The immigrant soldiers learned to fight like Americans that summer—but when they weren’t fighting they learned to fool around like Americans. Guys were thrown together who wouldn’t have given each other the time of day in civilian life, and once they got over the shock, a lot of them became buddies—first because they had to in order to survive and then because they had survived. They were hungry together, tired together, scared and lonely together; together they blew through their money in French estaminets and fell in love with French girls. War is hell, but war is also marching, smoking, foraging for food, scrounging for a place to sleep, getting drunk whenever you could, washing yourself and your clothes, keeping boredom and fear at bay during the stretches between battles. War is a dialect of dirty slang and catcalls and foul curses and muttered complaints about the rules and regulations and the damned officers who enforce them. For the immigrant soldiers, this sudden total immersion in American military vernacular was as strange as anything else. Back home, they were the foreigners, but when a bunch of them sat down together in a noisy smoky bar full of Aussies and Brits and French and Belgians, the dagos and yids and hunkies were all Yanks no matter how thick their accents.
They ate and swore and drank and bitched together, but most of all they sang together. It was a war in which men were forever raising their voices in song. American popular music was sweeping the country in those days, and all the catchiest jazz melodies and Broadway show tunes and toe-tapping little ditties inevitably swept the army. “Good Morning Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip,” “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France,” “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree),” “K-K-K-Katy,” “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” and “Over There” resounded loudly wherever American soldiers went. Songs were often the first thing the guys from a company had in common, the first thing they did in unison, the rhythm by which they learned to fall in step together. The foreign-born soldiers learned to speak English by learning to sing it. One private from a heavily Italian company of the 107th Infantry bragged that his comrades “sang the loudest, shouted the lustiest, and played the most.” New York City’s 77th “Melting Pot” Division marched and drilled to a song written by one Corporal John Mullin with the fitting refrain:
Oh the army, the army, the democratic army,
All the Jews and Wops, the Dutch and Irish cops
They’re all in the army now.
Jewish recruits, who had been policed on the Lower East Side, liked to change the refrain to “the Jews and the wops and the dirty Irish cops.”
One of the great movie moments of the war occurred that summer in France when the 77th Division was called in to relieve the Rainbow Division, and the Irish lads of the Fighting 69th and the East Side Jews and wops passed each other marching in opposite directions under a full moon in the Baccarat Sector. “Yesterday was New York ‘Old Home Day’ on the roads of Lorraine,” Father Duffy wrote in his diary. “There were songs of New York, friendly greetings and badinage, sometimes good humored, sometimes with a sting in it.” Ethnic jokes and slurs flew back and forth. Veterans and rookies razzed each other as only New Yorkers can razz. “We’re going up to finish the job that you fellows couldn’t do.” “Look out for the Heinies or you’ll be eating sauerkraut in a prison camp before the month is out!” “Well, thank God we didn’t have to get drunk to join the army.” “Anyone there from Greenwich Village?” As Father Duffy reported: “One young fellow in the 77th kept calling for his brother who was with us. Finally he found him and the two lads ran at each other awkwardly and just punched each other and swore for lack of other words until officers ordered them into ranks, and they parted perhaps not to meet again.” Inevitably, the two endless columns began to sing as they tramped past each other:
East side, West side, all around the town
The kids sang “Ring-around-rosie,” “London Bridge is falling down”
Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O’Rourke,
We tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.
Major General John O’Ryan, commander of the 27th Division (and son of an Irish immigrant), thought it would do his men good to have some musical entertainment; so during a break in the action in Flanders in mid-July, he ordered them to revive the play You Know Me, Al and the musical vaudeville routines that had been such hits in boot camp back in South Carolina. “It is strange to see this organization performing at a point where a ‘Jack Johnson’ or some similar bird might land at any minute and spread performers, stage and audience all over the landscape,” one soldier wrote home. But the guys were lucky and the show went on without being shelled. General O’Ryan remarked that wide-eyed Flemish kids packed the outdoor theater every night even though they didn’t understand a word of it: “At first they gazed in almost dumb wonderment at the nonsense of the clowns or the dancing of the ‘girls’ and listened intently to the divisional jazz band and the popular Broadway songs. . . . Before the division had been at Oudezeele a month one could hear the boys of the village whistling such songs as ‘Wait Till the Cows Come Home,’ ‘My Heart Belongs to the USA,’ ‘Mother Machree,’ and other melodies. In two months they were singing the songs in English.” Such was the irresistible power, then as now, of American popular entertainment.
