Cemeteries and memorials

     Vintage motion pictures online show an American army cemetery outside Cheppy and burials there.  The bodies were later exhumed and moved to what is now Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.  It is the largest American military cemetery in Europe with some 14,000 graves from WWI.  A 100-year commemoration ceremony was scheduled for Sunday, September 22.  Mayor Lamorlette of Cheppy said he planned to attend.  An American we met in Reims was going to lay candles for a luminaria and read names of 39 of the dead.  However, violent thunderstorms hit the region that day with 70 mph winds.  A hundred miles away in Trier, Germany, where I was, the same storm put Kansas thunderstorms to shame and lasted for hours.  Much of the ceremony was cancelled.  A few days later, I visited the cemetery. The flags were still there, and I left a copy of my book on Dad with the superintendent, Bruce C. Malone, Jr.  I signed it, but postdated it by a day so it read September 26, 2018.

American Argonne Cemetery

     German dead are interred in a cemetery outside Cheppy that is shown in an earlier post in which I noted some of the dead were Jewish.  I saw one cross with the name Acker on it.  Dad's maternal grandmother was named Acker.  It is a common German surname, but it raises the remote possibility that Dad might have shot, or shot at, a distant cousin.  I once asked him if he had killed anyone in the war.  He answered, "I don't know.  I never saw the people we were firing at."

     I saw no memorials to Americans in WWI in Paris.  There was this memorial to the

sons of France in WWI under the Arch de Triumphe.

      A Frenchman from Brest, France, that I met in Reims, said his port city has a large monument to the Americans.  About 700,000 American soldiers went through there in WWI.

       Washington D.C. has not had a WWI memorial although one is planned.  On one visit to Washington, I took Dad to the Second Division monument on the ellipse.  It honors that division's service in WWI.  Dad liked it and said it was enough.  We didn't know that the First Division, the Big Red One that took over from Dad's 35th, has a larger monument just a block away.

Second Division Monument

       In Kansas City, Missouri, where Dad worked when I was growing up, there is the Liberty Memorial for WWI.  The city claims that it is home to the only legitimate memorial to WWI.  It is a good claim since Kansas City started raising funds in 1919.  And, as motion pictures on the memorial's website show, commanders from the United States, France, Britain, and Belgium came to the dedication a few years later.  In more recent times, the memorial acquired and installed a large commemorative mural in its museum.  The painting depicts a celebratory parade in Paris at the end of the war and shows the same four commanders.  But the mural isn't original to the Liberty Memorial.  Instead, it was painted for the walls of a restaurant in New Jersey (as I recall) and was only moved to Kansas City when the restaurant closed.  After it was installed in the museum, city-pride took over and the face of Captain Harry Truman was added by painting his face into the crowd behind the commanders.  The memorial itself consists of a large museum building and a tall column with a perpetual flame (steam lit by a red light at night) and flanked by two large "Assyrian sphinxes"  The sphinxes perplexed me when I visited several years ago, but visiting the British Museum in London on my recent trip, I saw what I believe to be their model.  I don't know if, or why, a WWI memorial in Kansas City was inspired by an exhibit in London.  Maybe someday I'll find an answer.

Assyrian sphinx in the British Museum

Return From Cheppy

     Returning to the United States from Cheppy today was easy for me.  Cheppy is about a three-hour drive to Paris at the posted 130 Kmph (80 mph) speed although I detoured to Normandy first.  From there to London on the 200 mph Eurostar train was a two-hour trip.  And the flight from London to Dulles Airport in Washington took about 7 1/2 hours.  There isn't much fatigue in flying on a Boeing 787 with two passable meals served enroute.

     My father's experiences were quite different.  The 35th Division remained in France from the November 11, 1918 Armistice until March 1919.  During this time, they were trained and made tough for European combat, training that probably would have prevented the collapse in the Meuse-Argonne.  Dad took leave to see eastern France including Fort de Vaux at Verdon.  He recorded that human bones were still on the surface of the land.  Then his unit had a stint at a rifle range near Champagne before being moved to Montoir in southwestern France.  According to his diary, it was "best town I have been in in France.  Beaucou[p] mademoiselle of every kind."  He shipped out on board the USS Matsonia at Saint-Nazaire. The ocean voyage was rough.  A wave took off two ventilators and some railing.  Dad got seasick.  Years later, he told my brother that he was advised to eat lemon drops to prevent seasickness. The remedy didn't work and left Dad with a distaste for lemon drops for the rest of his life.  They landed at Newport News, Virginia.  The Army erected a makeshift triumphal arch at dockside, and returning soldiers marched through it.  It has since been replaced by a permanent, commemorative arch.  Dad's unit went by train on a kind of victory tour, stopping to march through cities along the route, before arriving in Kansas City where they were mustered out.  I still have a photograph of a jaunty Harold Johnston in uniform in front of the Revolutionary War monument in Yorktown.  Two years ago, after I had researched and written a book about my father's experiences, I posed before the same monument.

