Back Over There by RICHARD RUBIN

Author:RICHARD RUBIN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

The Burnt Woods and the Ball-Shaped Tree

Like many people who appreciate both history and fine storytelling, I enjoy a good urban legend. A lot. And as it happens, the First World War generated—and continues to generate—more of them than just about any other real-life event I can think of. Many are, shall I say, of questionable veracity, like the story surrounding the “Bayonet Trench” at Verdun, or the one about German divisions pursuing retreating British troops at the Battle of Mons in 1914 being stopped by a number of enormous, ghostly longbowmen, the spirits of English soldiers killed at Agincourt 499 years earlier—the so-called Angels of Mons. Others can never be proven or disproven—tales of soldiers killing other soldiers in hand-to-hand combat and then discovering, as they stand over the body of their slain enemy, that it’s their cousin or nephew or whoever from the wrong side of the border of Alsace or Galicia or some other frontier province; or of battlefield encounters with Corporal Adolf Hitler, which always seem to end with the other man’s rifle or sidearm jamming at the moment of truth and Hitler scurrying off. But some—like the one about soldiers on both sides spontaneously throwing down their arms on Christmas, 1914, and meeting in No Man’s Land for a game of soccer; or the one about Germany trying to entice Mexico to enter the war on their side by offering them Texas, New Mexico and Arizona—are actually true. Those kinds are my favorite. Patrick Simons told me two of them in one day.

It was June 17, 2009; the day we met. I had just arrived in France the day before, and was still gravely jet-lagged, but Bobby Bell had advised me that this was the only day he had free to show me around, so rather than recuperate, I drove the ninety minutes down from the Argonne, where I was staying, to Thiaucourt, where Bobby was the superintendent of the Saint-Mihiel American Cemetery. I didn’t know Bobby at all—I had only been referred to him by someone at the Washington offices of the American Battle Monuments Commission, which maintains all American cemeteries and monuments overseas—and was surprised and gratified that he would do me such a favor; I later learned that the Saint-Mihiel Cemetery gets even fewer American visitors than the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, which doesn’t get very many. I think Bobby was intrigued by my interest in the area, and determined that I get the most out of my visit. He invited along two local 14–18 aficionados who knew even more about the subject than he did: Stan Bissinger, an Englishman who had married a French woman and retired to the area; and Patrick.

Patrick, who is French, wasn’t native to the area, either, but I didn’t know as much back then, and would never have guessed it, given how well he knew the place. I also wouldn’t have guessed that he’d served twenty years in the French Army, and another thirteen with NATO, including three years at HQ and eight tours of duty in the Balkans.

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