; he saw men, but only old men or young ones who were bandaged or missing limbs. He saw church steeples and hedge-rows and delicate jade green fronds that by summer would explode in drifts of red and pink poppies. He detrained in a sector that looked a lot like the countryside around Rakov, only hillier. He scrambled to find places to sleep. He listened to the rumors of imminent attacks. He pined for letters—“I have not heard a word from anyone since I left the States,” he wrote his parents, “days have turned into weeks and weeks into months and even the months are turning and turning and still not a word from any one of you.” He pined for Anna. He became a crack marksman with a Springfield bolt-action rifle.
On the night of April 24, Company K took up its position about a mile from the village of Cantigny. Hyman, scoping out the terrain, understood at a glance what they were up against: the Germans had chosen an elevated position on the top of a chalk rise that commanded the countryside to the west. When it came time to fight, Company K would be slogging uphill without any cover into the teeth of German machine guns.
But first they had to survive the ceaseless barrage of German artillery. As soon as the regiment dug in near Cantigny, huge volumes of high explosive shells and canisters of poison gas rained down on them from some ninety German battery positions. German airplanes whined overhead, spitting down rounds of machine-gun fire. “The shelling did not come in bursts,” wrote one soldier, “but was continuous and apparently was meant to break down the morale of the new occupants of the sector.” Food carts were blown up or held back by the intense shelling, and the men counted themselves lucky to get one cold meal a day. For a week they lived on “a slice of meat, a spoonful of sour mashed potatoes, a canteen of water, a canteen cup of coffee, a half-loaf of bread, a beautiful country and sometimes a sunny sky.”
On the evening of April 27, German shells started landing with such deadly accuracy that Captain Quesenberry decided to move his men to a safer position. It was either move or
get blown up. Around eight o’clock that night, the men were engaged in digging a new trench in a less exposed position when the shell with the captain’s name on it came in. Quesenberry had listened to a thousand shells whistle and detonate—but this one was different. The shriek was directly overhead; the flash was blinding; the concussive blow immediate, deafening, and suffocating. On contact, the high-explosive shell casing disintegrated into a thousand hot splinters of steel. Some of these splinters tore into Captain Quesenberry’s arm and leg.
“We held our position,” wrote Hyman, “but Captain Quesenberry, the idol of our outfit, was hit and severely wounded.” A soldier with Company K who saw Captain Quesenberry fall testified that “he was taken away in an ambulance and I understand died on the way to the hospital, from loss of blood.” But Hyman gave a different account:
Four of us carried him into the church basement of the town, which was now a field hospital. We found many of our men lying there waiting for first aid and evacuation. The medics seeing the captain attempted to give him first aid. He refused treatment and ordered the medics, “don’t touch me until all my men are treated.”
The army’s Graves Registration Service recorded that Captain Quesenberry died of shell wounds on April 28, the day after he was hit. The twenty-three-year-old captain was buried in the temporary American military cemetery at Bonvillers, though later, at the request of his father, his remains were disinterred and returned home to Las Cruces.
The men of Company K carried on without their beloved captain. For a month they endured ceaseless pounding outside of Cantigny. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, May 28, they were ordered to take the village. It was Hyman’s first taste of combat. At the dot of 5:45 A.M., the combined French and American artillery opened up with everything they had and blasted away for an hour. When the guns fell silent, whistles shrilled up and down the line and the infantry moved out in waves toward the German stronghold. By 7:20 A.M., the Big Red One had taken Cantigny. The hard part would be fending off the inevitable German attempts to take it back.
Hyman’s unit was supposed to form “working and carrying parties” to supply ammunition and water to the units at the front of the assault. Hyman remembered it like this: “Our company was ordered to get to the top of the hill and dig in. Make no advances. Just dig in and defend our position. Our company reached the assigned positions. We lost many of our buddies while digging under fire.” These heavy casualties occurred during the ferocious counterattacks that German forces began mounting around 9 A.M.—seven counterattacks that went on for two days. Company K’s carrying parties made easy targets as they tried to run supplies to the front; their losses mounted quickly.
“We were under continuous fire,” wrote Hyman. “The German Army tried to retake the position, but our regiment held on. Cantigny was ours, and remained so.”
Though it looked like an insignificant knob on the map of the Western Front, Cantigny was a jewel much prized by the German high command because it represented the westernmost point on their line—the deepest they had penetrated into French territory. Paris was a mere seventy miles away. A German victory there would not have significantly altered the course of the war, but it would have dealt a stinging blow to American morale. The First Division made sure that that did not happen. They paid a stiff price, but in the end, the Americans fought off the ferocious German counterattacks and prevailed. Captain Quesenberry was dead, many of his men were killed or wounded in the course of the battle, but Hyman and the boys who remained held their position—and the Big Red One held Cantigny.
When new recruits were rotated into Company K to fill the places of those who had fallen at Cantigny, Hyman had bragging rights. He had been there first. He had acquitted himself honorably in the first major American engagement of the war, and the first victory of the First Division. A decade earlier he had been tinkering with watches in the Russian Pale. Now he was a warrior.