Among the men tapping their toes, whistling at the “girls,” and picking up Broadway slang in the outdoor theater at Oudezeele were Mike Valente and Epifanio Affatato, both with the 27th Division’s 107th Infantry. By mid-July Valente and Affatato had been in France for nearly two months, most of it spent marching from one training area to another. So far, pretty much the only thing they had to show for their time “over there” was sore feet. The division was on the road so much that the guys started calling it O’Ryan’s Traveling Circus. “The worst part of the war is getting to it,” one soldier remarked. “I feel as if I have walked all over this country,” Private First Class Angelo Mustico wrote his Sicilian immigrant parents in Newburgh, New York. “We have passed through a lot of citys [sic] and towns and most of them have been bombed from the air and very few people live in them.” The few inhabited villages they did encounter struck the American soldiers as unbelievably primitive. French peasants in 1918 still looked and acted like something out of a Breughel painting, throwing slops in the street, wearing clogs in the muddy lanes, piling manure right outside their houses, cooking their meals in cast-iron pots hanging in open fireplaces, living cheek by jowl with their farm animals. “The farmers are busy haying,” Private Matt E. Palo, a second-generation Finnish American farmer, wrote to his sister back in Fruitdale, South Dakota. “It seems kind of funny to see hay hauled in two-wheeled wagons and one horse hitched to it.” The stone houses packed together, the daily trek to fetch water, the smell of animals mingling with the smoke of cook fires, the fields going blond under the sun of midsummer: to immigrants from the south of Italy like Epifanio Affatato, it was exactly what he had grown up with in Calabria and never wanted to experience again. Even the language the French peasants spoke had a familiar ring—certainly more familiar than English had been when he landed at Ellis Island seven years earlier.
Epifanio hadn’t seen much action yet, but he had been close enough to the front to learn to recognize the smell of poison gas and the sound of an incoming shell. He had been in war long enough to take pity on the German prisoners of war with their dirty unshaven faces and haunted eyes. Always kindhearted, Epifanio shared his cigarettes with the prisoners. One time, when he came upon a bunch of German POWs suffering in the cold, he struck up a barter—his warm hat for an officer’s silver belt buckle stamped with the motto gott mit uns—God with us. It was more humane than scavenging German corpses for souvenirs as a lot of guys did. Accustomed all his life to prizing any useful object, however humble, Epifanio was shocked at how careless American soldiers were with their government-issued equipment. Once he picked up an ax that another soldier had tossed—he didn’t really need an ax, but he wore it around his belt anyway because he couldn’t bear to see it go to waste. The day came when the thing would save his life. He was squatting down to relieve himself when German artillery shells began landing in the vicinity followed by sprays of machine-gun fire. An enemy bullet caught Epifanio literally with his pants down—but by some miracle the bullet hit the ax blade and ricocheted off. Epifanio got up and ran with his trousers around his ankles—a stunt his buddies never let him forget. But for that bit of luck, he might have ended up like the guy next to him on patrol one time who took a machine-gun bullet to the groin. Epifanio watched in horror as his comrade fell writhing to the ground, turned purple, and died on the spot. Maybe there was something about his name Affatato—which roughly translates as “under a spell” or “bewitched.” Anyway, it was a story to share with his children, assuming he survived the war and had children.
In the course of that season in France, Epifanio learned to shed the last of his peasant superstitions. Back in Calabria, le fate, the spirits or fairies embedded in his last name, were believed to haunt wild waste places and caves and linger around anything that belonged to the dead. Epifanio was convinced that to take the blanket off a dead man would rouse his spirit to come after him and seize his soul. But one night when he was half-dead of cold and wet on the battlefield, he made up his mind to put this fear to rest. Brutal as it sounds, he crawled out to where a comrade lay dead and got the man’s blanket and wrapped himself in it. Crazy as it sounds, he waited in terror for the spirit to come. When la fata failed to show, Epifanio slept, and woke up the next day a changed man. “That’s that,” he said to himself. “No spirits.” One more door shut on his Calabrian childhood; one more thing he had in common with the guys huddled next to him.
