On Haunted Ground

When the train pulled into Verdun, my first impression was: pretty little city. A couple of canals and the very mellow Meuse River run through the middle of it.

The second impression was it was a place frozen in misery. Like Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Dresden, and Hiroshima, Verdun's identity is forever intertwined with death and destruction. For a while in the early 1900s it was the Battle Capital of the world. Some of the older building still show the scars of bullets and shrapnel.

This is Verdun as it looked like at the height of World War I. The Cathedral of Notre Dame is in the background, rising over the blasted shells of buildings by one of the canals.

This is what the prosperous little burg looks like today from the same viewpoint.

I stopped by the tourist office to pick up a few maps and discovered war is Big Biz here. The city and the area around had seen some of the bloodiest fighting in World War I. In 1916 a quarter of a million French and German soldiers were killed in the area, with basically nothing to show for it. By the time Uncle Tom arrived in September of 1918, the two armies had fought to an exhausted standstill. The French hoped the arrival of a million and a half Americans would give their side the necessary boost to push the Germans out.

The energetic young woman at the information desk had that special tourist office ability to read the map upside down as she cheerily pointed out the sights: memorials, the statues to the heroic dead, an ossuary full of unknown soldiers' bones, a place called Bayonet Trench where French soldiers were buried alive by an artillery barrage and only their bayonets protruded above the earth and on and on. Each site had an horrific and bloody story attached to it. And a brochure for it.

"Where is the American cemetery?" I asked.

"Up the road that way," she pointed north. "It has the largest number of American soldiers buried there outside the United States." Big smile.

What's a salient?

The plan was to follow Tom's steps through this area. His first battle was south of Verdun near a place called St. Mihiel. In 1914, as now, it was a sleepy village. Unfortunately back then it sat in the crossfire of French and German armies. For four horrific years friendly and enemy fire rained down on it. When Tom and his fellow soldiers arrived here from Chateau-Thierry their job was to clear the Germans out of something down that way called the St. Mihiel Salient.

I didn't know salient was a noun. Basically the word describes any kind of protrusion. In military jargon it refers to part of a battle line that has bulged into enemy territory, sometimes the result of a stalled advance. The German had a salient which had been a fixture near St. Mihiel for four years. The French had unsuccessfully tried to drive the Germans out of it, a piece of territory about the size of Manhattan. When the Americans arrived, the French said in effect, "You want something to do? Get those guys out of there."

History books are sketchy about the battle of the St. Mihiel Salient. The condensed version is the Americans launched an attack against the Germans on September 12 and the battle was pretty much over three rainy muddy days later, September 15. The attack was no secret - date and time had already been published in a Swiss paper - and rather than stand and fight the huge number of Americans, the Germans decided to pull out. They were in the process of retreating when the shooting began. It was a win for what was grandly called the American Expeditionary Forces. According to one historian the U.S. lost "only" about 1,300 men in that battle. That's about two years worth of KIAs in the Iraq War killed in three days. I guess human life was cheaper then.

There is no detailed record of how Tom did, but he survived. And his reward was a chance to die in another battle.

Battle Scars

Fortunately - if that's the right word - there are still sections of the battle zone which are preserved, or to put it more accurately had been frozen in time by benign neglect. The WWI generation has long died out and today few people bother to visit these forgotten places. I was grateful for this. I could step into a place where history was stopped and see what Tom had seen.

So, my GPS suction-cupped to the windshield of a rented car,a glossy tourist office map spread across my knees, I drove around until I found a spot my brochure said still had French and German trenches. Nobody in the parking lot. Everything was still. The only sounds were an occasional distinctive call of a cuckoo bird, the first time I heard one outside of a clock.Old signs pointed deep into the piney woods. I walked by a weatherworn memorial decorated with faded plastic flowers and stepped into the shadows beyond. A place which used to be crowded with soldiers shooting at each other, bombarding each other, killing each other was now a silent patch of overgrown woods. This is what I found.

A huge crater from an artillery shell. It looked a dark entry to another dimension:

A mossy, overgrown bunker:

The scars of trenches snaking through the forest.

How a similar trench looked during the war:

When I tried to climb down into one, I slipped in the mud - it had rained heavily the day before - and grabbed for balance as I dropped into the trench. For my effort I got a fistful of greasy mud the color of dark chocolate. It stuck to my skin like paste. It was impossible to wipe off. Days later I was still digging it out of my cuticle. Soldiers crawled through this stuff, slept in it, had to live with it for years.