Dad's ship home

Dad at Yorktown

Me at Yorktown

My father's equipment

     I still have some of the equipment Dad saved from World War I.  My guess is that he had this with him in Cheppy.  First is his helmet.  The 35th Division patch is stenciled on the side. I also have his mess kit and first aid kit.   I saw similar items in museums in France. Note the close up of the mess kit stamped with "1918 France."

     When I was a boy, I often asked my dad about his experiences in the war.  He told of a time when his machine gun company was moving through woods and came under artillery fire.  The men all ran to the side of the road and fell to the ground.  Dad was carrying the heavy tripod of the machine gun on his shoulders and, after hitting the ground, felt something warm trickling down the back of his neck and shouted "I'm hit."  His buddy, who was next to him, leaned over and said, "The tripod hit you on the head." Dad would always point to a slight dent in the skin of his bald head.

Hotchkiss Machine gun in museum in Reims, France

     Of course the most valuable item that I have is Dad's diary.  He had begun it in training at Camp Doniphan, Oklahoma.  But apparently, after he got to France, he had to turn it in for security reasons.  There are no contemporaneous entries from then until after the war.  But in a section for "Battles I was in" appears this page in his handwriting about having breakfast in the "Dutch kitchen" in Cheppy. Below it are pictures of the inside of the kitchen part of the building and of the electrical wiring that the Germans installed in 1916.

Dad's diary

Inside of German kitchen

1916 electrical wiring

The 35th Division's collapse

     Now that this blog nears its end,  I want to tell the sad story of what happened to Dad's 35th Division composed of the Missouri and Kansas National Guards.  After five days of fighting, it was counterattacked by a veteran German division.  Inexperienced, poorly led, and poorly trained, the 35th collapsed and was taken out of combat for the rest of the war. On its final night of battle, September 30, only 300 men, out of 28,000, formed an organized resistance along the Balny-Charpentry line a few miles north of Cheppy and Varennes.  Their stand was a 20th century Thermopylae except this time the Spartans, the 35th, won.  They were replaced by the First Infantry Division.

The 300 holding the line

     After the war, a memorial to the Meuse-Argonne campaign was erected on the top of Montfaucon, a hill an estimated ten miles north of where the campaign started on September 26.  The circular staircase inside the memorial appears in an earlier post.   A plaque in the building has the map below of the Meuse-Argonne campaign.  At the bottom of the map, you can see where the 35th stopped and the 1st took over.
     When relieved on the morning of October 1, only 4,700 men of the 28,000 in the 35th Division answered muster.  A picture in the Division's history book of the demoralized troops that morning is captioned, "Surely you remember that day."

Surely you remember that day

   

Memorial on Montfaucon

   

       

Meuse-Argonne campaign

     This is how the ridge line between Balny and Charpentry looks today.  It is roughly where the 300 men made a stand to protect the rest of the Division, which was strung out to the south to below where they had started on September 26.  And I should add that the 1st Division, also known as the Big Red One, was in the Normandy landing at Omaha Beach in World War II.  It is now stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, near where my father grew up.

From Balny looked east toward Charpentry in that depression

National Portrait Galleries

     At the National Portrait Gallery in London, I first saw the room with these portraits of Richard III, Henry VII,  and Elizabeth I.  But I'm not a royaltist, so having asked for directions at the front desk, I went to see Ayuba Suleiman Diallo.  My request raised eyebrows for a second, but someone knew the portrait was in Room 11.

Richard III

Henry VIII

Elizabeth I

     Diallo was a Fulani Muslim who was brought as a slave to Maryland in 1731.  I write about him in my book From Slave Ship to Harvard.  Indeed, I have a black and white image of him in the book.  When I wrote the book in 2012, his portrait was at the NPG but owned by the Qatar Museum, which had recently purchased it but agreed to leave it with the NPG in England.  I know this because I had to obtain the image and permission from the Qatar Museum.  After arriving as a slave in Maryland at age 16, Diallo was put to work on a tobacco plantation on the Eastern Shore.  Literate and terribly unhappy, he did a surprising thing.  He wrote a letter to his father in Africa, saying essentially "get me out of here."  Of course, the letter didn't reach his father, but men in England read it and arranged for his passage to London where he was feted and painted by William Hoare, a student of the great portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough.
       As I was looking at Diallo's portrait, two different school groups came by, one composed mainly of descendants from India or Pakistan and the other of descendants from Africa.  I am not shy about sharing stories from my book, so I gave each a short talk on African Muslims in America, showing a photo of Peale’s portrait of Yarrow on my cell phone.  Both groups as well as their teachers seemed quite appreciative.  One of the people with me said, “That is one of the few faces in the National Portrait Gallery that is the same color as theirs,” as you can see from the photograph below.
        This brings me to the difference between the NPG in London and the NPG in Washington DC with respect to racial sensitivity.  At the Washington gallery, former curator Asma Naeem arranged to borrow the James Alexander Simpson portrait of Yarrow from the Georgetown Library and placed it prominently among those of Yarrow’s white contemporaries to make the point that white males weren't the only founders of the country.  Diallo isn't given such treatment in England.

Jim and Diallo

Diallo in Room 11

Impromptu lecture