Leonardo Costantino and Peter Thompson, both serving with infantry units of the 91st “Wild West” Division, spent that July drilling and marching through France and wondering if they’d ever see any action. In his log Costantino kept a running account in his imperfect but vivid English of what mattered to him most—how much ground they covered, how little they had to eat, how bored and hot and frustrated they felt as the real war went on without them.
July 25 After one long and hard Hike we arrived in Milliers, France. Am very tired and many boys had to fall out and taken easy for it sure was one terrible hike. Had no supper to-night.
July 28 We are sleeping on the floor and Ho my back! Eats are very bad, some of us are getting nothing at all. This evening we had one spoon of tomatos and cup of coffee. No Bread so only I took it was coffee, no sugar or milk. Went to the river this after noon, Water was very cool so no one of us had regular Bath. The first one we had since we left Camp Mirrett [on July 11]
July 29 Last night we heard the big guns play their game from far away. Are now 40 miles from the front. Every body is hungry and here you can’t buy a thing expect wine. We have to start training once more and expect to keep it up until we go to the front.
Aug. 9 Granade practice, all day along. Private Aiello [another Italian American recruit and a buddy of Costantino] threw one and nearly Kill Lt. Fitts. He was nerves [nervous?]. Real action.
Aug. 16 Our Company have turn in one suit of everything. Are getting ready to move for the front. All of us are anxious to get a crack at the Huns.
Aug. 17 There is a french girl live next to our Billett and the owner of the place. She often come to me and ask when we will move.
Aug. 20 I do not talk any-more with this French girl she make me sick try to get your last penny out you. Am too wise at these French people.
“The French people are certainly rubbers [robbers],” Leonardo scoffed in one entry. In the course of that summer, he came to appreciate how much more he had in common with his buddies in the Wild West Division than with these French “rubbers” with their lousy wine and shifty women. It was a case of us against them, and Leonardo was now clearly one of us. On a day when the sun was shining and the weather not too hot, he wrote yearningly of “the old dear California” he had left behind when he was drafted. Not dear old Italy.
Meanwhile, Peter Thompson was picking up jokes and slang from the regiment’s hard-bitten Montana cowboys. One of the guys remarked that marching under the summer sun with a steel helmet on his head was like “wearing the kitchen stove with the fire drawing well and the coffee boiling over.” A homesick cowboy christened Peter’s regiment the Powder River Gang after the legendary western watercourse that supposedly ran a mile wide and an inch deep. “Powder River to Berlin” got chalked on the side of one of the hated 40 hommes 8 chevaux French boxcars. “Wild and woolly, full of fleas. Fright and frolic, as we please. Powder River—let ’er buck! Wade across it you’re in luck” became their marching ditty. But as of late August, the Powder River Gang had done more buckin’ than fightin’. Peter and his cowboy comrades were starting to wonder if they would ever see any action.
Epifanio Affatato had to work a double shift in assimilating to army life that summer, because his division had been folded in with the British army. So in a sense, he had to learn how to be both an American and a British soldier. In fact, the 27th had been serving with the British army ever since arriving in France back in May, though initially it was only for training purposes. The idea was that men would get up to speed under British tutelage, and then, when the time came to move to the front, they would fight on their own as Americans. Pershing had been adamant about this arrangement all along: American forces, at whatever cost, must preserve their integrity and independence. It was fine for Doughboys to train with the Allies; but the idea of using American troops as cannon fodder in decimated foreign units or putting American divisions at the disposal of foreign generals was utterly repugnant to the commander. But now, as the summer wore on and the Allies contemplated new campaigns against the weakened German army, Pershing came under increasing pressure from General Haig and General Foch to supply American manpower to their depleted British and French armies. Knuckling under, Pershing reluctantly agreed to temporarily lend both the 27th and the 30th divisions to the British. The American units would not be broken up and dispersed into the British forces but would retain their identity as American fighting forces. But as far as the men in the field were concerned, the Brits would be running the show, giving the orders, calling the shots. And so, in a sense, all the guys in the 27th and 30th were in the same boat as Affatato and Valente and the thousands of other immigrants: all of them were foreign soldiers that summer and fall.
