I have skipped a day, giving both the reader and myself a rest. I thought we had finished with war with the visit to the Normandy beaches, but that proved not to be the case because we went to Bayeux Thursday morning to see the tapestry. It is not truly a tapestry, I learned, but rather an embroidered cloth scroll. Frankly that was a disappointment because I was expecting to see a wall covered with a beautiful wool tapestry. It tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in pictures over perhaps a hundred feet or more of a two-foot high scroll protected by glass. Viewing it is an exasperating experience for someone like me who wants to tour at my own pace. The visitor is handed a cell phone-size listening device which narrates the story at a fixed pace, designed to keep the visitor moving along the scroll. But we were behind a large group of grade school students who moved at a slower pace, so the narrative that I listened to generally talked about a section of the scroll that was two or three feet ahead of where I was. So about all I got out of it was that because Harold broke his oath to William (spelled Willelm on the scroll), William conquered England. Adding to my frustration was the fact that the visitor does not see the explanatory exhibits until after he sees the scroll.
     From Bayeux, we drove to Paris where I had the dubious pleasure of driving through Paris traffic. Remembering the scene from European family vacation, I successfully avoided getting stuck in the traffic circles before getting to the hotel near the Place de Concorde and then to the rental car drop-off which oddly did not have a sign and which required the driver to take the car to a parking lot nearby.
     Friday, I gave Yarrow book talks at two university preparatory schools. Although these were explained to me, I am not sure I am correctly explaining the system, but my understanding is that these students are in a two-year program designed to prepare them for testing and admission to the elite universities. No matter, I gave my talks in English. The students were attentive and asked great questions at the end. Getting questions required some prodding on my part since, I was warned, French students tend to be shy about doing that. But once the ice was broken, the questions flowed. These talks were sponsored and arranged by the U.S. embassy in French as part of long-established State Department programs to provide cultural programs in foreign countries. I may have learned as much about French culture as the students learned from me about Yarrow Mamout’s experiences in America. Traveling to and from the two schools by taxi also gave me a chance to see most of Paris, obviating the need to do that today. Of course, it was an “oh there is the Eiffel Tower” experience. Still, it means the next two days can be spent exploring the sites we want to see.

Buzemont, early morning

     I got up at 5:30, yesterday, Sept. 26. I wanted to be awake 100 years to the exact minute that Dad’s machine gun started firing in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Then I realized because of Daylight Savings Times, I was one hour short. It was too late to go back to sleep. So we got an early start and soon were at Vauquois and Buzemont. It was a crystal clear day and, unlike 100 years ago, there was no fog to obscure the view I drove from the Missouri Memorial to the ravine to the Dutch kitchen and into Cheppy, recording the drive on my camera. From there, we drove five hours to Normandy. The drive was uneventful except that when we stopped to have breakfast in Cleremont at 9 a.m., the cafe said it had sold out its breakfasts. We may have been fortunate.

Omaha beach

     The two striking things about the Normandy invasion beaches are how long they are -- it is a 45 minute drive from our hotel at Sword to Point du Hoc, made famous in Ronald Reagan’s ‘The Boys of Point du Hoc’ if not in military history (the American Rangers stormed the cliffs only to find their targets, big German artillery guns had not been installed yet) -- and how tacky it is. For the most part, there are no signs, no interpretative aids, no National Park Headquarters. Instead, the first thing the visitor sees is at Gold Beach where a French entrepreneur has a big parking lot and campground on a cliff overlooking the beach with a gaudy cyclorama. A 40 minute drive through the tiny streets of tiny towns got us to Omaha Beach where the American invaders bogged down and suffered huge casualties. It is Omaha Beach that is in all the movies. To digress briefly, it isn’t fun to meet a tour bus or big French tractor on the tiny streets, particularly when the tractor driver has a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Anyway, Omaha Beach has a parking lot, some flags, and a restaurant, but no interpretation. It is, however, much longer than I imagined, extending more than a mile in both directions and the distance from the water to the protection of the sea wall is several hundred yards. In the invasion, men laden with heavy packs and weaponry had to traverse that distance through water and over wet sand while being shot at. Many, I read, decided not to do this and stayed neck deep in the cold water of the English Channel, hoping they wouldn’t get shot in the head.
For us too, a half hour on the beach was enough.

