The fourth winter of the World War lingered throughout northern France on Tuesday, April 16, 1918, reluctant to give way to spring. Mercury hovered in the low forties at midmorning under an overcast, almost colorless sky, shaping what one officer described as “a cold, bleak April day.” The persistent cold was especially discomforting to the division commander, Major General Bullard, who suffered from neuritis that shot debilitating pain through his right arm and left him shivering with chills even on warm days.
Standing before the three-story chateau serving as his temporary Division Headquarters, Bullard eyed the long approach road for the distinctive four-star command car of his boss, the “Big Chief,” Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing. Ever the field commander, Bullard stood informally in dusty, spurred riding boots and khaki soft-sided cap, the two-star rank on his shoulders concealed by his bulky wolfskin coat. At his side, a handful of staff officers stood braced in anticipation, polished in Sam Browne belts under buttoned-up, sleek olive overcoats. General Pershing was on his way to address the division’s officers, and Bullard, knowing the Big Chief’s impatience for sickly commanders, concealed his physical agony and forced a display of complete health.
A West Pointer from Alabama, fifty-seven-year-old Robert Lee Bullard was slim and refined. He stood five feet ten inches tall, and his clear blue eyes peered warmly from a pale face of delicate features, with short, frosted wisps of brown hair poking out from under his cap. His reading glasses appeared instantly when there was a map to be studied or memorandum to be reviewed, underscoring an erudition that more closely resembled a professor than an Army commander. But a highly informal and energetic command style belied his patrician appearance, and he drove his troops hard.
Bullard commanded the 28,000 soldiers of the US Army’s 1st Division, celebrated the previous summer as the first “doughboys” to land in France after America’s entry into the war. By fall, they had earned the distinction of being the first in the trenches, the first to fire a shot at the Germans, and the first to suffer combat casualties. In the bitter cold of January, as other fresh divisions of the AEF (American Expeditionary Forces) were trickling into France for training, Bullard led his troops into the front lines of an active sector, gaining for them indispensable experience under fire and fixing a fighting institutional tone.
Despite the neuritis that stung his shoulder and arm and hampered him with insufferable cold spells, Bullard remained an unbroken presence in the field by his men through the stretch of winter conditions so harsh many called it the “Valley Forge of the War.” In the privacy of his headquarters, staff officers occasionally spotted him wrapped in blankets in front of a roaring fire, but before his soldiers he forced a stoic façade betrayed only by a strained expression and a clench-fisted right arm slung in the grip of his left hand. Bullard believed the best officer was “ready to do and to bear all that his men do and bear,” and in living this—and through his folksy, courteous leadership style—he quickly earned the affection of his men.
* * *
Three weeks earlier, a massive German offensive forced Allied lines back forty miles, the most alarming movement yet on a Western Front marked by three and a half years of strategic rigor mortis. In the face of this great crisis, General Pershing offered French General Ferdinand Foch—the Supreme Allied Commander—“all that we have.” Of the five American divisions in France, Pershing ordered his favored 1st—which he openly regarded as the brightest star in the AEF’s expanding constellation—to the front to help stem the German tide. Thirteen months after America entered the war and ten months after landing in France, Bullard’s troops were finally headed into battle.
That morning, General Bullard and his staff awoke in their stately chateau situated on the edge of the town of Chaumont-en-Vexin serving as the division’s temporary headquarters on the way to the front lines. On a landscape still unreached by the fighting, green pastures were crossed by age-old stone walls, hedgerows, and patches of forest. Inside the chateau was a scene common in wartime France—elegant furniture and polished hardwoods invaded by clacking typewriters, scaled wall maps, and buzzing field phones.
