Pierre: It Wasn't Paris

 Pierre

Pierre was one of my great uncles, brother to my grandfather.  It is said that he had restless feet, and after serving in the First World War, he would disappear for some years and then suddenly reappear.

I understand the question that troubled some people about this well-loved uncle (and about other young men who went to France during the war), but it was a relatively shallow question: "How you going to keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?" -- as the WWI song put it.  The real question was probably a bit deeper for Pierre as it was for other soldiers returning home.  It wasn't Paris, where they spent some leave time -- with the wine, women, and song -- that caused them to be unsettled when they returned home from war.

Pierre enlisted the day after the US declared war on Germany.  One record states that he was the first in his community to enlist and "probably the first in his county"(Pocahontas Record) -- and the day he enlisted was his birthday: 15 April 1917.  Certainly he was, like so many young men of the First World War, tied up with ambition, ardent dreams of "some desperate glory" as one poet said, and...he wanted adventure.  Adventure, he may have thought -- like most of us have thought -- would come easily to hand, light up life like a carnival, and then leave us to return home to settle down.

Then there were the trenches, the shelling, the machine guns, and the friends whom one saw fall -- the friends that one survived.  So Pierre didn't come home with the same fireworks in his mind that most Americans saw on the 4th of July.  The fireworks he saw recalled a different reality.

He was in the Vosges where the German army had long before established trenches in the mountains.  Pierre's unit, at this time under command of the French, was sent to hold the line in the Gerardmer sector, in the mountain pass of Schlucht (Col de la Schlucht).

 Col de la Schlucht: Now a Ski Resort.... (source: Michelin)

One unit history has it that, among many other things they did, the German artillery shelled the American field kitchens that had been set up by some fresh-water streams, knowing that they could kill their enemy as they came to get water and cook food for their men.  Dastardly -- but it was war as it is now or at any other time.... In a game of kill-or-be-killed, who has ever played nice?  War isn't like that despite the so-many rules of engagement set up by politicians well behind the lines.

French (red) and German (blue) Lines in the Schlucht (Pierreswesternfront)

His unit, Company C of the 11th Infantry Regiment, was pulled back briefly, put into further training, and then sent (now strictly under American instead of French command) into the Meuse-Argonne while that battle was raging.  He spent the last days of the war pursuing the Germans in their retreat, up to the 11th Nov., the Armistice.  One event during this time involved his company moving to the east, swimming the Loison river, and emerging to capture the French village of Jamtez from the Germans.

The French Village of Jametz, East of the Loison River (Google Maps)

 

Jametz, France August 2014 (Source: Author)

On 11 July 1918, Pierre had written to his mother (note: brackets indicate my editions/guesses to somewhat garbled text):

My last letter was written just before entering the trenches the first time. Since then we have been in the trenches most of the time. Our first trip was in a different sector than we now hold. We spent our first period there [and then] were relieved and brought directly here so we have really spent most of that time in the trenches. Will be glad when we are relieved and taken back for a rest.  Trench life is not so bad where there is lots going on to [provide] plenty of excitement. We have had a real time with rats in the dug out. They are braver than any Huns that ever lived and there is sure some army of them. There are a million things I would like to tell you about but will have to wait until I return. I hope that won't be long, for the sooner we lick the Germans and get back to the good old States the better we all will feel.  I hope Gen. Pershing ... is right when he said it was either "heaven, hell or Ho-boken by winter." (Pocahontas Record 10 Nov. 1938, p. 16)

 Pierre continued his description of events in another letter to his father:

Aug. 9, 1918  Dear Dad:  Am out of the ditches now for a few days. Was relieved the sixth. Twas an awful night raining and dark as hell. The artillery and machine guns were very active right at the time our relief came in. I could hardly talk loud enough to make the fellows relieving me understand the orders of the sector. But at last I got them straightened out, ...I got my platoon together and started out. Well I hadn't gone over three hundred yards before half of them were lost. It took some little time to find them. And when I got them back, I had every one take hold of hands and follow me one behind the other. That way we got along pretty well but t'was 2:30 a. m. before we made it out. We spent ten days in the trenches this trip.  Our worst trouble is going in and out and of course moving from place to place. I'll tell you it takes guts to put your old pack on your back which consists of all a man's belongings and hit out down the road. There has been times when I'd think I couldn't take another step but I'd always reach our destination and I suppose I could go much farther if necessary. There's no use telling if [it's as hard a life as we think. It's tough not to think of it all the time in war.]  And after we get a good meal and a little rest we forget it all and are ready to start again.  We get good treatment and good eats so that is all that a man can expect at a time and a place like this. In other words we are getting along fine. (ibid.)

Shifting men, who get lost in the maze of trenches at night under bombardment and machine gun fire....  Yes, well: the effects don't soon wear off.  It was the American author and WWI ambulance driver Malcolm Cowley who perhaps best described the lasting effects:

We didn't want to be slackers, embusques. The war created in young men a thirst for abstract danger, not suffered for a cause but courted for itself; if later they believed in the cause, it was partly in recognition of the danger it conferred on them. Danger was a relief from boredom, a stimulus to the emotions, a color mixed with all others to make them brighter.  There were moments in France when the senses were immeasurably sharpened by the thought of dying next day, or possibly next week.  The trees were green, not like ordinary trees, but like trees in the still moment before a hurricane; the sky was a special and ineffable blue; the grass smelled of life itself; the image of death mingled together into a keen, precarious delight. (Exile's Return p. 42).

"How you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?"  It's not Paris that made them restless.  It's what lies between you in Paris on leave and your buddies left dead in the fields.

Hemingway put it this way, using an old barn and a grove of hemlock as metaphors for lost innocence:

We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn.  The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been.  You could not go back. (Farewell to Arms, qtd in Cowley p. 46).

The beginning of next month, August 2014, marks the centenary of the beginning of WWI.  The more we understand about it, the more we will understand Pierre's -- and other veterans' -- seemingly odd behaviors, their silence about the war, their restless feet, their need to sit in a room facing the door, what they see sometimes when they stare, and their simple desire for normalcy.

Merci, Pierre.  You carried the weight of trying to set a portion of civilization right.  And you carried the loss of friends.  It was a lot of weight to carry in silence because no one -- other than another veteran -- could quite understand it.