The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  4

  Yet failing to reduce Arras on the 26th and again on the 28th, Ludendorff was compelled to release his straining grasp on the city. The date was March 30, two days after go-it-alone “Black Jack” Pershing had finally agreed to shore up the front with American troops.

  On April 4, Ludendorff called on fresh reserves to resume the advance, this time turning toward Amiens, “the hinge of the Allies’ front,” where Jules Verne used to write his nineteenth-century science-fiction novels. The Germans had occupied this town for 11 days in August–September 1914, and with their customary humanitarianism took local officials hostage. At some point before or after, the locals fortified their cathedral’s ancient treasures with 2,200 sandbags. As for other prizes, Robert Graves remembers a “Blue Lamp” brothel for officers and a “Red Lamp” for enlisted men.

  In this centennial year 2018, massive photo-enlargements of Great War soldiers, some in the beekeeper-esque gas masks of the period, most of them young, grim, and handsome, stared down from the walls of the train station and the department stores and apartment buildings all around the cathedral square.

  The first attempt to take Amiens began on March 27. (The reader is reminded that the dates of battles, offensives, et cetera, vary extremely according to source. I have done my shallow best to rationalize these inconsistencies.) Ludendorff’s troops penetrated the Allied front southward of the Somme River, 10 miles from the city. The Germans were driven back, but continued to shell Amiens until June. According to a Michelin Guide from that time, “ruins accumulated in the town and suburbs,” but a hundred years later, those ruins had been nicely smoothed over.

  On April 9 the Germans won another local success at Armentières—at which point the French and British, as ever, began to dig in. General Haig was worried enough to warn, with uncharacteristic gloom, “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.”

  Finally the anxious Allies began to coordinate their efforts better, and appointed the French marshal Ferdinand Foch Supreme Allied Commander over their joint forces.

  5

  By now the Kaiser’s troops had reached the town of Villers-Bretonneux, a “Franco-British junction” some 10 miles from Amiens. Two Australian brigades stopped them, but 20 days later, employing tanks and gas, the Germans succeeded. As Sylvestre Bresson, my guide, tells the tale, “The Allies now found themselves in trouble, for Villers-Bretonneux was the last defensive bulwark on the Amiens road. The following night, the Australian battalions led a magnificent headlong attack,” which ultimately repelled the invaders. In a “2018 special edition” commemorative pamphlet published by the Communes of the Somme Valley, this organization’s president wrote: “Let’s never forget Australia.”

  The memorial to the victors (1,200 of whom died on that night) lies not far from a little roadside sign marking the place where “the Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s ace fighter pilot, was shot dead on April 21, 1918. Beneath the sign I saw a Styrofoam “100” and some fake flowers left by Australians; this I knew because my taxi driver, whose family hailed from the west, had chauffeured them out here just a few days before. He had never heard of this site until then. He had grandparents in the Resistance, in the Second World War, but as for the First World War, that was too long a time ago, he remarked, flashing one tanned skinny arm away from the steering wheel.

  “People around here don’t even talk about it very much,” he said of the Great War. He thought that I and my sister, who had accompanied me on this trip and served, when needed, as my French translator, were Australians. “Every family from Australia has some question about the war,” he remarked.

  At the Villers-Bretonneux Military Cemetery and Memorial roses bloomed on a rolling hillcrest sowed with tombstones. The inscriptions were more personalized than many, DEARLY LOVED SON being in frequent evidence. This complex was inaugurated in 1938, just in time to be shot up in the next war—or, as a plaque explained, “on the firing line.” (The culprit was a Nazi tank.) There was a grand tower erected TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN MEMORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN IMPERIAL FORCE IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS 1916–1918 AND OF ELEVEN THOUSAND WHO FELL IN FRANCE AND HAVE NO KNOWN GRAVE.

  Had they all been properly cataloged, would it have been any better for them? For a fact, their survivors might have gained what we now call “closure,” although one question does arise: How much information about the fallen is too much?

  “I do a lot of research for the families when they come,” Bresson told me. “Sometimes the stories told in the families are different from the truth, thanks to embellishment, exaggeration, and after one, two, or three generations especially. But the archives tell the truth.