General Pershing was scheduled to arrive at 10:30 a.m. to “speak a few words of confidence and encouragement” to all the officers of the division before they led their men off the next day for the three-day journey to the front and into the war. Out back in the chateau’s grass courtyard, an audience of more than 900 officers stood gathered. They huddled in familiar groups—frosty-haired field commanders, newly minted lieutenants, disheveled artillery battery commanders, and polished staff officers. With disparate sections and smaller subunits typically spread over miles of countryside in large sectors, rarely before had these leaders all assembled together, and never without the men under their charge or their ever-present French Army advisors. This gathering was a singular event, and theirs was a peerless group. As the collective leadership of America’s first fighting force to enter battle against the German Army, these officers personified the tip of the spear—the first face of US military power on a global stage.
Out in front of the chateau, with the crunch of tires on gravel, two cars pulled up, led by General Pershing’s distinctive olive-green Locomobile limousine with its American flag and four-star placards bordering the front windshield. Two staff officers emerged from the second car, and from Pershing’s car stepped the AEF supply officer, Col. Charles Dawes, along with the Big Chief himself.
Poised and handsome with broad shoulders and chiseled features, John J. Pershing was the ideal physical expression of America’s military presence in Europe. At fifty-seven years old, he was the picture of health and self-possession. His doctors said he had “the heart and arteries of a man of thirty-five and the eye lens crystal of a boy of eighteen.” He stood five feet nine inches tall, but his ramrod-straight posture and commanding bearing often left those in his presence with the impression he was six feet tall or taller. A French magazine described him as “slender as a sub-lieutenant,” and a correspondent effused that he was “tall, powerful of frame, without an ounce of fat anywhere on his body, and hard as bronze.” He was, as the doughboy and future historian S.L.A. Marshall would later write, “tailor-made for monuments.”
General Pershing walked up to the 1st Division headquarters wearing polished knee-high leather boots; a long, sleek, uniform dress coat; leather gloves; and a rigid peaked cap pulled squarely forward so the brim dipped almost to cover his eyes. General Bullard, in stark contrast, in his tilted side cap and wolfskin coat (a non-regulation gift from his men) must have rankled his fastidious and impeccably uniformed boss. After a flurry of salutes, Bullard ushered Pershing and his retinue up the limestone steps and through the chateau toward the courtyard.
Although both were general officers with careers that began just one year apart at West Point, their differences could hardly have been more pronounced—a contrast that began as far back as their childhood. A four-year-old John Pershing had seen Confederates overrun his Missouri town, where his father was a home-guard officer who used his general store to supply Union soldiers. Robert Bullard’s earliest military inspiration was seeing his brother-in-law return to his Alabama home from the same war in Confederate grays, and after young Robert’s home county was renamed Lee County for the revered general, he personally asked if he could be baptized “Robert Lee” instead of his own given name, “William Robert.” In a manner that marked their regional differences, Pershing spoke with a calm voice and discernible Midwestern accent, while Bullard—who complained he “couldn’t pronounce the ‘g’ on the end of a word if his life depended on it”—spoke in a high pitch with a deep Southern twang.
Lacking connections that would have afforded him a position commanding one of the few Regular Army units that fought in the Spanish-American War and the Philippines, Bullard had spent much of his career effectively forming and holding together volunteer regiments of citizen soldiers, experience that instilled in him a personal, informal leadership style. He had little patience for highfalutin military ceremony and no regard for formality, being more concerned with building good fighters than good marchers. His biographer notes that the men he led in combat in the Philippines “respected [his] poise, aggressiveness, and concern for their welfare … and his disregard for military ceremony”—sentiments that would be echoed by men under his command in the World War.
For his part, Pershing lived in spotless living quarters and was never seen publicly with a thread out of place. Obsessive over proper military appearance, regimented uniformity had gained ascendancy in him over all other virtues. He had an abiding dislike for disorder, insisted on perfection, and was, in the atmosphere of Army life, official and distant. Pershing was fond of formal ceremony and held himself publicly aloof from his men at almost all times. Bullard considered him “too impersonal” and “too given over to pure business and duty,” traits that “inspired confidence but not affection.”
