Switchboard Soldiers by Jennifer Chiaverini

Author:Jennifer Chiaverini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

13

April–May 1918

Chaumont

Grace

By the time a cohort of operators from the Second Group arrived in Chaumont, Grace had become accustomed to the routine of General Pershing’s First Army Headquarters. The sight of trenches and air raid shelters no longer immediately evoked trepidation and grim thoughts of the dangers that made the installations necessary. On the three-mile trek down the muddy road from her quarters to the telephone office in the caserne, she no longer did a double take if she passed columns of German prisoners of war, disconsolate or defiant, marching to work—digging ditches, clearing debris, shoveling coal—grueling, essential labor that was not unduly dangerous and would not give the prisoners an opportunity to jeopardize the war effort. The sight of troop trains packed with Allied infantry chugging past Chaumont en route to the front still made her pause and reflect, but she had resigned herself to the grim truth that some of them would return gravely wounded, and far too many would not return at all. She still flinched if an errant German shell exploded unexpectedly close, or woke, heart pounding and breathless, when the air raid siren shrieked in the middle of the night, but that was only because of the sudden jolt to her senses. She would be a fool to lose her respect for German artillery no matter how familiar she became with the devastation an attack could inflict.

Most of the time, she was much too busy to brood over potential dangers to her own safety, or even to her life. From the time her shift began in the morning until she was relieved in the late afternoon, she and her fellow operators worked tirelessly connecting calls, constructing long-distance relays, instantaneously translating from English to French and back again for callers who could not comprehend each other, and the myriad other tasks required of them. Every command to attack or withdraw, every order to shift troops from this flank to that line, every report from the front, every urgent message communicating vital intelligence to commanders in the field—every call was routed through the switchboard in the old stone barracks. At the end of her shift, Grace invariably felt both exhausted and exhilarated, knowing that with every call she connected, she was striking a blow for the Allies, bringing them one day closer to victory.

Yet while Grace firmly believed that the Allies would ultimately triumph, the classified reports she overheard on the lines revealed unexpected discord between the Allied countries’ commanding generals, disagreements they were careful to conceal from the public and the troops. Only days before Grace’s cohort arrived in Chaumont, French marshal Ferdinand Foch had been appointed Supreme Allied Commander, and a few weeks later, he had been named Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies. The French had long considered the inexperienced U.S. Army to be a “weak asset,” and General Foch believed that AEF troops should be dispersed among the French and British armies, reinforcing seasoned divisions whose numbers had been depleted due to heavy casualties.

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