“The line isn’t so bad,” the seasoned Tommies were always telling the green Americans of the 27th Division, “unless you’re at Ypres. Don’t go near Ypres.” But that’s exactly where Affatato and Valente ended up with the 107th Infantry. On August 12, Affatato in Company C and Valente in Company D were posted to a section of the front line at Dickebusch Lake a couple of miles south of Ypres. It was a flat fetid landscape of muddy fields, poisoned water, trench lines zigzagging in perplexing mazes. The terrain was so monotonous that one of the intelligence officers advised the men that the best way to avoid getting lost and wandering into a German trench was to memorize the names on the crosses marking the graves of Allied soldiers buried on the battlefield. The dominant feature on this prairie of Flanders mud was the ridgelike knob of Mount Kemmel where the forces of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria were dug in. “It was a bare, bleak earthen mound,” wrote one soldier; “not a tree nor a bush could be observed on top. It had been a target for artillery for years, and was battered and banged as no other in France.” Another soldier wrote his family, “You cannot conceive of the suffering, the wreck and ruin for miles and miles. Love seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.” Company C got its first real taste of war amid this desolation—a taste that lasted eleven days.
Company D was placed in reserve with the East Kent regiment called the Buffs before being rotated to the front with a Shropshire unit. “The English regiments were mixed with us to teach us the fine points of the game,” wrote the Company D historian. The men, however, took a dimmer view of this business of being mixed in. American soldiers grumbled that they were taller, fitter, and better fighters than their English counterparts; they hated the “iron rations” on which British soldiers were expected to subsist during battles (canned pork loaf or corned beef; biscuits, sugar, and tea; a couple of cubes of meat extract; some cheese if they were lucky); they looked down on the Brits for having failed to get the job done. The many Irish immigrants in the 27th were especially vociferous about having to answer to the English, whom they considered more their enemy than the Germans. They’d be damned if they were going to fight for the king who had his heel on the throat of their people. The same resentments seethed in the Rainbow Division’s Fighting Irish 69th. When the regiment was issued British uniforms because there weren’t enough American khakis to go around, the Irish soldiers refused to put them on because the buttons were stamped with the insignia of the English crown. “These buttons were a hated symbol of their former oppressors,” one member of the regiment wrote. “Some hotheads . . . built a fire in the main street of the village and started to burn the British issue, and there was great excitement as one after another joined in.” A full-scale anti-English riot was averted only when Father Duffy appeared on the scene to calm the lads down. “We have our racial feelings,” the priest declared, “but these do not affect our loyalty to the United States.”
The prevailing attitude among American soldiers, Irish and otherwise, was that if you were going to be slapped together with foreigners, it was better to serve with Aussies, who at least had a bit of pluck and dash. But it was best to stay with your fellow Americans, even if they had funny last names and strange accents. Some of the men of the 107th worried that while they were stuck in Flanders under the thumb of the Cockneys, the real show was going on elsewhere. That attitude would change shortly.
“We were given our line training at Ypres,” wrote Private Albert G. Ingalls in the Company C history, “that storm center of the world’s greatest passion, where fields of golden grain, mingled with myriad poppies, mask uncounted graves of fallen Australians, Canadians, French, and English.” Both companies C and D suffered losses at the “storm center” before being relieved by other units of the 27th on August 24. “I can’t describe the awfulness of the war,” one soldier wrote home the following day. “As most of the men say, it is not war, it is slaughter.” “Don’t go near Ypres” proved to be a prophetic warning. The 27th took nearly thirteen hundred casualties before being rotated out on September 3. In the end, the advance that the combined British-American forces made in the sector between August 18 and September 4 could be measured in yards.
Officially, Private Antonio Pierro was serving in an artillery unit—Battery E, 320th Field Artillery, 82nd Division—but in reality, Tony was spending a lot more time with horses than with high explosives that summer in France. After all those months of training and drilling at Camp Gordon, here he was wandering around the French countryside like a peasant with a horse and wagon. At least Tony knew something about animals. Back in Forenza, the family kept a mule to haul firewood and water and baskets of laundry to and from the stream, so Tony had grown up shoving and shouting at a stubborn beast of burden. One more thing he didn’t miss about Italy. Horse, mule—it made no difference to Tony. If that’s what the army wanted him to do, that’s what he did.