It was only after I had been here about an hour that I noticed something odd. I had hiked through woods in different parts of France and would always see some sorts of woodland creatures, birds, rabbits, even an occasional snake. But here there was nothing. The only sign of wildlife in all the time I was wandering through this silent world was a weird fluorescent orange slug shimmering in a patch of sunlight:

I looked around at the woods. The growth was so dense that even as noon approached little sunlight seeped into the dim place. If it was this dark on a bright summer day, what must it have been like during the sodden, rainy fall of 1918? Men who slept in such dank spots even for a few days got trench foot, diptheria. The Argonne Forest, where Tom was going next, was very much like this, I had read, only worse.

Depressing WWI Fact: Verdun was the site of the war's longest single battle. It dragged on for 11 months and caused over a million casualties.

{To be continued}

Uncle Tom's Nightmare Trip to France

Americans fighting in France 1918

The only other person in my family beside me who spent any time in France was my great uncle Tom Hogan. His visit was shorter and not as pleasant. He spent much of it trying to avoid getting killed.

His story, in brief, was this. In the spring of 1918 he was drafted and shipped overseas to fight in World War I. He had been in combat about four or five months when he disappeared.

This was all I knew about him. The story popped up in a casual conversation with my mother who talked about Tom's difficulties the way someone might mention that a relative had trouble finding a parking space at the mall. "He went off to France and just disappeared," Mom said with quiet bafflement. "No one knew what happened to him."

Intrigued, I started doing a little research.

The Internet can be amazing. With a little hunting I found a copy of Uncle Tom’s draft registration card. (You can't tell from this image, but in the lower left corner of the card the small print reads, "If person is of African descent, cut off this corner.")

He filled it out on June 5, 1917. He was 27, old for the draft, and not married. He worked at a factory, the Excelsior Needle Company in Torrington, Connecticut, making knitting needles. I noticed in answer to the question: "Married or Single [which]" he wrote, "No." I also noticed he lived down the street from his father, Patrick, my Great Grandfather.

I already had done a little family history research and knew that Patrick D. Hogan, was born in Ireland, in the town of Thurles, County Mayo. Family lore has it that Patrick’s parents decided he deserved better than to waste his life in the depressed and oppressed country that was Ireland back then. The family pooled their money bought him a ticket from Liverpool to the United States. He arrived in the spring of 1880. Here's a photo of the distinguished Patrick in his glory days:

Using his skills as a carpenter Patrick got a job building packing crates for a local factory. Even though he was illiterate -- my mother remembers sitting on his lap as a seven-year-old girl reading him the headlines in the local paper – he prospered. He bought land and built two houses in a quiet neighborhood, Cherry Street, in my hometown. He and other Irish immigrants dug out by hand the foundation for my parish church St. Francis, where everyone in my family, including I assume my Uncle Tom, were baptized and many were married and buried.

The early 1900s were hard years emotionally for Patrick. His daughter, Josephine, died in a flu epidemic in 1905 at the age of 11. His wife Mary died in 1916. And now, in 1917, the government was drafting his son to fight in a war many in the U.S. thought was none of their business.

National Archive records of most World War I vets were destroyed in a huge warehouse fire in 1973, but my sister Carol, digging through in the files of our town historical society, found a little more info on Tom. I learned that in May 1917 for the first time since the Civil War, the government reinstituted the draft. At time the U.S. entered World War I it had a pitifully small Army, just a few hundred thousand men. They needed a couple of million - fast. So they started dragooning men into the service. Record of local vets' service showed that in the spring of 1918 Tom's number came up. He had to report for active duty. Tom was assigned to the infantry. Cannonfodder.

It was not a good time to be a soldier. Training was absurd. Some recruits didn’t even have any weapons to practice with. During basic training soldiers were issued two-by-fours cut out in the shapes of rifles. I guess the Army figured the men could always yell "Bang! Bang!" and conk the enemy over the head. Even though the war had been fought in trenches for over three years, there was little grounding in trench warfare, according to one historian. Tactics taught were based on the Spanish American War and the Franco Prussian War. Men spent hours on pointless bayonet practice, a weapon which, when they finally got to war, they used to dig foxholes and hang stuff off of. (This fine moronic tradition has continued. Some 50 years later I too had hours of pointless bayonet training. When I got to Vietnam I used mine to open beer cans.)

