Unknown Soldiers by Neil Hanson

Author:Neil Hanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429896
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

14

GOING OUT LIKE CANDLES

On 18 June 1918, just a week after his wedding, Paul Hub parted from his new wife and family and returned to his unit on the front lines of the Somme, near Amiens. There he “reluctantly had to take over command, because my own commander stayed behind at Mons.” The depression at being parted once more from his loved ones was heightened by a deep sense of foreboding, as all the ground gained in the German spring offensive was once more being yielded to the Allied counter-offensive.

The last desperate throw of the dice had begun three weeks earlier, on 27 May, when, after an artillery bombardment that saw 2 million shells fired in four and a half hours, the Germans attacked the French forces on the Marne and advanced to Château-Thierry, just fifty miles from Paris. Once more the German guns were clearly audible in the capital and the anxious population poured into the streets, sifting the rumours sweeping through the crowds and scanning the eastern horizon for whatever portents it might hold. A soldier who returned to the front lines after being all night in the streets of Paris spoke of “the silent crowds blackening the boulevards through the few hours of midsummer darkness; other crowds on the skyline of roofs, all black and immobile, the whole city hushed to hear the bombardment, and staring, staring fixedly east at the flame that incessantly winked in the sky above Château-Thierry—history come to life, still enigmatic, but audible, visible, galloping through the night.”

On 11 June, French and U.S. troops, engaged in significant numbers for the first time, and eager to show how “superior” American forces would rescue the “tired Europeans,” drove the Germans back in ferocious fighting at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. The U.S. Marines added a new chapter to their formidable legend at Belleau Wood but the casualty rates were heavier than any they had ever experienced. At the time of the U.S. declaration of war on 2 April 1917, “the U.S. regular army was on a par with that of Chile, Denmark or the Netherlands,” and German commanders may well have assumed that the prime U.S. contribution to the Allied war effort would be financial and logistic rather than in combat. The vast numbers of U.S. troops now entering the front lines and the ferocity of their fighting spirit showed how foolish that presumption had been, even though American commanders proved themselves as willing as their British and French counterparts to squander the lives of their men. Just like the British on the first day of the Somme almost two years before, the American dead at Belleau Wood “lay in beautifully ordered lines where the traversing machine-guns had caught them.”

Before the American declaration of war, the Germans had released a propaganda document, “The Archives of Reason,” suggesting that Americans who contemplated joining the fighting should first “dig a trench shoulder-high in your garden; fill it half-full of water and get into it. Remain there for two or three days on an empty stomach.

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