It was only in private moments that Pershing’s warmer, sensitive side, buried beneath many layers of reserve, revealed itself. “He spoke of the soldiers as a father speaks of his sons,” one war correspondent noted. But to most officers who served with him and to the millions who served under him, Pershing’s personality was as impenetrable as any one of the bronze or stone monuments that would materialize in his likeness in the years to come.
For all their professional and personal differences, both generals invested their fullest measure of effort into their respective roles in America’s part in the war, and their commitment to the Allied cause was total. Most significantly, John Pershing had unflagging confidence in Robert Bullard. He had personally handpicked Bullard as the division commander five months earlier, and his later selection of the 1st Division to enter battle against the Germans before all others was the highest proof of his faith. Pershing believed in the men and he believed in Bullard, and imparting his confidence was the purpose of his visit.
* * *
The officers assembled behind the headquarters were listening to some preparatory remarks from the division operations officer—a tall, lanky, thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel from Pennsylvania named George C. Marshall Jr. Destined to become the Army’s senior five-star general in World War II, Marshall was one of many young 1st Division officers filling the courtyard who embodied the very future of American military leadership. Twenty-nine-year-old Capt. Clarence Huebner, a company commander from Kansas, would go on to lead the 1st Division ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day as a major general in the next world war. Thirty-year-old Maj. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., a battalion commander and son of the former president, would also lead men on D-Day, where he would earn the Medal of Honor as the first general officer ashore at Utah Beach. And Lt. John Church, a twenty-five-year-old platoon leader who one year earlier had quit his classes at NYU to volunteer, would cross the Rhine as a brigadier general in the next war, and would lead the 24th Infantry Division in brave fighting as a major general in the Korean War.
At perhaps no other moment in American military history was the future so brightly on display. In the present war and wars to follow, the 1st Division officers present would produce seven division commanders, four corps commanders, and three Army chiefs of staff. It was as if the entire future of the US Army was assembled in the small French courtyard, and General Pershing was coming not only to send them off to their first battle, but into a future of war and challenges that lay far beyond his own horizon-filling vision. The leaders there, Pershing would later write, “formed a rare group. These splendid looking men, hardened by the strenuous work of the fall and by two months in winter trenches, fairly radiated the spirit of courage and gave promise that America’s efforts would prove her sons the equals of their forefathers.”
The officers were called to attention when General Pershing stepped out the back of the chateau and into the courtyard. All except the most senior officers had only ever seen the man in passing, typically while they were braced at attention in salute. One lieutenant noted that, prior to this, his only “personal connection with the general” had been “reveille at 3 a.m. on a December morn, a long march, ten miles or more, on a very cold day over roads slippery with ice; a long, shivering wait in the streets … presenting arms while the general’s party passed” followed by “another long march back to the billets.” At the shouted command of “At ease,” they formed a large semicircle around their Big Chief a dozen deep, and strained to see him in this unusually intimate setting.
For all his public appearances and ceremonial duties as the head of American forces in Europe, Pershing was averse to giving speeches. The thought of giving any kind of formal talk, he once remarked, “makes me shiver.” The previous summer, at the July 4 parade in Paris honoring the newly arrived Americans, Pershing had designated a staff colonel to speak in his stead, whose words at the occasion—“Lafayette, we are here”—would be long ascribed to Pershing. When a speech was necessary, he preferred speaking extemporaneously, and in that manner he “found no difficulty.” Although he doubtless pondered his remarks on the ninety-minute car ride from his headquarters, he would later say his words to the officers that morning were “spoken under the inspiration of the moment.”
* * *
“I did not want you to enter into real participation in this war without my having said a word to you as a body,” Pershing began, pointing with his gloved hand. “I believe you are well prepared to take your place along with the seasoned troops of our Allies.” Training was complete, he explained, but “war itself is the real school where the art of war is learned,” and the fighting principles they had been taught would soon be applied “in the actual experience of war.” Imploring the young leaders not to strain to recall text from training manuals while in battle, he imparted plainly: “You will be called upon to meet conditions that have never been presented to you before.”