The Army was rushed into the war so fast it had all kinds of equipment shortages. American soldiers used helmets provided by the British. Their artillery was provided mostly by the French. The Army shipped cavalry horses to France. Horses. It was like sending George Custer to fight tanks and machine guns. Communication was by carrier pigeon.( I'm not kidding.) Practically no one -- officers or enlisted men -- had any combat experience.What's that cliché? Oh, right: Recipe for a disaster.

Historical society records also noted that in late spring of 1918 at the age of 28 Tom was loaded onto a troop ship and sailed to Europe across the same ocean his father had crossed 38 years earlier, getting the hell out of Europe.

The Historical Society notes pithily add that Tom was in three major battles at: Chateau-Thierry, a place called the Saint-Mihiel Salient, and the Argonne Forest. Tom survived the first two in one piece. But in the Argonne Forest [See U.S. Army photo taken of the fighting, above] his luck ran out.

I learned that at Chateau-Thierry our inexperienced troops fought under the command of the French. But at the Saint-Mihiel Salient and the Argonne Forest the Americans were on their own for the first time. Since both places were in striking distances of the city of Verdun in northeastern France, I decided to check them out. So, nearly 92 years to the day that Thomas Francis Hogan filled out his doomed draft card, I boarded a train in Paris and headed for Verdun.

Private Thomas Francis Hogan before shipping out to France.

{To be continued}

Depressing French fact: An estimated 1,385,000 French soldiers died in World War I. Over four million were wounded.

Separated at Birth

Street construction on Rue St. Denis.

Fancy schmanzy fountain on Blvd. St. Germain.

Celebrityspotting

I am convinced I saw Bernie Madoff going along the Rue de Rennes on a Velib. I will swear on a stack of Bibles that just around the corner from our apartment William Shatner was waiting for the 69 bus. My wife is understandingly skeptical. She sees these as hysterical sightings of a desperate man.

It is easy for her to be blase. Over the past year she has seen on, and around, the streets of Paris: Gerard Depardieu getting on a motorcycle, Katherine Deneuve (twice) shopping, Sharon Stone having a glass of wine at Brasserie Lipp, Julia Delpy pushing a stroller near Saint Sulpice, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Arielle Dombasle out for a stroll, and director David Lynch. I've seen practically no one.

It's a DNA thing. Either you have the Celebrityspotting gene or you don't. I don't. You would think in Paris where Popes, Presidents, Olympic torches and celebrities of all kinds waft through it would be like shooting fish in a barrel or whatever the equivalent French expression might be. And it is, if you have the requisite karma.

Yes, I once saw Juliette Binoche shooting a scene from a movie but that was only because my wife literally took me by the hand and pointed out the massive agglomeration of movie crew and the aforementioned Ms. Binoche standing in the eye of the storm of activity. And yes I also saw David Lynch but that was only because there had been a gargantuan poster in the window of a bookstore on Blvd. St. Germain announcing he would be in town for a book signing.

I think the gene is somehow attached to the female chromosome because my daughter, Deirdre, has it. In her relatively short life has seen close-up or met: Wesley Snipes, Quentin Tarantino, Barack Obama, Wayne Newton, P Diddy, and, for all I know, the Pope. When she came to visit last spring I mentioned David Lynch was signing books. We wandered over by the bookstore that evening where, yes indeed, you could see him inside. Without hesitation Deirdre and her husband, John, went into the store and within seconds purchased a book, ripped the shrink wrap off of it, got David Lynch's autograph in it and were involved in a conversation so long his publicist repeatedly tried to interrupt to move the line along, but he was having none of it. At that point Deirdre had been in town all of about five hours. I had been in Paris five months.

And so it goes. For all I know I have elbowed Carla Bruni out of the way at my local Monprix to get a bunch of bananas and I walk obliviously through the rues and boulevards cluelessly passing celebrities. Wait a second, I think I just saw Mick Jagger get out of a Smart Car on my street. Gotta go.

Fascinating French Fact: France is slightly smaller than Texas.

I gave my blood for France

You never know where an idea will take you. In our case the brainstorm to move to Paris resulted in me standing in a generic medical examination room with my blood dripping on the linoleum floor.

Qualifying, and requalifying, for a Carte de Sejour requires, among many other things, a physical. I am not a fan of being unclothed in front of strangers or being punctured by them, even if they are medical personnel. But if people need information about your body there is no alternative.