Omaha beach, Point du Hoc in the background

     We then drove to Courseulles-sur-Mer at Juno Beach to eat. After parking, I walked over to four visitors to ask if it was legal to park where I did. They didn’t know. They were from nearby Caen. My saying that we were Americans elicited stories. One said she is 82 and was here during the landings. Germans occupied Caen, the dreaded SS, she quickly added. The Germans were hostile. The first she knew of the invasion was when she heard the guns from the ships booming in the distance. Her grandfather hurried everyone to the cellar. Rather than fight, the SS fled north. But first, they killed the mayor and two other men who tried to stop them from taking several French women with them. The narrator said her British saviors were wonderfully different. They were kind, smiled, and best of all passed out candy to the children. Another woman said she too was here during the invasion. These stories of the rescued made our visit more memorable than the sights.
     We had a three-course meal at the restaurant for 20 euros, less than $24. The good-looking young man at the next table was sitting alone, trying awkwardly to order in French, marking him as American, so we struck up a conversation. He had graduated from Stanford business school in the spring and his job in New York would start next month. So he was filling the gap with a bike trip through Normandy alone. He hired a company that supplied him with a bike, arranged the hotels, and ferried his luggage. He was doing this because his grandfather had been in the 82nd Airborne Division and parachuted into Normandy. His grandfather didn’t talk much about the war until thirty years ago when his parents decided to visit Normandy. As they boarded the plane, he handed them his journal. They read it on the flight to France and learned of his experiences. That one can come here and hear first and second hand stories of the Normandy invasion is more moving than the sights.
     We spend the morning here and then drive to Paris. I am in the State Department’s speakers bureau and giving talks tomorrow on my Yarrow Mamout book at two schools. So this blog will continue. I’ve had enough of war.

Mayor Jean Lamorlette, me, Mme Saunier

   
     My return to Cheppy took place over two days beginning yesterday afternoon when I met with the mayor, Jean Lamorlette. I had emailed him in advance, and so he knew quite a bit about my father’s experiences. After chatting for a while -- he’s been mayor since 1995 and serves six-year terms -- he took us to what my father called the “Dutch [German] kitchen” where he breakfasted on the morning of the second day, Sept. 27. It’s still there!

The German kitchen

     Mme. Saunier’s parents owned the property in 1914. When the Germans invaded, they were evacuated first to the Vosges Mountains, but when the Germans went there, her parents were evacuated to Belgium. When they returned to the property after the war, their house was gone and a steel-reinforced blockhouse stood in their backyard with a tunnel into a hillside. The front of the building was used as a kitchen; the side building as a hospital. Sturdy concrete pillars supported steel beams holding up the roof. Mayor Lamorlette speculated that the American army had simply taken over the building after seizing Cheppy and put its own mess there.
     I teared up seeing it because my father had wanted to return in the 1960s, but my mother didn’t want to go. The thought that if he had returned, he would have seen the building was still there overwhelmed me. Plus, I was moved by the consideration the mayor and Mme. Saunier showed a stranger.
     Just up the road was the ravine my father had mentioned in his diary. He spent the night of Sept. 26 there, before moving to the German kitchen the next morning. The ravine was the site of a lot of action. German machine gun nests lined the ravine. An American officer was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading an attack on those. Harry Truman mentioned in his letters that his outfit stopped there.
     Just west of that, towards where the Americans started, is the Missouri Memorial erected by veterans of the 35th Division. And Mayor Lamorlette pointed to the field behind the memorial and  explained that is where George Patton was wounded. Several years ago, Patton’s grandson contacted the mayor, and the two of them visited the location.

The German cemetary at Cheppy

     Mayor Lamorlette then took us to the German cemetery. 6,165 German bodies -- or body parts -- are buried there, but not nearly that many markers can be seen. I noted that while most of the markers were crosses, a few were conventional tombstones and asked the mayor what they were. He assumed they were not Christians, and indeed, when we looked at the inscriptions we saw Stars of David and Jewish names, the most notable of which was Josef Rothschild. The terrible tragedy and irony of so many Jewish men dying for Germany in WWI with the Holocaust of WWII was not lost on any of us.