—
Two months later, the 18th Infantry saw action again at Soissons. It was Hyman’s last battle in the Great War.
Hyman had always admired square-jawed, starched-collar, old-line WASPs—and his new boss was a prime specimen of the type. Six feet tall, ramrod straight, broad chested, and steely eyed, Colonel Frank Parker, commander of the 18th Infantry, was a son of coastal South Carolina, a graduate of West Point, a gentleman and a scholar who spoke fluent French and taught young soldiers the art and science of modern war. He was also, apparently, one hell of an inspiring leader. Colonel Parker certainly inspired Hyman on the morning of July 17, when he stood in a clearing in the Compiègne Forest surrounded by his regiment—3,500 strong—and exhorted his men to fight and die:
Men, tomorrow we go over the top. Back home the war is a fight for the survival of Democracy. You just forget it. Tomorrow you and I fight for our own lives. Those of you who have no will or desire to live can start out by giving your life away. My advice is to go out and fight for your life and the lives of your buddies alongside of you. Starting tomorrow the whole world will be watching our activities. God be with you.
Hyman had no idea on that July morning that he was about to be marched into the battle that turned the tide of the war. “You in America know more about the war in one day [from reading the newspapers] than we soldiers find out in a whole month,” Hyman wrote the family back in Brooklyn. Men on the ground are seldom aware that they are making history, but history would be made in the wheat fields at Soissons in July 1918.
During their spring offensive, the Germans had punched a salient—a bulge—in the line between Soissons and Reims, from which they hoped to storm the Allies’ ranks and march on Paris. At this weary stage in the conflict it was little more than a desperate gasp of hope and both sides knew it. But the Marne Salient had been stuck like a thorn in the Allies’ side. The longer it remained, the more it goaded them. In July, the Allied command decided the moment had come to extract the thorn and start pushing the Germans back to their own borders. The First and Second American Divisions, along with the First Moroccan Division (which included the French Foreign Legion), were handpicked to do the job. Parker’s 18th Infantry would spearhead the push. “No more glorious task could have been assigned to any troops,” one of the regiment’s officers declared.
Hyman set out for the front with a full pack at dusk on July 17. Within minutes it was pouring down rain. Men, horses, mules, and transport vehicles became snarled in an epic jam on the narrow muddy French roads:
Blinding flashes of lightning illuminated the countryside momentarily and gave the moving columns of men glimpses of a scene such as they would witness only once in a lifetime. Every road, every track and every field was filled either with trucks, wagons, artillery or moving columns of men. Here and there the French cavalry could be seen threading their way through the maze of tangled men, trucks and animals. . . . Clothing, packs and equipment of all kinds were soaked until they added many extra pounds for the men to carry. Strange oaths of the Orient mingled with those of Europe and America.
In one burst of lightning the serene neoclassical façade of the royal Château de Compiègne appeared at the end of a long straight line of trees and then vanished: a glimpse of heaven in the midst of hell. The sky cleared before dawn and by first light Hyman stood blinking and shivering in the crossroads village of Coeuvres—two intersecting streets packed almost wheel to wheel with rows of French artillery. There was to be no preliminary shelling. It was so quiet Hyman could hear birds heralding the dawn. At the dot of 4:35 a French artillery captain gave the signal to lay down the first salvo of the rolling barrage and two thousand big guns opened up simultaneously. The divisions to the south did the same thing at the same time. A thirty-mile wall of fire blazed, died, and blazed again.
Hyman understood that his time had come. Crouched like a boxer stepping into the ring, he gripped his Springfield rifle in both hands and moved out. About a thousand infantrymen fanned out in the first wave. Once Hy
man cleared the scrubby woods around Coeuvres, he was in open wheat fields—fresh golden waist-high grain swaying in the morning sun for mile after mile on rising ground. A beautiful sight to behold if it weren’t for the sudden flash of machine-gun fire and the black fountains of dirt that spouted where German shells detonated. Every now and then Hyman heard a cry and then a pockmark appeared in the wheat where one of the men fell and bled. By noon the wheat in every direction was speckled with dots of moving khaki and littered with pockmarks. Hyman kept moving ahead. The German fire was too intense to evacuate the wounded—as for the dead, they swelled and blackened in the summer sun until the battle was over and the chaplains and burial details could tend to them. Hyman didn’t stop; he tried not to look at the wounded or hear their pleas for water. His orders were to go forward into the bullets and bombs. He fired his rifle when he had a target, ducked his head instinctively at every explosion, crawled on his stomach through the wheat when a burst of bullets came, and rose again to put one foot in front of the other. Even though every fiber of his being wanted to turn and run, he advanced. He had had no sleep and precious little food for thirty-six hours. Adrenalin kept hunger and the dull ache of sleeplessness at bay—adrenalin and fear. “No man is fearless in battle,” wrote one of his comrades of that day, “but most well-trained soldiers hide their emotions.” Hyman had lived through Cantigny. He hid his fear and pushed on.