It was on the soldiers under their command, “upon their stamina, upon their character and upon their will to win,” that the officers were to rely. Pershing beseeched them to keep their men’s interests foremost, to keep their morale “at the highest pitch,” to “keep in close touch with them” and be an example for them “in everything that personifies the true soldier, in dress, in military bearing, in general conduct, and especially an example on the battlefield.” Most important, he urged them to prepare their soldiers mentally to bear thoughts of their own mortality, “that when the occasion demands it they must make the supreme sacrifice.”
Pershing used no flowery diction and employed no powerful metaphors, but through the pin-drop silence of the frosty air, his words carried an affirmation of high purpose. One officer said it was just “a few simple words” to show the Big Chief’s “confidence in them and what they would do to uphold the traditions of their country.” Brig. Gen. Charles Summerall, the division artillery commander, noted Pershing’s “personality and his lofty sentiments were an inspiration.” One of the brigade commanders, Brig. Gen. John Hines, was reminded of a football coach getting his team up for a game, and the official Division History would later engrave it as “Pershing’s Farewell to the First.”
Behind Pershing stood Bullard, cradling his stiff right arm in his left hand and wearing what one officer described as a “solemn, determined look.” Of the speech, Bullard observed “it was not oratory,” describing it as “earnest but not … dramatic,” which his boss delivered “in his terse, businesslike way.” Pershing’s delivery lacked charismatic sparkle, and he halted every few words filling frequent pauses with “eh, eh, eh.” Still, his rough and uneven delivery combined with his reassuring bearing to reach the perfect pitch. It was “[h]is manner and his expression, more than his speech,” George Marshall observed, that “fired the officers of the 1st division with the determination to overcome the enemy wherever he was encountered.” Pershing’s chief of staff, Col. James Harbord, agreed, telling his dairy later that night that the Big Chief’s “very stirring talk” was “made in that simple, direct manner which is supposed to appeal to the American soldier, and in which our General quite excels.”
One company commander noted General Pershing’s “earnestness impressed all hearers,” but it was the specter of battle that lingered sharply in most ears, as if his words served as final confirmation of what the coming days and weeks held. “All who heard” Pershing’s remarks, the same captain estimated, “were convinced that he contemplated an offensive use of the division, and that soon.” Another young officer, Capt. Edward Johnston, spotted a sobering effect of the message on the gathered men. There was, he perceived, “a certain lack of Napoleonic enthusiasm on the part” of the officers, who seemed “rather serious.” Still he sensed no “atmosphere of gloom” but “a certain air of anticipatory interest.” “And why not? The Great Battle was bound to be interesting.”
“I did not come here to make a speech,” Pershing continued. “I am not given to speech-making, so only a word more and I shall close.” He turned to the herculean task ahead, likening it to a noble crusade: “You are about to enter this great battle of the greatest war in history,” and striking a distinct note of national pride, he reminded them, “in that battle you will represent the mightiest nation engaged.” That thought alone, he nudged them, “must be to every serious man a very appealing thought, and one that should call forth the best and the noblest that is in you.”
Anchoring his statements firmly in the allure of world history, Pershing declared, “Centuries of military and civil history are now looking toward this first contingent of the American Army as it enters this great battle.” Reminding them of the “young and aggressive nation” they represented, he narrowed his appeal to their national past. “We come from a nation that for one hundred and fifty years has stood before the world as the champion of the sacred principles of human liberty.” It was the United States, now personified in these officers and the men they led, that had returned “to Europe, the home of our ancestors, to help defend those same principles upon European soil.”
In a finality crafted to arouse dormant enthusiasm, Pershing asked, “Could there be a more stimulating sentiment as you go from here to your commands, and from there to the battlefield?” He concluded:
Our people today are hanging expectant upon your deeds. The future is hanging upon your action in this conflict. You are going forward, and your conduct will be an example for succeeding units of our army. I hope the standard you set will be high—I know it will be high. You are taking with you the highest hopes of the President and all of our people at home. I assure you, in their names and in my own, of our strong beliefs in your success and of our confidence in our hearts that you are going to make a record of which your country will be proud.
