Reflections

    My trip had several purposes.  I wanted to see Europe for myself, having never been there.  I
wanted to see France through my father’s eyes. I wanted to do what he had wanted to do but had
not been able: to return to Cheppy.

    Eastern France is the most beautiful countryside I’ve ever seen.  It is a landscape of low, uneven,
lazy-rolling hills, waves on a gentle ocean, bounded by tree-filled ravines.  When I was there, the
harvest was over and the fields plowed. The bare soil was black, gray, brown, and light tan.  It is like
central Kansas where my father grew up but not as flat nor as treeless. There are notable differences.
Most are man-made.  The roads in all of rural Kansas are laid out in mile-square grids, called
“sections,” as stipulated when the state was settled in the latter part of the 19th century.  The roads in
France display no such mathematical precision but instead wind across the countryside along
seemingly natural footpaths. The only long, straight road I traveled was the old Roman road between
Varennes and Charpentry.  It is tree-lined and arrow-straight on a ridge between the two villages.

Farm on the road to Cheppy

    This part of France is characterized by a complete absence of signage whereas even the most
remote parts of Kansas have, to this day, rusted Burma Shave signs and sometimes in the distance the
Golden Arches of a MacDonald’s.  The farms in Kansas are usually large, one-crop affairs whereas
those in France are smaller and grain shares the land with pasture for the ubiquitous “les vaches,” the
typically-white, dairy cows. Rural Kansas looks like the agricultural factory it is whereas rural France is
pastoral in every sense of that word.

Les vaches

Restaurant at inn near Cheppy

Small towns dot the scene in both places, but again there is a difference.  Those in Kansas have been abandoned, their buildings vacant and falling apart.  The small farms they served have been consolidated into larger holdings, and their farm supply businesses have gone out of business.  In France though, the small towns, like Cheppy and Varennes, are still alive. What supports them is less clear. When I was there, tourism was one source of income since it was the 100th anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne offensive.  Truckers are another source of income. Unlike Kansas, large trailer-trucks regularly rumble through the small towns, a horror on the narrow streets of the tiny towns of Normandy. To my father, Cheppy would not have looked too different from the town of Kipp, which is just two miles from the family farm outside Salina, but Kipp today is practically a ghost town.  You can spot the villages in France from a distance by the church steeple rising skyward from the ravine they are in. Each village has its own, built long ago when people walked to church on Sunday. The same was once true in rural America, but the old neighborhood church has largely been replaced by mega-churches collecting congregations from many miles away.

Varennes

Vauquois

My memory of my father’s talk of France is that he found it backward by early-twentieth-century
Kansas standards.  That is not true today. Except for the old buildings and bucolic feel, rural France is
as up-to-date as Kansas City, indeed more so.  It is a case in point that modernization doesn’t need to
come at the cost of charm.

    When my mind’s eye goes back to September 26, 1918, it sees fog, smoke and the flash
of explosions.  It hears whistling and exploding shells, the rattle of machine guns, and the cries of
thousands of wounded and dying men.  It sees destroyed farm houses and burning fields pock-marked
with shell craters. And it feels almost uncontrollable fear.  It is not a place to which I would necessarily
want to return, yet my father did.

    The most surprising thing to me about Europe was how violent its history is.  I knew of course that
I was visiting a World War I area in the Meuse-Argonne region and a World War II area at Normandy.  
But war stalked me on the whole trip. I went to Reims expecting to see a beautiful cathedral, but the
first thing I noticed upon getting there were obvious shell holes in the exterior walls.  I thought the
arms missing from the statues were caused by time and weather, but they were shot off. The Roman
forum seemed peaceful enough but the “Field of Mars” obviously wan’t. In Trier, the ominous black
gate is a vestige of a 6 km wall the Romans built to protect the city from marauding Germans.  In
Verdun, I wanted to visit the same WWI fortifications my father did, and so when I saw a huge wall in
the city, I assumed that was the one my father visited. However, men there told me the in-town
fortifications dated from the 17th or 18th century. The 20th century ones were several miles out of
town.  The dramatic Rodin victory statue in Verdun commemorates Parisian resistance to the
German invasion in 1870. Throughout Europe, statues, even in and around churches, such as Joan
of Arc, have weapons in their hands. Richard-the-Lion-Hearted outside Parliament in London carries
a sword. While tourists gawk at the various monuments in Paris, the fact is a great many of them
commemorate victory in war or, like the Champs Elysees, the Elysian fields of dead. The Bayeux
tapestry celebrates the Normans conquest of England. True enough Washington D.C. has war
memorials, and I've written about them, but I know of no statue in the city of a military leader with
weapon in hand.  The major memorials, such as the Washington Monument and the Lincoln,
Jefferson, and MLK Memorials, are for political not military accomplishments. Europe today is
peaceable, but its history wasn’t.

Rodin in Verdun

Richard the Lion-Hearted outside Parliament

     My trip also brought thoughts I had not expected.  Rather than simply remembering my father, I
was awakened to what he and the WWI generation of Americans stood for.  Decency, honor,
principle, idealism, and pragmatism. Visiting Normandy brought home to me that this was repeated
in WWII.  Tom Brokaw entitled his book on WWII “The Greatest Generation.” They were Ronald
Reagan’s “Boys of Point du Hoc,” the men who selflessly fought and died to free Europe from the
evils of Nazism.  

    And I reflect on the men who shook my hand in Reims and thanked me for what my father had
done.  They said the United States had saved them when France was defeated then, but now they
stand alone.  The people of Cheppy remembered what the United States did for them in both wars
just like the women from Caen remembered June 6, 1944, when the Allies came to Normandy.  To an
American visiting Europe, the slogan Make America Great Again rings hollow. America was made
great by our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, and by their parents, not by
retreating from the world or by asking for a quid pro quo for each element of our foreign policy, but
rather by the realization that decency, honor, principles, idealism, and pragmatism are what made
America great.  It is why this country is respected around the world. Returning to Cheppy made me
see how far the current administration strays from what really made America great.

    My father was a boy from a Kansas farm who never had traveled more than a few dozen miles
from home before joining the army and seeing the world.  The world would never be the same.
I learned the same lesson in Cheppy.