The grave of Josef Rothschild at the German cemetary

     Before leaving, the mayor, who is a farmer and whose family has lived outside Cheppy “forever,” said that he had run over a shell while working his field last week. It exploded, and he had to call the fire department. So WWI remains very real for him.
     Today we set out early to fill in the details of Dad’s exploits. No one seemed to know where Buzemont was. That is the hill army records show his machine gun company was located on the morning of September 26, 1918. That is, no one knew until we stopped by the office of the mayor of Vauquois. The mayor was busy, but the secretary said it must be the same as Buzemont farm and gave us directions. It proved to be private land, but we parked the car and hiked a half mile to the top of the hill. From there we had a clear view of Butte Vauquois and are sure that’s where Dad arrived at 11:00 the night before the battle, almost exactly 100 years ago as of the time of this writing, and from where the Meuse-Argonne offensive began for him.

Butte Vauquois seen from Buzemont farm

     We then followed Dad’s route from Cheppy to Varennes, then north to Charpentry and Balny. To get there, I followed what I knew to be an old Roman road. The 35th Division took heavy casualties  following that route because it ran along a ridge for a mile, exposing the Americans to constant fire from German artillery and guns. The 35th made it to both towns and the ridge line on which they stood only to be hit by a counter attack by a German division that collapsed the 35th. After five days of fighting, only 300 men out of 28,000 could be organized to hold the line against the Germans. So total was the collapse that the entire 35th was pulled off the line and sent back to a rest area, never to fight again before the armistice, which came only 47 days after the Meuse-Argonne offensive was launched. As President Wilson and General Pershing believed it would, waiting until the entire American Army was ready to fight brought a quick end to the war.

The steps at the American memorial at Montfaucon

     From Balny and Charpentry, we visited Montfaucon, the high hill the Germans held some ten or so miles from Cheppy that overlooked the entire area. We decided not to climb the 272 steps of the circular staircase that is inside the even higher American memorial on Montfaucon. We did see the reinforced observation post the Germans had constructed in the tower of a destroyed church at the top and gnarled trees whose limbs were shot off during the fighting 100 years ago. I had read that the old trees can’t be cut down because they are riddled with bullets and shell fragments that ruin power saws.

The American cemetary

     Our tracing of Dad’s part of the war ended at the American cemetery where 14,000 are
buried. Flags of the United States and France still decorated each grave from last Sunday’s
ceremonies. I stopped by the visitors’ center and left a copy of my book on Dad’s experiences
with Bruce Malone, Jr., the superintendent.
     We ended the day by driving to Verdun, walking along the Meuse River, and dining outdoors
next to a British couple. Tomorrow morning, I return to Cheppy one last time, to Buzemont
where my father’s experience five days of the horrors of combat.

The Germans

View of the Moselle River

     Yesterday was again spent in Trier, Germany, where we took a two-hour cruise on the Moselle River.  It was not as picturesque as I had imagined.  It rained the whole time, forcing us to stay at a table in the enclosed part of the ship.  It had big picture windows.  It also had a tour group of about 100 people from Baden-Baden, Germany who were happier than we to eat and drink their way up and down the river.  While we were standing on the dock waiting to depart, I talked with about ten or so of them.  Well, 'talked' is a little strong since I speak no German, and they spoke little English.  Collectively, though, they knew enough English for us to carry on a rudimentary conversation.  That is, after I spoke, they would discuss in German what I said and nod their heads.  Then, one of them would answer with others chiming in with corrections.

Roman bridge across the Moselle at Trier

   Old feelings die slowly, I discovered.  They still don't have the warmest feelings for anything French.  For example, an offer to converse in French was met with boos.  It made me wonder how much 'union' is in the European Union.  That is, until the conversation turned to Donald Trump.  The boos were louder.  One man said pointedly and slowly in his best English, 'Merkel needs a partner in a President of the United States who is her equal.'  He clearly didn't think that partner was Donald Trump.  So I asked, 'what about Obama,' and met smiles and cheers.  I was surprised.
     Thunderstorms moved in later in the day.  They were more violent and longer-lasting than the ones you, and Dad, would see in Kansas.  Nonetheless, in a break in the storms, we visited the ruins of the Roman baths, where the original plaster can be seen in sections of an exterior wall.  These were, the sign said, the largest baths in the Roman world except for Trajan's baths in Rome itself.  We also visited the amphitheater.  Once Rome fell, the local people plundered all the Roman structures for their stones, but apparently the mortared walls of the amphitheater were too much.  It was a multi-purpose structure that saw animal fights, gladiator contests, religious ceremonies, and true theater.  With respect to the last, when I stood at the center of the field and shouted, my voice was amplified and echoed around the stands.  Tourists up there turned and waved for my demonstration.
     I return to Cheppy today.  I emailed the mayor and will meet him at 2:30.  He has promised to show us some of the sites.