With that, his short speech came to an end and he stepped back. General Bullard stepped forward and “said a few words” in closing. “There was no effort on the part of either to be dramatic,” a colonel later recalled; “the scene and occasion required no emphasis.”
* * *
Most, but not all, who witnessed the scene were impressed. George Marshall noted that Pershing’s remarks “made a profound impression on all those present.” But Maj. Robert McCormick, the coeditor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune who was presently answering the call of national service as an artillery officer, dryly described it as “a weak speech saying we were to go in line.” And as the crowd dispersed, Lt. Lansing McVickar of Massachusetts asked his friend, Lt. Earl Bonham of Indiana, “[W]hat did you think of the General’s speech?” Bonham quipped that he “shed a few tears, but did you [notice] the boots?”
For those who found omens in such an occasion, the speech filled them with a foreboding of the prospect of war, as well as their own mortality. “We began to think when our offensive training schedule was published and actually knew that the end of our lives had come when General Pershing bade us all farewell,” noted a lieutenant in the engineers. Another later remembered walking away from the speech “with a rather creepy feeling because I didn’t fancy at all getting killed.”
But for most of these young leaders, General Pershing’s speech was a stirring summons, and it gave immortal expression to the durable virtue of valor in the cause of country. His words not only ignited the emotions of many present, but left a lasting impression on all. Years later, one lieutenant in attendance would recall, “A picture that vividly comes to mind whenever I think of the war is … when General Pershing made what I have always considered his valedictory address to the First Division.” General Summerall would later describe the scene as “one of the outstanding incidents in the life of the command.”
Pershing’s confident but muted delivery anticipated the historic gravity that hindsight would later assign the moment. His supply officer (and future vice president), Col. Charles Dawes, described the occasion as both “solemn” and “historical,” marking “the real entry of our nation into actual battle.” The scene became legendary among division officers not for any feat of oratory but for Pershing’s presence, and mostly for his final confirmation that they were to be sent into battle in a cause worthy of their “supreme sacrifice.”
* * *
The next morning these officers would organize their men and begin a three-day trip to the front lines. Their destination was a sector facing an enemy entrenched in the small farming hamlet of Cantigny. Captured by the Germans two weeks before, Cantigny sat on a hilltop jutting into and overlooking the Allied lines, representing the westernmost tip of the recent German thrust. The division’s task would be to push the Germans back and recapture the village—a feat that would not only wrest from the Germans a dominating observation point but would also loudly announce America’s presence in the fighting line. Along the whole of the 468-mile-long Western Front, there was perhaps no better place for such a statement than Cantigny.
Six weeks to the day after Pershing’s courtyard speech, at dawn on Tuesday, May 28, 1918—the 1,394th day of the war—the United States finally entered the fight as American riflemen climbed “over the top” of their trench parapets and crossed no-man’s-land into history. It is no spoiler to reveal here that they were successful, and their long path to victory is the story you are about to read. It is my attempt to tell how a few thousand young soldiers found themselves thrust abruptly into manhood in a bloody struggle for survival within the ghostly remains of a small French village.
Doughboys who fought to capture Cantigny were met with a violence never before experienced by uniformed fighters of the United States. In the two-and-a-half day fight, men were shredded by machine-gun fire, blown to unrecognizable bits by mortar blasts, and knocked into instant death by the concussive detonations of high-explosive shells. Over one-fourth were wounded and nearly one-tenth killed in action, marking a higher casualty rate than that suffered by the Continentals at Saratoga, either side at Antietam, or even the Allies on D-Day.
For all the satisfaction that victory brought, Cantigny exposed the sad reality that the newly arrived Americans were not exempt from the inescapable butchery of the Western Front. Though the battle was a small operation—just over 4,000 Americans fighting a smaller number of Germans—it served as a harsh awakening for the AEF high command: a forced realization that despite noble efforts to fight a new and different way from its allies, the United States could not help but surrender itself to the grim embrace of total war. Beginning with the first reports of killed and injured to flow from the dirt of the village to field commanders’ muster rolls to AEF casualty totals cabled across the Atlantic on May 29, each day for the next five and a half months, newspapers back in the States published heartbreaking casualty lists, which by fall would reach a daily scale unseen in American history, before or since.