Anyway, he was partly to blame for getting put on equine detail. One day when he was ordered to clean up the cigarette butts littering the encampment, Tony made the mistake of raising an objection. “I don’t smoke,” he told the sergeant, “and I’d rather clean up after the horses.” Whether the sergeant laughed—or more likely cursed—in his face, Tony never said. But the officer took him at his word and gave him a horse to clean up after—and a lieutenant too into the bargain. So now he was a lieutenant’s orderly and in charge of the lieutenant’s horse. Somehow that led to Tony getting a horse of his own—by far the best thing that had happened to him since being drafted. Whatever pride he felt in his mount, however, was quickly soured by a terrible accident. One day a soldier in his unit walked around behind Tony’s horse and slapped its rump as a practical joke. The horse spooked and kicked the guy in the head and killed him. Not the kind of death you wanted to be remembered for.
You’d think that nationality wouldn’t make much difference to a horse, but Tony found out otherwise. On the trip across the Atlantic, a German torpedo sank the ship carrying the regiment’s horses, so when the 320th Field Artillery got to France, they had to procure new steeds from the French—French steeds, naturally. When Tony landed the job of looking after the two horses, he discovered that they didn’t respond to commands in English. Curses didn’t work either. Nor did Italian. These were French horses and they obeyed only if you addressed them in their native tongue. So Tony picked up some French. Actually it wasn’t all that hard for him. Different accent from Italian but a lot of similar words.
Tony’s regiment was on the move a good deal in the first days of August—from a training area at La Courtine well south of the front to a series of villages in the Marne district and then, on August 12, over to Château-Thierry. On August 13, the 320th Field Artillery was ordered east to the Meurthe et Moselle district between Verdun and Strasbourg, and it was here in the dense woods shrouding the Moselle River north of Nancy that Tony got his first real taste of combat. German planes flew over every night to launch bombing raids on the American line. During the day the guys worked on their unit’s 75-millimeter guns—the standard smaller field artillery used by the AEF—along with nine 90-millimeter guns on loan from the French. One of Tony’s jobs was to carry crates of high-explosive shells to the gun emplacements, and he did this job so often that he wore out the front of his tunic—particularly irksome for a guy who took such pride in his appearance. August 21 was a day worth remembering: at 5:00 P.M., the 320th FA fired its first shot of the war at a German airplane that was harassing an American observation balloon. A week later, word came down that a major offensive was in the offing and the regiment snapped into feverish activity. Tony and his fellow privates were put to work digging gun pits, dugouts, and shelters; in order to conceal the impending attack from the Germans, all the work had to be done at night or behind camouflage nets. Nonetheless, the Germans got wind of the fact that something was up behind the American lines, and in the first days of September they became “vigorous with their harassing and searching fire,” in the words of the regiment’s historian. On the night of September 5–6, the 320th was severely gassed—and they responded immediately and lethally. Battery E, Tony’s battery, was moved forward and ordered to fire four hundred shells of high explosives and gas into the enemy trenches “at a rapid rate.” (By now, after the initial fumbling attempts to deliver poison gas from spray canisters, both sides had figured out how to load gas into artillery shells and fire them from the big guns along with rounds of HE and shrapnel.) “This fire had the desired effect,” the anonymous regimental historian noted tersely.
Whatever was afoot behind the American lines in that first week of September, Tony could only guess at from the stepped-up pace of work. “The nearer we get to the trenches the less we think about the war in its larger aspects,” one soldier wrote home. “Our own particular job fills our time and thoughts.” A common complaint of the enlisted men was that they understood even less about the progress of the war than the folks back home reading newspapers. They were the army’s muscle—and they found out about a new push only when their sergeant told them to pack up and head out.
Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year—started at sundown on Friday, September 6, that year. It was a sign of how culturally sensitive the army had become that Jewish soldiers were granted furloughs (whether they wanted them or not) from noon on September 6 to the morning of September 9.