Which is how we ended up in a bleak, utilitarian medical office in the 17th. There was the appropriately humorless bureaucrat at the reception desk, a woman who, from the looks of her face, had all the joy sucked out of her life around 1992 and never got a refill. She seemed disappointed to find we had an official letter of appointment and were there on the correct day and time. She pointed us upstairs.

There we found her antitheses: cheerful, helpful people who patiently explained to us in simple French what the process would be. We were early and watched the clients arrive: a young Asian woman, Japanese I think, who kept getting up and pacing around; a couple with an infant; a tall young African man, a college student I guessed, reading a textbook. And us.

The staff drifted in: the black technician who would give me my eye test and prick my finger; a woman doctor in a white lab coat; a lanking balding guy in a loud tropical shirt. They seemed to genuinely like being around each other. A lot of joking and "how was your weekend" chat.

Dripping .

                  .

               . 

         BLOOD
The physical was very basic: a simple questionnaire, an eye test, blood pressure cuff, a quick finger prick for a blood sample. It was after the prick that I had the bleeding problem. The technician only half-covered the hole with the band-aid and so a substantial amount was oozing out. I knew I would clot eventually but in the meantime my hand was dripping red dots on the floor. What followed surprised me. He apologized and nervously started layering band-aid after band-aid on top of the bloody fingertip. Now I had an oozing stump of a digit which looked very post-amputation.

The second last step was an X-ray. It was like a scene from a French farce: Open one door. Enter a large closet. Lock door. Remove shirt. Now that you are half-naked, open other door, step into a large dark room where two women briskly tug you over to an X-ray machine and push your naked torso up against very cold metal. Inhale. Hold. Click. Voila. Back in the closet. Shirt on. Unlock door. Out to the waiting room.

THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW
Eventually I was summoned to see the doctor. He turned out to be the guy with the wild and crazy tropical shirt -- pineapples and palm tree designs all over it. He already had my X-ray (see above) on his light box. The image of my pacemaker glowed in it like a weird alien spacecraft drifting through a black night. To my relief he spoke English.

The conversation went something like: "You are old. You have a pacemaker. And your blood pressure is a little high."

"White coat syndrome," I suggested.

He shrugged in reluctant agreement. "But you also have health insurance and money. So welcome to France."

Afterwards we sat in a cafe down the street and had two champagnes to celebrate. For the first time in our lives were not just tourists. We were now visiteurs.

Mysterious French fact: The word for "prostate" in French is feminine.

Jokes from the bums

For some reason the few people I have meaningful contact with in Paris are the clochards, or what my father would call: bums. I have a predisposed liking for them as one of my grandfathers was a bum. Literally. (The last time my mother saw him he was a homeless man begging for quarters on a street.) So there is a kind of family tradition there. On at least two occasions the locals felt compelled to make wisecracks about my jogging. I suppose when your whole day is a physical challenge: trying to find a place to eat, to sleep, hauling your crap from one spot to the next, passing the time like a character from a Beckett play, the idea of putting on a T-shirt and what look like a pair of nylon undershorts to run around in circles and deliberately tire yourself is absurd.

There are two guys who have been living not far away in the back doorway of a Shell station mini-mart on Boulevard Raspail. How long they have been there I don't know, but they are as much a neighborhood fixture as the Musee Maillol diagonally across the street from them. One guy has long gray hair and a beard. The other guy has dark matted hair and glasses. Crammed in the doorway is some sort of duvet for their bed, their sleeping bags and two backpacks which I guess contain all their life’s possessions. I have seen a lot of people stop to chat, including the manager of the mini-mart. They sleep in the doorway all year long, even this past brutal winter.

Although they have a small plastic bowl with a perfunctory “Monnaie, SVP” sign in front of it, they are not aggressive beggars and actually don’t seem to care if you put money in it or not. I must have passed them hundreds of time going to and from my run. Mostly I just nod. A couple of times I put money in their dish to their great surprise. One day I was walking past them sweaty and relaxed on the Rue de Grenelle on my way home and the graybeard said, "Hey!"

I turned. "Where you going? The track is that way." And he started laughing at his own joke. I knew Spring was here.

The other, more droll comment came from a black homeless guy sitting meditatively on a bench tucked in a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. He studied me each time I went past. I have a grim, preoccupied look on my face when I run, like I’m thinking about a dead puppy. So as I loped by him a third time he urged, “Allez. Avec JOIE” which basically translates into, “At least try to look like you’re enjoying it.”

Fascinating French fact: The word clochard comes from the French verb clocher, to limp.

Sunday In Paris

NEXT TRAIN :04