* * *
After the Armistice, 116,516 envelopes were mailed from the War Department, each addressed to the closest surviving relative of an American killed in action during the war. Enclosed was Graves Registration Service Form #120, which gave a widow or father or mother or sibling the one-time option, at government expense, of shipping the remains of their loved one home to the cemetery of their choice—to include Arlington—or to be buried at one of the newly constructed US National Cemeteries scattered throughout France and Belgium.
The bodies of men killed at Cantigny whose families did not request them shipped home were buried in the Somme American Cemetery and Memorial in Bony, France. Like the battle in which they fell, the cemetery is small—actually the smallest of the five military cemeteries in France dedicated exclusively for the burial of Americans killed in the First World War. Residing on fourteen acres of beautiful and peaceful rolling northern French countryside forty-eight miles from the battlefield, the Somme American Cemetery holds the graves of 1,844 of our military dead. Names, units, and dates of death are carved into the faceless, white marble headstones, Latin crosses or Stars of David frozen in eternal rows of military formation. Inside the small stone chapel at the southeast end of the cemetery are the tablets of the missing. Below an inscription honoring the fallen “who sleep in unknown graves” are carved the names of those whose remains were never found. There, 333 names are arranged alphabetically, followed by rank, unit, date of death, and home state. Individual soldiers are memorialized in orderly etched rows, lit by subdued sunlight through a cross-shaped crystal window.
Scanning the heartbreaking list for “May 28, 1918” and the two days following, visitors can see that the battle of Cantigny accounts for one-quarter of the chapel’s carved names, each signifying someone last seen fighting in the dirt and among the ruins of the village. Outside, located mostly in Plots C and D, more than 100 headstones memorialize men whose lives ended during the battle. Together with those whose remains were shipped back across the Atlantic to rest nearer their family, more than 300 doughboys were killed in the two-and-a-half-day fight for the village.
But as with every battle before and since, the struggle for Cantigny did not end at the cemetery, and it was on the battlefield around the village, where so many breathed their last, that the future of the war was written. Marking the first time that an American unit would capture enemy territory, the 1st Division’s improbable victory in what Pershing called “this great battle” was the first American dent in the impregnable armor of the Western Front. Making far more than a single statement, Cantigny was the doughboys’ baptism by fire, and for those who survived, it became the crucible by which they would measure all subsequent experience, in large-scale fighting at Soissons and the grand Meuse-Argonne offensive.
Historically, the fight for Cantigny was the first American clash with the German Army, a conflict between two world powers that would see many bloodier fights over the next twenty-seven years. Tactically, the operation previewed modern military methods, marking the first time American soldiers fought with the intricate support of artillery, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenades, gas, tanks, and airplanes, signifying the establishment of combined arms and the birth of our modern Army. Thus, May 28, 1918 was the US military’s coming-of-age—the day it crossed a historical no-man’s-land that separated contemporary fighting methods from the muskets and cannon of the nineteenth century.
The 1st Division’s casualties in the battle tolled more than 1,600 men. Thinking as one does in the context of the First World War as a whole, this number is small, but the scale of turning points is not always grand. Not always is a vital battle of war marked by the magnitude of Operation Overlord on D-Day, the desperate struggle of the Marines on Iwo Jima, or the romantic attachments of historians to the pivotal battle of Gettysburg. Often the tide of events reaches a peak on the corner of a small foreign field with relatively few witnesses.
Cantigny was such a moment, reminding us that in history’s malleable narrative, scale is no measure of significance. The decision to attack the Germans first at this small village would prove momentous, and the surge stirred by the battle’s timing and outcome would not only elevate the AEF’s role on the Western Front and in the World War, but would prove America’s first small step toward a colossal Allied victory.