Samuel Goldberg, serving with the 12th Cavalry Regiment in Hachita, New Mexico, was called in by his lieutenant colonel the day before the Jewish New Year and given a three-day pass to go to El Paso, Texas, about 150 miles east. “What for?” Private Goldberg asked. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” the officer shot back. “Goldberg is a very Jewish name. I just got a telegram instructing me to give furloughs to all Jewish soldiers for the weekend. You’re going to El Paso. Get yourself a room and go to temple.” Goldberg shrugged and took the pass. He had rarely set foot in a synagogue as a boy, had never been bar-mitzvahed, prided himself on passing for Irish (except for the name). But what was he going to do—a furlough was a furlough. Goldberg recounted the story nearly nine decades later: “I got to El Paso, checked into a cheap hotel, took a walk. What do you know, I walk right by the temple [Temple Mount Sinai, the synagogue Sam Dreben belonged to]. What the hell? It was ten, eleven in the morning, I walk in, figuring when I get back to camp I can tell the lieutenant colonel, ‘Yes sir, I went to temple.’ There’s one guy alone in there wearing the uniform of the Jewish Welfare Board [an organization founded at the outset of the war to supply Jewish chaplains to the army and to tend to the “physical and spiritual needs” of Jewish soldiers]. When he sees me, this guy says, ‘Come on, you’re late.’ He tells me that local families were taking in Jewish soldiers for dinner and entertaining them. He checks me out of the cheap hotel and checks me into a decent place. Then he rides me over to a young family—a man who owns a shoe store. They took us all around El Paso, we had lobster, ice cream. The food was so rich I got sick.” And that was how Sam Goldberg spent his Rosh Hashanah in the army.
Meyer Epstein, a devout Jew all his life, would have welcomed the chance to celebrate Rosh Hashanah—but there was no way he or anyone else in his regiment was going to get a furlough. The Rosh Hashanah leave was available only when “it will not interfere with military operations,” and on the day of the holiday, Meyer’s unit was under orders to pack up and move north toward the line as part of the big impending American offensive. So prayers would have to wait—or be offered silently amid the chaos and uproar and gut-twisting anxiety of tens of thousands of soldiers being funneled into combat. For Meyer the anxiety was especially acute because this was his first time—first assignment to a combat unit, first battle, first time fighting with Company H, 58th Infantry Regiment, 4th “Ivy” Division. Like Max Cieminski, Meyer Epstein was a replacement soldier, new blood transfused into a company that had bled too heavily to go on fighting. In the first week of August, Company H had taken casualties of 70 percent at the Vesle River, at the northern edge of the Marne salient where the 4th Division had relieved the Rainbow Division on August 3. On August 7, five days before Meyer was rotated in, Company H’s captain was gassed and one of its lieutenants was killed. Obviously, replacements were sorely needed if the unit was to go on fighting—and at this stage in the war it didn’t matter where those replacements came from or how little they had been trained. More bodies—American bodies: it was clear that volume of flesh would win the war.
When Meyer joined Company H on August 12, he faced the usual grumbling about goddamn replacements from the veterans of the Marne campaign—grumbling that was all the more barbed because so many of their buddies had fallen so recently. There is no elite as impenetrable as the fraternity of men who have just come off a blood-soaked battlefield. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, how brave or strong or good you might be—if you weren’t there fighting beside those veterans, they have no use for you.
Meyer arrived the day after the regiment got pulled off the line. They were hunkered down at a farm deep in the northeastern French countryside between Troyes and Nancy, but still close enough to the front to be regularly shelled, bombed, and strafed by machine guns mounted on German planes. In fact, on Meyer’s first day, a German shell blew up one of the regiment’s ammunition dumps, wounding eight men. The following day they were on the move again—they would be on the move nearly every day for the next week, always marching at night, pushing east. The men collapsed around dawn and slept through the morning. On warm dry days they slept in the open or under trees without bothering to pitch their pup tents. Meyer was horrified to wake one day and find himself sleeping in a woods littered with the corpses of hundreds of American marines.
Meyer had been living by his wits and his muscles since the age of ten. Marching with the army through France was not much worse than hauling junk around the shtetls of the Pale with a horse and cart. Even the replacement stigma didn’t set him back for long. Some of the other Jews complained about anti-Semitism, but it was never an issue for Meyer. Whatever they threw at him, he’d know how to handle it.