  “A couple of years ago I had a tour with a couple from Australia. They wanted to visit the grave of a great-uncle. Before they came they gave us the name and I was able to find a lot of information about the great-uncle. But he wasn’t killed in action. He was killed in a stupid accident. He was at rest with his regiment and he was shooting ducks with one of his friends and his friend shot him by accident. It was literally written killed shooting ducks by accident.

  “So on the day of the tour I met them and the story they knew was: he was killed on the battlefield, killed by German snipers when crawling under the barbed wire. Well, they were very moved to come. We went to the cemetery and left flowers there, and I told them they could get more information. I did not tell them directly. They were coming from the other side of the world.”

  In one of ever so many rows in that cemetery, beneath the emblem of the Australian Imperial Forces, lay 6733 PRIVATE H. J. GIBB 14TH BN. AUSTRALIAN INF. 7TH JUNE 1918 AGE 45, and after a cross came the motto that someone had chosen for him: PEACE AFTER STRIFE. Whatever the circumstances of that untimely death, whether he had bravely held a position, saved a comrade, bayoneted three Germans, or died while shooting ducks, untimely it was, and I felt sorry.

  6

  The Germans, having been frustrated at Amiens (but never mind: they would break through on a June day in 1940), swung toward Paris, eventually coming within 37 miles of the city. They had drilled a deep salient into French and British lines, but it wasn’t enough. The historian Gordon Craig writes that the German offensive “was bound to be disastrous after the enemy had recovered,” and that indeed it “degenerated by June into a series of separate thrusts, uncoordinated and unproductive.”

  Declining to give up, Ludendorff’s troops commenced Operation Blücher, assisted by almost 4,000 Krupp guns, shelling and shattering the French Sixth Army. Unfortunately for the Germans, their newest enemy was now in the field. The day after Blücher began, the Americans counterattacked. The US First Infantry captured 200 Germans and buried 199 Americans, and immediately won a victory in the village of Cantigny.

  At observation post “Pennsylvania,” First Lieutenant Daniel Sargent of the Fifth Field Artillery Regiment reported, “The ground was pounded to dust by our shells—all that was visible was the heavy smoke.” The division’s commander, General Robert Lee Bullard, called this “the first serious fight made by American troops in France,” which was “greeted enthusiastically as a wonderful success.” Why not? There were lots of corpses. As a certain Captain Austin wrote home: “When the wind is right you can smell Cantigny two miles away.”

  7

  For Ludendorff this “wonderful success” must have been an incitement to hurry up. On the first day of Blücher his troops gained 13 miles, unheard of in the former static years. Having crossed the Vesle, they took Soissons—although they now kept facing more tank attacks. “Just think a moment!” cried Guderian, wisening up. “Five tanks with crews amounting to ten men had been able to reduce an entire division to disorder.”

  By June 4, with 30 miles now to their credit, they had reached the Marne at Château-Thierry. What must they have felt upon finding themselves back where they had been in 1914? But that was the way of the Great War: Fight and die along static lines. Then do i
t all over. Thus July’s offering: the Second Battle of the Marne. The Oxford Companion to Military History remarks: “Just as the Marne had proved the high water mark of German success in 1914, so it did in 1918.”

  Happily unaware of how their offensive would play out, the Germans still imagined themselves on course for the capital. To and fro in the trenches rushed that busy dispatch runner Adolf Hitler. But now the French rushed up tanks, accompanied by rapid mobile truckloads of infantry. As the American Battle Monuments Commission told it: “Responding to urgent pleas from the French, Pershing ordered the American 2nd and 3rd Divisions into the line in relief of the French Sixth Army.”

  8

  “Nothing on earth,” wrote infantryman Percy Clare of Britain’s Seventh East Surrey Regiment, “is as melancholy as a journey over a recently-fought battlefield, especially on the day of action . . . The lust of killing has burned out . . . Here is a young Second Lieutenant on his back . . . the jagged ends of his thigh bones protruding through his torn breeches. No, he felt no pain. Sticking from his pocket is a letter to a woman.” That diary entry dates back to the Battle of Arras, in April 1917. Comparable horrors filled Château-Thierry 13 months later.

