Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count

286 Pages·2017·34.1 MB·English

by  Richard Rubin

BACK OVER THERE
One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War,
500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many
Trenches, Shells, Legends and Ghosts to Count Richard Rubin
St. Martin’s Press New York
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To memory,
and those who keep it
And to M.A.L.,
one tough little
Courtesy of National Park Service, Cultural Resource GIS Facility
Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word, over there,
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, The drums rum-tumming
ev’ry where.
So prepare,
say a pray’r, Send the word, send the word, to beware,
We’ll be over, we’re coming over, And we won’t come back till it’s over over
there.
—George M. Cohan, “Over There,” 1917
PROLOGUE
FOLLOW ME
France.
I was lost.
Really lost.
Now, I’d been lost before. Many times. In just about every way one can be.
And yet, while lost is, in my experience, a state with infinite permutations, none
is quite as profound as creeping forward slowly in a rental car through a
labyrinth of narrow and overgrown tractor trails lined with tall grass and weeds,
deep in a country where you don’t speak the language very well, which last fact
doesn’t really matter anyway because you haven’t seen another human being in a
half hour, and haven’t had a cell signal for even longer than that.
Yes, that’s a First World Problem; but you’re not supposed to be able to get
lost in the First World anymore, what with excellent signage and detailed road
maps and GPS. And so, because you’ve become so dependent upon these
conveniences, you’re really in bad shape when, one by one, they fail you. The
place you’re trying to find—I’ll just drop the pretense and change that to the
place I was trying to find—wasn’t on a road, at least not a real one. It certainly
wasn’t on a map. And if it had coordinates, which I am told everyplace does, I
had no idea what they were. I doubted anyone had ever even written them down.
Worse yet was the fact that I’d already been to this place I was now trying to
find, and had gotten there all by myself. Only a few years earlier. Five years, to
be precise, in 2009. Under ordinary circumstances I might start wondering what
this said about my state of mental fitness. But I didn’t have time for that right
then, because I was really . . . well, you know.
In my defense: I had only been there once, and five years is a fairly long time
to remember directions to a place in the middle of nowhere and thousands of
miles away from home. And this place wasn’t in, say, Oregon or Alberta. It was
in the other direction, across an ocean, in France. In northern France.
Northeastern France. A part of northeastern France called Lorraine.
Poor Lorraine: Outside of France, it’s scarcely regarded as its own entity.
People pair it with the neighboring region of Alsace as inextricably as they pair
Q with U. Never mind that they’re thoroughly distinct in culture, landscape,
even language; never mind that Lorraine is almost three times the size of Alsace,
with a half-million more residents. Among the French, Lorraine’s natives say,
they are regarded as paysans. Peasants. Hicks. They will tell you this with pride.
I’m not sure why, frankly. I suspect it may be that they like being
underestimated.
The Germans certainly underestimated Lorraine. If you know anything at all
about the place, you know that the Germans annexed it, along with Alsace, after
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Except they didn’t, really. Germany did
annex almost all of Alsace back then, but they only took about a quarter of
Lorraine, which was all they wanted of it. The part of it where I was lost—the
Germans didn’t take that. If they had, the roads here would probably be better
today. By the time they did take this part, in 1914, they were too busy trying to
take the rest of France to undertake a major infrastructure project like building
new roads. There would be plenty of time for that after France surrendered. But
here again, the Germans underestimated Lorraine, because while they took it
fairly easily in 1914, it cost them hundreds of thousands of lives over the next
few years to hold it. By 1918, they finally seemed to appreciate the place,
clinging to it bitterly, desperately, killing and dying in great numbers for every
trench, every yard of blasted soil. It was their last line of defense.
They never did get around to improving the roads, though. Perhaps they were
as vexed as I was by the French system of naming their towns and villages. It’s
not enough, in many cases, to give a place a simple one-word name: You have to
modify it, it seems, with some sort of explanation of where it is. Dun-sur-Meuse:
Dun on the Meuse, a river. Gesnes-en-Argonne: Gesnes in the Argonne, a forest.
Saint-Benoît-en-Woëvre: Saint Benoît on the Woëvre, a plain. Braye-en-
Laonnois: Braye in the vicinity of Laon, a city. Nanteuil-la-Fosse: Nanteuil the
pit, because it’s near a large chalk mine. (I’m not sure how the locals feel about
that name.) This, of course, enables the French to re-use town names again and
again, sometimes without even putting much distance between them. Romagne-
sous-les-Côtes, or Romagne below the hills, is only about forty minutes or so
from Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, Romagne below Montfaucon, or Mount
Falcon. Both were ancient Roman sites, and wanted to acknowledge this
distinction in the most direct way possible; with a little elaboration, no one had
to flip a coin to see who got to use Romagne and who had to go look for another
name. And you can see why locals might want to commemorate the Romans:
Among other things, they built good roads. Some are still among the better ones
in the area.
The day I got really lost was a Sunday in June. I set out late that afternoon
from Verdun for Ville-devant-Chaumont, which translates as the village before
Chaumont (not, if you think about it, a big improvement over Nanteuil the pit).
And there’s even less to the place than its name suggests—a handful of houses
and garages for farm equipment, that’s it. But it was, as I remembered, the place
to pick up a certain tractor road that would lead me to the place I was looking
for. Now, it’s true that I am essentially an urban creature, having been born in
New York and lived most of my life there and in other cities, but when I say
tractor road, I do not mean a dirt road that is more or less the same as a regular