On August 19, Company H moved into the hamlet of Liffol-le-Grand, just east of the provincial border between Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine, seventy-one kilometers southwest of Nancy, and here they remained for the next twelve days. Meyer and the other 279 replacements with the second battalion were given a round of intensive training. Another 125 replacements arrived on August 25. The lieutenant colonel let it be known that before moving on he wanted every man in the battalion to have experience firing a Chauchat, the French-made light machine gun that the AEF was acquiring as fast as it could. So in the last days of August, Meyer became adept—or at least competent—at shooting. On September 1, the men of Company H were piled into trucks and driven a hundred kilometers north to Remebercourt, arriving at their new post at three in the morning on September 2. Four days later was Rosh Hashanah, and that night, starting at ten thirty, Meyer’s company was ordered to pull out and head north toward Verdun. It was a miserable, fouled-up exodus. The rolling kitchens and water carts weren’t ready, so the men departed without provisions. Drivers got lost or separated and had trouble turning around. According to the company historian, at some point in the night, “The truck drivers were . . . lined up and told that the whole trouble was because they were afraid. One replied that who wouldn’t be afraid if one was going to the front for the first time.” Finally, at six the next morning, they arrived at a woods east of Fort d’Houdainville—practically at the outskirts of Verdun.
Instead of praying and meditating to the blast of the ram’s horn that ushers in the Jewish New Year, Meyer had spent Rosh Hashanah huddled in a truck on his way to the front. Private Epstein knew—everyone in Company H from the scared truck drivers to Captain Bertram M. Cosgrove knew—that it was only a matter of days before the big offensive was launched and they’d be ordered into the fire of German machine guns.
On September 9, three days after Rosh Hashanah, General Pershing’s headquarters issued an order allowing alien soldiers serving in Europe to file for immediate citizenship without returning to the United States. The May 9, 1918, amendment to the naturalization act had already expedited the citizenship process for aliens serving in the armed forces by waiving the residency requirement and the need to take out first papers—but now General Order 151 made it even easier and quicker. Under GO 151, immigrant soldiers needed to file but a single form (in duplicate) comprising “the Petition for Naturalization, the Affidavit of Witnesses and the Oath of Allegiance,” and they were in. Pershing further ordered that “all commanding officers will lend their active aid to aliens under their command, and will see that the naturalization papers are supplied, understood, properly executed and promptly forwarded.” The accompanying Bulletin No. 68 written by Pershing’s chief of staff more or less rolled out the red, white, and blue carpet: “After any alien has made out his ‘Petition’ and taken the oath of allegiance before the proper army officer, he may for all purposes be regarded as an American citizen. There is nothing further for him to do so long as he remains in the army.”
Pershing’s headquarters was immediately flooded with petitions. Fridolin Blanchard, Frank Zappala, Vincenzo di Clemente, Olaf Berget, Jake Goldberg, Lars J. Rindal, Michael Christian Schouten, Condiloro Lombardo, Aristotile Zoccoli, and Michael Francis Walsh were among the names sent in with the first flush. Private Nicholas Carras appended this note to his petition: “I don’t exactly remember the date but over five years ago I took out my first naturalization papers in New York City. I was born in Locovis, Macedonia, November 1, 1890, then Turkey, now Greece, by Greek parents. I landed in the U.S.A. April 17, 1912 as a Turkish citizen and in taking out my first papers I had to denounce the Sultan of Turkey.” Private Carras was General Pershing’s butler.
The timing of GO 151 was revealing. With the AEF about to mount the first all-American offensive, Pershing had flung open the doors to citizenship as wide as they would go. A symbolic, perhaps even a cynical gesture—but immigrant soldiers nonetheless streamed through by the hundreds.
The big offensive—the drive to clear out the St. Mihiel salient south of Verdun that the Germans had held since 1914—was the first action in the Great War entirely planned and led by American forces, and it had all the signs of a young, untried power flexing its new muscles. Pershing laid on ten American and three French divisions, with four more American divisions in reserve—more than a quarter of a million men in all—against a force of perhaps twenty-three thousand war-weary Germans. The logistics were mind-boggling, especially since the American command was frantic to keep the attack a secret. In this they were at least partly successful. Though the Germans realized the Americans were up to something in the sector, they were taken by surprise when American artillery opened fire at 1:00 A.M. on the morning of September 12.
The All-American Division was on tap for the initial assault, and Tony Pierro was there on the front line feeding his battery’s 75-millimeter guns with unbelievable quantities of shells. While the opening barrage was in progress, the 320th Field Artillery was under orders to fire at the rate of one and two-thirds rounds per gun per minute: every thirty-six seconds an artillery piece would rear back and vomit forth a high-explosive shell loaded with either gunpowder or poison gas. Tony’s tunic acquired a few new threadbare patches that night.