  A century after that, the melancholy kept everywhere green. Here at the bank of the gentle gray-green Marne, where white swans were floating and very occasionally ducking in their heads, I looked across the water to houses, apartments, and industrial edifices, once more hardly able to feel that the war had come here. The river was barely swirling. It appeared an easy swim to the other side of town.

  Beside me stood an inconspicuous waist-high granite marker erected in 1921: a tapering plinth with a helmet on top. One of many fashioned by the sculptor Paul Moreau-Vauthier, it marked the limit of the enemy advance. There had been a whole line of these memory stones. In 1940, when the Germans returned thanks to Hitler, certain German commanders chose to remove them entirely. Others, evidently proud of what the kaiser’s troops had accomplished in the Great War, left them but erased the inscriptions.

  When I came upon the Château-Thierry American monument, a white stone colonnaded edifice honoring the American divisions that helped repel the German advance, it felt just like coming home, for here alone of all the Western Front sites I visited the entrant had to empty his pockets and pass through a metal detector. As they say, freedom isn’t free.

  Myself, I preferred the simpler, sadder truth of the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. Summer green, summer clouds, so many birds. Driving up a long avenue lined with rosebushes, we met a blue-capped gardener who was breaking out a lawn mower. From the burial registry in the visitors’ room, I chose for remembrance Plot A Row 3 Grave 72, the grave where lay Edmond P Maes, Private, from Massachusetts. He served in the 101st Field Artillery Regiment, 26th Division, and fell on 23 July 1918.

  Lines of marble crosses curved in parallels on the rich green grass, wrapping around a hill of dark green forest. The pigeons were calling, the lawn mower droning far away. Overlooking the graves was a chapel (slightly scarred by the following world war) whose walls were engraved with the names of the missing. Once in a great while there would be a rosette made to the left of the name of someone who was “found,” such as LUPO FRANCIS PVT 18th INF 1st DIV JULY 21 1918 OHIO.

  In a poem from the month when the slaughter finally stopped, the decorated British soldier Siegfried Sassoon advised his British readers, “when you are standing at your hero’s grave,” to remember “the German soldiers who were loyal and brave.” I asked to see a cemetery of our former enemies. “The German cemeteries are different,” explained Bresson. “There was a strong animosity toward them, so in that time the German cemeteries were always set away, on a back road, whereas our cemeteries were set on the top of the hill so they can be seen from miles away. From the German perspective the First and Second World Wars are so linked, like one war. The Germans still feel ashamed of what they did to the Jews, so they don’t have any motivation to visit their soldiers.”

  Indeed the nearby German cemetery was discrete, out of sight from the victors’ graves, and instead of white, the crosses, thicker-armed than ours, were gray (in some cemeteries they were black). I saw a very few oval-tipped slabs with the Jewish star, as for Fritz Stern, grenadier. (As a special reward for their service in the Great War, the Nazis would deport some Jewish veterans in passenger train carriages rather than freight cars, their destination of course being the same as for the others.)

  Not far away stood a cross for Unteroffizier Peter Latour and Infanterist Ulrich Lederer and on the other side Ein unbekannter Deutscher Soldat (an unknown German soldier) and for Vizefeldwebel Franz Stiefvater—yes, four men buried under one cross. In this soil lay 8,630 bodies. In the sprawling American cemetery adjacent there were not quite 2,300.

  Leafing through the visitors’ book, my sister discovered that an American with a military affiliation (I will not give his name) had made a fingerprint in what appeared to be real blood, and left a sneering English-language inscription.

  9

  A German attack of July 14 was hopefully named the Sieggesturm, or “Turn of Victory,” but Ludendorff was fresh out of victories. The next day he launched his final offensive, aiming at Reims. Three days after that, Generals Foch and Pétain counterattacked on the Marne, close by Villers-Cotterêts—by surprise, with tanks again, and to good effect.