* * *
The first reports of American victory at Cantigny made their way into print by the second morning of the battle, May 29, 1918, even as General Bullard’s soldiers hung on tenuously to their positions in a struggle against death under a rain of enemy steel. Triumphant headlines monopolized the front pages of newspapers: “Americans Take Town Alone,” “Sammies Shout ‘We’re on Our Way to Berlin’ As They Take Village,” and “Yankees Yell As They Take Cantigny,” all bought up by a public thirsty for good news from “over there.” It had been thirteen long months since the citizenry had been stirred by President Wilson’s eloquent call to arms—“The world must be made safe for democracy”—and since then, communities had seen their high school students and local businessmen flock to the colors in growing numbers. Hometown papers carried daily articles about local boys in training, and published letters home in devoted sections, “News from the Front,” or “Letters from the Trenches.”
So when morning headlines carried bulletins of America’s first victory against the Germans—against “Kaiser Bill” and his dreaded “Huns”—a national pride was ignited that would endure unmatched by any subsequent news until war’s end. In the years after the Armistice, each May 28th would see editorials celebrating the battle, often including interviews with local veterans of the storied attack, occasionally enlarging the deeds of many into exaggerated legend. John Pershing and Robert Bullard, even in retirement, would each preside over “Cantigny Day” ceremonies, which often coincided with Memorial Day.
Through the 1920s and ’30s, “Cantigny” remained a symbol of American sacrifice and triumph, a uniting emblem that finally exorcised the dividing demons of the Civil War in a way the Spanish-American War never could. But then came Pearl Harbor. And D-Day. And the Bulge. And in the wake of these epochal events, the 1st Division’s attack at Cantigny lapsed into footnotes, its story left to slumber for a century.
This book is my effort to pull America’s first fight of the Great War out of the dark shadows of a forgotten past. It is an attempt to memorialize the battle by revisiting a few of war’s irreducible truths—that victories in combat are the collective actions of otherwise ordinary citizens, that statistics cannot tell sacrifice’s story, and in war, no matter how many millions are killed, soldiers die as they lived, one by one by one. The last Cantigny veteran died in the late 1990s, and with the passing of Frank Buckles in early 2011, the living narrative of the doughboy on the Western Front was forever sealed. Any attempt to breathe life into names chiseled in the faceless marble crosses at the Somme American Cemetery or to pierce the anonymity of featureless lists on the tablets of the missing entombed in the cemetery’s chapel can never be complete. Soldiers’ private writings, official reports, and memoirs are now all we have, but they add rich color to fading, sepia-toned photographs. They reveal the transformation of farmhands from Kansas and factory workers from Michigan into soldiers. They shed light on the difficult transition of a handful of professional Army officers—veterans of quieter times—into commanders of the first American fighting force on a world stage. And they chronicle the front-line education under machine-gun and artillery fire that turned college students and young professionals into leaders of men.
The diaries and letters of Cantigny veterans contain expressions of dread or nerves otherwise hidden beneath layers of youthful bravado. They uncloak the men who fought to the high ground of the village, revealing an inner spectrum of adrenaline, strength, fear, and sadness. Many were mere boys who had sprinted to enlist, propelled by images of battlefield glory. But the blood and death that soon besieged them forced a realization that war was no adventure—it was dark, confusing, brutal, and harrowing. Those who survived would go on to work as accountants, railroad engineers, and insurance salesmen; they would be elected mayor and US senator; and a few would continue military service as generals in World War II and Korea. Though they helped bend the course of a world war, they allowed neither the battle nor the war to define them, and most only spoke of it—if at all—when corresponding with old Army friends who had shared their experience, or when pressed by family members or an occasional print reporter.
This book chronicles that small part of their life’s journey—the passage of the men of the 1st Division in World War I, from enlistment to training to France to the trenches to what General Pershing envisioned on that frosty April morning in a small French courtyard: a “great battle of the greatest war in history.” It is the story of the first “over there.”