Meyer Epstein, Peter Thompson, Leonardo Costantino, and Tommaso Ottaviano were all infantrymen at St. Mihiel, but this first brush with real action proved to be something of a letdown. Meyer’s unit had been assigned to support the 59th Infantry—and “the duties consisted of watchful waiting and constant preparedness to act,” in the words of the company historian. The 91st Division was held in reserve, so Peter Thompson and Leonardo Costantino sat out the battle perched on a hill in the rain watching smoke rise from the villages below. Leonardo jotted down in his log it how it looked and felt to him:
Sept. 11 Are now in reserve for the Saint Michel Drive. Went through many towns but cannot see much. Pitched a tent at day light. Spent a very cool night. SOME life into woods.
Sept. 12 Again we moved last night. Can’t stay in one spot very long for fear of the enemy. Are only 9 miles from the line. Rain all the time out here.
Sept. 13 The Americans took 20,000 prisoners in two days. Eats are O.K. Sleep pretty warm in my tent with my friend Emil C. Berhard.
That pretty much said it all as far as the Wild West Division was concerned.
The first great American battle of the war was over in a matter of hours. “One of the darkest nights ever seen,” wrote the Catholic chaplain serving with Meyer Epstein’s regiment on Friday, September 13, “and yet biggest trick pulled off in war to date.” It was not, however, entirely clear who had been tricked. The Germans had been intending to abandon the salient anyway, and the American push merely served to hasten the inevitable. As Pershing’s mighty army advanced, the Germans staged a swift, devastating scorched-earth retreat, burning villages, fouling water supplies, and exploding bridges as they went. In the two-day campaign the AEF managed to seize some 13,521 German prisoners (Leonardo’s figure of 20,000 was a touch inflated), 466 guns, and a large smoking triangle of mud that the Germans had occupied for four terrible years. Allied casualties totaled around 7,000. There was much weeping and embracing from liberated French villagers. German soldiers were also falling into the arms of the advancing Doughboys. Many Americans noticed the grins on the faces of the tattered, hungry German prisoners as they surrendered. “Can I go back now to Sharon, Pennsylvania?” pleaded one Austrian prisoner who had been working in the States when the war broke out. The American command, desperate to show the AEF in the best possible light, boasted of the lightning-fast decisive victory—one general crowed over the “vim, dash and courage” of the army’s “splendid young manhood”—but our partners were less impressed. The French sniffed that the battle was no more than a German retreat disguised as an American advance. French military observers faulted the American army for its lack of foresight, poor map-reading skills, wretched traffic management, and mediocre liaison. And some officers wondered why, with the Germans on the run, Pershing had failed to press his advantage and continue east to the strategic city of Metz on the Moselle River.
With both the Marne and the St. Mihiel salients pinched off, the war had in a sense come full circle: after the German retreat was completed on September 13, the Western Front ran through more or less in the same territory as in the autumn of 1914 when the conflict had first become stuck in trench warfare. The signal difference was that the German army had steadily and massively beefed up its defensive position in the interval. In the winter of 1916–1917, the Germans commandeered gangs of prisoners of war and French civilians to fortify a hundred-mile stretch of the front from east of Arras to Soissons with an elaborate network of triple trenches, barbed wire, concrete bunkers, observation posts, and machine-gun emplacements. In their pride, the German command named sections of the line after the Norse gods and heroes of Wagner’s Ring operas—from north to south, Wotan Stellung, Siegfried Stellung, Alberich Stellung, Brunhilde Stellung, and Kriemhilde Stellung, with the Siegfried section reputed to be the strongest. The Allies dubbed the entire vicious skein of wire and concrete the Hindenburg Line and spoke of it with the grudging awe one accords an enemy’s most lethal ingenuity.
The Germans insisted that the Hindenburg Line was an impregnable barrier between the Fatherland and the Allied armies, and so far the Allies had had no reason to write this off as an idle boast. But the word “impregnable” did not figure in the battle plan that British, French, and American generals had come up with to end—and win—the war. Even as American divisions were streaming north and east through the St. Mihiel salient, orders were being sent out to move hundreds of thousands of men into new positions and, in a matter of days, to throw them at the wire, the concrete, and the bullets of the Hindenburg Line.
Epifanio Affatato and Mike Valente had the bad luck to be among those thrown first and hardest at the most impregnable stretch of the line—but no combat soldier, even those who had yet to see a lick of action, got off easily in the autumn of 1918.