  July 18 marked the beginning of Marshal Foch’s counteroffensive. “Although the Germans fought stubbornly to the end, they were henceforth always on the defensive,” recalled Lieutenant John Clark, an American eyewitness to the battle for Soissons.

  On August 8 came what Ludendorff would call “the black day of the German Army,” when he realized “the war must be ended.” By then a British tank brigade had helped reduce the German-held stronghold of Moreuil. One British major took a spin “in one of those huge armoured cars, and found it most disagreeably hot; but I felt a sense of delightful security when I heard the bullets rattling against the steel walls.”

  Now began the Battle of Amiens: Australians, Canadians, French, and British all fighting together. General Haig commenced with a tank attack 20 miles wide and 456 (or if you like 552) metal monsters thick; he achieved utter surprise. German casualties may have been three times the Allied ones. In his memoirs, Guderian wrote: “Even now old-timers like us relive that feeling of impending doom which overtook us on that day in August.”

  On August 21 the British drove toward Bapaume and Albert, reducing both; on September 1 Péronne fell to the Australians. How would all this captured territory have appeared in early autumn 1918? “Deserted,” recalled Captain C. N. Littleboy, a British commander of the Sherwood Foresters. “Bleak, devastated.” Continuing eastward, Littleboy saw “a derelict Tank, a dead horse, a rifle stuck upright in the ground.”

  In 2018, driving over this same sad old Somme country, I thought the rolling hills and sky could almost have been somewhere in eastern Washington State, maybe around Pullman. We ascended what appeared to be the curvature of the earth itself, everything gently, evenly falling off; here came Morlancourt; we kept on Highway D42; then ahead stood three trees, to guard the edge of the world.

  10

  The shelling of Paris finally ended on August 9.

  On September 14, after continued Allied gains, the Austrians sent a peace note. Five days later, the Turkish front collapsed in Palestine. On the 21st, the Croatians hung out their flag. On the 24th, the Hungarians rose up and called for independence from Austria. On the 28th, Bulgaria fell. A day after that, Ludendorff had a “fit”—perhaps a minor stroke.

  Now at last Marshal Foch called for a coordinated series of assaults upon the creaking Hindenburg Line: on September 26 in the Meuse-Argonne Forest, the Americans with 411 tanks and the French with 654; on the 27th, the British, launching the Second Battle of Cambrai (they would take their objective on the 9th); on the 28th, the Belgians in Flanders; on the 29th, more French and British attacks.

  The Meuse-Argonne Offensive,
fought by Pershing’s First Army under Foch’s overall coordination, was intended to breach the Hindenburg Line westward of Verdun. One history calls it “the biggest logistical undertaking in the history of the US Army, before or since.”

  Six French divisions assisted 22 American infantry divisions, most of which had not yet proven themselves in battle. (By the end, more than 90 Allied divisions participated in the fight.) “The Germans,” the previous source continues, “had created four successive, mutually supporting defensive lines, linked by trenches and interlocking arcs of fire.”

  The attack began at 5:30 in the morning on September 26. Its logical result was the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery, the most populated American necropolis in Europe, with 14,246 burials. Which should I single out? In one row of marbled crosses on a field walled in by trees, accompanied by another field of crosses and then more of the same, HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD—though never to his hoping, wondering, finally despairing family, who when I read this inscription in 2018 must have all gone underground themselves.

  The US 35th Division managed to take that ghastly old concretion of trench-line stasis, Vauquois, bombarding, machine-gunning, and gassing the Germans while overrunning them from behind, and even continuing another 1.5 miles north-northwest, toward Varennes and Cheppy. Yes, they broke that horror and hurried on.

  But now, when from a prominence of fossilized sandbags at Vauquois I gaze down into a steep narrow dugout connected to a tunnel, a beech tree outgrasping from the top and a cloud of midges expanding above my head, it seems the nightmare remains. In the grass around me, crowded by trees with singing birds, in dugouts with their side tunnels going who knows where, how much human craft, cunningly, maliciously employed to maim and murder still lies ready to harm? Yet I feel grateful that this is so. Here is one of the Great War’s most accurate monuments.