The Roman baths at Trier with original pink plaster

Panorama of the amphitheater at Trier

Alone again

The Black Gate at Trier

     One of my aims in this trip was to find out if the French remember the United States' contribution, and my question was answered yesterday.  But before explaining that, I turn to breakfast at the small Continental Hotel in Reims where I talked to another American who is here for the 100th anniversary of Meuse-Argonne.  He is from State College, Pennsylvania and here because of his interest in the 28th Infantry Division made up of the Pennsylvania National Guard. They were to the left of Dad's 35th Division at Cheppy.  It was into their sector that Harry Truman had his artillery fire, an act for which he was almost court-martialed.  There will be a commemoration ceremony at the big (14,000 graves) American Argonne Cemetery this afternoon (Sunday).  This man has volunteered to participate in the reading of the names of the 14,000 dead. He is assigned 39 names.  It is expected to take 30 or 40 hours.  He will also help place electric candles on each grave for an illumination tonight.  We exchanged learning and maps.  We met again later at the car rental place at the train station in Reims, two blocks from the hotel.  The Continental, we discovered, is popular because it is within walking distance of the train.
       And so it is at the car rental place, Enterprise, that my question was answered.  It is a tiny, almost sleepy business.  I was the only one there for ten or twenty minutes, before the other Americans wheeled their suitcases from the hotel.  But a short time later, two Frenchmen arrived to turn in their car.  When they learned that the Americans were here to commemorate WWI, especially me, a man whose father had fought here, they began shaking my hand vigorously.  They were muscular men in their fifties.  They hadn't been born when WWI was over.  Indeed, they were probably born after WWII.  But they still knew the history.  Speaking in French, one said 'We were defeated and then the Americans came and saved us.'  Then referring to Trump's attitude of neglect for the defense of Europe, he added, 'But we are alone again!'  Another older Frenchman arrived with our rental car. When he heard that my father fought in WWI, he too shook my hand and thanked me for what my 'pere' had done.  Dad would have liked to hear that.
    I write this from Trier, Germany.  We drove here yesterday past roadsigns for exits to the places Dad recorded in his diary.  St. Mihiel, Claremont-en-Argonne, Varennes and over the Aire and Meuse rivers.  Distances that took Dad a day or two to march in 1918, we passed in five or ten minutes on the A4 highway at the posted speed limit of 130 km/hr or 78 mph.
     We decided that it is best not to mention the purpose of my visit to the people in Germany.  We are instead just two of thousands of tourists.  Last night we visited the Black Gate the Romans built. Trier was surrounded by a high wall that ran for 6 kilometers in Roman times.  This one gate to the city was preserved because a priest name Simeon converted it into a church in about 1000 AD.  No cement or mortar was used in its construction, we were told.  The old Roman amphitheater still is here as well, contained within the now-vanished walls.  So Rome's influence and the bellicosity of the area can still be seen and felt.  I fell asleep last night imagining a farm boy from rural Italy conscripted into the Roman army and dispatched to man the wall at Trier.  Like Dad, army service took him away from a narrow farm existence and let him see the world.
     I will end with a return to WWI history.  Trier is also famous for Karl Marx's presence.  The house he lived in is a tourist site.  It was suggested we eat at the same restaurant he ate in here, but we found a better place just down the street.  And whereas Dad was critical of the French fighting spirit because of their stopping every few hours to drink wine, the wine from the Moselle Valley around Trier that we had at dinner last night was exceptionally good.  We talked to the elderly German woman dining alone at the table next to us.  Although we couldn't speak each other's language, she communicated that we should also try the beer and after dinner wine.  Perhaps we will do that today.